Determined, page 67
*Searle gives a particularly clear explication of why the idea of top-down harnessing of randomness to create free will is silly. J. Searle, “Philosophy of Free Will,” Closer to Truth, September 19, 2020, YouTube video, 10:58, youtube.com/watch?v=973akk1q5Ws&list=PLFJr3pJl27pIqOCeXUnhSXsPTcnzJMAbT&index=14.
*“Legendary,” as in everyone attributes that to Feynman, but I couldn’t find an exact source, other than “in one of his [famed] lectures.”
*Both monkeys and chimps interact differently with a person who is unable to give them food, versus one who is able but unwilling; they don’t want to be around the latter: “What a mean hairless primate—they could have given me food but chose not to.” Particularly interesting work, by psychologist Laurie Santos of Yale, has shown that other primates have their own sense of agency. A human test subject rates their preferences for an array of household items. Find two that are rated equivalently, and force the person to choose one over the other; thereafter, they show a preference for that item: “Hmm, I’m a rational agent of free will, and if I chose this one over that one, it must have been for a good reason.” Do the same thing with capuchin monkeys—force them to choose one of two different colored M&M’s, have them believe that they made a choice (even under circumstances where, unknown to them, their choice is actually forced)—and they show a preference for that color thereafter. If a human chooses for them, no preference emerges.
*Leopold and Loeb. Not to be confused with Lerner and Loewe.
*Jeremy Meeks, the famed “hot felon.”
*Variants on the manipulations: Reading single sentences saying things like “Scientists believe that free will is . . .” versus “Scientists believe that free will is not . . .” Having to write a summary of the Crickian (or control) reading. Being asked to recount a time when they exercised a great deal of free will or when they had none.
*Vohs’s work has been extremely influential and widely cited.
*The implicit binding phenomenon has some elaborations. In one study, the button was pressed by another individual; subjects typically underestimated the interval between the pressing and the subsequent tone, showing that they were projecting agency onto the other person . . . unless they thought the timing of the button press was determined by a computer rather than a human.
*Which, it should be noted, suggests that even if you decrease free-will belief a smidgen, people who nonetheless still believe overall in free will become more amok-ish. Not great news.
*On a related note, throwing some Crick at judges lessens their free-will belief . . . without changing their judgments. Why am I bothering writing this book?
*Is this because of that depressogenic void left by a lack of a god? Perhaps in part, but the minority status probably plays a role as well—in markedly secular Scandinavian countries, it is the minority who are highly religious who have higher rates of depression.
*Necrophilia and bestiality—come on, really? This atheist is finally getting a bit fed up with this.
*This antiatheist bias runs alongside a widespread belief that being a scientist precludes being moral (amid scientists generally being respected and viewed as “normal” in degree of caring, trustworthiness, or valuing fairness, and not particularly prone toward atheism). Instead, scientists are viewed as being immoral in realms of loyalty, purity, and obedience to authority. One reason makes sense to me, amid its nearly always being wrong—that in the pursuit of scientific findings, scientists would not hesitate to do things that would be considered immoral by some people (e.g., vivisection, human experimentation, fetal tissue research). The second reason kind of floors me—that scientists would be willing to undermine moral norms by promulgating something, just because it happens to be . . . true.
*A similar challenge hobbles the literature showing that religious belief seems to have some health benefits: “You, yeah you, you start believing. You, over there, you don’t. Let’s meet in twenty years and check your cholesterol levels.”
*There is, of course, similar if less studied heterogeneity to styles of atheism—people who mostly arrived at their stance analytically versus emotionally, people raised with belief who seceded versus those who were never believers, people whose stance is an active versus a passive one (stay tuned for the end of this chapter), gradually acquired versus arising from a non-Zeusian bolt of lightning. Amid that heterogeneity, though, most atheists seem to have gotten to where they are by an analytic route (not me, though), and when people are experimentally prompted to think more analytically, they also then report less religious belief. And then there are atheists who, nonetheless, embrace some religion’s culture and rituals or embrace the stable supportiveness of a humanistic community of nonbelievers, versus those doing their atheism in a solitary way. All this brings to mind the argument in Catch-22 between Yossarian and Mrs. Scheisskopf, both atheists, about the nature of the God they don’t believe in. The bitter Yossarian wishes there were a God so that he could express the violence and hatred he feels toward Him for His divine cruelty; Mrs. Scheisskopf is horrified by this blasphemy, insisting that the God she doesn’t believe in is warm, loving, and benevolent.
*An interesting parallel occurs with the notion that during times of trouble, atheists lack the larger structures of comfort available to theists. In reality, at such times, many atheists resort to and gain comfort from their belief in science.
*It should be noted that while Scandinavian governments expend more money on the poor than does the U.S., Scandinavian people give individually to charities at a lower rate than Americans; however, the higher rates of governmental social services in Scandinavia more than offset the higher rates of charitability in the U.S. The distinctive cultural responses to tragedy in one Scandinavian country will be explored in chapter 14.
*Okay, despite my obvious enthusiasm, it is crucial to point out how Scandinavian countries have gotten a ton of egalitarian mileage out of being small, ethnically/linguistically homogeneous countries, and more American-esque problems are emerging as they become less so. And then there’s ABBA.
*Just as an important reminder from chapter 3, genes don’t determine your future; instead, they work in different ways in different environments. Nonetheless, a stance of “It’s all genetic” is an acceptable stand-in in this case for “It’s all biological.”
*To paraphrase Henry Ward Beecher.
*To paraphrase Tevye.
*To paraphrase comedian Ricky Gervais (as cited by, hmm, psychologist Will Gervais).
*The SN-Exc-MN route works a little slower than the SN-MN, since the SN-MN signal needs to traverse only one synapse, while SN-Exc-MN involves two.
*Just as a reminder, all the DNA is in a single, continuous stretch, rather than broken into separate parts; the DNA was drawn this way for clarity; also, I don’t know why the DNA gets smaller toward the right in my drawing, but it’s not like that in real life.
*Two subtleties. First, after all that effort to construct that second synapse, why not just keep it around, assuming that it will be useful at some point in the future for dealing with another cluster of high-intensity shocks? Because maintaining a synapse is expensive—repairing wear-and-tear damage to proteins there, replacing them with new models, paying rent, the electric bill, etc. And here there’s been an econometric evolutionary trade-off for Aplysia—if there are going to frequently be shockful circumstances where the Aplysia will need to retract its gill ten times longer than normal, might as well retain that second synapse; in contrast, if it’s a rare event, it’s more economical to degrade the second synapse, and just make another one of it somewhere in the distant future when needed. This is a common issue in physiological systems, having to choose between keeping an emergency system on all the time versus making it inducible as a function of the frequency of emergencies. For example, should a plant expend energy making a costly toxin in its leaves to poison an herbivore munching on it? Depends—is it some sheep coming to graze every day or a cicada coming once every seventeen years?
An even subtler issue: Suppose the tail has been shocked once, and a smidgen of Stuff is liberated inside the SN. How does that small number of Stuff molecules “know” to activate step #1 rather than #2 or #3? Why that hierarchy? The way it is solved is a common theme in biological systems: The molecules that are triggered by Stuff in the step #1 pathway are much more sensitive to Stuff than the relevant molecules in the step #2 pathway, which in turn are more sensitive than those in step #3. Thus, it’s like a layered fountain: it takes X amount of Stuff to activate #1; more-than-X to spill over and also start activating #2; lots-more-than-X to spill over into #3 as well.
*Just to inundate you more, here’s what the abbreviations are for: 5HT = serotonin; cAMP = cyclic adenosine monophosphate; PKA = protein kinase A; CREB = cAMP response element–binding protein; MAPK = mitogen-activated protein kinase; C/EBP = CCAAT-enhancer-binding protein. On and on.
*And the more new synapses, the stronger the conditioning.
*And implicit in this is that we and Aplysia share the genes that code for cAMP, PKA, MAPK, and so on. In fact, we share at least half our genes. To give a sense of just how pervasive this overlap is, we share roughly 70 percent of our genes with sponges—and they don’t even have neurons.
*Just to be clear, the circuit is more complex than in the figure, and this has forced me to look up all sorts of obscure places in the brain in a neuroanatomy textbook that I open once a decade. Neuron 1, which signals the air puff, is actually a sequence of three classes of neurons—first neurons in the trigeminal nerve, which stimulate neurons in the trigeminal nucleus, which stimulate neurons in the inferior olivary nucleus. Neuron 2, which turns the air-puff signal into an eyeblink, is also actually a sequence of three classes of neurons—the first being neurons in the interpositus nucleus within the cerebellum, which activate neurons in the red nucleus, which activate facial nerve neurons in the facial nucleus, which cause the eyeblink. Neuron 3 is also a series of neurons in real life, starting with the neurons of the auditory nerve, which stimulate neurons in the vestibulocochlear nucleus, which stimulate neurons in the pontine nucleus. Logically, projections from the inferior olivary nucleus (carrying air-puff information) and the pontine nuclei (carrying tone information) converge on the interpositus nucleus. Neurons 4 and 5 are a circuit in the cerebellum involving granule cells, Golgi cells, basket cells, stellate cells, and Purkinje cells. There, I’ve done my neuroanatomical duty and have already forgotten what I wrote three sentences ago.
*How glucocorticoids disrupt the function of neurons like those in the interpositus is understood as well but is more detail than we need.
*As far as I know, no one has seen if adult humans who underwent a lot of childhood adversity have impaired eyeblink conditioning, but it seems perfectly plausible. Which would obviously be the least of their long list of life-altering problems.
*We’ve unpacked the features of fear conditioning: acquisition of the response (acquiring the conditioned response in the first place); consolidation of the response (remembering it long afterward); extinction of the response (gradually losing the response after being exposed to the tone a bunch of times where it isn’t followed by a shock).
*According to historical records, current events, and the thread of See alsos, starting with the Wikipedia page “Ethnic and national stereotypes”: 1d, 2a, 3g, 4i, 5b, 6f, 7e, 8c, 9h.
*Interestingly, this turns out to be a significant predictor of growing up to believe that COVID-19 vaccines are part of a conspiracy to harm you.
*Just for clarification, there is actually little reason to think this was a circumstance where a lot of people were indeed conditioned to make this association solely as a result of that single statement. Instead, much of its success was in signaling the people who already thought this way that Trump was their kind of guy. So this is just a simple model system of the reality, which requires repetition.
*I’m apparently easily distractible right now, since, while looking for a good angel/devil image, I wound up looking at two hundred such pictures to confirm a spur-of-the-moment hypothesis that a disproportionate percentage of the images have the devil on the left shoulder and the angel on the right. And that was the case 62 percent of the time in my sample. As a leftie, I’m slightly offended—I’ve come to terms with being gauche, but being satanic is another thing.
*The Mirabal sisters, Patria, Minerva, and Maria Teresa, were murdered in 1960 for their political opposition to the dictator of the Dominican Republic, Rafael Trujillo. An extra level of poignancy is added by the fact that there was a fourth sister, Dede, who was relatively apolitical and escaped death and who lived another fifty-four years without her sisters. Our household got obsessed with the Mirabals awhile back when one of our kids read a book about them.
*Imagine a teenager, off at her freshman year of college. During that first semester, her friends begin to notice with concern that she isn’t eating much—she’s always insisting that she feels full halfway through dinner, or that she feels a bit unwell and has no appetite. She’ll even fast two, three days at a time; on more than one occasion, her roommate catches her forcing herself to throw up after a meal. When told by friends that she is becoming too thin, needs to eat more, she insists instead that she has a huge appetite, eats like a glutton, feels like that is a personal shortcoming to be overcome—that’s why she fasts. She’s constantly talking about food, writing about it in letters home. While she has many female friendships, she seems to recoil from men—she says she plans to be a virgin her whole life, says that fasting is actually helpful to her in that it takes her mind off any sexual feelings. She’s long since stopped menstruating, and her reproductive axis has shut down from starvation.
We know exactly what that is—anorexia nervosa, a life-threatening disease that is often interpreted in the context of our Westernized lifestyle as lying at the intersection of our overabundance of food and lives filled with interest in food consumption (Iron Chef, anyone?) on the one hand, and on the other, the corrosive, nonstop sexualizing of women in the media, which drives so many women and girls into body image problems.
Makes sense. But consider Catherine of Siena, born in 1347 in Italy. As an adolescent, and to her parents’ consternation, she started limiting her food intake, always insisting that she was full or feeling infirm. She started having frequent, multiday fasts. Joining the Dominican Order of the church, she took a vow of celibacy; now married to Christ, she reported a vision in which she wore Christ’s wedding ring . . . made from his foreskin. She would force herself to throw up when she felt she had eaten too much, explained her fasting as a display of her devotion and as a means to curb and punish herself for her “gluttony” and “lust.” Her writings are full of imagery of eating—drinking the blood of Christ, eating his body, nursing from his nipples. Eventually, she got to a point where (wait for it . . .) she committed herself to eating only the scabs of lepers and drinking their pus, and wrote, “Never in my life have I tasted any food or drink sweeter or more exquisite [than pus].” She starved to death at thirty-three and was canonized in the next century, and her mummified head is on display in a basilica in Siena. An irresistible history. I even teach about her in one of my classes; the details about pus and scabs are always a crowd-pleaser.
*And remember, “being changed” by the circumstance of plowing through this book can consist not only of rejecting free will but also of deciding that all this is a crock and you now believe even more strongly in free will than before, or that this is the most boring topic imaginable.
*Which are chambers deep inside the brain filled with cerebrospinal fluid.
*Where are all these factoids from? From my having plowed my way through what is apparently the definitive book on the subject, a five-hundred-page bruiser by the Johns Hopkins physician and historian Owsei Temkin (The Falling Sickness: A History of Epilepsy from the Greeks to the Beginnings of Modern Neurology, first ed. 1945). It’s one of those learned books with quotes in all sorts of ancient languages (“as Menecrates of Syracuse wryly observed . . .”) that are not translated because, well, after all, who needs their Greek or Latin or Aramaic translated? One of those books where, if you’re bored out of you mind by hundreds of pages of minutiae, you feel like it’s your fault for being a Philistine, and not even an interesting enough Philistine for Temkin to quote in whatever language they spoke.
*Actually, Jesus gets kind of snarky about there even being a question of whether he has this under control. Can you cure my son? “You unbelieving generation. How long shall I stay with you? How long shall I put up with you? Bring the boy to me” (Mark 9:19, New International Version).
