Posted by Eddie Sylvano on May 19, 2003, at 15:20:43
In reply to Re: This American Life (NPR)-developmental disorders » Eddie Sylvano, posted by Tabitha on May 19, 2003, at 13:52:25
> I think you've hit on the key fear behind much of the anti-med sentiment.. it's just so hard to accept we're not as 'in control' as we want to believe.
--------------------And as Snoozy mentioned, we don't want to accept the idea that criminals had no control over their actions. Accountability is at the heart of law and religion, and it would seem like Pandora's box to say that there is no free will.
I can't begin to explain the basic rules that account for all of human behavior, but I'm sure they're there, just as they are for beagles, houseflies, and crabgrass. It's easier to accpet the idea that houseplants are bound in their behavior by simple rules, because they exhibit very mundane behaviors (grow towards light, sink roots towards gravity, etc). When you're attempting to solve a difficult mathematical model, there is a technique that says, essentially, simplify the problem to it's most basic constituents. If you can generalize a difficult problem to a simpler, but logically similar problem, you can cut out the extraneous details that cloud the issue. Life is all based on the same processes employed in various guises and degrees of complexity, but is still the same at heart. It also uses a very obfuscated method of solving its problems, employing trial and error rules, the most effective of which win out. This proces, played out over billions of generations, results in a mind boggling number of simple rules, whose interactions become exponentially more diverse as the number of them rises. Compared to the purposeful design of a computer program, this results in a hopeless mess of rules that just happened to work, and will probably be impossible to tease out of the whole. Saying that we're based on simple rules doesn't mean that we'll ever understand them.
The part that most people probably get hung up on is the idea of predestination. If we're robots following simple rules, doesn't that mean that all of our future actions are set in stone? In a sense, yes. The neat trick with people, though, is that our rules allow for much more environmental sensitivity than simpler systems. The fact that you're reading this post means that it could change your future behavior. The knowledge given to you every second by myriad sources is employed by your brain's program to modify it's behavior. On top of that, you have no way of knowing what kinds of information or input you'll get from day to day. Today, for example, my girlfriend warned me of a speed trap on my usual route home. Hence, I'll take a different route. Had she not told me this, I would likely have gotten a ticket. In smaller and smaller ways, these types of behavior modification happen all the time. The net effect of all this is beyond all hope of predicting, much like the weather, but is still a series of smaller, dumb interactions. To take Snoozy's example, the groundwork for Kenneth Lay to take advantage of a percieved loophole in accounting code was likely in place before the particular circumstances that put him into a position to do so arose. His inputs all conspired to make his particular mind believe that this would be advantageous enough to pursue. Had anything else happened during that time to cuase him to question this course of action, he might have stopped. No one else experienced the same unique set of inputs during their lifetime that he did, so no one else would have behaved in exactly the same way. I'm sure it seemed to him as if he were forging his own future, but that's only an interpretation of the big picture. What he didn't have control over were the trillions of smaller events that led him to such a system of beliefs, geographical location, group of peers, job, and so on. Worded differently, your current actions are based largely on your experiences up until that microsecond, and those prior experiences are similarly based, all the way back to the big bang (if you want to be philosophical). To say otherwise is to introduce some sort of supernatural force that acts on the scene.
When you push a series of stacked dominoes, you don't see one "decide" to do something like fall at a novel angle. The only way for us to be any different is to be made of atoms that have some sort of transcendant free will, much like the errant dominoe. Free will is an intractable engineering problem.
Anyway, I've rambled a lot here. I probably need to think of some better analogies to describe this.
poster:Eddie Sylvano
thread:227629
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/social/20030517/msgs/227695.html