The Visit

April 4, 2012

  

I'm not sure why but at lunch I went for a run to go visit an old friend. Nothing much has changed with it, maybe in a couple hundred thousand years it will be a dramatically different place but for now nothing seems different with the cliff top where my life began to unravel nearly 10 years ago. I stood here on a brisk overcast day in February many years ago contemplating the direction my life had taken. Going up there today took me back to that time, where I was at personally, all of the unanswered questions I had in my head, the dread and pain that I felt, the betrayal, confusion and mistrust. I was at that time clinging quite dramatically to a house of cards. The decisions that I made that day placed me on a rocket ship of maturity. Not only did my visit up there today set me on the memory train, I was confronted in the starkest way I can imagine with the different place that I occupy today. I am no longer in any way dominated and controlled by fear, honesty is a treasure to me today, in nearly every way I am unrecognizable to the guy who occupied this space back then. Coincidentally the weather set out to match my disposition on each occasion. Years ago the grey and overcast day accented my mood and today the sun shined while a light snow fell, it was incredibly beautiful. Dark clouds rolled over to the north and occasionally blasted me with cold wind and corn snow, but the sun warmed my face all the while. This might sound rather unremarkable to anyone but me, it was in my case a pretty big deal. 

Also do yourself a favor and make a note not to listen to this while hiking on a ridge line in a thunderstorm... spooky. 

Why Philosophy?

I believe that we need philosophy in order to lead a complete and fulfilled life. In my own life I came to this realization the hard way, by trial and error. As a young person throughout my teenage years I spent very little time or effort on critical thought, in so many ways I wasn’t concerned with learning how to think. What I really wanted was to have someone who I respected tell me the right answers, rather than spend the effort required to learn how to think for myself. This inability to think critically and logically left me vulnerable to some toxic and harmful ideas. Not the least of which was joining a Christian cult which readily exploited my lack of critical thinking skills.

I moved to Idaho in May of 1997 and only had a few friends. That first winter I was lonely and bored. Missing home and family I began attending a church group attended by many friendly people who gave me a great deal of attention. They possessed such steadfast conviction about the truth of the religion which they offered me. I was extremely underequipped in assessing the structure of beliefs that came from them. Indeed I barely even questioned whether these ideas were true or what their effects would be in my life. I succumbed unquestioningly to everything these nice people offered to me. In times when I questioned the things which I was being told I would reassure myself with something like, “It must be true or else they couldn’t be so sure.” After going through the motions and looking for reinforcement I slipped into the mindset of a true believer. I became one of those selling these lies. I would often experience dissonance in the realization that I was not so sure about some of these things, especially when it came to behavior restrictions and how members were being treated. I did not like the things that I saw coming from the leaders and other members but I did not have at my disposal tools which would combat these bad ideas. I did not know how to disagree with someone who was so certain in their dogmas. This back and forth mental wrangling led to nearly 6 years of personal torment culminating in a dramatic “falling away”. During this period I was visited many times by fellow members who attempted to persuade me to stay. I began to realize that it was fear and not reasons which held sway over the members of that group. Slowly but surely I began to break free.               

  Although simply breaking the chains of unquestioned dogma left me: without a rudder, zero direction and a scrap heap of faulty ideas and useless assumptions. As I began the painful and difficult process of learning how to live on the other side of my membership in that destructive group, it was philosophy that served me best. Although, I would not have even known to call it philosophy as I began to think critically and analyze the things I had been told. Increasingly I began to employ these useful skills in every area of my life, at work, in relationships, in financial planning decisions and even in recreational pursuits such as hiking in the wilderness. Far from being the worst thing that could have happened to me, succumbing to the atmosphere of a cult, led me by a circular route to the thing I was longing for; answers. The big surprise came in the knowledge that truth cannot be fed.  Truth at its best must be discovered through a deliberate search. Once I began rejecting the conventions of authority I was enabled to gain ownership of the ideas and beliefs which I accept as true, this has given truth substance and purpose in my life. In discovering that certainty resides not in unbending dogma but in a humble openness to new evidence, my energy is no longer wasted maintaining insecure and shaky beliefs. Instead I can be fluid and adjust to new data, inching ever closer to reality, which becomes a friend the more I embrace it. This is where philosophy is most useful to the average person; in being able to decide what is true and what is right.

But what is philosophy? In the broadest sense philosophy is the pursuit of wisdom. To many purists it is the love of wisdom. But philosophical thought ranges from analytic and formal logic to simply asking big questions such as; why there is something rather than nothing or what does it mean to be. Actually in its simplest sense it is something we all do in our day to day lives. It is the attempt to know what is true. It is a set of ideas and beliefs about how the world works and how we can best make our way through life. This is where philosophy pays it dividends. It doesn’t tell us what to think but how to think. And it helps us determine what to do and how to be. This is where philosophy came to my rescue; it offered me the tools to decide what is true and right and it stilled my conscience as I rejected the guilt and fear based belief system.

            One strange and surprising idea is that I had a philosophy while in that group, albeit a naïve and foolish one. At a root level we are really left with no choice about whether we will have a philosophy or not. The choice lies in whether we possess a philosophy which is our own or something which was handed to us. Simply put we can have a philosophy that is a junk heap of amassed and unrelated ideas which are not logically coherent, cancel one another out and quite simply do not correspond to reality. Or we can through a process of purposeful thought and analysis learn to think critically about what we believe. And thus come to some reasonably solid ideas about how the world really is. I learned the hard way which of those two choices is optimal. But learn it I did.

            In philosophy we are dealing with the foundations of many of our beliefs. Why is the foundation for our beliefs important? A belief is like a lever, once it is firmly held as true it sets into motion courses of action or inaction as the case may be. But what did it mean for me to say that I believed what I was being told? During that time of my life it simply meant that I had accepted what someone else handed me as truth. According to philosophy this is a bad belief. In fact in order for the word belief to have any meaning at all it must mean that the proposition in question is true, not merely that we wish it was true. Beliefs represent our attempts to build a model of the world which we can then rely on as we live our lives. To make the best use of our beliefs we need: internal coherence, logical consistency and most of all intellectual honesty. These traits are what differentiate a good philosophy from a bad one. These are what I strive for today. And I have found that once in place a good philosophy quite simply provides the tools I need to make accurate conclusions and to reject unfounded and ineffective beliefs.

                        Certainly many of the beliefs we possess about the world have come to us by second hand information. For instance I have never seen a person fall to their death from a great height.  Yet, I am next to certain that it is correct to believe that jumping out of a plane without a functional parachute would be very unwise indeed. How can I be certain this is true? This is a very important matter which seems absurd to even question, given what we know about gravity and falling bodies. The crucial question to ask when confronted with the acceptance of ideas which are really based upon second hand information is; do I have any reasons to doubt that this is legitimate? 

            My example is simple enough to answer, but what if we increase the level of uncertainty in our question? Take for instance something like the question. Is it wrong to eat other animals? This question might admit many different answers, but the question would not even occur without some hint of interest in ethical matters. It is important to recognize that a question like this one regards something which is nuanced and not obvious. It is in this type of pursuit that an adherence to critical thought and a habit of questioning even the questions themselves comes home to pay the bills. There are literally an infinite number of questions like this example, which we face every day (some of them very important) which we cannot address without some form of philosophical thought and the framework it provides.  

            Consider the realm of morality, right and wrong. For much of my life I took morality to mean something akin to following the rules, doing what I was told. Since learning how to think and question, morality has become something much more challenging and also deeply rewarding.  Simply abiding with the rules has been supplanted by a desire and a conviction to think for myself and to question authority, to analyze and decide with my own powers of reason what is the correct course to be taken. Many times throughout history justice has been wrought only through defiance of the rules set out by the authorities. An example which is extremely instructive is the American Civil Rights Movement during the 1960’s. The right thing to do was at the time against the law. Those civil rights activists were operating on philosophical ideas of peaceful resistance. The foundation of what they did was a conviction which sprung from the idea that people should be given equal treatment regardless of race, creed, social status, etc. The segregationists had a philosophy as well, flawed though it is. Dogma is the best word to describe the ideas which gave ground to the bigotry present in an opposition to civil rights. Without the equipment provided by analytic thought, the ability to question, self-examination and the rejection of authority, individuals and groups are ill equipped to combat such bad ideas.

The hallmark of a mind concerned with using philosophical tools to align with reality and reject fantasy is openness to revision, an intellectual honesty which compels them to say the most important words one can utter; I don’t know. All knowledge rests on and begins with this honest admission. If we possess beliefs about which nothing could possibly admit of us changing them then we can be sure that this belief is not an attempt to represent reality, it is merely wishful thinking or something worse. Even my own belief in the necessity of philosophy is provisional, open to revision and fluid in interpretation. One might think that certainty is a sign of strength and force, but it is really fear and insecurity which buttresses absolute certainty, not solid evidence. It is openness to new ideas and better more complete information that produces a security which no dogma can, a security stemming from personal integrity.

Reality is a harsh judge; whatever tools we have at our disposal which can enable us to align with how the world really is must be implemented in order that we not end up on the wrong side of the real world. I once chose a comforting fantasy over the edgy reality. In hindsight I see now that the easier softer way comes not from fluffy ideas which aren’t true and only disappoint; it comes from confronting and embracing reality, life on life’s terms. Philosophy continues to equip me with what I need to face the music and what a sweet song it is. 

The Meaning of Death.

Among the various species of the Earth human beings are uniquely equipped with comparatively large brains. Obviously we are afforded many benefits by having this equipment. Although not everything provided by this cognitive ability is beneficial at all times. We are enabled to imagine distant and abstract things, such as the future. We can picture many things which may never come to pass. But one thing we can fully imagine which is unavoidably certain is our own death. Indeed death confronts us every day. We see on the news a fatal car accident, a relative or an acquaintance dies from illness. All of this, and we know that we ourselves will die. What effect does this knowledge have on us individually and collectively? Even more what are the effects when we are made consciously aware of our mortality? What are the behaviors and psychological consequences handed to us with this ability to recognize our own mortality?

These questions have become somewhat of a quest for a team of experimental psychologists who were inspired by the ideas put forth by Ernest Becker in his Pulitzer Prize winning book The Denial of Death (Becker). They set out to develop methods which would test the speculations which Becker made about the psychological effects of death anxiety in human beings. Becker’s framework has fallen under the name of Terror Management Theory (TMT).             
            In its simplest form TMT states that the human capacity to be aware of death and the resulting finality creates a potential vessel for anxiety and terror. Human beings then erect structured worldviews and cultural symbols which bolster self-esteem and meaning for the individual in the face of their own death. These external cultural ideas are internalized and provide the individual with an increased sense of self-esteem as long as they live up to the standards the cultural framework provides. Human worldviews are largely based on symbolism having been constructed by people and they are many and diverse. The personal security afforded by these cultural constructs is threatened directly by the opposing views of other people and other cultures. The opposite effect holds true as well. Others who possess the same worldview bolster the shield provided by the mutual worldview. This security and protection from death anxiety is largely dependent on the perceived validity for a particular set of beliefs. This dependence on cultural ideas leads people to strive in defense of their culture from other cultures which oppose or threaten this security system. These defenses come in several forms from disparaging other views, attempting to convert others to one’s belief system or by simply killing and exterminating those who hold differing beliefs. Crucial to the security of anxiety protection systems is an absolute certainty about the ideas it contains (Pyszczynski, Greenberg and Solomon).

In the late 80’s Greenberg and colleagues realized that the TMT hypothesis needed to be verified with experiments. Thus began nearly two decades of research into the effect caused by subtle reminders of death (also known as mortality salience or MS). They have performed over 300 hundred different clinical examinations in 15 different countries and a multitude of cultural settings (Greenberg and al.). Their research has shown that death anxiety is reduced by increases in self-esteem, that reminders of death raise favorable reactions to those who support one’s belief structure while raising hostility to those who threaten it, that direct threats to an individual’s self-esteem raise the ability of death related thoughts to have psychological import and that higher confidence in one’s culture and belief structure produces a dramatic reduction in death anxiety.

The first study performed by the team involved American Municipal Court judges. In this test the judges were asked to assign bail for someone accused of prostitution. One half of the judges completed a survey which contained direct death reminders. The TMT hypothesis predicted that since prostitution is generally considered morally reprehensible in America the judges in the MS group would be more punitive. The results confirmed this prediction. The average bail assigned by the judges in the death primed group was $455, while in the control group the average was merely $50 (Solomon, Greenberg and Pyszcynski, Pride and Prejudice: Fear of Death and Social Behavior).

In another study conducted in 1998 the effects of terror management on physical aggression were tested and analyzed. The experimenters set out to answer whether MS encourages physical aggression toward others who possess a different worldview, particularly those who are threatening. After the participants performed a mortality salience or control induction survey, they read an essay written by another participant which either supported or threatened the political views held by the subjects. Then in a second seemingly unrelated study under the guise of personality and taste preference, participants were directed to choose a quantity of extremely spicy hot sauce for the writer of the essay to drink. As TMT would predict, the amount prescribed by the control group did not vary, but those in the mortality-salience group assigned a much larger quantity of hot sauce for those whose essay threatened the participant’s culture than to those who supported and agreed with their worldview (McGregor and Leiberman). 

Although these studies and the many others performed by Greenberg and his colleagues are far from conclusive they validate in many ways the speculations put forth by Becker in The Denial of Death. His speculations posited that human beings are troubled by the inevitability of death (Becker 501). Becker proposed that we cope with this potential existential crisis through the construction of culture and especially hero worship. Our natural impotence in the face of death can be combated by creating a hero system which can enable us to imagine that we transcend death through participating in something bigger than ourselves (Becker 133).    

One might be tempted at this point to reason that if confidence in and adherence to a cultural framework truly does reduce anxiety and provide security for people in the face of their death, then what’s the harm? As noted by Becker himself the problems begin when the framework provided by our culture is threatened (Becker 4615). We rise to defend our worldview from outside threats. This defense often takes the form of drastic violent action, warfare, even attempts at annihilation. Taken to its extreme this armor of defense against anxiety begins to hold the person prisoner (Becker 1762). The flip side comes when we encounter persons or cultures which bolster the protection against death anxiety. We are drawn to them and experience fondness; rather than being threatened our self-esteem is buttressed by them. They are our allies.

One real life instance where this occurred on a global scale came from the atrocities of Sept. 11, 2001. Ask anyone and they will be able to recall in striking detail where they were and what they were doing on that fateful day. As a people the nations of the West and all of the resulting worldviews were threatened in dramatic fashion on that day. As TMT would have predicted in the days following the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, the nations who support and share the American worldview and cultural constructs rose to support and defend those idea which seemingly came under threat. While many of those who hold views in line with the attackers celebrated in the streets the falling of the great cultural symbols which threaten much of what they value.

One of the most obvious signs of this worldview defense came from a dramatic spike in American flag sales immediately after 9/11. As noted by Klee Manufacturing and Distributing owner Carol Klee Carter, of Flint, Michigan. “The demand for U.S. flags was so overwhelming that there just wasn’t any red, white and blue material left in the United States. Some people waited months to get one.” Even more telling is her own recounting of the events of 9/11 and the threat it posed, “After what happened to our country, people realized we were the best country and no one wanted to see that happen again,” Klee-Carter said. “Everybody came together and it was wonderful. They cared for one another and loved one another” (Mostafavi).

The flip side of this patriotic symbolism and a nation united came in the form of revenge seeking. And it goes without saying that the attacks themselves were perpetrated by persons who were themselves defending strongly held views from threats posed by the west.

This back and forth cultural struggle goes on both globally and locally every day. There are of course socially acceptable ways to defeat a cultural enemy as well. We can trounce them in a debate or even just talk down those who are different from us. We see this every day.

The research which has been performed on TMT has largely confirmed the speculation of Becker. It has put into perspective what is possibly the primary motivation behind all of this struggling to be right and to convince others of our positions. Our striving to find symbols and ideologies with which to ally ourselves is explained when death anxiety is added to the equation.  Death is terrifying and this terror is too much to handle for our fragile psyches so we place bandages on it with culture and hero worship. When the security afforded by these cultural constructs is placed in jeopardy we attack, defend or cling to them even harder. The work of TMT researchers aims to provide us with a window into our own tendencies and thus take one step toward equipping us to overcome these tendencies and their effects. While their work is far from conclusive it has been instructive and illuminating. And it is certainly interesting.

Some Of The Pigs Are More Equal Than The Others

  Imagine with me if you will, the Republican convention is being held in some U.S. city.  As the attendees are entering the facility an outspoken liberal critic is seen filming everyone.  Security is informed of his presence and subsequently approaches him to inquire what he is doing.  He states angrily that he is filming all of the attendees and that anyone who speaks out against the Democratic party will be hunted down and killed.  Once the Organizers are made aware of these threats they inquire with the director of security, who informs them that he is not surprised.  Though the shocker comes when he lays the blame on the organizers for holding the convention in the first place and allowing people to say things which might offend or upset people who disagree with them.  After some disagreement the organizers decide that for the protection of everyone attending they should cancel the convention.

  In a country like the U.S., with our First Amendment protecting free speech, this story sounds very far fetched.  It is difficult for us to imagine such an improbable scenario playing out.  One in which the safety of individuals is threatened by someone who disagrees with them and then rather than apprehending this individual who has threatened innocent people, the authorities side with the radical and blame the convention holders for attempting to express free speech.  Those who are threatened are not the victims of silenced speech but the perpetrators of discrimination or harmful speech.  

  As unlikely as this might seem to us, this is exactly what occurred last week in London.  It is absurd to me that this type of intimidation is allowed to occur, while the man making those threats has not been apprehended or charged in any way.  The only difference between my fictional account and what actually occurred is the country where it took place and rather than the threats coming from a dissident political party member it was from an Islamic radical.  What, I must ask is the difference?

  Why should religious beliefs be placed in a separate category from every other ideology?  What is to become of the protections afforded by the freedom of speech if we allow that certain ideas are beyond criticism?  Who is to decide this? Why haven't there been people speaking out against the silence of free speech in a democratic country?   Why hasn't there been more coverage in the media?  No one at the secular conference was threatening anybody, at all.  Who is going to stand up and say the plain and simple truth? A basic fundamental human right is being stripped away right before our eyes all in the name of avoiding the offense of some group or idea.

  Most people don't condone violence, but the troubling trend comes in the form of the idea that we need to tiptoe around people who have strong religious beliefs.  This is idea is extremely flawed, it assumes that religious believers aren't bound by the same obligation to exercise judgement and restraint as the rest of us when the are offended.  Hidden deep within all of the talk about respect and tolerance is a mountain of fear and the tacit admission of a link between demands for censorship and silencing criticism with threats of violence.  

  As some might be prone to dismiss this as the fault of secular groups speaking out about Islamic barbarism, it would do us all well to imagine a time in which anyone who imagines verbal slights as a reason to threaten violence.  A pro-life group protests a family planning center to shouts of "We will kill you if you don't stop this picket".  An ACLU meeting is cancelled because some people think that it is an evil organisation.  Adding insult to injury the threats are not treated as the crime that they are and instead the free speech is silenced in order not to offend.  As unthinkable as these might sound today, they are no different in principle than what took place over the pond.  

  There is only one acceptable response if we are to see the upholding of that most supreme of human rights; outcry.  Call it what it is, intimidation and silencing through fear.  As any dog owner knows the dog who barks the loudest and threatens the most violently is really the least secure and most afraid.  Islamists know that their rhetoric doesn't stand up to a free exchange of ideas and so they threaten with violence in order to silence what would expose Islam for what it is, a fraud. 

Thank You For Not Leaping

Copenhagen resident Soren Kierkegaard (1813-1855), is commonly referred to as a philosopher. Though he was trained not in philosophy but in theology and this is apparent in his line of thought.  His system is certainly not reasonable and therefore not philosophical.  He is most notably known for his pithy exclamation “leap of faith”.  As he imagined it this leap from the ethical stage of development to religious faith is how one becomes an authentic person.  Proposing three stages of development he attempts to show how a radically personal relationship to the Judeo-Christian God is crucial to being a complete individual.  The first of his three stages is the Aesthetic stage in which sensuous enjoyment is the goal of all pursuits.  He likens this to the moral development of a child in which a person who doesn’t progress beyond this stage is left without any sense of right and wrong and an undeveloped character.  This brings him to the ethical stage.  In which people come to grips with laws and social norms, which leads to the conclusion that the path to goodness is to follow the rules and directives of society. 

Kierkegaard realized that merely following rules and directives does not lead to moral authenticity.   He found that this ultimately leads to despair because one is continually confronted with moral failure while trying to follow impossible rules.  He reasoned that in judging oneself with the standards put forth by others, personal existence is removed from the individual’s hands and placed in the judgment of others.  He found this prospect distasteful, looking for a way to be compete and whole as an individual he arrived at what would be the third and final stage of development in his system; religious faith.  This is where the “leap” would be required.  Where he imagined true existence began.  He compared this existence with “riding a wild stallion”, while contrasting it to the “conformists who are like those who fall asleep in the hay wagon”.   He held that the third stage of development begins when individuals are filled with despair over their “sinfulness” and thus are compelled to leap out in faith to God.  He held that it is in this radical commitment to a relationship with God that one is made complete.

                Kierkegaard became convinced that the key to a fulfilled life is to shrug off societal conventions and the “comfort” of reason.  As may seem obvious, it can be rather daunting to argue against someone who has forsaken reasonableness in favor of faith in the unseen.  Though, I think I can highlight the absurdity contained in this man’s refusal to grow up. 

                He begins with faith in God.  What does he mean to have faith something?  He seems to mean something other than the commonly used word belief.  The common usage of belief is simply to say “I believe X because it is an accurate representation of how the world really is”. We cannot however, say that I believe in X because it makes me feel good, as Kierkegaard implores us.  Or that I believe in Y because it is prudent to do so, as Pascal would have us do?  Let’s see how this functions in real life.  Imagine that I hold that the president of the United States has gifted me with 200 million dollars’ worth of gold bars, which the CIA has buried in my backyard.  This would no doubt leave me feeling very happy and secure.  But do I have any reason to accept the idea that bars of gold have been planted in the ground behind my house?  Of course I do not.  This is where these epistemological Ponzi schemes run aground on the shore of reason.  As soon as we confront the belief in hand with contrary evidence and are unwilling to alter the belief in question it is clear that our belief is not an attempt to align with reality.  It is a childlike attempt to run from reality to consoling fantasy.  This is the faith of Kierkegaard’s fancy. 

While Kierkegaard maintained that the life of faith was the equivalent of riding a wild stallion, he was drastically wrong.  Faith is nothing short of the comforting blanket which a child clings to for security.  Ill equipped to accept and face life as it really is, warts and all.  Faith becomes the antidote.  This leaves one unable to distinguish truth from falsity in the most important matters imaginable. Contrast this with a life spent opening all of one’s beliefs to new evidence, evidence which might smash a strongly held belief to the ground.  What Kierkegaard and his ilk are afraid of is reality.  It is trivially easy to see who is riding in the “hay wagon”.

I certainly agree that faith can give us something which ethics cannot.  However, I disagree strongly that what it gives us is beneficial.  It seems to me that the leap made by Kierkegaard was a leap backward and it requires both the immaturity of a child who never grew up and a demand for comfort.  Comfort even at the hand of self-delusion.  I can’t help but think that Kierkegaard experienced dramatic failures of self-restraint which led him to run into the arms of a merciful deity for forgiveness.  It would not take much to reason that his personal failures were victimless crimes, in which the only one offended by them was the God who resides in his imagination.  The moral failure came not in an inability to follow the rules; it came from an acceptance of the arbitrary as legitimate in the first place.  This sounds like Stockholm syndrome to me.  It is the submission of the bullied to the bully.  It is likely no coincidence that one of his heroes was Abraham.  Who as the story goes, submitted to the cosmic bully Yahweh even to the point of willingly setting his son on a death stage.  This is faith at its necessary conclusion.  It is also humanity at its worst.  When human credulity escapes from the constraints of reasonableness, internal consistency, civility, and candor it becomes faith.  The benefit provided to the individual is illusory at best and certainly destructive to societies filled with people who maintain numerous unfounded and unjustified beliefs about the instructions of invisible deities.

A very effective example of the destructive nature of faith comes to us from an event in our own times.  The atrocities of September 11, 2001 resonate with anyone alive at the time.  The men, who piloted those planes into the trade towers, were not insane or wicked, as they were portrayed again and again in the western media.  They were men of faith, perfect faith. 

Certainly, it is not hard to call to memory, similar or worse atrocities committed without faith in a deity or religious text.  Though, looking deeper reveals that genocidal and terrorist atrocities are always backed by an unbending faith in some comforting vision, be it a future utopia or the eradication of a hated ethnic group.  Simply and frankly ordinary conscience unbound by irrationality is all that is needed for ethical behavior.  Indeed passion guiding reason and reason guiding passion fills one’s toolkit with all they need to lead a complete and fulfilled life. 

Sadly Kierkegaard never grew up.  In fact he refused to.  This certainly motivated him to go about developing a philosophy which justified his refusal to reason and live as an adult.  Living as an adult means taking responsibility for oneself and applying all of our faculties in the business of living.  Some would say he was unable, I say he was unwilling. 

The Author

Imagine you are walking down the street and come upon a woman lying on the ground crying. Suddenly you realize she has obviously been assaulted. You rush to her side, feeling an intense desire to help. The thing we would refer to as our “self” stands at the intersection of the lines of input and stimuli with decision and action. By all accounts you will tend to feel that you are the root cause of your own thoughts and actions. Personal choice has led you to either act or not to act. You seem to be acting on your own free will. However, as I hope to highlight this perspective cannot be held in light of what science tells us about the workings of the human brain.

At a conscious level we are aware of only a small portion of the information that our brains are processing at each moment. While we are continually aware of acute changes in our moods, thoughts, perceptions, behavior, etc. we are left completely unaware of the brain states that produce these changes. Yet nearly all of us maintain that we are the creators of our own patterns of thought and action. The physiologist Benjamin Libet has demonstrated that neural activity in the motor regions can be detected 350 milliseconds before the subject is aware that they have decided to move. (Libet, Gleason, Wright and Pearl, 1983). More recently fMRI data has been shown to convey that “conscious” decisions can be seen in neural activity 10 seconds before the subject is aware of them. (Soon, Brass, Heinze and Hayes, 2008) These findings make it difficult to maintain that one is the conscious author of their own actions.

No perspective which takes into account causality leaves room for freewill. Our internal dialog of thoughts, desires and moods simply pop into minds producing either action or stasis. The reasons for this are left unexplained from a purely subjective point of view.  Our belief in free will seems to spring out of our moment to moment ignorance of the causal chain which produces our thoughts and actions. The term “free will” merely describes the feeling of being the author of our own thoughts as they arise in consciousness. Take for instance a train of thoughts like, “I’m hungry. I think there is some cake in the fridge. Well cake isn’t very healthy, maybe cottage cheese would be better,” this example highlights the apparent choices one can make, and they seem freely made.  But looking deeper reveals that these thoughts simply arise free of our authorship and yet direct our actions nevertheless.

The alternative position to traditional free will is often known as Determinism, and is almost considered a bad word by most people. The philosopher Daniel Dennett has highlighted the confusion most people carry with regards to determinism. “They equate determinism with fatalism.” This confusion produces questions such as, “if determinism is true why should I do anything? Why not just wait and see what happens?” This line of questioning reveals that most people imagine that if our choices depend on prior causes that they do not matter. The fact that I am writing this paper is the result of a choice to do so, if I had not decided to write it, it would not get written. But my choice to do so was unquestionably the result of many causal factors, such as the desire to achieve a decent grade, social pressures and a desire to achieve a goal. Choice is as important as those who fancy free will state that it is. Some people imagine that if we acknowledge that we are not the author of our own thoughts and actions that, moral and political freedoms then become unimportant. But merely acknowledging the causal influences and the fact that we do not know what we will intend until the intention arises, does not lessen the value of personal freedom of individuals to do what they intend or not to do otherwise, regardless of the source of those intentions.

This issue is not purely philosophical and academic, meant to be a silly logical exercise. This belief in free will is the foundation of the religious notion of “sin” as well as the underlying commitment to retributive justice. Free will has been deemed by The Supreme Court a “universal and persistent” base for law in our country, also stating “a deterministic view of human conduct that is inconsistent with the underlying precepts of our criminal justice system” (United States v. Grayson, 1978). It seems that any advancements in science which threaten the commonly held notions about free will draw into question the ethics of punishing people for their bad behavior. It seems that the primary worry is that an honest discussion of the root causes of our behavior will erode moral responsibility. But does the acknowledgement of underlying causes for our behavior mean that we cannot be expected to take responsibility for our actions? Of course we wouldn't.

We can view human beings as forces of genetic and environmental influences and still not be prevented from talking about moral responsibility, it does however, cause problems for our practices of retributive punishment. Obviously there are people who possess the intent to harm and cannot be helped away from his intention. We need to protect society from them. It is clear from the scientific findings that the people who are the worst criminals we can imagine have some grouping of bad genetics, bad influences, bad ideas and bad circumstances. The role these have played in the bad choices they have made should seem obvious. The question then becomes, which of these ingredients can we hold them responsible for? The justice system (if is to be just) must reflect the understanding that any of us could easily have been dealt a very different hand in life, and given that different hand we could be in their place. It borders on immorality to not consider the level of blind chance which is involved in morality.

Imagine a heinous murder in which the killer did it “just for the fun of it”. Yet upon psychiatric and medical examination he is found to have a tumor the size of a golf ball in the medial prefrontal cortex of his brain (this area is responsible for emotional control and behavioral impulse). It would be fairly easy to surmise that he was not in any real sense responsible for his actions in carrying out the murder. He was not in his right mind. We would not prescribe the same punishment for him as we would a perfectly healthy individual. Why not? Would it be moral to deny this man surgery as a ”punishment” for his crime? And furthermore where do we draw the line in ascribing personal responsibility apart from the causal forces which author our thoughts and actions? 

Claims of Knowledge About The World.

Are beliefs different from other claims of knowledge about the world? What is intended when we say that a person believes a certain proposition about the world? In the case with anything which carries as much familiarity we must be wary of being led astray by the terms we use to describe cognitive events. Believing is not guaranteed to be a unitary phenomenon simply because we have one word to describe it. Precision in description is key when one attempts to describe mental events, such as memory, recognition, or belief.

Our closer cousins in the animal kingdom (dogs, pigs, apes, etc.) can be seen to form associations regarding things and events, this could be said to be "believing" things about the world. This is not however the sort of "believing" I am shooting for in this essay. When I refer to beliefs that people subscribe to consciously ("Malaria is transmitted by mosquito bites," "Soccer is superior to hockey," "Jesus brought Lazarus back from the dead,") I am speaking about ideas that are communicated and acquired, through language. In order to believe a particular proposition, is to say that it is a correct representation of some state of the world, this fact brings about some insight into what our standards should be in the function of beliefs. Mostly it reveals why we value evidence and demand logical coherence in regards to the propositions we asses all the time. In the same way that we are not free to mean whatever we fancy when using words like "dead" or "fire" or "two" we are not free to adopt unjustified claims about science or history. When anyone becomes certain they have such an ability to fly free of justification for what they maintain as "true", they should not be shocked when the rest of us cease to listen to them.

A strong case can be made that what gives our brains its unique humanness is largely our capacity to evaluate new statements of asserted truth in reference to the multitude of others it has already integrated. With the use of intuitions regarding truth and falsity, necessities of logic and contradiction, we are capable of putting together coherent images of the world. What must take place inside our heads in order for this process to occur, for us to come to a conviction that a particular statement or group of statements are true or false? No one really knows, what it takes at the level of neurological events. Information processing, especially linguistically, must play a substantial role, for sure, but how does the brain take products of reasoning, perception and memory into focus regarding particular propositions and convert them into the substance of actions. In an adaptive sense beliefs have been extremely useful. By believing things about reality we are able to predict events and ponder the possible outcomes of certain actions or occurrences. This can and has been exploited by the unsavory. But living a life free of understanding which is in some large ways second hand does not appear to be possible.

"Beliefs are principles of action: whatever they may be at the level of the brain, they are processes by which our understanding (and misunderstanding) of the world is represented and made available to guide our behavior." Sam Harris

Once a proposition has been affirmed as true by in an individuals mind it can have powerful effects in both emotional states and actions they take. Imagine someone proposes to you, "The police have raided your home." There are many things which may either throw you into a panic or lead you to reject this claim at all. Maybe you have a large drug operation in your basement (panic), maybe you are sitting on your couch when told this (disregard). In the first case the door of belief has opened forcefully and in the second case belief has not opened. Beliefs are interdependent with their neighbors, both being related in semantics and logic. They constrain and are indeed constrained by each other. A belief like I highlighted above "malaria is transmitted by mosquito bites," hinges upon the affirmation of many basic and derivative endorsements of truth. In order to integrate this as a true statement of reality one must first accept that mosquitoes bite humans (basic) and that malaria is a disease which is carried in the blood (derivative). But one could not be said to believe this example and then claim that humans cannot acquire malaria because mosquitoes do not bite them.

The things which a person integrates into their mind as true must be highly coherent in order for personal identity to remain intact. Try to picture a person who thinks he is a professional cyclist and that he has no legs, that he has a daughter who is also his mother. Once logical inconsistency reaches a certain level our notions of personhood disappear. Our behaviors are largely informed by what we believe, this necessitates that we believe things that are at a minimum possible. "Anything is possible," you might say. Lets see how that would work. There is a knock at the door, either it is a salesman or it is not. I may believe one proposition or the other, I may even say I do not know. I cannot say it is both.

To say that you believe a particular proposition to be true is to admit that when questioned "why" you can provide defensible reasons. In order to claim that a particular belief is an accurate portrayal of some aspect of reality it must be defensible and coherent within the framework of the multitude of other acknowledge claims you have accepted. Spinoza thought that belief was synonymous with comprehension, while disbelief needs a rejection upon comprehension. Maybe comprehending a proposition is analogous to perceiving an object in physical space. It may that we default to accepting appearances as real until they are shown to be false. Regardless of whether this process is active or passive, we are continuously auditing the verbal ideas (our and others) looking for factual inconsistencies. Changing just one word in a spoken phrase determines the different response we are likely to have. If someone stops you in the street and says, "help a Spinx is raping a woman in the alley." you may question the validity of this claim. If he says "help a man is raping a woman in the alley." you may run faster than he will to help.

In the epistemic sense, belief is that which aims at representing knowledge of reality. This commands that to believe something is to say that it is true, not simply that we would like it to be so. Placing these constraints upon ourselves is indeed a very good thing. Unrestrained wishful thinking is not likely to lead to a very long or peaceful existence. We generally place a high level of importance on evidence for the claims people make. But in some especially tenacious beliefs, biases can nearly prevent us from engaging the lack of support for our most strongly held ideas about reality. We as humans can have massive failures of rationality which can take several forms, all the way from inconsistencies in logic to full on losses of subjective continuity. The possibility that we will ever be able to possess minds which are perfectly free of contradiction is zero. Still, due to the demands of language and conduct, the reality is we cannot afford to leave incoherence in place, to do so requires failures in linguistic sense or of understanding regarding possible occurrences. Simply it is immoral to continue to call something true which is not supported by evidence in reality.

As soon as we conclude that beliefs are efforts to bring understanding into line with reality, we come to understand that in order for them to be valid they must be in correct standing with reality. To say that your understanding of the world represents the way the world is, you must believe that your beliefs are a result of the way reality is. This in turn leaves you vulnerable to new evidence. If nothing could conceivably change in your experience and understanding which would lead you to question a particular belief or set of beliefs, then you cannot claim that your understanding of reality is based upon reality. It is at least in some part based on fantasy. No one would want to admit this is the case. But resistance is not only futile but incoherent.