Freeze Sucka! Pt 2 – Two Kinds Of Fear

I recently ran into a discrepancy in the research on the human adrenal response: some sources suggest that the weak-kneed feeling is caused by tons of blood rushing away from your head and core and towards your large muscle groups, preparing you to run or fight, while others suggest that you are literally weak-kneed as blood rushes to your core, far from any limbs or appendages that might shortly sustain injuries like lacerations. I implore any of my readers who know more about the physiology to please post any solid info in the comments section. Until that time, I am left to my own experience and speculations. Here it goes…

In Pt1 I argued that the adrenal response readies one for fight or flight, but that for social reasons (ie not wanting to look weak) I would often fail to increase respiration though my heart was starting to pound. Accordingly, I more easily entered a “panic” state simply due to oxygen deprivation. However, I just read the best book on martial arts and violence that I have ever found: Sgt Rory Miller’s “Meditations On Violence.” Therein, he states that “blood is pooled in the internal organs, drawn away from the limbs. Your arms and legs may feel weak and cold and clumsy,” adding later that “vasoconstriction in the extremities decreases the amount of bleeding from bites to arms, legs, and head.” What to make of this discrepancy? My theory is that humans have evolved two different responses for two very different kinds of violence. We have two kinds of fear and two forms of aggressive. We have a fear of in-group violence, such as play fighting, fisticuffs and even duels, and another one for predatory violence, such as that issuing from a dangerous animal or a hostile tribe. This is obviously an outgrowth of my theory about two kinds of aggression, discussed in a previous post, but it also falls within the paradigm described by Miller, who describes the “Monkey Dance” versus predatory behavior.

The fear of in-group violence and competition is much more about humiliation, being dominated, ostracism and mating rights than it is about the fear of death. That is, it is the fear of the annihilation of “face,” identity or personality, with the deeper fear of resulting ostracism, exposure and death underlying it. The fear of predatory violence is simply about being violently ripped apart, limb-from-limb. Accordingly, we have fear (fight or flight) and we have panic (freeze). The problem is that we so rarely face predatory violence that we easily confuse these two situations and start to panic when our identity is challenged. This is the great purpose of the martial arts in my opinion: educating people about their own feelings so that they can avoid panic as often as possible. So too is this the great purpose of philosophy: not only to prepare one for death, but to prepare one for ambiguity, uncertainty, and assaults on your dignity. Sadly, not only do modern people experience Monkey Dance-type fear when faced with having to sing or speak in public, but they also experience Monkey Dance situations as if they were facing a charging lion. This is not so good for stress levels, immune function, and overall health.

Look at dare-devil behavior and note that though it incites fear, this is experienced as “excitement” and the activity has the effect of enhancing identity, whereas facing down a grizzly bear will likely result in your shitting your pants and questioning your cosmic specialness; fear versus panic. These two modes of response, however, are running on the same physiology, so you basically have fear/excitement up until 145 BPM, with a sweet spot between 115 and 145 BPM as far as performance is concerned, and then panic when heart rate increases past 145 BPM. Miller describes three reactions that are very, very important to distinguish:

Some people get big, red, and loud. Their face flushes; they swell up and try to intimidate with size and voice. They are trying to intimidate, pure and simple. They have more in common with the Monkey Dance than predatory violence. They are usually not a problem.

Small, white, and pale indicates a threat in a pretty advanced stage of adrenalization. His blood has pooled to his center and he is on the edge of panic. If something sets him off, he will go frantically insane. He will hurt you, much like a cornered animal.

Some go ‘flat’ when the adrenaline hits. They seem emotionless, alert. Eyes widen into a thousand-yard stare. In general, they are experienced with the adrenaline state and can and will hurt you. They will retain a large percentage of skill. They make ugly opponents. On the good side, of the three types, these are the ones that can still communicate. You can talk to them.

The guy who is red in the face (the above Diego Sanchez, for instance) is trying to project confidence and intimidate his opponent. Perhaps it works on some, but essentially he is betraying the fact that this is a match, not an assault. The Japanese knew how to do this right and cultivated a state they called zanshin, roughly translated as “awareness,” “remaining mind,” and “indomitable will.” The American corollary is being “cool,” that is cool-headed, cool under pressure, etc. Sadly, ala the theme in a prior post, we have today mistaken the face of intimidation for the true display of projected competence. Though what follows really should be added to a recent post, I must remark that MMA competitions often blur this line between Monkey Dance and predatory violence. Some competitors choose to pick a fight and make it personal so that they can get angry, red in the face, and “excited” for the fight (ie Monkey Dance). Other competitors speak of “going to war,” wanting a “war,” being ready to die, and so forth. Still others don’t say anything, appear entirely calm or even bored (I’m thinking of Gegard Mousassi), and then fight like the devil. Be scared of the last guy. Miller explains that “some people associate the ’1,000-yard stare’ with shell shock. It’s actually a way to use the eyes to detect movement very efficiently and increase peripheral vision.” Anyway, I suppose this all makes sense, given that one form of human aggression–play fighting and jockeying for position–is ultimately a preparation for the other–group hunting and warfare. It makes further sense because the MMA competition is somewhere between friendly fisticuffs, an honor duel, and the practice of single combat in ancient warfare. Sometimes it pays off to play the “game,” bide your time, wrestle to tire out your opponent out, and then finish him in the end via a war of attrition, but other times a full-on assault-style blitz does the job a whole lot better, despite the fact that most of the effective moves are barred in such a competition.

“Alpha” or “Omega” Male? Pt 3 – Rise of the Nerds

Many people use the terms “Alpha Male” and “Beta Male” to refer to guys with machismo versus “nice guys.” This is a misunderstanding. I have known plenty of happy-go-lucky, sweet, innocuous guys who are terribly popular with both genders and could easily qualify for “Alpha” status, given that this term is best used for the winner in a tournament species. To the extent that humans are a tournament species, this tournament largely involves charm, verbal dexterity, diplomacy, and social tact, not direct physical violence. The popular “nice guys” that I have known were A) extremely good looking and B) had charmed plenty of “toughs” who would have their backs in an instant if they were ever challenged with violence. As I argued in Pt1, these are the folks that became leaders for the better part of history and pre-history, not the biggest, baddest fighter. Simply put, terms relevant to canine psychology are woefully inadequate for describing humans accurately.

These terms are being bandied about because our society and education system unwittingly encourage the segregation of the good-looking & charming from the unfortunate-looking & awkward; the “cools” from the “nerds.” But this even misunderstands the canine psychology, for as I argued in Pt2, the “beta” is always nipping at the “alpha’s” heels and is a potential rival and stalwart ally, not the meek, quivering underdog. The “beta” is the second in command! The appropriate term for the nerd would be “omega male,” the true underdog at the bottom of the pack who doesn’t even wrestle and compete for position. But even this term has been misappropriated, finding its way into the urban dictionary as the “opposite” of the alpha, though the description is basically the ultimate alpha–the alpha who doesn’t even need friends to back him up! The wishful thinking and wounded merit involved here is just plain transparent. What is going on?

1) the death of the honor culture and myth of “glorious battle” (lost between WW1 and Vietnam), feminism, gender-neutral society, etc.

2) as Harvey Mansfield argues regarding the rational, liberal state, “The entire enterprise of modernity, however, could be understood as a project to keep manliness unemployed.”

3) technology has gradually eroded male relevance, while increasing the relevance of “nice guy” behavior and intelligence (hence the “Rise of the Nerds”)

The Rise of the Nerds

Who is using the terms in question? Usually it is nerds referring to their oppressors as “alphas;” nerds referring to their chosen nerd-in-chief as “omega;” nerds referring to that guy who gets some girls, though he isn’t really an alpha, but he’s not smart enough to hang out with the true nerds, so he’s a “beta.” That is, the entire linguistic mess is born of nerd-ressentiment towards anybody that is getting the status that they feel their intelligence alone merits them. Because more and more anti-social, nerd-types are gaining wealth, fame, and fanboy ego-stroking, I imagine that this ressentiment will only grow. Let’s back up a bit, however, because this stuff starts on the playground.

Though I really like the phrase “Monkey Dance” that is often used to describe male ritual combat in humans, this combat is rare, while the actual tournament might involve, well, dancing. That is, we have a “Human Dance” that involves song, speech, dance, and, sadly, pick-up-artistry, and it is this dance that decides who has status for modern humans, though wealth and apparent celebrity are good substitutes. Unlike any other species on earth, however, our little dance doesn’t have built-in safety measures, which must be imposed by culture instead. You see, very few tournaments in nature involve serious injury or death. When bears wrestle for dominance, do note that the winner doesn’t tear his opponent’s throat open, as he would likely do to his prey. A ram who loses the head-butt competition could easily turn around and ram his opponent in the side, killing him, but this doesn’t happen. The loser knows he’s lost and his genes forbid him from sullying the hallowed combat ritual that maintains the quality of the gene pool.  Ironically, unlike any other species I’ve discovered the cultural safety measures governing the “Human Dance” have historically involved violence! As I argued in Pt2, the honor duel was not there to determine “alphas” from “betas,” but instead, was meant to protect the honor culture within which the “Human Dance” took place. If someone grabs your girl’s butt on the dance floor, then you punch him; you do not punch the biggest dude in the room as a means of asking a strange girl for a dance!

In modern society, however, we have failed to protect or revive anything like an honor culture and thereby strip our children of any safety measures governing their little status-tournaments. It’s pretty simple really: fail to teach two young brothers the “rules” of wrestling, and most of their innocent-meaning bouts will end in bloodshed. Worse still, this bloodshed leads everyone to mistakenly believe that the roots of male competitiveness is some kind of blood-lust!

When we understand sibling rivalry for the critical problem it reflects, we can understand the naturalness of ambition, and the basic benignancy of competitiveness. Children are not vicious animals struggling to dominate rivals, but culture-heroes in the making, desperately trying to stand out. -Ernest Becker

The result of all of this misunderstanding is that young boys have no fucking clue what to make of their natural ambitions, energy and competitiveness, while the omega-boy who should be entirely ignored as a potential rival or competitor is mercilessly thrashed, verbally and physically, to the extent that this bullying accomplishes exactly the opposite of its natural aim: to chide a potential hunting-partner into manning up, getting stronger, and proving a useful ally. You see, our verbal taunts and so forth have a number of extremely healthy functions. It is perfectly natural and helpful to the victim of teasing if his friends, knowing that he is really a homosexual unsuccessfully pretending to be hyper-masculine, taunt him and test him, because there is something that he just “doesn’t get,” and this will harm him in the future and possibly harm other people. They are really trying to accept him, but only if he joins the groups shared reality. Laughing at someone’s intellectual error has elements of shadenfreude, but ultimately this is one of the best mechanisms for enforcing learning and the elimination of cognitive errors (See Dennett’s “Inside Jokes”). The deep problem is that we haven’t taught our children the proper uses of teasing and the disastrous effects of bullying. We should hold courses in the “art of brotherly un-love,” for this art is one of the greatest mechanisms for regulating the Human Dance. (evolutionary psychologists even suggest that “gossip” has been one of the main tools checking the power of the dictator or powerful leader).

Taking a Stick to the Stones Will Always Hurt You

When I was in the 4th grade it suddenly because trendy to punch your buddy in the nuts. Don’t ask me who started this. It does kind of betray the less noble aspects of male competition, though, doesn’t it. Its obvious that this is about sexual competition. Keep in mind, however, that these kids have no common enemy to rally against and fight, so there is no outlet for the raison d’etre of their male competitiveness. Thus, right from the start it seems obvious that they are natural enemies and rivals in the sexual marketplace. This ball-busting evolved into kicking out the back of your buddy’s knee, then punching him in the arm, and then by the 6th grade everyone realized that the girls were interested in the guy with the band, not the guy nervously jockeying for position by the use of physical force. Then the real “ball-busting” begins–the really cruel stuff. 

Sadly, while playful combat and jockeying for position in social animals has the effect of strengthening each group member, determining who is best at what, and cementing bonds of trust, it has the exact opposite effect in modern humans. Unregulated taunting physically weakens the victim while proving no test of strength, fails to determine who is the best at what, and fosters distrust and isolation among everyone. (The “in-crowd” too is a shark-tank where nobody is safe). Play-fighting in animals, much like the “love bite,” is not an expression of aggression, but of care. It is an example of “physical irony,” but ironically, while all animals understand the real message of this play, only modern humans are dumb enough to misunderstand and take it literally, concluding that such behavior is really about sadistic domination and aggression. (a view I was critiquing in the recent post “On Sexual Aggression“). 

Bullying is a form of emotional terrorism that is a strange, twisted version of natural play-fighting. It has the effect of lowering the victim’s self-esteem and their immune function, which effects testosterone levels and physical development. It is a means of literally clipping a rivals nuts and making him feel, look, physically develop and act not like a “beta,” but like an “omega” or even an outcast altogether. The bully can discard physical violence and simply use verbal taunts, therefore appearing to be taking part in the “Human Dance” instead of the “Monkey Dance.” That is, the very tools of biting humor and annihilating rhetoric which were meant to keep the physically imposing in check are used by the physically imposing as a proxy for physical intimidation and abuse that they can always just fall back on anyway. The result is a social hierarchy that more closely resembles that of the mountain gorilla than that of our tribal ancestors. “Cools” are those with decent sexual self-esteem, while “nerds” are those with no sexual self-esteem and who retreat into fantasy worlds where they slay monsters, physically dominate opponents and win sexual favors. I hypothesize that this is really why all of this bullshit about “alphas” and “betas” is being introduced. But with the tech revolution, many of these nerds are gaining power, wealth, and celebrity, which they feel should entitle them to reproductive rights. After all, they display great amounts of the virtue that our society is moving towards in terms of preferred fitness markers: intelligence. So of course they are justified in memorizing some PUA tricks and NLP to use their intelligence in order to extort their due of sexual favors؟

As I discussed in Pt2, “winning” has been overemphasized in our culture such that the true spirit of human competition is replaced by a spirit of domination and shadenfreude. “Toughs” feast on empty honor-calories by attacking the defenseless, robbing them of any chance to grow stronger with real competition, and then move on to verbal taunts to finish them off, forgetting that in doing so they rob themselves of any honor gained from such a victory. Because this “competition” grants no honor or lasting security, they keep doing it because they remain compromised and unproven themselves. Much of bullying is just misdirected hostility (redirected aggression is the term from Biology I believe). You see, this is not how the brotherly art of un-love is to be conducted: you should rib a guy in your baseball league about being too fat or not appearing to give full effort because it degrades the value of the competition for you; it strips you of legitimate pride for the win, but compounds your shame in defeat. Taunting a teammate viciously and without relenting will not have the effect of improving your teams chances of winning, but will likely just make him more nervous and clumsy. Since America is not a community, but a business, kids realize that there is no “team,” there is no common goal, and everyone is a rival.

Sticks and Stones Are Highly Preferable To Words

No one who has worked with patients for a long period of time can fail to learn that the psychological and spiritual agony of depersonalization is harder to bear than physical pain. -Rollo May

Dave Grossman argues that aggression and ostracism are the core of man’s deepest phobias and anxieties. This “universal phobia” is what grounds people’s fear of public speaking, hitting on girls at bars, and being creative (ie standing out). It was not unwarranted for Degas to write that “A painter paints a picture with the same feeling as that with which a criminal commits a crime.” But what is important to remember is that the human body codes a moral threat and verbal assault just like a physical assault. Some words from Rollo May should be helpful here:

Every experience of creativity has its potential of aggression or denial towards other persons in one’s environment or towards established patterns within one’s self. To put the matter figuratively, in every experience of creativity something in the past is killed so that something new in the present may be born.

(adding later in the same work): Neurotic anxiety and helplessness are not the result of a realistic view of inadequacy of power but arise out of an inner conflict between dependency and hostility. What is felt as the source of danger is primarily the anticipated hostility of others.

Instead of aggression and competition serving to build a healthy sense of power and proper station, today it has the effect of multiplying anxieties. This is made worse by our misunderstanding it all. We think that guys are scared of talking to strange girls, when in fact they are scared of getting beat up, dominated, or humiliated in front of them. This is the source of their fear, and it is a legitimate source, because they really haven’t earned the right to approach those girls in the first place! Then these poor guys think that they are actually afraid and perhaps angry at these girls, instead of realizing that they are afraid of sexual rivals and that the “bar scene” is a tragic caricature of the true “Human Dance.”

As a brief aside, I would like to suggest that one of the reasons that we are fascinated by zombie movies stems precisely from this “universal human phobia.” There are other reasons, of course: on some level we know that we are not “conscious” all the time, that most stupid-asses out there are rarely conscious ever, that the homeless guy over there screaming nonsense is functionally a zombie, and also we would really like an evil “other” to kill but don’t want to admit this or admit that we have murderous, war-like thoughts about other humans, so zombies are a nice fill-in and scapegoat. But primarily, I argue, the fascination with zombies comes from a deep genetic memory of vicious physical conflict. Just watch this video right before a single episode of “The Walking Dead” and you might notice that “gorilla fighting” looks just like a human fighting off a zombie (holding his chest and neck so he doesn’t bit your neck, etc). End of digression…here is some Ernest Becker:

The psychiatrist Harry Stacks Sullivan liked to use the term ‘self-system’ instead of the Freudian divisions of the psyche, because he saw that you cannot arbitrarily chop up the child’s total ongoing action and experience. For Sullivan, this self-system was largely a linguistic device fashioned by the child to conciliate his world. Words are basic to the formation of his self, and words are the only way he can control his environment. This is a powerful formulation, because it permits us to understand that what we term ‘personality’ is largely a locus of word possibilities. When we expose our self-esteem to possible undermining by others in a social situation, we are exposing a linguistic identity to other loci of linguistic causality. We have no idea what words are going to spout forth from another’s self-system.

This is why words are such potent weapons: we are not born with self-aware “minds,” but develop this with socialization and language. Therefore, our minds are highly volatile and subject to verbal disruption. You can shut your eyes when someone in your 4th grade class chews some food and opens his mouth to gross you out, but you can’t shut your “ear-lids” when he calls you a worthless pussy. Verbal bullying is a tragic misapplication of a natural “ball-busting” instinct used to correct erroneous speech, beliefs, and behaviors. This instinct also relieves some of the social pressure in a situation where everyone sorta tacitly understands that mating rights are still on the line. Watch the barber-shop scene from Clint Eastwoods “Gran Torino” and you will notice that there is a way of busting balls that is affectionate, while still demonstrating power that demands respect. Its a form of irony in which both parties know where the “line” is drawn between appropriate and innappropriate. But while these old-schoolers “got it,” today we have simply erased this line in the hopes that nobody gets called names and everyone feels like daddies special little boy. Foolish. Here is some more Becker…

We see a clear example of inept performance, and of constant attempt to force status, in the phenomenon called ‘riding.’ ‘Riding’ is simply clumsy acting, a grotesque attempt to heighten one’s self-esteem by denigrating another. It is a continuous preoccupation of close in-groups temporarily thrown together in distasteful occupations, like waiters and counter-girls. ‘Riding’ makes a mockery of the delicate skill of cue-sensitive performance.

Hmmm, “close in-groups temporarily thrown together in a distasteful occupation,” does this remind you of anything, like, say, public school!!?! Is it any wonder why healthy “ball-busting” turns into “riding”?

One of the impetuses to the fragmentation of society into subgroups is that they provide some respite from the continual strain on creative alertness of the self-system. In the subgroup, conversation is familiar, automatic, untaxing for the most part. In some primitive societies ‘joking relationships’ are established between certain individuals. These people, when they meet, engage in an unashamed mockery, teasing, and joking that is denied to others. Joking relationships seem to be established at points of tension in the social system–among inlaws, for example–and relieve the individuals of the strain of meeting these encounters, and the necessity of facilitating them creatively. Joking carries the encounter along automatically and also provides for release of tension.

Sadly, in its attempt to remove aggression and violence from society, our (ahem) “culture” multiplies these “points of tension” and necessitates routine purges of anxiety and tension that end up just compounding the problem for everyone. Sadder still, as nerds are now increasingly coming to power, they seem to be applying this same strategy of intellectual battle to their prior oppressors and this seems to be where the “alpha/beta” terminology is coming from, not to mention various movements to label nerds as “brights,” and so forth. But by honoring intelligence and mocking the physical courage of the “brute” or “alpha,” these guys are just further alienating themselves from their own masculinity while perpetuating the very war that they despised and which created them (qua nerds).

“Less Wrong” Than You Might Think Pt 3

Current psychology is wedded to its history with much stronger ties than any other science. As a laboratory investigation, psychology is only a century old; as a body of insights, observations, and hypothesis, it is the oldest science in the world. -Julian Jaynes

Unlike Pt1 and Pt2, this article is not a response to a particular Less Wrong post, but instead aims to offer an antidote to the basic assault that such “reality heads” usually direct at myth and religion. In a previous post I showed how Sam Harris made a horse’s ass out of himself by trying to deride the notion of a “soul” while at the same time claiming that primitives and myth-makers simply had no clue how cosmically special and complex the brain was. Since the mind, though more complex than a galaxy, is not suitably special to qualify for a term like “soul,” typically the genome is the only thing a “reality head” will be willing to admit vis a vis his essence. Accordingly, I want to explore the pervasive mythological theme of personal responsibility endemic to reincarnation, metempsychosis, as well as notions like “blood guilt” and “sins of the father.”

The skeptic or rationalist can hew down all of these silly stories by simply claiming that they are absurd if interpreted literally, word-for-word, but this presumes to know exactly what “soul” and “transmigration” refer to, were meant to refer to, and could refer to. That is, it assumes the words are meaningless and proceeds to invoke ridiculous imagery from Raiders of the Lost Ark, and so forth. These people get in a little more trouble when asked if the myths are true metaphorically, but this usually doesn’t delay them much from a cynical dismissal. However, with the discovery of epigenetics (see the documentary “The Ghost In Your Genes”), this cluster of myths now appears to be quite literally true to a certain extent. The way we behave and the environment we choose to occupy will change our epigenetics and subsequently the expression of our genes, but most importantly, the expression of our childrens’ genes (sometimes up to three generations down the line). That is, we are to a certain extent the stewards of our own genome, though we are only now scratching the surface of such transgenerational epigenetic inheritance phenomena. My claim here is that the above-mentioned myths might be a sort of opaque, primitive realization of this truth. It doesn’t really matter if the myths were after the fact rationalizations of a manifest drive, for this is far superior to their being delusions completely untethered to reality. When someone discards myth as such, they fail to see that such myths are precisely the phenomenon that the mind sciences need to explain, as well as the fact that they constitute some of the best evidence we have available for understanding the brain and its evolution. 

There are plenty of inherited motives and instincts that help regulate the quality of a given gene pool: fitness markers, the incest taboo, infanticide of deformed infants, etc. However, these do not focus on one’s own genetic essence as the myths in question do. It doesn’t matter that bicameral man was unaware of the science of epigenetics or that his fanciful stories might correlate well with this future science: it is still reasonable to claim that these people were “aware” of a certain fact and that the various associated fables and myths, however bizarre-sounding, contain an important kernel of truth. Furthermore, if this inherited drive to preserve one’s genomic integrity exists, it could have provided the first step towards the creation of ideas like “Free Will” and other memes that fundamentally change the human operating system. Myths, poems, and metaphors are generative and are not meant to have a fixed meaning or operational definition.

The wonderful thing about poetry, religious or otherwise, is that the poet isn’t aware of the whole range of interpretations and meanings of his work; that the work doesn’t just call for interpretation, but demands multiple interpretations, perhaps ad infinitum. In fact, “reason” and “science” were born in this process of interpreting ambiguous, cryptic art, just as history was born from mythology. For science-minded rationalists to dismiss myth is quite silly, when you think about it, for their own coveted mental “software” evolved from these beta-versions, which accordingly could not fail to contain some truth. I must invoke the “No Miracles Argument” here if anyone disagrees with me on this point, for it would simply be miraculous for history, philosophy, law, and science to have emerged from total and utter nonsense produced by psychosis-addled artists, poets, and bards. No, it has always been art that has reached out into the unknown to find or create meaning, with rational tools playing a game of catch-up that has often proven Ockham’s Razor to be far too dull and slow a tool for the task. In epigenetics we see a case where Ockham’s Razor has caught up, providing a plausible interpretation of mythical themes involving responsibility for one’s soul and the souls of one’s children. Before epigenetics, these myths were usually interpreted as referring to the mind or personality as soul or essence.

The mass of myths dealing with reincarnation of an individual into one or another life form, its status dependent on how this person has lived his or her life, attests to the awareness in the experience of the race that the individual does have some responsibility for how he or she lives. Sartre’s argument that we invent ourselves by virtue of the multitude of our choices may be overstated, but its partial truth must nevertheless be admitted. -Rollo May

But epigenetics adds that we also partially invent or curate our own genetic inheritance and that of our children! However, there are two deeper layers to this general line of argument I want to explore:

1) The human brain has evolved in conjunction with culture, such that changes in culture, like the invention of new words and ideas, actually has an effect on the future evolution of the brain, which has an effect on which ideas are likely to run “natively” and which are likely to be invented easily, and so on, in a feedback loop. Therefore, choosing to follow ancient rituals and perpetuate old cultural practices will have an effect on the phenotypes of your tribe down the line. The genetic quality of your tribe will change depending on whether you endorse a mythology that celebrates inquiry versus one that celebrates blind obedience, or one that celebrates the truly human versus one that denigrates it.

2) As Julian Jaynes argued, what we call “consciousness” is the product of language, culture and socialization, not strictly biology per se, meaning that the stories that you decide to teach your children and the fidelity with which your actions reflect those stories will change what kind of consciousness they enjoy. Therefore, whether you identify the idea of a “soul” with your genetic essence, or your particular brand of self-awareness “software,” you simply must admit that modern science has begun to pour meaning back into the very myths that it largely set out to annihilate.

Though the scientific narrative is certainly “less wrong” than myth, I hasten to ask whether it is “more right”? This narrative says a whole lot less than myth and, while perhaps “less wrong,” does not support the cavalier disparagement that someone like Sam Harris heaps on myth, claiming that the history of religion is a “carnival of errors,” as if the history of science too could not also be aptly described as such (see PMI). I’m sure the reader has heard of “physics envy” before, but I would like to introduce and coin a new term, “psychology envy,” to describe the jealousy that physicists and the like should have for the worlds oldest science, for unlike any other science, ideas in psychology have the unique trait of actually changing the phenomenon in question. Psychology (in this general sense) is far more powerful than physics, for it gave birth to physics and remains fertile still.

Inventing an idea like the indivisible atom does not change atomic structure or behavior, while inventing an idea like “wrestling with the gods” changes the software and thus hardware of the human brain. An entire people (the Israelites) were changed by such an idea and proceeded to develop a culture of rational discourse, textual criticism, and thoughtful questioning. In fact the very name “Israel” means “wrestles with god.” I think this idea has done more to promote “rationality” than a list of logical fallacies or cognitive biases ever has. One should wrestle with the gods, wrestle with his own biases and prejudices, instead of discard them or ignore them in deference to the maxims of logic. That is a better formula for “rationality,” for it actually acknowledges and attempts to incorporate the “irrational.” But no, let’s just discard the story of Jacob because nobody has seen asexual, winged people with halos flying around trumpeting messages from god or wrestling with mortals؟ In this case Scientism fails to really get the good stuff out of actual “science” (see the work of Jaynes, Persinger, Ramachandran, or the journalist John Geiger for an explanation of “third man” phenomenon). 

Julian Jaynes emphasizes that there is no common pattern of growth between the disparate sciences:

My point is that the history, philosophy, and sociology of one science should not be modeled on that of another, that there is no such thing as normal scientific progress, no one pattern of scientific activity, no one criterion of excellence though there may be of aesthetic satisfaction, that there is no one ‘scientific’ method, and no one way of scientific history.

This doesn’t stop the “reality head” from asserting the superiority of “science” over and above any other organization of knowledge, as if it were one “thing,” method, or process. Crucially, these people miss the fact that the history of psychology is uniquely relevant to the science of psychology, as well as relevant to the history of every other science. Hell, 17th century terms from physics are entirely anthropomorphic: originally ‘force’ referred to muscular strength, ‘inertia’ to an idle and unemployable person, and ‘acceleration’ to the hastening of one’s steps. Need I analyze the term ‘attraction’?  I’ll repeat and expand the quote we started with:

Current psychology is wedded to its history with much stronger ties than any other science. As a laboratory investigation, psychology is only a century old; as a body of insights, observations, and hypothesis, it is the oldest science in the world. Moreover, its history is not a musty attic of intellectual bric-a-brac and mildewed curiosa, as are often found in the history of chemistry or neurology, for example. -Julian Jaynes

This should be earth-shattering to any of you rationalists out there, for it means that the mentality described in the “Illiad” is better evidence about the reality of the physical brain than the idea of the atom is evidence about the structure of the material world. The “Illiad” is both a model and a fact; a theory and evidence. “After all, what is a fine lie? Simply that which is its own evidence,” wrote Oscar Wilde. Bizarre as much of the “Illiad” is to our modern minds, it captures, describes, and teaches a certain form of mentality quite accurately; a mentality that actually existed and can exist again, for instance in a psychotic break (see Johnathan Shay). Furthermore, the growing body of myths and religious revelations quite literally altered the physical states of human brains, forcing them to run certain software and be prone to certain further religious (psychological) epiphanies, whereas the idea of the indivisible atom was just an idea bandied about for a couple millenia, then discarded for a more accurate model once the idea could be sufficiently probed. I think psychology should be the queen of the sciences, for every idea ever spoken or written down is a fact or piece of data that we can use to better understand the human mind and brain, while this improved understanding will help illuminate the source and limitations of every idea or theory whatsoever.

Those addled with physics envy should remember that most physicists do not share their limited purview. Heisenberg once said that our mechanisms and technology make us “uncertain in the impulses of the spirit.” That’s right, spirit! He did not refer to it as arbitrary cultural/linguistic software running on a clumsy, intuition-addled meat-computer. Furthermore, is this not the raison d’etre of Less Wrong: to make us “uncertain in the impulses of the spirit”?

Perhaps I am being unfair, but my fear about that particular blog is that it obsesses on physics, math, statistics, and basically everything but real psychology, but purports to be telling us deep truths about our selves. It is meant to “promote rationality,” but fails to see that the irrational is not overcome by rationality; it must be fully expressed and integrated, ordered and curated, if it is to stop interfering with rational decision making. But more importantly, the “irrational” is precisely what grounds the majority of our actual decisions in life! Unless you are taking a math test or have found yourself in a cognitive science laboratory you are going to be trying to make rational choices about your irrational drives, motives, and dreams. “Reason” is there to order the Will and arbitrate disputes between the passions, not replace them with infallible logical dictates or a Bayesian panacea.

One cannot protect the self and become stronger, smarter, and more emotionally stable simply by downloading the latest Baloney Detection Kit. This assumes a sort of mechanical/technological solution to spiritual troubles, while not taking responsibility for cutting the reader off from anything approaching the spiritual, a term which the Less Wrongian perhaps reserves only for god-like-machine-intelligences. The most endearing feature of the blog in question is that it has an unwritten agenda of “nerd rehabilitation,” but sadly, it all-too-often just strokes the nerd for his strengths and encourages him to ignore his weaknesses. The nerd does not need more technology, logic, rationality, or behavioral economics; he needs a martial arts class, a caring therapist, a musical instrument to play, and perhaps a creative writing class. (In fairness, Eliezer Yudkowsky seems to have the creative writing element down just fine؟). It was no less a logician than Aristotle who said that educating the head but not the heart is no education at all! For my part, I am quite wary of obsessions with technology, especially when they are mixed with a thinly veiled longing for immortality.

This means that technology will be clung to, believed in, and depended on far beyond its legitimate sphere, since it also serves as a defense against our fears of irrational phenomenon. -Ernest Becker

Note added May 18: One should read Thomas Carlyle in order to thoroughly purge any cynical scientism from his soul. This paragraph is a good summary of my sentiments on the matter:

For Paganism, therefore we have still to inquire, When came that scientific certainty, the parent of such a bewildered heap of allegories, errors, and confusions? How was it, what was it? Surely it were a foolish attempt to pretend ‘explaining,’ in this place, or in any place, such a phenomenon as that fardistant distracted cloudy imbroglio of Paganism,–more like a cloudfield than a distant continent of firm land and facts! It is no longer a reality, yet it was once. We ought to understand that this seeming cloudfield was once a reality; that not poetic allegory, least of all that dupery and deception as the origin of it. Men, I say, never did believe idle songs, never risked their soul’s life on allegories;  men in all times, especially in early earnest times, have had an instinct for detecting quacks, for detesting quacks. Let us try if, leaving out both the quack theory and the allegory one, and listening with affectionate attention to that far-off confused rumour of the Pagan ages, we cannot ascertain so much as this at least, That there was a kind of fact at the heart of them; that they too were not mendacious and distracted, but in their own poor way true and sane!

“Alpha” or “Omega” Male? Pt 2 – Winning

Honor has to be asserted and claimed because nature does not make it clear to all concerned what truly deserves to be honored. -Harvey Mansfield

I had a pretty domineering older brother and eventually learned the utility of cunning, misdirection, reverse psychology and playing the “Beta-male.” I even told myself and others that I didn’t care that much about winning, when in fact, that desire had just been beaten out of the realm of plausibility. In reality, I simply hated losing more than I enjoyed winning, which, given my size and the relative frequency of losing to winning, was not entirely unwise. However, each man truly desires victory and becomes sick if he disregards this deep wish, something we have done as a society for over half a century. Ironically, we made such a shift in response to a pervasive opinion that what men desire most is power, superiority, and dominance; that “winning” is either the dangerous genetic imperative of “real” men or the despicable essence of a vile patriarchy that could be eradicated by good social conditioning. Though men do love winning, we have profoundly misunderstood what “winning” has meant in the past or could again mean. Men don’t simply long for competition; they long for a worthy competition, in a culture that cultivates, preserves, and celebrates such worth. At its nastiest, the desire to preserve the worth of such a culture can lead to honor duels and bloodletting, but let’s not hastily conflate this old practice with modern “prize fighting” or schoolyard fisticuffs. We must be a little more discerning.

Pt1 of this series received more attention than anything else I have written, so I will take this as a mandate that my readers are also tiring of various modern myths about masculinity. The myth I was attempting to explode in that piece was that the strong-man has always become king; that the alpha-male achieved this alphabetical priority by means of physical strength. MMA shows promote many such myths about masculinity. Even the idea of a “championship” smacks of the myth from Pt1, as this champion is “crowned” with a golden belt that every young buck is then gunning for. Much is said about a “championship spirit” and how you have no business fighting in MMA unless you are realistically pursuing one of its crowns. The ring-girl is there to “get us started,” as Goldberg puts it; getting everyone excited and full of testosterone, while acting perhaps as the “damsel” in a fucked-up version of the heroes journey where you fight your good buddy instead of a dragon. However, despite all of the theatrics, self-promotion, gloating, and raw individualism on display, men of true honor, such as Lyoto Machida and Anderson Silva, will inevitably emerge. Furthermore, despite appearances, MMA is hardly a solitary sport: it is a team sport– more than most actually–only, a single person from the team “represents” at a given time, with the others shouting instructions and encouragement from the corner.

For my part, I truly wish that the UFC and other promotions would return to the reverence and respect that you might find in a Karate dojo when someone spars or tests for a black belt, or, for that matter, the respect that you will see in Japanese fans watching the same sport. Instead, the UFC generally panders to the meat-head action-junky and perpetuates his sickly masculinity with the usual cocktail of beer, tits, and hard hits. However, it gives me courage to see that despite this commodification of fighting skill and spirit, that genuine fighters still emerge and can be seen crying and holding each other on the canvas after a brutal match, covered in each other’s blood and congratulating the other for a spirited contest. Gone are the days, I pray, when a fighter cheers for a win due to a technical fowl or disrespects a defeated opponent with a glib dismissal of his skill. Hopefully we are heading to a period when it is recognized that “winning” is not what is important; a time when winning or losing the right way again merits ultimate respect.

Though we have gradually eroded anything resembling a healthy honor culture, this will not stop human nature from exacting its due and metastasizing this urge into super-hero fantasies and even misogyny, when it is not languishing in cowardice and inaction. Furthermore, something like an honor culture will develop in each little hunting-band of 7-th graders, not to mention any profession that requires physical bravery. It is simply impossible for an organization like the UFC not to develop a “code duello,” thereby providing the rubric for a “fair fight” in its culture. While some of these little sub-cultures might get it right, our society is generally geared toward individual accomplishment, with the result that honor gets tied to winning, while the unifying, community-building essence of honor is entirely eclipsed. This involves a very deep misunderstanding of healthy honor cultures and what they would construe as “winning.” This misunderstanding is often typified by MMA shows, but importantly, instances of true honor in the spirit of healthy competition also emerge, in no small part I think to the positive effects of training in the traditional martial arts.

Most people will think that the picture on the left depicts the “alpha-male,” “the man,” and the born leader. However, the true essence of “winning” involve the granting of respect from those who deserve respect themselves, making the middle and right pictures more appropriate depictions of “winning.” I think Randy Couture deserves more respect for losing to Machida at 47 than winning the belt at 35. Seen as a progression, the above three pictures encapsulate the growth of healthy honor: from individual victory; to the joy of being tested against a peer and making a good showing, win or lose; to finding inclusion in a group of worthy peers based not simply on having “won” at times, but instead, based on how honorably you fought, won, and lost. The true “winners” are dudes who can walk around with a justified confidence while being totally comfortable kissing their buddy on the cheek (I have a ways to go on that front, despite living in the Bay Area). You see, in true honor cultures, even in those that promoted honor duels, the point of competition was not to reveal a “winner” who would lead the people to the promised land, but instead, to maintain a certain kind of culture that was the promised land! The very fact of showing up to a duel revealed you as a winner, just as it served to reinforce the meaning and value of the honor culture in which the competition took place. The point was to ensure that people watched what they said, never slandered the reputation of another, and upheld the value of the honor culture without poisoning it with false-merit or false-aspersions. There was an economy of respect, with fisticuffs and gentlemanly duels serving as the SEC. Now we have a black-market and a mafia, with libel and slander law if you have the time, money, and the nerve to pursue such matters.

Here is Roy Baumeister on the topic:

Many people imagine that fighting a duel was a way to resolve a dispute, as if whoever won the duel was proven right. This is mostly mistaken. True, long ago there was a legal tradition in Europe of using trial by combat to resolve disputes, based on the assumption that the Christian God would intervene to ensure that whoever’s cause was right and just would prevail in the joust. But that belief faded long before dueling ended. Rather, the point of a duel was simply to prove one’s honor and manhood by taking part. In principle, it didn’t really matter whether you got the better or worse of the actual fighting. This is why dueling scars were often marks of respect. Personally, I always wondered why men of bygone eras would be proud of their dueling scars and would show them off. After all, if you had a scar, didn’t that mean that the other person cut you, so in effect you lost? But duels were not about winning or losing. The essence of dueling was that you put yourself at risk of physical harm, as a way of showing that you were serious. By taking part in a duel, you proved that you held your honorable reputation above life and limb. It was important not to back down if you were insulted, and also not to back down if you insulted someone and he challenged you.

There is a huge difference, however, between a competition and a duel. Boys rough-house and cultures hold Olympics far more than they allow the decimation of their youth in trials by combat. Today’s talk of “Alphas & Betas” is just straight bullshit, for the victory of the “Alpha” is only glorious to the extent of his opponent’s strength and courage. To deride your defeated opponent would be to strip yourself of any real accomplishment. Think about it for one second, will you: its not like the defeated “Betas” staid home with the womenfolk and knitted sweaters; they were the men covering your right side with their shield and the left with their spear. Natural male competitiveness is not about “winning” or being “the undisputed champion,” but about achieving some standing in a culture worth defending; it is about finding and building a family; it is about engendering trust and cooperation. Seriously, if humans naturally crown a god-king, the one true leader, why did the Spartans–the most warlike culture of all–have two kings and why didn’t they kill each other? You see, the “god-king” had more to do with the bicameral mind and the “Omega-male” than it did any kind of muscle-bound “Alpha” taking charge by beating everyone in single-combat. Who the hell would be left to lead into battle once this mighty king had dispatched all of his foes? No, throughout history it was perfectly respectable to be what today is crudely referred to as a “Beta-male,” with all but the strongest being perfectly satisfied just to be esteemed a worthy competitor and reliable ally.

To return to the duel, the purpose that loomed larger than protecting one’s petty ego was the protection of a culture where reputation and dignity were more important than life and limb. That was the promised land, foreign as it looks from our veritable Egypt of postmodernism. Furthermore, a man’s reputation benefited the tribe because each man’s courage in the group added to that group’s reputation for strength and courage. I’m quite sure that any Spartan facing the enemy would prefer twenty “Beta-males” at his side to ten “Alpha’s.” They knew how to maintain standards back then.

James Bowman tells us that we are suffering from “cultural phantom limb syndrome.”

Any coherent idea of honor was amputated from Western culture three-quarters of a century or so ago, leaving nothing behind but a few sensitive moral nerve endings that make themselves felt every now and then when our residual sense of propriety and public virtue is outraged and we don’t know why.

Though I agree, I think the phantom wound is far more painful than he lets on. Today, ‘masculinity,’ ‘hero-worship,’ ‘heroism,’ and ‘honor’ are all silly, anachronistic notions that we disparage so that we don’t have to feel bad about our pudgy selves, but in doing so we unknowingly breed a twisted religion of “Alpha-status” that erodes the respect that was meant for both competitors, the winner and loser alike. Trying to create an equal society free of status and superiority is not just foolish, but undesirable; it’s like trying to create a flourishing society where women don’t value having children. Nonetheless, there remain far better means of distributing this status and maintaining its meaning than what we currently employ.

Note added May 5: Remarkably, this “cultural phantom limb syndrome” is actually far more than a metaphor. With actual phantom limb syndrome there is a disconnect between what the somatosensory cortex expects to be pinged by and what the now compromised body has available to ping the brain with. In the “cultural” version, certain ideas and social systems prevent the body from undergoing certain physiological and psychosomatic experiences, including initiation into manhood and so forth, therefore functionally amputating the entire body from a somatosensory cortex, insula, TPJ and all other cortical networks expecting signals of honor and accomplishment from the body. This “phantom pain” explains why an otherwise sane person would step into a cage looking for a “win.”

On Sexual Aggression Pt2

In Pt1 I tried to simply argue that it is not “natural” for men to essentially “hunt” women. Men “hunt” to get social standing and mating opportunities; they don’t stalk their mates! I argued that aggressiveness is not an exclusively male thing, that the idea of a “rape instinct” at the core of male assertiveness is wrong, and that healthy, wholesome men, when they are truly honest about it, generally fantasize about proceptive women rewarding them for some virtue or brave feat, not forcibly taking what they have no right to under the dubious assumption that such assertiveness is what women really want. I argued that the playful aggression, sexual or otherwise, seen in our species and many others is used to heighten awareness and excitement precisely to highlight the true message of care and trust. However, I failed to emphasize certain things and left others out entirely, so read on if you enjoyed Pt1 and have the patience to indulge my fumbling through this murky issue. The emerging theme that most resembles a conclusion seems to be that of a healthy, useful male drive being channeled into rather maladaptive and tragic purposes, but please read none of what follows as either an apology or condemnation, but instead, an exploration of some possible leads.

In-Group Competition Ain’t No Picnic

I mistakenly under-emphasized how nasty in-group competitiveness and politics can be in my attempt to show that the really heinous forms of aggression, such as genocide and rape, are not standard human “programs” for dealing with members of one’s own tribe. Really, the occasional fist fight just doesn’t compare to the methods we have been programmed to pursue in the presence of an outside threat, crimes of passion notwithstanding. But this led me to overlook something rather important. Males are built to compete with other males in the community of men, but now that females are competing in the same circles, perhaps natural male competitiveness is growing increasingly confused and conflicted. I hesitate to say that this competitiveness is “misdirected,” for it is directly precisely where it has been designed to be directed, only, women have historically never been in the cross-hairs of such political ambitions. This surely is no fun for the women, but essentially they asked to join the men’s club, perhaps not realizing what a shark-tank they were diving into. Perhaps I am not really in touch with how much aggression this involves or how much impotence and rage get vented at women these days. All I’m trying to argue is that this situation is not “natural,” if you will forgive a clumsy term; that this aggression is not meant to be directed at women and is certainly not the core of male sexuality.

A male’s sexual identity requires challenge, competition, and accomplishment for him to feel like a “man,” whereas a women’s sexual identity and power are a given of biological development. But with women in the workforce men suddenly find themselves with half the available job openings, half the opportunity to compete to deserve their manhood, and furthermore must compete, quite unprecedentedly, with women in a game that has only always been predicated on being a fair contest among men. Furthermore, it is acceptable routine for guys to bust each others balls in this contest as they establish their identities, but it is far more devastating to have this done by a female (whose sexual identity is under no threat whatsoever), while reciprocating would just look like misogyny or sexual harassment. The game has certainly changed and contains all of the hazards of a co-ed, tackle football match. You could fairly say that the “carrot” is now a baby one that has already been nibbled in half. The man is no longer “the provider,” so what exactly can he stake his identity on, threatened as this identity already was in the face of early feminist attacks? What does he uniquely have to offer a woman and what will he get in return these days? Schopenhauer, writing at a time when the man was “the provider” and “man of the house” and competed only against men for status, asserted that “Marrying means to halve one’s rights and double one’s duties.” What’s in it for him now?

This predicament is essentially what I think is causing the strange inversion of the sexual equation whereby men seem to think it deeply masculine to hunt women, thereby achieving manhood and social status by obtaining sex, instead of the other way around. It’s easy for them to confuse sex with the relevant challenge and test of manhood, given that their identity is predicated on accomplishment and no suitable test or initiation is provided by society. Guys idolize the playboy because there are precious few options left for establishing one’s masculinity. I shudder to think that this may be fueled also by a wounded resentment towards women built up for a plethora of reasons, not least of these being instances where women seem to benefit from a double-standard: enjoying special treatment and chivalry when they want, but claiming equal status for their accomplishments. Perhaps there is more misogyny today than I am aware of, but for my part I doubt it springs from authentic male sexuality.

Evolution has put mankind in an awkward position somewhere between a tournament species and a pair-bonding one; a polygamous species and a monogamous one. Therefore, any system or institution society devises will be a compromise. I am trying to argue that the current compromise in western cultures is far from the best option available. The present situation is all mixed-up, not least of all because it was in no small part created by a just, progressive, and necessary feminist movement. This, however, denied certain stable features of human nature in a society that was already banishing male relevance for technological reasons. The result? Well, there was the unrealistically hyper-male action-movie star of the 80′s. Apparently, by that time natural male assets were so vilified by society that men could sit through movies like Commando or Conan in a desperate hope to glimpse or recover something authentically masculine. Society continues to confuse this situation and concludes that these hyper-violent films are causing males to be violent, entirely failing to see that violence springs from powerlessness, as does the fantasy of violence or the fantasy of having super-powers, for that matter. A man who has proven himself does not long for battle. Cinema has become more graphic and violent just as society has become more peaceful. Violent movies fill a need in men that has been building in intensity for decades, knowing as they do on some level that men have a right to be proud of the assets they used to be able to celebrate openly.

If you want to see just how tragically irrelevant men have become, just watch the show The Walking Dead, for it is actually a male fantasy! That’s right, a zombie Apocalypse is a fantastic world for male identity to thrive in compared to the society of today, as his physical strength, navigation ability, willingness to fight to the death, and hardhearted decisiveness are suddenly invaluable traits again; men can return to their preferred job of building shit or organizing and leading groups of men for scavenging, raiding, and war parties. (I would watch the show just to escape to a fantasy world without paperwork and taxes!) This should really shock you, actually, for, as Roy Baumeister argues, men have always been the expendables: those we send to war, to hunt, and to kill menacing animals. To the extent that we are a tournament species, only select men have been able to actually procreate, while nearly every available female passed on her genes throughout human history. To make matters worse, the men had to compete with each other, often using violence, just to get a shot at potentially, just maybe, getting mating rights. Thus, it should shock you that so many men truly do long for the “good old days” where they were at least relevant and where those who couldn’t get laid could at least make themselves useful to the tribe by making a rash decision or two. If the gambit was successful, this male might even get mating rights, and if not, then at least he was overtly pursuing the interests of the community. Besides, he’ll die by 30, so what is there to lose? But perhaps I am being to generous with this hypothetical frustrated male of ages past. Perhaps his wounded merit drove him to think of options like rape and while the taboo against it and threat of reprisal may have stopped him from carrying out such plans within the tribe, he may have wandered to a neighboring one looking for an easy score. Or maybe he turned to homosexuality? I’ll stop rampantly speculating.

Rape has been used as a tool in warfare for a long time, but let’s keep in mind that it was often perpetrated against men! Even today, prison rape is one of the most under-reported forms and plenty of studies suggest that men are perhaps raped more often than women if this is taken into account. This hideous practice is pursued when humans feel an annihilating threat to the tribe or when they are dehumanized and stripped of any sense of belonging in the brotherhood of man, rendering them powerless to pursue legitimate forms of sex. It is not the core of their (“normal”/”healthy”) sexuality. But what is then? Perhaps the reader of Pt1 also felt that I could have given a better treatment of male proceptivity.

Male Proceptivity: A Blessing Misunderstood and Misused

The natural proceptivity that men must display results from the fact that a woman has much more at stake when it comes to sex: she risks her reputation, freedom, enormous amounts of calories, years of investment, and potential death during childbirth. This is why males in our species are so “horny” and females remain the “gatekeepers” of sex. People feel horny when it is an opportune time for them to indulge their sex drive, a drive no less powerful in women than men perhaps, only, it is always an opportune time for men, while this is hardly the case for women. (see lesbian death bed for an interesting if controversial angle on this) Thus, men usually initiate sex, but assertiveness and initiative are not aggression. A woman’s sexual reputation is more fragile and valuable than a mans, rendering it pragmatic for the man to initiate overt contact. However, women routinely initiate covert contact (thank god!) through a telling glance and so forth, which is really just as assertive in a sense. But regardless, assertiveness is not aggression and, importantly, this male assertiveness is meant to serve and protect female virtue! That this drive has been twisted into the untoward cat calls and wolf whistles of the modern metropolis is not exactly a mark against this feature of male psychology, per se. If anything, what is required is more angry, macho male protectors around to defend a woman’s honor and keep others in check (and legal protection for doing so, of course).

Though men and women, some argue, enjoy sex drives of equal strength, surely everyone is willing to admit that this drive manifests more frequently for men. That is, they are hornier. But, you see, a drive and a desire are not the same thing. Often we mistakenly desire and pursue things that we later find we really had no genuine wish to obtain. My first one-night stand is a perfect example. I discovered that this is not actually something that I wish for naturally and that I was likely more interested in regaling my male friends with such “brave” exploits. This kind of misunderstanding is largely what drives men to be as promiscuous as they now are. Think about it: if men are really just interested in getting laid, having a steady girlfriend is a far more secure bet than trying your chances at the local watering hole. However, to be fair, it does seem that men desire and genuinely wish for more variety than women seem to require. The fallacy is to think that their wandering gaze cannot be steadied by the right pair of caring female hands. Still, there are those who argue that strip clubs and brothels are simply necessary because of this “biological reality.” Who am I to say that my sex drive is of “normal” intensity and that others don’t suffer from an imperious will so intense that such things prevent crime and war? However, even if we grant this, I implore the reader to look a little deeper even at this apparently raunchy and disgusting aspect of male culture.

Norah Vincent pointed something out that I had only vaguely grasped before: financial and health concerns notwithstanding, the male propensity to go look at strange ladies naked is actually a noble attempt to protect the virtue of the women they actually intend to pursue. Bare with me here. One of the most disgusting features about strip clubs, porn, etc is that the women more closely resemble dolls than actual human females, a fact that largely grounds the feminist attack of “objectification” and “misogyny.” However, this attack is entirely unfounded because the very point of making these females look like dolls is to protect a mans respect for women and buffer him from the shame of treating them like objects. He finds women who have already abdicated their virtue, for the most part, and who gladly contract to sell their bodies (who is objectifying whom again? Hint: customers don’t set lap-dance prices!). This way the man can in good conscience simply negotiate a deal with a businessperson instead of skulk around singles bars looking for an unsuspecting woman to seduce and then ditch. I’m not just saying that strippers and hookers are the better of two evils when it comes to the problem of the imperious male libido, but also, that this arrangement, if utilized wisely, is a sort of sweet or endearing attempt to keep the truly feminine sacred! Porn and so forth allows men to explore odd curiosities without degrading their wives and girlfriends, only, today far too many men confuse their most twisted and perverted curiosity for the very core of their sexuality! Its terribly sad really that these supposedly virile, libido-addled men actually get bored with regular old intercourse, mistaking, as they do, erotic curiosity for a genuine wish and need. If they were truly honest with themselves, my guess is that they really wish for and need dignity and respect but fail to find a stable source of it. You see, the one stable feature of male hierarchies is that respect is always in short supply, which is one way of maintaining its meaning and value. With women competing for the same spots in this hierarchy, there is far less of an already scarce commodity to go around, while the status of what remains attainable for men is rendered ambiguous at best. Is it any wonder that men have opted to indulge in cheap philandering for their self-respect? But there is another angle here that should be explored, at my great peril, I’m afraid.

Female Sexual Competition & Male Resentment

Men are by nature merely indifferent to one another; but women are by nature enemies. -Schopenhauer

I am generally sickened by the actions of my male compatriots when it comes to sex and relationships, but my disgust has been growing stronger as time goes on. You see, by about age 27 men have figured out a loophole in Nature’s design, one that they often ruthlessly exploit. I think they do so in response to built-up resentment, but please, my dear reader, do not read the following as an apology for this male behavior or a condemnation of women.

Because females blossom earlier, both physically and emotionally, they hold the power for at least the first decade of sexual maturity. The pendulum begins to swing the other way around 27 when women realize that they need to snag a decent guy and stop fooling around with whatever bad boy they were having fun with or showing off to their female friends. What does the above Schopenhauer quote have to do with this? Well, he reasoned that because men were competing in the economy but employed in different trades that they were merely indifferent competitors, whereas women (at that time) were all in the same trade–that of landing a decent husband–making them natural enemies. While the economy has evolved dramatically since this quote was penned, the point about female competition continues to sting. While men compete with each other for women indirectly, that is, via sports matches, hunting expeditions, promotions, and so forth, women compete with each other for men directly, buffered only by the kind of sly, nuanced politeness you expect in a Jane Austin novel. Therefore, today, plenty of rather nice and upstanding young gentlemen must wait their turn as they watch female friends and love interests continually choose assholes, over and over again, largely for social advantages that include status in the female hierarchy. The resentment builds up over long and lonely years, fueled by an unconscious genetic alarm clock that seems to scream “get laid as many times as you can, right now! You shouldn’t expect to live past 30! If you are failing, just do something rash, as you have nothing to lose.”

This “inarticulate rage,” to borrow a phrase, gets more and more intense, leading to misogynist conclusions like “ok, well, I guess she wants an asshole, so I’ll damn well give her one then!” But then he hits 27-30 and realizes that the genetic messengers were wrong: he is not dead, the king has not sequestered all fertile females in a harem, and suddenly the power dynamics have entirely shifted in his favor. There are now plenty of eager women looking for a decent husband to settle down with, women who may have had their fill of jerks. The moral question many of these men fail to answer correctly is “do these girls deserve forgiveness or retribution?” Thus, many men are led by their resentment to lead women on, wasting their precious reproductive years in the dating circuit as the women’s unconscious alarm clocks blare desperate warnings of lost immortality. If there is a sickly, aggressive core to modern male sexuality, it is to be found here. Ironically, this aggressive betrayal is hidden behind the false intentions of a good gentleman looking for love, and so appears innocuous or noble. But as we have seen, appearances and easy moral judgements on male behavior are hazardous in a society as twisted as ours. The greater irony is that males have essentially adopted an historically (and biologically?) feminine strategy of obtaining sex to gain social status, perhaps, as I have speculated, in response to their witnessing young women do the same. If so, it appears that these angry men have become what they hate, just as perhaps many feminists have also.

On Sexual Aggression

I am sick of hearing people’s drugstore philosophy about sexual aggression being “natural” or how the “aggression” part of the brain is right next to the “sexuality” part of the brain. This seems to feed into another recurrent feature of today’s Zeitgeist: that males are naturally aggressive towards women, sexually proceptive, and have something like a “rape instinct.” All of the above is repulsive, false, and dangerous. I could appeal to authorities like Robert Sapolsky on this matter, or refer the reader to an even more articulate attacker of the above view in Girl Writes What, but instead I will simply regale you with some plain-old philosophizing. I will argue that people consistently confuse features of the modern sexual marketplace with biological realities or necessities, and in particular seem to lose sight of the true equation that governs human sexual dynamics: males seek power to get access (rights) to sex, while females use sex to gain access to power and social standing.

It is somewhat true that male humans must be more proceptive and females more receptive: men typically initiate contact, ask for a date, inquire about marriage, etc, though some of this stems purely from our modern culture. Our dating environments reflect a stark caricature of male proceptivity, requiring as a right of passage that males compete with each other by feats of daring flirtation for the transient affections of random women. This leads many people to think that this proceptivity is the cause of rape; that men are simply pathologically proceptive, but this is total nonsense. You see, it is profoundly unnatural for men to be competing with other men via the rubric of pick-up-artistry: they are supposed to be competing with each other or cooperating against an environmental obstacle, the fruits of which being social status in the male hierarchy, as well as tangible gains like food provisions. What we see in sports is a sort of twisted simulacrum of the real thing because in the tribal environment women wouldn’t even see most of the hunting and killing; they would simply see who gets the most respect from other males and who gets to eat the best parts of the kill, or whatever. Women don’t need to see the touchdown and the victory dance, just the resulting accoutrement of power. The modern dating scene gets this entirely backwards: the victory dance, in anticipation of some “touchdown,” is made the center of the competition, whereby men receive respect in their peer group for subsequently winning sex. Let me run that by you again: today, men use deception and pick-up-artistry to win sex in the pursuit of social power, which will then give them the confidence to get sex without trying so hard (ie when they are hardened and entitled narcissists). Women fall for this bass-ackwards approach because 1) they don’t have much of an alternative, and 2) they can still see which males are getting the most respect from their male friends (ie the biggest man-slut), therefore triggering natural sexual receptivity.

There is a naturally aggressive-looking aspect to the play behavior of social animals, especially pack-hunters, but what is especially important to notice amidst all of the wrestling and nipping is that blood is not drawn. That is, the nips and tackles are carefully and tenderly controlled so as to demonstrate care and build the trust needed to hunt cooperatively. In species where the males must hunt this way, competition serves later cooperation by building trust and establishing who is best at what. A female watching two males compete should be looking both for physical virtuosity and overt caring; a pair of traits that interact in an interesting way. If I can dominate you so thoroughly that I don’t even have to give you bruises, I must be one hell of a genetic specimen! This innate drive for competition in the service of cooperation is sometimes extended, as in the case of chimpanzees, to war parties and raiding of other chimp troupes, and this seems to be where the really vile types of aggression manifest, including behaviors like rape, cannibalism, and tribal genocide. But these nasty aggressive behaviors are not the types of things that human males choose to “display” in order to attract mates, but instead, seem to keep such matters amongst the male hunting group, and then discuss such things only after reaching sufficient levels of guilt-banishing intoxication.

But what about the “love bite,” you might ask? This is again primarily a demonstration of care, but more importantly, it is open to either gender in the act of coitus, as is the choice of who provides most of the sexual, how do I say, “locomotion.” Its not like males are the only ones who grit their teeth in the presence of intense Eros or who might express this delightful frustration with a caring nibble or delicate but swift change of position. Simply put, the dude who wants to do nothing but thrust like a jackhammer is doing it all wrong, just like the girl who wants to ride her man into the winners circle of most-orgasms-per-minute-of-coitus relative to her girlfriends’ avowed performances. Perhaps there is a time for simple “fucking,” but our society has relegated human sexual intercourse to this only, with “love making” just being the pacifying phrase you use to refer to fucking when talking to your girlfriend. Truly sad. Lastly, it should be mentioned that, with oral sex for instance, it is sometimes necessary for a man to hold his girl down, which can be enjoyable for both parties, but again the authentic intention is to maximize her pleasure while avoiding a black-eye delivered by her pelvis. There is nothing “dominating” about it except in the sense that you might want to force a friend to keep laughing by unleashing a further volley of jokes.

Our modern, backwards social system has the effect of increasing natural male insecurities while decreasing cooperation and trust, the very opposite of what natural male competition is all about. Today, all of the animosity or frustration that would have been directed at a nimble gazelle that got away (or whatever God-of-the-Hunt that failed me) can only be directed at 1) that uptight bitch who unjustly shut down my advances, or 2) that dick who cock-blocked me from making the kill. This mix of backwards psychology and constant humiliation breeds a powerlessness and desperation in men that easily leads to violence and rape. Furthermore, it breeds dishonesty and sociopathy because each man must be his own advocate and salesman. In fact, his self-advocacy, sense of smug entitlement, and salesmanship are precisely the “virtues”or “fitness markers” that will determine his success as he apes the natural trappings of success, status, and power with NLP, self-hypnosis, and foolhardy bravado. The natural state of things involves a woman seeing some legitimate evidence of fitness and status, which importantly includes another female or male advocating on behalf of such a fit, if overlooked, male. How many of you women have suddenly become interested in a man simply because your girlfriends saw something in him? If you will forgive the digression, let me remark that the same thing applies to the modern job market: really we should return to a system where “referrals” and “character references” dominate, instead of relying on each person’s self-advocacy. If this happened, people would be naturally motivated to simply be competent and honorable people; to compete to be a character deserving of strong referrals. It would be a society of virtue ethics, true relationships, and honor, instead of today’s pathetic assembly-line for the production of sociopaths.

The tragedy is that we have essentially socialized or conditioned our males to have the opposite temperament and character to their natural inheritance. Males today routinely talk in militaristic terms about their various sexual “conquests,” trading fantasies about how aggression, initiative, and force “won” the day. To put it bluntly, the male who talks about wanting to push a girl up against a wall, turn her around, and tear off her skirt is likely harboring some homo-erotic tendencies, sociopathic tendencies, has been abused, or is simply lying. If you ask men what they dream about at night, or what their fondest sexual memories are, they invariably involve exactly the opposite of this “proceptivity/aggression” myth. Men fantasize about deserving sex so justly that a woman grabs them by the belt and pulls them into a side room with a coy smile and accepting embrace. That is, men are turned on by women being turned on; they are longing for the right to procreate, not the physical power to dominate a woman.

A man’s true libido is not very different than his fighting spirit, as they are both intensified and liberated by honor and a sense of deserving honors. In fact, the “rescue-the-damsel” myth is the raison d’être of a man’s fighting spirit and he longs to prove himself by protecting his women against the invader or rapist. Along with the universal rape taboo, this fighting spirit is exactly the natural mechanism that ensures honorable sexual relations. The greater the justification for protective violence, the greater the will-to-fight and the greater the will-to-procreate. Many a nice-guy hesitates in a fight because he is unsure of whether he is truly justified in harming the other guy, just as he often hesitates in pursuing a woman because he is unsure whether he has a right to. But the simple fact is that he doesn’t have a right to! Women are all-to-quick to make him aware of this, even when they have placed their thong-partitioned butt-cheeks on a bar stool and are obviously putting on a sexual display. The truly sad fact is that the modern male hero-myth requires the male to “face his fear” (a legitimate fear!) and pursue a woman precisely despite the fact that he has been granted no right to do so! This only inflames the urge to fight and compete amongst males, because they see all of this injustice taking place, all-the-while longing for a situation where they can come to the rescue of the girl who can’t seem to get rid of her nagging pursuer. Unlike women, men must do something to think of themselves as adults (as “men”), but the modern equation for obtaining manhood is only a recipe for shallow philandering, misogyny, male powerlessness, violence, and even rape.

I always felt inadequate for not being able to pick up chicks, when in fact, I was simply a good guy who naturally sensed the injustice and backwardness of this kind of pursuit. Never did I want to impose my sexual and self-image needs onto an unsuspecting and unreceptive female; never did I want to be such a burden, but then “win” her affections based on persistence or guile. All I ever wanted was to be wanted, and to deserve being wanted by someone similarly deserving. Our twisted society has somehow encouraged people to adopt an attitude whereby women have this commodity called “sex,” which they dole out to the person who best competes for them, or as it often tragically happens, with them (see “negging“). This is the very apogee of a malformed sexual discourse: where men compete with women using the tools of deception and contempt sufficient to display their relative advantage in social power. You could not develop a more twisted application of human longings than this complete inversion of the human sexual equation.

Djangoism

If you find no meaning in Tarantino movies you need not read on, though I hasten to remind such a reader that a movie, much like travel to foreign lands, conversation, or smoking ganja, is only as interesting as you are. I recently watched Django Unchained and greatly enjoyed Christoph Waltz’s acting and his character, King Schultz, without which I would have enjoyed little else. What struck me first was the fact that Waltz’ character demonstrated exactly the opposite point offered by his brilliantly played character in Inglorious Basterds. In the latter film, Waltz drags the viewer into the murkiest caverns of moral ambiguity, forcing him to ask how it could possibly be that the most intellectually sophisticated culture in the world could also launch the Holocaust. I left the theater shaken to the core by Waltz’ performance. In Django, however, Waltz’ character, who provides the great majority of the humor in the film by way of his having mastered English better than any of the Americans, again gives us the ultra-sophisticated German, only this time he is the only humane white person in a film which completely abandons moral ambiguity in favor of easy pandering to black indignation and white guilt. Schultz’ appreciation of high culture will not even allow him to listen to Beethoven during the sale of a slave, while this high culture does nothing to curb the barbarism of the Americans. All of the moral ambiguity involved in American history is jettisoned for an easy “white Americans are greedy and evil” formula, summed up nicely in the film when Calvin Candy asks Django if he, unlike Shultz, is used to seeing black men torn apart by dogs and Django replies that he is simply more accustomed to Americans than Shultz.

Yeah, sure…forget about the North, which was about to fight, in part, to free the Southern slaves and forget about all of those economically prudent slavers of the South who handled their merchandise with care or even humanity, and simply write off the entirety of white America as no better than the films villain, Candy. How clever and deep, Quinton. What he implies about Americans is laughable, not simply because there were plenty of honorable white people around at the time, but also because there was no other place on Earth much better! What, were all the blacks in Africa singing Kumbayah and holding hands at the time? Please. The world–though I’m sure full of wonderful individuals like yourselves–has been largely cruel and wretched to everyone. But why not: since there is no true Devil to find in this world wrought with suffering, lets just find an adequate scapegoat and thrash him for easy kicks. Did nobody notice that Django is no different than the Nazi propaganda film, Nation’s Pride, that is mocked as a shallow, masturbatory killing-fest in IB?

What is so tragically ironic about this is that the very moral simplicity and scapegoating that form the core of Django hold the answer to the deep moral question posed by Inglorious Basterds! That is, the same undiscerning and cowardly instinct to find an external Devil to blame for one’s misfortunes created both the Holocaust and the basis of Django’s heroism, though this was thinly veiled behind the “rescue the damsel” pretense. Any decent portrayal of American slavery must grapple with the true terror, the honest problem, the unspeakable dilemma: how could great people like Jefferson have owned slaves? People have been butchering and enslaving each other for all of recorded history just as all great civilizations have been built on forced labor–not to mention the fact that feudalism and other caste systems ain’t that far from slavery–so the really unsettling question is the same posed by Inglorious Basterds: how could such sophisticated and enlightened people do such evil? I could answer with that Solzhenitsyn quote about the line between good and evil running through each of our hearts, but the answer I’d prefer here is this: the Constitution was a document more humane than the humans who drafted it just as the German culture produced towering figures of genius whose masterpieces transcended that very culture’s ability to assimilate such wisdom. In short, it takes a while for a culture to catch up with the moral genius of its great individuals, just as it does for these individuals to live up to their own pronouncements, if they ever manage to. We are actively writing the essence of humanity, but while Genius reaches beyond itself, Tarantino settles for the most inglorious aspects of human nature for some cheap thrills and box-office loot. The moral core of Django is the very essence of what is wrong with man, so I therefore propose the term “Djangoism” for this sort of pandering to black jingoism. You see, there is no such thing as “Racism;” only various forms of tribalism turned into a religion. While purporting to hold the moral high ground of racial equality Djangoism promotes exactly the same tribalism and scapegoating that justified slavery and genocide.

Christoph Waltz is now one of my favorite actors, but as a German, I wonder how he could countenance this great disparity in the portrayal of his culture. Both movies display German sophistication, but the first implies that the more intellectual the culture the easier it can justify moral corruption while the second shows the opposite, as simple hillbillies and Southern gentlemen alike are low as they come. The only “good” white person in Django makes his living killing people and selling their corpses for cash, enlightened as he is. The truth is that the source of evil and barbarism exists in all of us, slaves and slavers alike, only the slavers are in a better position to exercise these passions and so play the villain. Put the slaves in power and see how they treat the other races; see what kind of Constitution they pen! Lincoln brilliantly said that the true test of character is not adversity but obtaining power. The way that Jefferson used his power betrays just as much about his character as the way Django exercised his freedom, but whom I ask you was more enlightened? So, as African Americans have gained political and cultural power in this country, how are they comporting themselves and how should we encourage them to comport themselves? Tarantino wants to turn a profit inflaming racial prejudice against contemporary whites who have nothing to do with racism and slavery while deifying the violent and aggressive redress of grievances from decades or centuries past as if these were some kind of historical aberration!

My great grandparents immigrated to Canada fleeing poverty in Russia and Germany (*the reader yawns). Nobody in my lineage, to my knowledge, owned slaves, and if they did, it is just as likely that they were white slaves and more likely still that my ancestors themselves were the slaves of others. History has only ever been boatloads of fun for the .01%. Thus, it has always chapped my hide while living in America to be subjected to white guilt that simply doesn’t make any sense. Furthermore, this tribal-blood-feud mentality encourages African Americans to continue to segregate themselves instead of assimilate into American multiculturalism; to form exclusive groups dubiously predicated on equality. How many people have you met who don’t just play the “black card,” but routinely slap down the “straight black flush;” who don’t bother to develop any authentic identity of their own save their emulation of Malcolm X, as if they have a right to pretend to be as oppressed as he; who turn race into a dogmatic religion for their benefit? How many people have you met who can talk of nothing but race and racism, all-the-while extorting a hushed approval from everyone, terrified as they now are of offending someone’s deep sense of cultural identity? After all, you would call me a savage if I punched a man simply for calling me “a worthless piece of shit,” but you would all likely call Django a hero for knocking out the guy who said the N-word. How wretchedly ironic that nobody sees the hypocrisy in the latter case: someone calls you a word that means something like “subhuman savage quick to animal passions and without intellect or virtue,” and you respond by breaking his jaw in a fit of rage? Am I the only one who sees the cultural power grab that all of the above involves? Its like a beautiful feminist walking around naked and then blasting the first guy who checks her out as a misogynistic pig who is objectifying her, while she betrays the fact that her only real identity rests on just this objectification and the leverage it grants her. Does nobody else long for a black comedian who decides not to discuss race; who has something else to say? How is it that a black guy can talk about his “ancestry” at a party all night, but nobody would put up with my white ass doing the same? Everyone probably stopped reading at the beginning of this paragraph because its not very interesting subject matter to anyone but the person talking (unless black)! Oh…I see I have your attention again. It must be this girl’s biting political point, which I’m sure is the only satisfaction she is deriving from this little display:

A woman may look as if she is surrendering, but in truth she is indulging her relational aggression. -Harvey Mansfield

Though I somewhat worry about getting lynched for writing this, I suppose it would only prove my point, so go ahead: crucify me. I will remind this lynch mob, however, that I don’t even believe in human “races” or “racism” and am simply a cultural bigot: I prefer great cultures and great ideas just as much as I despise shallow ones full of Ressentiment. I love much of African American culture, especially as it flourished in the 20′s through 50′s, but for this very reason I resent most of modern rap and black entertainment for failing to live up to their cultural progenitors. I see regression, not progression, and Tarantino is just capitalizing on this fad ruthlessly.

Freedom Aint Liberating

“Patience is bitter, but its fruit is sweet.” -Aristotle

Samuel Johnson famously states that all experience is for the freedom of the will, all theory against it, but while this captures a great truth about causal reasoning/theorizing, it also obscures the fact that our most autonomous decision-making feels like hard work instead of liberation; a burden instead of a windfall; anxiety instead of boundless opportunity. Accordingly, far too much is made of the so-called “experience of freedom,” as if this were a single, unified phenomenon and the only grounds for positing the existence of FW in the first place. The truth is that there are many experiences of freedom and none of them are direct experiences of Free Will.

In a shallow sense anything you mange to be able to do is done freely and therefore is an experience of freedom. This experience is intensified if an external constraint existed that you were nonetheless able to overcome, filling you with a sense of power. This is still further intensified if that external obstacle excited fear or some other internal obstacle to action that was nonetheless overcome also, adding a further feeling of courage. The most discussed experience of freedom, however, is that feeling or report of “meant to do that” that accompanies an action that conforms with prediction or expectation. Lastly, there is a truly liberating feeling of relief from the burden of choice when the window for choice has closed, either by external constraints or because a choice has already been made. Though each of these are experiences of a freedom, they are not direct experiences of Free Will, per se. As we proceed, however, let us keep each of these feelings in mind. There is the feeling of:

1) action without external constrain, 2) overcoming external constraint, 3) overcoming the internal constraint of fear, 4) “meant to do that” reported after any predictable action, and 5) relief from the burden of choice.

The conventional wisdom has it entirely backwards, for true freedom doesn’t feel liberating in the moment at all, but only perhaps after the fact, at which point it is no longer an experience of Free Will, but instead its opposite: the feeling of relief from the burden of choice (5). Paradoxically, the choices that involve the most autonomy involve enormous internal conflict, not an easy, spontaneous being of one mind. Exercising Free Will involves a conflict between many possibilities as well as a conflict between many desires or values, an experience called “anxiety” that hardly feels like easy liberation or freedom-of-whim. There is only one exception to this, artistic expression, where a sense of freedom is actually preserved, but the catch it that one is so heavily invested in the artistic pursuit that none of the above five experiences of freedom can enter consciousness. The highest expression of Free Will totally eclipses the usual feelings of freedom that we so often mistake for an experience of Free Will.

Many people interpret any unconstrained decision as a free one because of (1). This mistake plays into the hands of the Free Will critic, who might, for instance, point to priming experiments where a person is fooled into thinking they made a free choice when in fact they were secretly primed to do so. These experiments, however, always involve unimportant decisions that didn’t activate the Will much in the first place and more importantly hardly required any deliberation whatsoever. The authentic experience of freedom, by contrast with (1), involves many constraints–internal, external, or both–that force the choice of a single alternative to the exclusion of the others. Authentic freedom feels like conflict, not free license.

Being aware of an overabundance of possibilities is the feeling of anxiety, which can be a heavier burden to carry than those troubles that life forces on us without raising the issue of consent. In deed, this anxiety resulting from choice is one of those troubles that life forces on us without our consent! And this is the crux of the matter: this is why even the most liberated people in the world today might feel that the idea of Free Will is nonsense. However, their unease at being forced to be free presumes the very Free Will that they feel like rejecting as nonsense, for if they really didn’t believe in Free Will, then their “freedom” to choose between staggering numbers of possibilities would cease to be a problem or generate angst.

While kids who grew up in the fifties may have fled the claustrophobia of their limited choices, kids of this era felt the agoraphobia of seemingly unlimited opportunity. -Bennis, Thomas, “Geeks & Geezers”

The amazing thing is that these old “geezers” felt more autonomy than the modern “geeks,” despite the latter having far fewer obstacles to face down and far more opportunities before them. How do we explain this paradox? Firstly, the more limited your choices, the less burden of choice you are strapped with, which can be experienced as a freedom or relief (5). Obstacles can make certain choices impossible, therefore narrowing down your choices to a manageable number, adding to feelings 1, 3, & 5. This is not all “illusory” freedom, either, for limits can also free up mental resources that would otherwise be overwhelmed, providing you more freedom of thought and thus choice. A poet, for instance, might become far more creative by limiting himself to a certain style or meter than if he burdened his mind with the amorphous instructions to come up with any old brilliant poetry whatever. Secondly, obstacles provide resistance to one’s free powers and therefore highlight them in sharp relief, especially when one’s free powers are up to the challenge, which results in the intoxicating feeling of autonomy and power (2).

The “geezers” weren’t strapped with much of a burden of choice, but were forced to face obstacles that not only challenged their freedom, but often threatened their very survival as well. Those who survived such ordeals were far stronger for having been tested and found able, but more importantly, their own precious freedom had been narrowed down so far as to be threatened with annihilation, giving them an incredibly sensitive eye for the freedoms and opportunities they had left. The “geeks,” by contrast, never had obstacles like World War II to winnow-down their horizon of possibilities, never experienced trials and tests that if overcome would become the stuff of Spielberg movies, and never found compelling obstacles upon which to test their strengths. The “geeks” big obstacle was there freedom and burden of choice. This largely explains the above paradox, but needs the addition of our basic thesis: that true freedom does not feel liberating in the first place, so we shouldn’t see this situation as “paradoxical” at all!

The feeling of Free Will involves the turmoil of knowing that alternatives exclude and that one’s choice will change his identity permanently; a feeling perhaps akin to the nausea and preemptive regret that accompanies sitting down to get a tattoo. After making the choice, excluding the alternatives, and successfully conquering an obstacle, one might receive that feeling of power and autonomy noted above, but this is only an aftereffect of Free Will, not its indelible signature. This signature is felt in that tortured moment of uncertainty before choice and during deliberation. However, when the identity has been thus altered by a decision, similar decisions will be made more reflexively, on a whim, and therefore get confused with the experience of Free Will that made such whimsy possible. They are free choices, to be sure, for they resulted from a moment of tortured deliberation that altered the Will, but they are not themselves experiences of Free Will unless freshly considered, doubted, and so forth all over again. That we could subject our whimsy to deliberation at any time further reinforces the tendency to confuse such whimsy with Free Will.

But how do we square this with the experience of artistic expression, which at the same time feels like the apogee of liberation while being maximally subject to the spontaneous and unpredictable movements of the Will? If whimsy is not Free Will, then what about artistic creation and “authoring” something spontaneously? Complicated as this at first seems, the answer is simple enough.

Artistic Creation, Inspiration, & Creative Flow

The flow or whim of artistic creation is built upon thousands of moments of painful deliberation and disciplined practice which alters, realigns, and teaches the Will, thereby freeing it not only from external and technical obstacles to self-expression, but also those obstacles that the Will places in its own way, like competing desires, caprice, boredom, fear, etc. It is not the ego therefore that learns discipline, but the Will, for the ego already knows how to submit. Creativity is a great example with which to demonstrate Free Will because it is an instance of a freed or educated Will. The creativity of children often appears random, haphazard, or arbitrary for precisely this reason: their Will has not had its aesthetic preferences refined nor has it developed enough discipline and patience to allow these preferences to emerge clearly in the work. However, the flow or “whim” of true creativity is not the same feeling as (1), though it builds on this, for it is also the feeling of being so completely absorbed in the act that there simply isn’t enough conscious bandwidth for reports of “meant to do that” (4) or any of the other after-action-reports we usually mistake for experiences of Free Will. In fact, many artists describe inspiration from the perspective of an external locus of control; that they are beholden to their muse. This is just our basic thesis again: as liberating as artistic expression can be, the experience of Free Will more closely resembles its opposite than some sense of unlimited free license.

The artist is driven to create beauty or truth and hardy has such absolute prerogative. In fact, their sense of freedom almost resembles the abandon of (5), especially if they in fact view inspiration as coming from “out of the blue.” The reality is that the ego has carefully instructed the Will, edited its prior revelations and musings, and significantly shaped what happens to come “out of the blue,” but the illusory sense of (5) seems to allay the existential burden to “the muses” at least until the work can be completed and claimed as the artist’s freely authored creation.

A human being can invest the totality of their consciousness into an activity so thoroughly that there remains no bandwidth left to report a feeling of prior-intention or deliberate-choice (4), though the activity is the very apogee of human powers & freedoms. Despite this, the Free Will critic takes (4) to be the “experience of freedom” upon which FW is fabricated. These critics are clearly in error because (4) is predicated on predictability and accurate expectation, where creative work is only interesting and “creative” if it cannot be forecast accurately. Creative flow involves investing ones whole mind so intensely that the mind is filled with a sense of awe, self-overcoming, and authentic expression precisely on account of the unpredictability or capriciousness of the resulting work. An artist’s claim of “meant to do that” should never be taken at face value, for at best that artist had only a vague conscious notion of what he intended to produce. A musical performer, by contrast, might know what they intend to produce, but their total conscious investment in this task eclipses the feeling of freely choosing, with a sense for one’s contribution coming only after the performance has come off. The freedom to play well with a symphony requires submission to the group and to the piece, further reinforcing a feeling of un-freedom or constraint while nonetheless performing a remarkable demonstration of Free Will.

The Will-To-Freedom

The most fundamental desire of the Will is for freedom, for more Life, but the Will has a limited “knowledge” of what that could mean and requires the ego to investigate the greater meaning, significance, and possibilities inherent in this drive. This is where the ego makes some elbow room that the Will can later capitalize on. Though ‘Free Will,’ as Voltaire noted, can be quite a misleading moniker, it is nonetheless far more accurate than “Free Ego” would be, despite the fact that the ego was instrumental in freeing the Will from itself. Acquired discipline can look superficially like the ego has been freed from the imperious demands of lust, greed, etc, a mistake which resulted in thousands of years of “mind-body” dualism muddling the issue terribly and associating freedom only with restraint of the Will. In fact, the ego’s ability to say “No!” to the Will can be quite misleading, for the ego can only remind the Will that its demands on the ego conflict with its prior demands, therefore persuading it or seducing it more than ordering it or mastering it. Being the “captain of your soul” is more like being a good navigator, observer, and manager than it is like having the boat on “remote control.” Nevertheless, the Will still needs the ego to perform certain functions, with the result that the ego does have Sartre’s radical power of “No!” along with Libet’s “veto” or “Free Won’t” simply by failing to perform or act when prompted by the Will’s immediate wishes. The ego does not have unlimited power to do this, as the Will will press the issue, but it can bide time like this via justifications that have been acquired through an intimate knowledge of the Will. The ego might say something like “No! I won’t! When I followed this imperative before, I noticed you (the Will) were not assuaged but instead became more perturbed still.” Having brought the prior and disturbing episode “to mind,” the Will must cleave to its own orders. The matter is much like negotiating with a child: if you force something down their throats you risk engaging their natural rebelliousness, while the use of reverse psychology, mirroring their own words back to them, or other forms of persuasion usually bring them around. The big blank check in this balance sheet that grounds any radical freedom comes from the fact that the Will’s basic desire is for freedom and therefore a clever ego can always call the Will’s bluff by explaining to the Will that it is violating this very desire with its rigid imperatives. Thus does the ego educate and free the Will from itself. Free Will, then, is a freedom-from-will stumbled upon first by the ego while carrying out its duties to the Will, and learned subsequently by the Will itself. Not everyone is the “captain of his soul” or has developed a robust Free Will, as we all start out as deck-hands and few ever even reach the status of first-mate. However, nearly all of us are capable of such a promotion if we could be bothered to learn the ropes.

Freedom From Destiny

“The paradox is that freedom owes its vitality to destiny, and destiny owes its significance to freedom.” -Rollo May

I love titles with two commensurate interpretations. This one captures the compatibilist position on free will, as we can have ‘freedom from destiny’ by wresting ‘freedom from destiny.’ That is, freedom is the measure of how many determinisms are in play, because each determinism describes a new level of the causal nexus that is actively, that is freely, at work in the universe. Accordingly, the more laws of nature one must use to describe an object or action, the freer that object or action. This goes against our intuitive understanding of the laws of nature, in which we presume that laws only constrain and therefore the more laws in play, the more constraint is involved. But subject this intuition to a single observation of the world around you and note that the more complex an object or action, the more laws are in play, and the more apparent freedom is displayed, however you may want to define ‘freedom.’ That is, a cat has a much wider range of actions and behaviors than a palm tree does, while the tree has a much wider range than sand does.

The mind advances into novelty apparently much as stones in an arch, though partly resting on the ones below, yet partly reach out into empty space. John H. Finley, Jr. in “Four Stages of Greek Thought.”

This metaphor of the arch is quite beautiful and I choose here to appropriate it as follows: the mind is like the arch, supported by other stones (perhaps the categories of perception, etc), but nonetheless it is a physical body in its own right, reaching out into space “on its own” to the extent of its own height. Furthermore, the stone arch secures both pillars to each other with the proper distribution of its own intrinsic mass, rendering them more stable “from the top down,” despite being supported by these pillars from the ground up. But leaving aside this interesting matter of “downward causation,” the point I want to make here can be found in the observation that all of the books in any library are relevant and indispensable to understanding the phenomenon called ‘man,’ while the other parts of nature can be understood using far more limited selections therein. This point can be seen even in a simple ladder of determinisms:

Humans: physical determinism + chemical determinism + genetic/biological determinism + environmental/behavioral determinism + psychological determinism + linguistic determinism + logical determinism + cultural/social determinism + technological determinism + economic determinism, etc… (Dare I add “Self-Determinism”?)

Animals: physical determinism + chemical determinism + genetic/biological determinism + environmental/behavioral determinism + (limited) psychological determinism

Plants: physical determinism + chemical determinism + genetic/biological determinism

Molecules: physical determinism + chemical determinism (laws of chemistry)

Atoms: physical determinism

If the free-will-denier is right, then each level higher on this ladder would have to add another constraint without adding any freedom: atoms would have the most freedom, as the fewest kinds of causality apply to them and “govern” them, while humans are the most constrained. Do you think your pet hamster enjoys more freedoms than you do, or that an atom trumps you both? Of course not. The behavior of the atom is easier to understand and predict than that of the hamster, which should imply that the hamster has more freedom, right? How odd that we can take our immense powers of prediction as proof that Destiny has all the power and we have none. What exactly did we predict if not Destiny? Does the power to foresee negative eventualities and avoid them not grant freedom? Foresight allows us to predict Destiny and avoid her, thereby obtaining freedom from Destiny, or to better align with her and literally assemble freedom from Destiny.

Each successful rung on the ladder does not add a constraint, but simply expresses the limit of the newly available freedom. As Rollo May astutely puts it, “every advance in freedom gives birth to a new determinism, and every advance in determinism gives birth to a new freedom.” There was a time on earth before DNA. When DNA emerged a new form of freedom in the universe was born (Life), while a new form of determinism was born (genetic). This new causal system, however, did not “restrain” or “govern” anything, for it acts only on life, which didn’t exist before genes. ‘Genetics’ do not control ‘genes,’ as this statement is pure tautology. Rather, genetic laws simply describe what genes and genomes freely do! How else could genomes do things but freely? If they were constrained from doing them, we would have no behavior to describe or explain.

Scientific laws describe the limits of what genes can do (on their own). That is, laws are descriptions of what genes cannot do. Therefore, each law itself only tells what something is not, while the sum of the laws that inhere in an object can describe what it is, much in the same way that a video camera captures the various surfaces or boundaries of an object moving past it, allowing us to infer what the insides consist of. The Hard Determinist is simply stopping his analysis “at the surface,” so to speak. The speed of light is a law, but this law does not state that light must travel at speed (c), but rather, that light cannot go faster than speed (c). Thus we can infer that whatever it is and whatever freedoms it enjoys, light is really fast, but all we really know from this is the limit of its freedom of motion. Electromagnetism is a freely operating force not in the world but of the world and it has no “goals” or “purposes” to be “thwarted” or “governed” by other forces or objects. In some places, like Earth, its freedoms have been harnessed and infused with purpose by intelligent apes who have extended the scope of electromagnetism to include new forms of order. They have added their causal powers (as de-limited by scientific law) to those of electromagnetism, so in a very real sense anything man does like this is “super-natural,” for he adds further order and complexity to an already complex system of forces.

Thus, freedom builds on freedom, but from the human perch looking down from the top of this ladder of freedoms it looks like determinism all the way down. I must assure you that from the perspective of the ground looking up this ladder, it looks like freedom all the way up. The laws that describe a being’s “limits” must be amended when we see evidence that other objects or forces, perhaps in higher rungs on the ladder, extend ranges of activity. Psychological, logical, or cultural forces can directly shape genetics and obliterate whatever limitations existed for the unguided evolution of DNA, for instance. Once you reach the height that humans have struggled to on this ladder you are over-determined. That is, there are so many deterministic levels available to build with that one can be set against another, or aligned with another, so as to produce an action whose freedom is more than the sum of the freedom of these interacting parts.

Setting The Record Straight:

Nature is not governed by law. Nature is lawful, meaning full of law-like phenomenon. Forces are not distinct from matter-in-motion. Forces are matter-in-motion. As such, forces do not act on matter, for they are the same thing. Many of the freedoms of individual material objects are impeded, altered, etc by other objects, but they also oppose with an equal and simultaneous reaction, therefore demonstrating the core of their autonomous powers. Even a small rock gravitates just as it is attracted by other masses, for mass generates gravity, or stated differently, mass is gravitational force. It is not like some mysterious entity “gravity” is governing that rock and those bigger all the more for their size! What a mysterious foe that would be, growing in exact proportion to any opponents size and strength. Gravity is an attractive force, meaning that it is false to say that the earth’s mass attracts your mass more than your mass attracts the earth. Aside from Newtons 3rd law that describes equal and opposite reaction, there is also Newton’s 2nd law of gravitational force: The force that one mass exerts on a second mass is proportional to the product of the two masses. It doesn’t matter whether you multiply 4X8 or 8X4, you get the same product! More importantly, your mass was not “trying” to escape the Earth’s mass, so one cannot be “governing” the other. But, if Gravity still has you down, if you really think that gravity has you, remember that you can even increase something as fundamental to your being as your mass by changing your velocity relative to another object. Such is the freedom of the human within this vibrant gathering or hierarchy of forces-in-tension.

A Limiting View Of Limits

The incompatibalist is making the following poor assumptions: 1) that a determinism or force of nature governs and controls the substance in which it manifests, 2) a force is separate and distinct from these “things,” and 3) a force acts on these things non-reciprocally. Put another way: nature is governed by laws that reign from somewhere outside nature in a one-way fashion.

These assumptions emerge from our tendency to think too far outside the box, by which I mean the positing of a non-existent “space” around any concept–like the concept ‘universe’–in order to get a perspective on that concept; in order to look in on it from the outside. This gives the impression in the minds-eye that this enveloping bubble, or the indiscriminate “space” around it, actually has some control over the contents, contain and constrain them somehow, as if the logic of physical containers applied to conceptual containers (concepts) in more than a metaphorical way. Accordingly, many of us erroneously tend to think of laws as being “all around us,” or really “all around everything,” when in fact this is literally a super-natural explanation of “nature” and therefore none at all. In our attempt to wrap our mind around Nature, we mistake the abstract symmetries of our mind for an envelope of causal forces that are literally wrapped around Nature. This mistake is easy to make for a number of further reasons.

1) Our concept ‘freedom’ comes from the child’s early experience of his own Will squirming, writhing, and reaching out, whereby the material world at first seems only to surround and constrain this expanding Will. We thus grow up understanding freedom to be “what I am impelled to do” and necessity to be “the world resisting this expansion.” Its “us” versus “the world,” a habit of mind that is difficult to jettison and grounds much of Fatalism as soon as that child realizes he is part of that all-constraining world.

2) We take a view from the outside so as to de-limit an object, in order to see where it ends, and accordingly our concepts stress limitation instead of the extent of limited freedoms. But in modern times the word ‘end’ carries connotations of exhaustion, death, deficiency, and dissolution more than it implies purpose or goal. (This is truly bizarre, as something certainly must live before it can die; pursue goals before it can be “deficient” in power to reach them, constrained, etc.)

3) Laws of nature are always expressed as limits. The speed of light (“c,) is not the speed light must travel, but the maximum speed it could possibly travel. Accordingly, laws, and the forces they describe, look like limits or constraints, as people fail to realize that these are the limits of the forces, not the limits that some otherworldly forces mysteriously impose on matter!

4) In order to simplify nature so as to quickly predict its behavior we seek universals, symmetries that seem to apply to everything (every-”thing”). This leads us to believe that they are distinct from everything, or that they are “things” in the material sense; we reify the laws. Given that we can see matter and motion, but cannot see these invisible forces that are universal and act on everything, some people tend to think that they are outside the system causing things in a one-way fashion. These people fail to understand that forces of nature are visible, for they are matter-in-motion.

5) Really, it is motion that is so difficult for us to understand. Motion is visible only as it inheres in matter and only when there is enough distinct matter to grant perspective. We can accept that matter is, but why is it changing and evolving exactly like this? What impetus or force started it all moving? It is the search for an answer that has spawned great discoveries in the previously invisible world of microbes, molecules, and atoms, but also great blunders like thinking that the active agents in the world are not actually in it, but outside it (or in parallel dimensions). Let’s briefly explore the problem of motion.

The Problem Of Motion

Let me begin by including a quote from the beginning and one from the end of an article by Julian Jaynes:

The Aristotelian writings had made motion or activity the distinctive property of living things, an idea that occurs naturally to children and primitive peoples of all centuries. Because they moved, the stars were thought by no less a scientist than Kepler to be animated.

Physics in the seventeenth century is anthropomorphic about matter, applying animate terms like attraction, force (originally muscular strength), inertia (originally referring to an idle and unemployable person), and acceleration (to hasten one’s steps) to get started. The reverse occurred with Descartes when he applied the inanimate statue analogy to animal motion.

The human intellect simply cannot get a handle on motion largely because our concepts are abstractions and the very features that are “abstracted away” in a concept are the properties of inherent motion in that object. This allows us to speak and think nimbly and quickly. For instance, the concept ‘water‘ means “a contiguous quantity of moving H20 molecules,” but the concept ‘river‘ means roughly “a large body of moving water.” Furthermore, a river can itself “move” or change its over-all path as time passes, but so too can the rate of this evolution itself vary or “move.” Telescoping back down we find that even within each H20 molecule electrons are moving about. Accordingly, even when thinking about something as simple as a body of water, our concepts start hiding sources of motion the more general these concepts become and we end up in a situation where a single static word can actually hide layer upon layer of motion or change. Heraclitus was trying to bring our attention to these levels of abstraction when he famously proclaimed that we cannot step into the same river twice.

There are a handful of very special concepts, like ‘Being,’ ‘Nature,’ ‘Universe,’ and ‘Freedom,’ that attempt to encompass every last layer of motion-within-motion, and this is why they are so difficult to work with or understand. These concepts hide the maximal amount of ignorance behind the feeling of understanding as we nimbly think or speak, dragging whatever actual understanding of these underlying process “we” have along, incompletely, in the background of thought without actually pulling all of their weight, so to speak. But these concepts furthermore limit true understanding by implying oneness at the core of things, when in fact we might find, with Heraclitus, that not oneness but strife holds the center.

Limits: Constraints or Confrontations?

I will start by ignoring worlds like ‘limit’ or ‘end’ in favor of the word ‘ambit:’ the scope, extent or bounds of something (ie “within the ambit of federal law”). What is curious about “things” is that they contain their own ambit. Federal law is physically instantiated in a bunch of documents, one of which being the Constitution: a document that sets limits on the scope of federal law (and itself). When we point to the Colorado river, for instance, the various bustling H20 molecules both shape the shoreline and are constrained by it, but both together form what we mean by the word ‘river.’ As Heraclitus proclaimed, people “do not understand how that which differs with itself is in agreement: harmony consists of opposing tension, like that of bow and the lyre.” So the ambit of the river, its extent, scope, and its bounds, are physically identical with what we denote by the term ‘river.’ Therefore, the river contains its own ambit; it “holds itself up.” The water molecules and the subatomic particles that make these up do not somehow control the river: they are the river. But these molecules are constantly flooding into the worlds oceans while fresh molecules fall to earth and constitute the river anew, and this change is what grounds Heraclitus’ perplexing statement denying the ability to step into the same river twice.

We cannot deal with so many levels of change (motion) and our concepts only obscure the matter. Yet, the fact remains that there is a somewhat persistent shape or form that we conventionally refer to as the Colorado river: it is real, physical, and can reliably get you wet. If an asteroid pulverized the earth into dust, that form or shape would cease to exist, but its constituent parts would not: you cannot annihilate matter or energy. You can temporarily annihilate a certain organization of matter and energy, but in a very real sense you cannot destroy the river, but only disperse it more and more widely so that it doesn’t as closely resemble the conventional mental image associated with the term ‘river.’ But this word ‘river’ means “a large quantity of a flowing substance,” so couldn’t the dispersed water molecules that were flung from the earth and now follow the direction of the planet-killing asteroid be said to “flow” in “large quantity”? Could we not look at the “solar wind” instead as a “river of ions”?

But what of my claim that a thing contains its own ambit? Does the asteroid obliterate the river, or not? Well, actually it can’t, for the river will oppose the motion of the asteroid just as much as the asteroid will oppose the inertia of the river. The asteroid does not come away unscathed! Similarly, you cannot say that the Earth’s gravity is what pulls me down, for my feet are on the earth and contribute to its overall mass and therefore its overall gravity too. Therefore, a thing contains its own ambit, but another thing can alter this arrangement, sometimes adding to its scope, while more often reducing its scope (to a point). Stated differently, “things” are not omnipotent, but they are at least potent. The crucial point is simply that every “thing” has some freedoms in its own right and so long as it is that thing, it “holds itself up.” Its “limits” are simply the net result of all the containing and enabling of its constituent parts as they “con-front” each other in their own right. That is, each constituent part is also a “thing,” with an ambit, scope, or end (boundary). This boundary is the “front” that confronts, the “face” that faces the boundaries of the other constituents of the aggregate form we are here discussing. But now that we know what makes up this aggregate, we have “de-limited” it, named it, and we promptly forget that its limits are imposed from within via free powers.

This point should be obvious when you think about it: certainly atoms and other things “hold themselves up” instead of being infused with properties via forces from without. This was the view of the ancient Greeks, according to Heidegger, who explains their view thus: “Whatever places itself into and thereby enacts (or completes) its limit, and thus stands, has form, morphē.” Notice here that the limit is self-imposed; it is the extent of the freedom the object embodies. Imagine, for instance, a house, which stands because of the ordered tension of its apposing and reinforcing beams. The “unity” of the house results from tension and opposition! It means many different fronts of many different pieces “con-fronting” each other, but with an overarching cooperation among these antagonisms, such that they all could be recognized as one form. When Heraclitus says that war is the father of all and the king of all, he doesn’t mean human war, but polemos: confrontation, strife, struggle. Heidegger tells us that “in con-frontation, world comes to be. [Confrontation does not divide unity, much less destroy it. It builds unity; it is the gathering (logos). Polemos and logos are the same.]” He continues in a later chapter: “Con-frontation–that is, not mere quarreling and feuding but the strife of the striving–sets the essential and the inessential, the high and the low, into their limits and makes them manifest.”

One might object that the house also uses gravity to pin some of its parts together and to pit it to the earth, so the house is not just “internal” forces buttressing each other, but requires an all-pervading gravitational force from without. But we have already shown how forces are within what we conventionally call ‘objects,’ buttressing their structure as well as spilling outwards as a “field.” Accordingly, the house is being pinned not by “gravity,” but by the gravitational force that its own mass contributes to!  The earth pushes back on the house via the weak nuclear force of its atoms, which stop the house falling into the earth. The above objection does not stand, however, because “the house” includes the floor, which is technically a square of the earth’s surface pressing “up” against the house, while the house and earth’s gravity together pull all “down” towards the center, that is, while the gravitational force of both objections “gathers” itself.

Whatever takes such a stand becomes constant in itself and thereby freely and on its own runs up against the necessity of its limit, peras. This peras is not something that first accrues to a being from outside. Much less is it some deficiency in the sense of a detrimental restriction. Instead, the self-restraining hold that comes from a limit, the having-of-itself wherein the constant holds itself, is the Being of beings; it is what first makes a being be a being as opposed to a nonbeing. For something to take such a stand therefor means for it to attain its limit, to de-limit itself. Thus a basic characteristic of a being is its telos, which does not mean goal or purpose, but end. Here “end” does not have any negative sense, as if “end” meant that something can go no further, that it breaks down and gives out. Instead, “end” means completion in the sense of coming to fulfillment. -Heidegger “Introduction To Metaphysics”

Note that the atoms that compose the Earth are what provides the weak nuclear force pushing back on the house; this is not imposed from anything but the Earth itself as it “runs up against the necessity of its limit.” Why do humans assume that they must be all-powerful or unlimited to be free? In a sense we are all-powerful, in that we can access all of the powers of the universe, but these each have limits themselves, besides being of limited number to begin with. Though there are a “limited” number of freedoms that comprise us and that we can utilize to assist us, this limit is no limitation, in the same way that having 27 letters in an alphabet is a “limit” of available letters, but no “limitation” for the creation of infinitely diverse words in a language. You can either think of yourself as 27 letters rich, or 27 letters poor; equipped with 27 letters, or restricted to 27 letters. It doesn’t matter because you could still create an infinite number of words with just 20 letters! Still, I’d prefer more letters to fewer. If restricted down to just two letters, there are hardly infinite numbers of meaningful words you could create, so there is a critical threshold. In the case of forces impinging on (or co-substantive with) the human being, I’d similarly prefer more to less, but essentially it doesn’t matter after a certain threshold is passed. In a trillion dollar economy where you have billions it doesn’t really matter whether you say “I have billions of economic freedom” or “I have a financial limitation of 10 billion dollars.” Furthermore, unlike the economy example, nothing else in Nature has “trillions” to our “billions,” so we are the wealthiest beings in existence when it comes to available causal powers and hardly need all of them in order to be the most autonomous beings around.

Philosophical Musical Chairs

So why is this all so hard to demonstrate? Why is it so hard to persuade people that Freedom and Determinism are allies (or even synonyms)? The problem comes from there being a plethora of laws but no paradigm that puts them all together coherently. Therefore, debating against a “Determinist” is a fools errand, for he doesn’t even have a coherent picture called “Determinism” that he advocates, but instead, he merely asserts that there are lots of forces forcing everything. This leads to a game of musical chairs because anytime I pin my opponent to his seat and force him to discuss a single force or determinism, demonstrating my freedom relative to it, my opponent can start singing again and shift to another seat. “Yes, in a certain sense the Earth and its gravity affect me, but that doesn’t stop me from using other forces to, for instance, jump four feet in the air, or built a rocket capable of leaving the atmosphere!” However, every time the proverbial music stops in this game and I point out how humans can gain freedom from an apparent limitation, my antagonist begins to sing again because my explanation involved the use of a different force to oppose the first. If logic allows us to gain control over our passions, my antagonist will start singing about logical determinism. If I then show that we can imagine illogical propositions or use our passions to override logic, then he will start singing about psychological determinism. As soon as the music and movement in this game stop, my opponent forgets that there was music and motion, choosing to remember only the hard fact of his groundedness in an individual seat. He never takes a view of the game as a whole, which might require him to acknowledge motion and change instead of simply explaining them away with the word ‘causality.’

“Causality” is not something apart from “causes” or “forces;” its just a name we use to sum them all up. You cannot explain forces in nature by appeal to Causality, for this would be to ask what causes Causality itself, a question that assumes both that an answer exists and that the answer is some form of cause or force, leading to regress. However, this reductionist intuition is not baseless, for higher-level forces are most often constituted by lower-level forces, and therefore when trying to understand the higher-level force, you need to mention the forces that make it up. The mistake occurs where you conclude that the lower level forces control the higher ones, when in fact they are intimately fused as soon as the higher-level force emerges and often the higher supervenes back down on the lower, changing both in a feedback loop (see downward causation). Do the stones in the two pillars control the height of the adorning arch at the top? No. The arch has some height of its own, but furthermore, the arch and pillars are not competing and therefore the language of control is inappropriate to begin with, while Newtonian relativity assures us that nothing in existence has total control of anything.

Human freedom, in my view, is the harmony that can be arranged by the opposing tensions of all forces available in Nature, just as Heraclitus’ bow and lyre oppose cooperatively. The hard determinist seems happy to look at each force of nature in isolation but never puts this big picture together. It is true that humans are subject of the “forces” of physics, genetics, culture, psychology, and of all existent forces of nature, but so to is each force of nature subject to all the others built on top of it. Genetics can be altered by psychology, and psychology by genetics. The human simply has access to every form of force known in the universe, where the cobble stone has access only to physical ones, and this allows the human to manipulate these forces, to rearrange them so that they cooperate or antagonize each other. It is true that material things (conglomerations of forces) can alter each other. In this sense things mutually define each others boundaries sometimes, fail to interact in other instances, and sometimes reinforce each other, but crucially, neither is ever totally annihilated, but at worst, one is disseminated or absorbed. At best, downward causation occurs. Humans are simply in a privileged position to align, realign, and build with these freedoms.

There is only one sure way of defeating this elusive antagonist: one must ask him what Determinism or “Causality” categorically inhibit a human from doing. Determinism really only states one thing definitively: that there is only one physically possible future. So just ask what a human being categorically cannot do in that inevitable future. He might respond that a human cannot travel faster than the speed of light. While the warp-drive has recently achieved growing attention at NASA, we might be willing to grant this point and agree that humans cannot travel faster than the fastest phenomenon known in Nature, but so what? Nothing can travel faster than ‘c,’ so its not like humans are deficient where something else in Nature has true freedom and power, and besides, 299,792,458 meters per second is a fantastically huge range of possible speeds! Its like if we can’t be the best, we are nothing at all; if humans can’t have unlimited speed, then they are ultimately constrained. (a law of human self-esteem perhaps? lol)

Another strategy you might employ is to answer the question “are human beings free” with something like the following: Well, free compared to what? Compared to animals, “yes.” Compared to plants, emphatically “yes!” Compared to chemicals or atoms, an overwhelmingly emphatic “yes!!”, and so forth. Are humans free compared to the known laws of nature (which include psychology, logic, economics, etc)? Duh! Of course humans are free compared to these laws, for they are the only set of objects in the universe in which the latter half of those laws operate or inhere! “Nature” didn’t even have physical examples or instances of these laws operating until humans showed up. But humans are precisely the most free of objects because they contain the most forms of determinism and accordingly the greatest number of scientifically discernible “laws” are required to understand/describe their behavior. Are humans determined? Well, not exactly; they are overdetermined. Humans are not determined in the sense of having “fates,” but they are determined in the sense that they can only work with the forces of nature that comprise them and act through them. However, that is to admit that they have access to all existent forces of nature, to every freedom in the universe. As an anecdotal proof of this, note that Van der Walls forces don’t usually show up in our macroscopic world, but then geckos evolved and started taking advantage of them, and later humans evolved and found even more uses for these forces. Therefore, one could accurately state that Geckos and humans expanded the ambit of Van der Walls forces to macroscopic objects by manipulating them. Without Geckos or humans, Van der Walls forces would be far more boring and restricted.

The Incompatibalist is completely done in by two facts: 1) we desire or value freedom, and 2) we have a concept ‘freedom,’ though this concept is hostile to the very thing that concepts are used to compute (i.e. causal relations). The Incompatibalist wants to say that our “concept ‘freedom’” is irrational, illogical, and has no sense or meaning for all things are governed by causality, but he fails to realize that this undermines his logical determinism simply by virtue of the fact that we can in deed entertain illogical concepts (and rather persistently in the Western Philosophical tradition)! He will then shift to the fact that “irrational desires” are controlling us in such a case, but he fails to realize that this undermines his psychological determinism by virtue of the fact that we desire freedom; we are determined to be determined by our own determination! We can be stubbornly logical, stubbornly illogical, stubbornly anti-logical, or we can just stubbornly make no decisions whatsoever. We have the freedom to-Will or not-to-Will. “Free-Will” emerges from a dialectic between the conscious ego with its feeble veto, and the Will with its weighty imperatives, whereby the conscious ego, following the Will’s imperative to obtain freedom, votes to-Will or not-to-Will and thereby alters the Will, instructing it in the art of expanding the freedom that it ambiguously demanded in the first place. The very fact that this desire for freedom is amorphous and indistinct grants the ego freedom to pursue an infinite number of interpretations and plans for obtaining that amorphous end. This internal ambiguity grants further possibilities as the ego can cater to the Will with options the Will did not anticipate, thus honing and refining the options the Will is subsequently likely to send up the chain for the ego’s vote or guidance.

Further possibilities are similarly granted by the fact that we can hold concepts or propositions that are illogical, amorphous, or downright absurd. There is no such thing as “Fate,” or “the inevitable,” but telling a young child that there is such a thing reinforces his us-versus-the world paradigm and inflames his disdain of fortune and necessity. Samuel Johnson famously stated that all experience is for the freedom of the will, while all theory is against it. This is roughly true because the will-to-freedom forms the basic Gestalt of our concept ‘freedom,’ but this remains a concept like no other for you can’t get to the bottom of it, you can’t discover its essence or controlling dynamics, and therefore can’t give a positive definition of what it is. This concept bristles when used to understand physical necessity, or at the very least, appears to be superfluous to such an understanding, for if we know that the Earth orbits the Sun, it goes without saying that it “freely” does so, given that nothing is stopping this from happening. But there again, you see that the concept ‘freedom’ is defined as “not-constrained,” where that initial impetus or force itself is left perfectly inscrutable and mysterious. We unconsciously think of the necessity of causal forces “out there” in terms of the experience of necessity “in here,” (i.e. from the Will) but on some level we realize that this whole show “out there” would go on even in our absence, and so we go on looking “out there” for something like Will or freedom: the essence of Nature that infuses it with energy, motion, change, and expansion. Most people tend to settle on “energy” or “Gravity” for this ground of being, the great puppet-master, but few ever question whether this whole search was doomed by confusion from the start. There is no “ground of being” just as there is no God, while the search for either fabricates an invisible power-source that governs all mysteriously and invisibly. Oscar Wilde has the best response to this when he states that the great mystery is the visible world, not the invisible!

Union Of Opposites

I have argued that the way we conceptualize and talk about the world tends to foster a confused Deterministic worldview, so is this not an example of Linguistic Determinism limiting human thought? Nope, for we have been able to think outside this naive picture and formulate some idea of freedom as necessity, proving that this was a mental speed-bump, not a towering cliff face. How can concepts that are exact opposites ultimately refer to the same thing? Its simple, really: for the sake of convenience and ease of reference we typically coin terms that stand for the limits or extremes of something, meaning that terms exist for each end of a continuum, but few terms exist for anything in between. Furthermore, these opposites define each other and accordingly either one is never completely absent in any given case out there in nature. Even our prototype case of freedom, the experience of our own Will, is both the experience of our free powers and the necessity of being burdened with them. Accordingly, one should view ‘freedom’ and ‘necessity’ as convenient terms for either end of the the spectrum of Nature, where Nature is never fully one or the other, but is both simultaneously. The concept “Nature,” or “Universe,” then, should be broken into two sub-concepts of “Freedom” and “Necessity,’ with the understanding that Nature cannot be explained or described without recourse to both terms, whose tension produces a harmony that is the phenomenal world. The essence of the universe, then, is twofold and conflicting, as Schopenhauer realized. To demonstrate the truth of this strange union of opposites, let me reignite a debate that had raged for millenia until it was supposedly “solved:” Does air resist the motion of a projectile or assist it?

Aristotle apparently thought that air assisted motion, while Galileo et all discovered “the truth” of air resistance. However, this begs the question of “assist or resist motion compared to what? Ballistic flight through a vacuum?” An example should clear this whole matter up. Take a gun in your hand, bury things hand twenty inches underground, and fire the bullet. The ground will resist the bullets motion. Do the same thing in water and notice that this medium slows the bullet less. Do the same thing above ground and you will find that the air resists the bullets motion still less, which we typically express by the word “assist” or even “liberate.” Do the same thing in space and you will find that the vacuum resists the bullets motion still less. Each of the above cases involve less and less resistance and more and more assistance, but both ‘resistance and ‘assistance’ are involved. Does air resist motion then? Well, far less than the mediums of earth and water, but more than a vacuum and far more than a properly aligned EM field, which could actually accelerate the bullet faster than what is possible in a vacuum via the bullet’s internal propellent charge. Even in the EM field example, though, this field could be aligned tangentially or opposed to the path of the bullet and end up “resisting” its motion more than earth or water did! So there is no definitive answer to the question because the terms we use are “ideal,” they are the outer limit, while few things in Nature ever even approach this limit and therefore are some admixture of both extremes. Asking whether air assists motion or not is like asking if visible light is Gamma radiation or radio: you can only answer by either saying “neither” or “oddly both.”

Are humans free? Well, we don’t have as much inertial freedom as an object with the mass of the sun, but we have at our disposal far more freedoms to arrange or draft behind, with many being unique to our species. We can at least claim to have some inertia of our own, whereas the sun cannot claim to have any psychological or logical forces to tap into. Therefore, I conclude that a human being is more free than a planet or star. Stars don’t even have a monopoly on thermonuclear reactions anymore! I can scarcely think of a clearer demonstration of the human concept ‘freedom.’

Its not as though Free Will grants us immunity from Causality. Again, “Causality” is not a “thing” distinct from the plethora of existing forces. If we look at all of these forces and call that Causality, then human beings are the apogee of Nature’s forces. If we look at each force in turn, one can make a case for how Free Will grants immunity from a form of causation (ie a force of Nature). but we don’t even need Free Will for this, for entropy is a law of physics, but yet Life is negentropic–its vary definition is the thwarting of a law of Nature lower on the ladder.

More importantly, the Hard Determinist denies that there are purposes in a world infused only with blind causation; that even human “purposes” or “ends” are only illusory manifestations of physical law. What they fail to grasp is that this bars them from using words like ‘limit,’ ‘govern,’ ‘constrain,’ and so forth, as these only make sense in a world with ends, in the sense of “purposes” or “goals.” You can’t limit or govern atoms because they are not “trying” to do anything; they pursue no goal. The same atom is just as happy being part of the sun as being part of my left hand. If you do introduce the language of agency and goals, then you must admit that these atoms strive towards something freely, at which point some force limits or governs them, stopping them from reaching that something. That is, you have to admit some freedom exists if you are going to claim that it is governed or constrained. For ‘inevitability’ to be coherent, something must be ‘evitable,’ as Dennett argues. But if ‘evitability’ explodes, as it it has done in the evolution of life on this planet, then the word ‘inevitable’ becomes incoherent and we begin wondering anew what ‘evitability’ or ‘freedom’ might be, as well as what it might be becoming or end up being.

Could Have Done Otherwise

This claim is the most controversial part of compatibalism. All it means is that two options under considered are not barred by the laws of physics, though one can only do one of these actions at a time. But think of two things we can do at the same time: think of jumping and singing, for instance. These choices are not mutually exclusive, yet we can choose to do only one or the other, or neither. If I choose only to jump, then would anyone really claim that it wasn’t possible for me also to let out a cry while I jumped? This is somehow barred by the laws of physics? A simple experiment proves I can, always, do so (in the future). I can’t go “back in time” to do it, but I can go “forward in time” to do it! Why, then, is the case any different with mutually exclusive actions? I can’t jump and sit at the same time, but to suggest that the one I end up doing first was “inevitable” and that it was physically impossible for me to have chosen the alternative instead is a case of special pleading. Determinism is what assures us beforehand that either sitting or jumping are physically available options, so how does one twist this into the idea that one was not physically possible at a certain time? (A: Because we can’t physically alter the past, that great source of legitimate fatalism, and so we erroneously project the same fatalism onto the future as if it were as set as the past, when in fact the only necessity is that there will be a future.) Hard Determinism as a thesis is unfalsifiable and does not count as a scientific theory. It is just the claim that whatever happens had to happen, no matter what! Think about that: nothing at all interesting could take place in the future, or a pink, pan-dimensional unicorn could fly down and magically stir the Sahara into a forest overnight and all that the our antagonist could say is “it must be so.” Lastly, Determinism alone makes no predictions whatsoever. It says that there can only be one physically possible future, but it doesn’t predict anything in that future specifically. So I’ll leave you with an open question: what exactly am I barred from being able to do in that single possible future?

Sam Harris Leaves Me Speechless (well not quite…)

Last night I watched a lecture by Sam Harris that seemed unusually eloquent, even for him (though this is likely the result of his at least having read the back cover of Becker’s “Denial of Death”). Nonetheless, it contained the most stunning failure of imagination that I might have ever seen from such a brilliant public intellectual. My mouth literally gaped open before I started laughing heartily for the duration of minute 26-7.

He claims that most people have an intuition that their minds are somehow separate from their bodies and that this “soul” will live on after death, adding that our intuitions are shabby and our introspection comically limited. As proof of this limitation, he tells us that we have more connections in a cubic centimeter of brain tissue than there are stars in our galaxy, but that “our inner experience offers absolutely no clue that this is the case.” Really!?! No clue at all? How about that strange intuition about a miraculous and otherworldly “soul?” Getting warmer? How about all of those strange intuitions about gods, angels, afterlives and being separate from nature in a super-special sense? Ever heard the term “divine spark” before? Those ideas and intuitions don’t count as a “clue” to how unimaginably complex, interesting, and special our brains are? Harris says the brain is far more complex than a galaxy right after lambasting the intuition that there might be something cosmic about mind!

Harris is right that a galaxy pales in comparison to the complexity of a single human brain, but he fails to emphasize the important point that as complex as our galaxy is, it has no thoughts or consciousness to speak of. Accordingly, our intuition that mind is somehow apart from nature or apart from the body is actually a stunningly prescient epiphany about the nature of mind as emergent “software;’ our intuition that angels exist comes from the fact that we are demi-gods ourselves; our intuition that god exists is grounded by our experiencing something like a god in our own minds, let alone the minds of those brighter than us  (or crazier). The entire corpus of sacred literature is one long exaltation of mind or consciousness of some form or other, and yet Sam thinks that introspection doesn’t even give us a clue, that it doesn’t even hint at how mystifying and spectacular the brain really is! He cannot have it both ways and claim that our intuitions are both fantastical and not nearly far-fetched enough. Somehow he can countenance this massive conflict and continue to speak of human minds as “neuronal weather patterns,” as if the complexity of the brain was the complexity of chaos theory, of disorder, instead of order and structure, apparently harmonizing well enough to order ‘chaos theory’ out of actual chaos! We managed to do that with this meat-telescope of ours, so I say that we call it a miracle, so long as we define ‘miracle’ as “something made by God or at least looks like it must have been.”

Instead of correctly explaining that religious intuition & experience were how humans first became aware of awareness, he wants to just tell the second half of the story, where fully-self-conscious priests used religion to squelch the very mental freedoms those before them stumbled upon and embodied. The spectacular irony of the lecture above is that Harris has obviously secured freedom from suffering the limitations he describes in his book “Free Will” with a religious practice founded upon religious intuition, only he fails to interpret this revelation as any proof of freedom or the value of religious thought, yet he goes on trying to free his audience from the “spell of thought” through this very same religious practice! He is a champion for rationality and critical thinking, but yet fails to see these as attainable freedoms so much as the burden of proof and the mere shackles of logical determinism. It seems there are yet more “spells” to be broken.

Harris was planning to speak in the above video about Free Will, but decided to talk about death and the present moment instead. Thinking this a natural addition to his lecture on Free Will, he fails to notice that he entirely demolishes the sophistry he had so cleverly arranged there. I was going to post a long-winded critique of this earlier Free Will lecture, but this recent lecture of his will spare me the hassle. Simply watch the two Sam Harris lectures back-to-back for a thorough self-refutation. However, if you don’t want to do that yourself, you may read on…hopefully my struggle to piece together the fragments of a divided mind will produce some light from the friction.

The essay “Free Will,” along with Harris’ FW lecture, present a unified, if terribly confused, argument. Here is a summary of what I take to be his most important premises:

Basic Premise 1: Authors don’t exist. ”For you to author a thought, you would have to think the thought before you think it.” Thoughts unpredictably arise in consciousness, but the conscious ego does not know why the ones that did arise manifested at all.

1A) The ego does not have authority over memory, but memory has authority over the ego.

1B) The past has ultimate power over the future. The future and the past are equally immutable. The past is by very definition unchangeable, but the future happens to be just as set–for it is determined by the past! Harris claims that the brain is “entirely beholden to the laws of Nature,” but what he really means is beholden to the past with a capital ‘P.’ (he then likes to look into the past and ask questions about what was possible, then apply his conclusions to the future as if they were equally applicable)

1C) ‘Consciousness’ means ‘awarenesss.’ ‘Reflective awareness’ could only mean that strange, thought-less absorption in the present that Buddhists describe. “Attention” is what the brain gives “me,” not what my conscious ego has at its disposal or under its command.

1D) Humans are not moved or motivated by “reasons,” as these are just post hoc confabulations of fully determined action.

All you need to do is watch Sam’s recent lecture with the above list of premises ready-at-hand to discover a complete self-refutation. The major conflicts with the above premises come from Sam’s new claim that conscious framing can determine the nature of experience and his claim that Mindfullness Meditation is one radical way of doing this, thereby freeing the ego from being beholden to the next chaotic thought that arises.

Harris is a successful author intent on selling controversial books, but apparently he doesn’t notice any problem with his claiming that authors cannot exist according to the laws of physics, for they would have to think their thoughts before they think them. He thinks authoring something requires perfect knowledge beforehand of what is to be thought. If this were the case, no brains anywhere could “think,” for they would have to know what they would think beforehand and could thus never work out new solutions or learn. He is claiming that learning cannot take place, or that if it does, it does so mindlessly (without consciousness). This is the exact reverse of actual fact. Notice that when you try to learn a new skill, it is rather maladaptive to consciously attend to something else!

Authors do not have to “think a thought before they think it,” but they do need to have some vague idea of what thought they are intending to give birth to! In addition, thoughts we have already come across are stored in memory where we can recall them, whole and complete, whenever we want and therefore “think a thought before we think it.” Once a thought enters consciousness, whether it came from the unconscious, another person, a passing billboard, or the machinations of the conscious ego, it is stored in memory already “pre-thought,” so to speak. This is not controversial in the least. Harris’ claim amounts to saying that you cannot really pen an essay in the English language, because you did not invent the English language, or to saying that you can’t really take charge of a given vehicle, because you didn’t build it yourself. Just because our first “thoughts” occur in childhood before a robust conscious ego differentiates itself does not mean that we cannot “take charge” of those thoughts later in life, shape them, or alter their trajectory and system of associations. Doing so is to become the author of your memory: to have authority over memory instead of memory have authority over you. If memory has authority over you, then you are psychotic, and I’m sorry Sam, but there is a difference between psychotics and the rest of us.

We can store memories with a filing schema of our choosing and this changes what is more and less likely to “just pop up” from the unconscious mind. Your choice of what to read, how you read it, etc similarly rewires the switchboard of your recollection in predicable ways. Furthermore, your ego can query memory to pull something up that was never intentionally moved up the priority list or that had never been synthesized before from contents therein. That is, the ego can request a surprise. It can either ask memory to surprise it or to predictably retrieve exactly the thought that is sought, but in either case the ego generally gets what it asked for (barring various psychoses), otherwise activities like writing would be next to impossible. All of the above grounds our sense of authoring our thoughts. Memory is a big lynchpin here, as Sam must play some tricks with it for his position to come off. For instance, at 27 minutes in, he makes a joke that it almost never occurs to him that he has a brain. The audience laughs, but the humor depends on the audience understanding that we don’t have to have a memory in front of our consciousness at all times for it to be accessible at all times. Sam doesn’t actually “forget he has a brain,” he just forgets to recall this fact and bring it into clear consciousness regularly. This amounts to a gaping hole in Harris’ “philosophy,” as he apparently doesn’t know the difference between recollection and recall. Animals have recognition memory, humans have conscious recall in addition, which Sam gives no account of in his attempt to reduce people to animals with no moral responsibility.

The ‘Why’ Game

This game is played by every child at a certain inquisitive age and basically consists of asking “why?” ad infinitum, and in different senses of the word. ‘Why’ can mean “for what reason” and it can mean “how come.” The frustrating part of the game for adults is that it exposes their ignorance as they struggle for the ultimate answer to existence. This should not frustrate them, however, because science can not answer “ultimate” questions either, even in theory! The word ‘ultimately’ means “in the end,” placing our perspective at a point at the end of time looking back upon a past already laid down, with no freedom in sight because there is no future left! Harris prefers this “view from nowhere,” from the edge of the world, because it obscures freedom by eliminating anticipation, imagination and choice, making room only for one long backwards glance into the eternally immutable (P 1B.)

Sam Harris exploits the fact that there are no “ultimate” answers quite ruthlessly, yet never mentions that science too cannot answer them. He asks his audience to perform a thought experiment that is rigidly prescribed, he claims that this is the very paradigm case of a free choice, and then he bombards the audience with “why” in every possible sense of that word until they realize they don’t have an “ultimate” answer. He implies that science will someday have that ultimate answer, but in so doing betrays his irrational faith in science and his faith in the ultimate intelligibility of the cosmos. He will ask the audience to do something random, and then ask them “why” (in the sense of a “reason”) they did it. When they can’t answer he claims that this is because they are not free, when, in fact, they cannot answer because the request was for the audience to pick something for no reason! There is a reason in the sense of a “how come,” but the audience can easily answer that one! So he asks still more ‘why’ questions: “why that thought?”, “why did it pop up?”, “why was it influential?”, “why did it pop up then?”, “why not another thought,” etc. He does this until the audience realizes they don’t have an “ultimate” how-come answer. Harris tricks them into assuming that there even is one and then uses its apparent existence to prove that nobody is free, that only that ultimate answer, whatever it is, could be governing anything. What is that something? Harris would like to say “the past,” ala P 1B, but he can’t, for any child can keep asking why, and besides, people ultimately exist over a span of time, meaning that their own beings are causally relevant parts of their own past.

Harris simply refuses to deal with the reality of the future, though it doesn’t exist (yet). He tricks his audience by determining the parameters of the experiment, telling them that there are no parameters (that it is a totally free choice), and then after the fact asking them why they were not free in that experiment (the past) to violate some of these parameters! This cleverly masks the fact that we can violate any of those parameters in the future, we just can’t violate them retrospectively from the present, as the past is immutable. Harris’ thought experiments corral the audience into either asking their memories to retrieve something at random, or something intended, but in either case he will claim that these thoughts just popped up. If it was a request for something random, he will claim that you were not free to choose something intentional, but if he asks for something intentional, he will tell you that you were not free to choose something random. Either way, he is trying to enforce P 1B by subtly inferring that what cannot be changed in the past also could not be changed in the future.

The “Randomly Pick A Random City” Game

This one is really clever. Sam asks the audience to pick a random city. Sam will then tell you that you were not free to choose whatever name popped up, but this was part of the parameters! Sam requested that you give up choice as much as humanly possible and leave things to random or unguided association, only to then accuse you of having no choice! “You no more picked the city you settled on, in subjective terms, than you would have if I picked it for you,” he proclaims. The twisted part is that he is right, but by virtue of the fact that he actually DID pick it for you: he chose a “random” one, and only he knows “why” in the sense of a rationale. The painfully obvious thing that is not being mentioned here is the assumption that the audience had to, by means of physical necessity, play Sam’s game, when in fact they didn’t have to. Because they agreed to go to the lecture, Sam can take advantage of their tacit complicity and willingness to play along, but at best, he proves only that you can hypnotize people, which is true, but it is also true that one can hypnotize himself!

Sam’s choice of a “random city” as a prompt ensures that whatever you answer he can claim that you didn’t author it, because it was random! Then he can ask you to think of a white elephant and he’ll conclude that you didn’t author that thought either, because he could predict beforehand that you would soon picture a white elephant. He can ask us to picture anything we want, and then badger us with the “Why? Game” for an “ultimate answer” of why we picked what we did. Whether predictably random or predictably predictable, Harris will claim that you don’t author your thoughts, but that they just popped up. “What else could they do,” he mockingly asks, “but simply arise,” and “where is the freedom in that?” The answer is simple enough. We are not stuck in either of his little thought experiments, but can run our own in which we have every ability to choose between random, novel thoughts, or predictable, pre-articulated ones, while being fully capable of switching between the two modes as needed, or simply stop querying our memory altogether! We are even capable of entering a different mode, like Mindfulness Meditation, or intense meta-cognition, but my point is simply that these are all freedoms because any of them can be initiated at any time and in any order. Sure, logical thought has its limitations and so does emotion-poetic thought, and so forth, but the ability to utilize all of these limited freedoms as we need to is what grounds our sense of freedom for they each make up for each others’ weaknesses. The ability of Sam’s audience to do any stupid little thought experiment he wants to throw at them, in any order he wants, is proof of a robust adaptability and freedom that Sam tries to sweep under the rug with the authoritarian swagger of a guru. When Harris is giving instructions, he subtly implies that people are incapable of giving themselves the same instructions without him, for if they were, then they could consciously and purposefully alter their state of awareness at any time (which sounds like freedom).

A curious fact, however, is that in this experiment the audience actually can accurately predict the outcome. They know “what” (random city), and “when” (randomly–”whenever you feel like it”), but don’t seem to know the “why.” The “why” that his audience knows is something like “because you asked me jerk! only you know the real why!” Or, they know something like this: “I like Harris and I like lectures, so I came here and committed to listening and following the lecture and that is ‘why’ I picked a city and a random one, as requested.” Harris asks the audience why they picked the exact city they did and counts on them not being quick-witted enough to give the above solid answers. He wants them to squirm around in his riddle and then conclude that they must always be stuck in such a puzzle unwittingly. Truly unconscionable. But crucially, he doesn’t believe that the second kind of “why” question is valid in the first place, for people are not influenced by “reasons” (P 1D). And this is his “reason,” his “rationale,” for posing just this game: to ask for a kind of answer that only he possesses, but that he is not willing to admit as causally relevant and that he can demonstrate as such by withholding this rationale and playing the “Why Game” until his audience is intimidated by their lack of any “ultimate answers.” Harris never has to give us any of these answers; just convince us that they exist!

Sam’s audience has to exercise certain mental abilities to run his thought experiments that Sam will then claim are impossible, as supposedly proven by that very thought experiment! Sam’s request to “pick a random city” presumes that they can at that very moment alter everything in consciousness to follow Sam’s lead, whatever they had just been thinking about. But then Sam concludes that the ego has no power to lead, alter, or frame experience, abilities that his very experiments rely upon in the moment.

Sam tells the audience that they didn’t really choose the city that they “chose,” but that it just popped up in consciousness, chosen by their unconscious, which is precisely what he told them to freely and immediately do. The ego was fully able to request a random city from the unconscious, and see that request well met, despite whatever either of them may have been thinking about before Sam’s instructions. This fact destroys Premise 1, for everyone in that audience knew that whatever arose would be a city that was purposefully and consciously random, which is as specific a prediction as you could possibly make given the request for a random answer. That is, they all perfectly predicted the thought that arose, for otherwise they wouldn’t have been following Sam’s instructions. Sam then asks questions like “could you think of a city that did not occur to you” and other such rhetorical traps. Here, he takes something from the past, which we all know we can’t change, and implies that the same thing holds for the future (see P 1B). This is why he retreats from making any hard claims, like “you can’t ever think of a city that does not occur to you,” for then we could easily prove him wrong by turning to our neighbor and getting him to say the most obscure city he has ever visited, enabling us then to be thinking of a city that did not occur to us. If Sam claimed that “you couldn’t possibly think of a city that doesn’t exist,” we could just make up a name, like ShadySophistberg. His traps might only be true of the past, but the future is fundamentally different: the past already is, where the one defining feature of the future is that it isn’t (yet). Furthermore, he forces his audience to confabulate by asking them why they chose the city they did–a question they might not have entertained at all for the simple fact that there is no “reason,” they were just unthinkingly reacting to his lecture and any “reason” thereby must reside only in Sam’s head! He gets them to start confabulating, accuses them of confabulating, and then claims that this is all they ever could do or ever will do (P 1D).

Contrary to all of Sam’s premises, your conscious ego does have the power to initiate chains of thought, to request the recall of memories, and to do all manner of things that make Sam’s thought experiments possible. Sam tells us that “a moment or two of serious self-scrutiny, and you might observe that you no more decide the next thought you think than the next thought I write.” But how could we affect this moment or two of serious self-scrutiny when we cannot predict our next thoughts at all or alter the trajectory of our current thoughts? The ego is just along for the ride, a passive observer of thought, so how would it somehow bring to consciousness “serious” thoughts, or “self-scrutinizing” thoughts? Given that thoughts just pop up, how could we possibly be assured that we are indeed scrutinizing or being serious? The answer is that when Harris asks his audience to seriously self-scrutinize, or to be really, super aware, he means, “be super aware of nothing in particular, of whatever happens to be there or pop up.” That is, he is telling you precisely not to be self-conscious, in the sense of reflective awareness, but instead, to essentially do Mindfullness Meditation (MM). However, the very fact that we can do such meditations proves that the ego has power enough to alter thought. This can be seen in the very instructions, which involve letting thoughts pass on, instead of indulging them; pulling back so that the whole stream of thoughts is framed as a single constellation, instead of the ego being immersed in the frame with the initial thought. Who or what could be acting out these instructions or shifting perspective if not the conscious ego?

Meditation Games

According to Harris’ FW book and lecture, it should be impossible to meditate. Therein he claims that we can’t predict our next thought; that our conscious ego is just helplessly “buffeted by thought ceaselessly,” with no recourse to change “the” mind. If this were true, it would be impossible to follow any of the instructions that Harris gives his audience in either lecture! But this is where the similarities between the two lectures end. In his FW lecture, Harris asks his audience to humor him in a guided meditation aimed to demonstrate their own lack of freedom and how they are eternally beholden to the next thought. In the second lecture, he leads a guided meditation aimed at showing how they can obtain liberation from this very same chaotic thought, suffering, and mental slavery. How ironic that he uses a religious practice to liberate the minds of an audience of modern atheists in a lecture about the folly of religion and the absence of freedom in human minds! But I digress.

If you listen carefully to either lecture, the language he uses in his instructions is replete with terms of freedom and requests for people to literally change their mind, yet, all the while he claims that the mind is beholden to the brain, which is entirely beholden to the laws of nature; the brain can change the mind, but the mind cannot change the brain (P 1C). How are we to possibly follow his instructions then? When he asks me to “pay attention to my experience,” or “look closely at my thoughts,” or “be aware of that constellation of feelings,” he is addressing my conscious ego, as if it had the power to change the frame, move attention around, or stop identifying with a particular stream of thought in favor of another one. He knows that for his audience to participate it must be conscious and listening to every word of his, so he knows he is speaking to the ego with such commands, yet everywhere he denies that the conscious ego has any power whatsoever to alter the trajectory of thought. Thus, introducing MM of any sort whatsoever cripples his arguments against Free Will. If Sam were right, what sense could we make of the instruction to “pay attention to my experience.” Who or what is paying what to whom or what? The very sentence implies that the ego has a currency called “attention” that it can pay to all sorts of things, not just the two channels of its inner & outer experience.  Premise 1C holds that  “attention” is what the brain gives “me,” yet he here uses a phrase that implies that one could use that currency to change experience. We need phrases like this because it is a fact that awareness is different than reflective awareness (self-consciousness), a distinction Harris never mentions in his attempt to make the mind beholden to experience+brain.

At 38 minutes into the new lecture, Harris has the audience perform yet another experiment predicated on a conscious ability to project anything he may suggest at any time. This time, we are asked to”visualize a diamond between my two hands…just project it there.” Even if your powers of visualization are poor, Harris claims, “something changes, when I ask you to do this,” adding after a brief pause, “change it to a tomato.” I’ll ignore the fact that he is appealing to our powers of visualization and focus on the fact that he is right: we can actually visualize, albeit with less-than hallucinatory clarity, whatever he may suggest or whatever we may want to see as a percept. All of this undermines every premise of his argument against freedom, however. If thoughts really had us, instead of our authoring many of them, then it would be impossible to do this sort of projection on que, or “at will.” Here is my knockdown argument against P1: If I cannot predict my next thought, how come I can predict with 100% accuracy when projected diamonds or tomatoes are likely to pop up? Because it is my ego that demands this projection! The ego has amazing powers to frame and work on experience, powers that Harris fully endorses in the new lecture: “the frame we put around the present is important and largely determines our experience of it.” The way we think about an experience can so dramatically alter experience as to change pain to pleasure, such as in the case of enjoying “the burn” at the gym. Somehow Harris doesn’t notice his FW premises dropping out of the air like flies (especially P 1D).

Regarding the experience of pain while working out, Harris explains that this pain is not very bothersome because of its positive framing, but that if we suddenly thought the pain was caused by a disease it would seem excruciating, adding that we often think about training our bodies, but “we give very little thought to training attention itself.” Well, Sam, perhaps you haven’t given it much thought because your theory of mind denies that attention itself could be trained or that you had a currency called attention that you have the freedom to spend! After all, who exactly will train my attention? Will my unconscious mind train itself? Do I just have to wait until the idea “must-train-awareness-itself” pops into awareness? Harris does not answer, but he is willing to commit to the position that our greatest lever for controlling suffering as well as nagging, chaotic thoughts, is just this sort of training, which he claims can “break the spell of thought.” I wonder, who exactly is under this “spell,” who exactly “breaks it,” and who exactly enjoys the clear outlook afterwards? It is the ego of course! He admits as much at the end of the lecture when he says you can “just drop your stress and the automaticity of thinking for a moment,” that through MM “consciousness is equanimous even in the presence of that kind of emotional pain,” adding that “it does erode the pain.” The word ‘equanimous’ means “of an even temper” or a “composed state of mind” that is not easily dragged into depression or elation. Here, Harris admits that the conscious ego can be unmoved by something as immediate and determined as pain and has the power to shape or balance one’s temperament. He claims that it is difficult and takes commitment to break the spell of “merely brooding and thinking.” I guess he just answered that question he keeps asking about “what else could thoughts do but just pop into view,” although I have no idea what he means by “commitment,” as who knows what their mind will intend next, right (P1)? Nearly all of his language involves terms of freedom that make no sense in his declared worldview.

The End Of Hatred

According to Harris, the two paths that end hatred are 1) to reject Free Will and any form of blame, and 2) to practice MM or otherwise “train attention itself” so as to “break the spell of thought.” By some miracle, he sees no contradiction between these two paths. If you put the two lectures together it is like Harris says the following: “We don’t have free will because we are all under the spell of thought, so we shouldn’t hate anyone any more than we would hate a scared dog that bites us, but we can become even more hate-free by breaking the spell of thought ourselves!” This raises a couple immediate questions: 1) are people responsible for breaking the spell of thought?, and 2) does breaking the spell of thought amount to having Free Will? After all, even if you had tremendously bad moral luck and had abusive parents that you hate, you apparently have the ability to transcend that hate, which makes you less likely to project that hate on others and potentially harm them. So in most cases I answer “yes” to Q1, which obviously leads to the same answer for Q2.

As a brief digression I just want to point out how pathetically naive it is to believe that such things could solve hatred. First of all, I hate inanimate objects all the time though I don’t think any of them have even the agency of a rabid dog. Secondly, we can still hate someone that we don’t blame for being how they are. And lastly, as long as we love, we will hate, for they define each other. Anger at those we don’t care about is contempt, not hatred. Sure, becoming “non-attached” to everything is a good road to the end of hatred, as you wouldn’t care enough about anything or anyone to invest in hating them, thereby paving the road to an end to love as well (I mean love in the active, verbal sense).

Evil

According to Harris evil doesn’t exist. Nobody thoughtfully and intentionally does something wicked: the past did it. He claims that “responsibility vanishes” in the face of “the stream of past causes,” apparently blatantly unaware that people persist in time (for some time) and that this means that they exist in their own past! Therefore, if the past and all of its causal forces “did it,” then I, being one of those forces in the past, am also implicated. I might even go out on a limb here and say that the person that existed in the past is the most relevant causal force to investigate! The reason that I wrote a post titled “I’m Gonna Kick Sam Harris’ Ass” was to demonstrate deliberate evil: it was my best attempt to show someone feeding off of their emotions, getting hotheaded, and planning to do evil in the future, but also totally aware of what he was doing. We are not responsible for having feelings of vengeance when betrayed, or anything, but we are responsible for how we frame those feelings and act on them, something that animals are incapable of doing.

Animal Choice

The most serious attack ever mounted on Compatibalism is that it cannot meaningfully differentiate animal choice from human choice or justify why the latter implies moral responsibility. What I find interesting here is that neither can Sam! He wants us to look at a psychopath like a scared tiger, as if they were all just born that way, when in fact they are usually “made” by a sick socialization process in addition to this genetic predisposition. In fact, Sam’s theory of mind is just the old animal model of Descartes applied to humans, with the addendum that humans are somehow aware of their determined animal selves, while this awareness changes nothing vis a vis control. He sums this up by saying that Compatibalism is just liking the desires you are stuck with. I guess dudes like Newton who were celibate were just stuck not liking the desires they were stuck with. But wait a minute, his celibacy proves that he can act on his second-order desires instead of his basic animal ones! How can a human choose to be celibate while no animal can intend as much? It seems like those second-order preferences can completely override the most potent psychological determinism in existence: the sexual impulse.

The NOW

Sam’s P 1B is a very confused view of the future. Sam claims that “all we have ever had is the NOW,” showing just how deeply he confuses human with animal experience. Humans were once very much stuck in the NOW of immediate experience in the same way animals are, but modern humans can imagine (right now) a future that doesn’t exist (yet). That is, “the NOW” for humans can include magical communications from a future that has not yet taken place; they can tap into a causality that is different at least in direction than the one “pushing” from the past. The tricky part is that animals can appear to do this when a recollection is triggered in their nervous systems, so that if they see something that even vaguely resembles a predator they will run, as if they had foreseen their being run down, caught, and eaten in a little mental movie. Of course, they see no such future, but react instinctively. Humans react instinctively too when they recollect, but they can also intentionally recall things and imagine things (or even indulge and toy with that instinctual recollection that pops up unbidden)! Harris is again (ala P 1B) trying to interpret the future like the past by suggesting that consciousness is not really even in the “NOW,” but that it is a representation of what was just a fraction of a second ago “the NOW.” This makes consciousness look more beholden to the past for some reason, though he does assure us that “there really is a way of living in the NOW,” by which he means MM.

Consciousness Is Memory

Harris claims that all we have is the present, but is careful to clarify that in physics there is no “present’ or absolute simultaneity. However, he then goes too far by explaining that neither is there a true “present” in consciousness, for everything is buffered in memory and is merely represented as having taken place at the same time. He concludes that consciousness is always then a memory, except during meditation. The logic is simple: it takes different amounts of time for the various sensory channels to get to the neo-cortex and therefore what we see with our open eyes is not “the present.” However, if we realize this, or happen to be taken over by a rogue wave of MM, we will not be looking exactly “out there” at our visual experience, but instead will be sinking back and viewing our visual experience as one whole percept. When we do this, perception is simultaneous with our consciousness of it, for the percept has already been “buffered in memory” and does not need to be fed through our sensory organs, up through our limbic system, and arrive in the neo-cortext: it is already there! What of other mental perceptions that are “already up there”? What other ways do we have of really living in the NOW other than MM? This is an extremely subtle point, but an important one, for it undermines Harris’ claims in the FW lecture that “we are utterly unaware of the neurophysiological events that produce [] changes.” The fact is that we are intimately aware of the neurophysiological events of our perception, only we are aware of them “from the inside,” and thus rarely think of this visual gestalt neurophysiologically. That is, when you look at a photo of ten people but don’t recognize yourself amongst the people, you still see “you” in the photograph, but not “as you.”

What Harris is claiming, in essence, is that if you are looking at the back of what you later find out to be a painting, you were not looking at a painting before this discovery! We are very aware of many of the changes in our brain that affect our actions, we just experience the “back side of the canvas,” most of the time, which appears as desires, intuitions, gustatory sensations, day dreams, etc, instead of as wiring diagrams, math, and cell biology, though both sides are true of the same material real-estate! Harris is claiming that our unconscious is entirely unconscious, as if it was discovered by mathematicians or something. True, most of the unconscious is largely inaccessible at any given time, but not at all times, as if by some genetic law! Otherwise, an Augustine, Schopenhauer, or Freud could not have been.

Pulling “A Harris”

The unconscious is like the subatomic world in that we contaminate it with the observer effect when we try to view it. Just as we can know either the position or the velocity of an electron at any time, but not both, so we can know that we desire something or why we desire it at any time, but usually not both. Many of Sam’s thought experiments rely on this bottleneck, but are pretty obvious mixtures of sophistry and badgering. Let me “pull a Harris” regarding electrons:

You just measured the position of that electron, right? Good. Now, could you have measured its velocity? No! Aha! Therefore you cannot measure the velocity of electrons in the future! Could you have measured the suns mass just then? No! How limited your instruments are!

Obviously, we can measure the velocity of electrons. So too can we discover that we desire something, why we desire it, and what desires oppose this one and why, etc: we just can’t discover them all at the same time. However, one interesting thing that we can do at the same time is be fully conscious of awareness (be it outward perception or inward introspection/feeling). As Schopenhauer pointed out, this is the only case known in the universe of the phenomenon and the thing-in-itself being apprehended at the same time, when we are usually, like the quantum physicist, stuck knowing one or the other piece of information at any time. When Sam claims that “What I will do next, and why, remains, at bottom, a mystery,” he is just pulling a Harris, for he can answer one of those questions at a time, he just cannot collapse the investigation into five seconds of inquiry! It takes a lifetime to know yourself as fully as possible.

Harris exploits the above bottleneck by alternatively posing forms of the “why” question, the “what” question, or the “when” question, as it suits him. In Benjamin Libet’s experiments both the subject and the researcher are fully aware of “what” will happen (feel an impulse to move, for instance), just not “when” or exactly “why.” But this is determined by the instructions, which tell you to just feel some random impulse randomly; that is, for no reason and at no specified time. Harris then comes in and inform us that we couldn’t predict “why” or “when” the impulse would pop up (duh!) and therefore we have no Free Will. This is just pure manipulation. Similar experiments required the subject to move either their left or right hand randomly and at a random time. The subject knows a little less precisely “what” he will do (move his left or right hand), but everyone is assured perfectly that he will not start singing Italian Opera! My knockdown argument here is simple: how? How does the subject know he will not start singing Italian Opera, begin doing back-flips, start picking random cities, or start doing MM? He knows this because he can predict his own thoughts with stunning accuracy. He certainly knows, for instance, that one of his hands will move in the near future. How is this possible if we are just “hostage to the contents of the next thought”?

Priming experiments are also referred to, whereby subjects are cued just before an unimportant and meaningless decision, and then asked why they made the decision that they did. These experiments prove that people can be unaware of priming influences regarding unimportant and meaningless decisions that they weren’t thinking much about anyway. Crucially, these people didn’t volunteer an answer–they had to be prompted! That is, the experimenter suggests to them that they should have an explanation, and so the person confabulates one on the spot, when in fact their implicit self-explanation before being accosted by snoopy scientists may have been perfectly adequate. More importantly, however, is that Sam asks not “were they aware of the true reasons for their actions,” but instead, he asks “did they know they were primed.” Someone could have a fantastic understanding of why they made a choice, but simply miss that little nudge from the priming, and Sam will just write off his explanation as total rationalization, as if the person’s explanation was as absurd and ungrounded as the answer “fried food monsters pluck grass diamonds.”

Mental Onesness

Sam assumes that just as the brain is one organ (ignoring actually the most important and prominent anatomical feature of the brain, btw), so too is the mind “one.” This allows him to claim that the brain causes the mind and suggest that part of the mind cannot rebel or govern anything. But then how is mindfulness meditation possible if the mind is “one” like this? How is mental dialogue possible? He mentions discursive thought and the fact that there is always a voice in our heads saying something or other, but his analysis ends there. He simply has us picture a meandering stream of thoughts and images, without drawing your attention to the fact that you can change anything you see! In his latest lecture, he demonstrates this perceptual malleability with his “picture a diamond…now a tomato!” bit. But what this means is that the voice in our head can be altered by the conscious ego. We call this internal dialogue versus Sam’s meandering monologue. If part of my brain (the ego) can chat with another part (let’s say the limbic system), instead of simply receive or interpret the signal of the latter, as Sam implies with his term “witness,” then the possibility  of internal conflict, cooperation, etc is opened up and freedom becomes easier to spot. One must first shed the assumption that one is “one,” however.

Conclusion

Harri’s understanding of the history of ideas is tragically shallow. Speaking of religions at the end of his recent lecture, he says that “they are just a carnival of errors.” This introduces circus imagery, associations of frivolity and Dionysian frenzy, as well as pits religion against common sense, as a carnival is a celebration that marks an overturning of daily life. He fails to mention two crucial points though: 1) so too is science a “carnival of errors,” a point usually termed the Pessimistic Meta-Induction, and 2) most of our ideas, scientific or otherwise, began as religions intuitions, meaning that the latter are something much more than just “errors.” The idea of the “soul,” for instance, is far more scientifically accurate a description of the brain than either a weather system or a computer would be.

Sam’s whole paradigm is predicated on a future neuroscience being powerful enough to read your thoughts, but this has proven so difficult not because of the chaos involved, but because of the immense order! I don’t mean order in the sense that the brain follows the laws of physics and thus is constrained by their order. I mean that there is genetically programmed order, on top of cultural order, on top of the order imposed by parental units, etc. Brain’s are not hard to understand because of the complexity of their disorderedness, but their gatheredness. Furthermore, brains can understand, brains can anticipate, and brains are biologically motivated to thwart your attempts to pigeon-hole them or tell them what they will inevitably do. Clouds and galaxies do not respond adaptively to verbal threats to their autonomy! If Harris ever sees his vision for neuroscience to its completion, then human beings will be able to read their own thoughts with perfect accuracy, to know “why” they did things (though not “ultimately”), and therefore have far more freedom, perhaps even radical Free Will! But Harris is not impressed by the brain’s ability to build a science capable of this, too obsessed is he with showing how this future science proves our present enslavement. Hilariously, this “author’s” central premise is that we can’t predict our own thoughts and thus can’t be authors with Free Will, while his proof comes from his faith that these same non-authors will very soon build a Free Will app for your iPad.