The argument summarizes thus:
- The mammalian brain is imperfect due to the lack of refinement form evolution
- Our minds are "like a crapware-saddled virus-ridden Vista-running laptop brought back in time to 1973"
- Human cognition is fundamentally irrational
- Biological drives (survival, reproduction, etc) constitute our basic impulses
- The human mind is not unified
- We are no different from other mammals
Okay, great, I agree with all of this except for the irrational part (to some degree). But I would argue that this model is incomplete. While I am a determinist, I still think that we have the illusion of free will (the experience of the processors chugging away). We have biological drives, but we also effectively (though not actually) have choice. In the words of Sartre, "[people] are condemned to be free." I can choose to rebel against all of my biological drives, stop eating, isolate myself, or commit suicide. I can die for a cause, or make huge sacrifices for the sake of an idea.
Yes, we absolutely have irrational biological drives, but we also have a rational cogito. Our mind is divided, hence why we can feel so divided. The pull of all these parts determines action, as if on a voting system. Your Freudian superego was installed (experimentally and by accident via evolution) to make you a social animal, but went haywire and now you can possess values that are counterproductive to evolutionary reproduction.
You do have choices over your biological drives. You can madly lust after someone, yet never act on your desire, even if given the opportunity to get away with it. Yet another person would take advantage of the situation. Why is that? The cogito portion of the democracy that is your mind can have a pretty strong say in your actions. Often these cogito functions are programmed by the indoctrination of children by their caregivers. This tends to lend itself to the realm of ethics on a social scale. However, as individuals, how can we justify wanting this or that, or valuing what we've learned through authority. Taking authority at face-value can be a very dangerous thing.
My existential crisis was born out of a number of factors that led me to recognize the value nihilism of nature: that existence precedes essence. My body gives me biological rewards by making me feel pleasure when I do certain things that I am programmed biologically to do. But is feeling good the point? Are we mere slaves to our passions? Clearly not, or at least not all of us.Values essentially sweep through as a diagnostic of our actions. "Is this right?" is what our drives are always asking. It performs a checksum on each part of our being. But when you turn the diagnostic against itself, it can't checksum because it has nothing to check against. All the other people have different values. Our OS was installed without the ability to check if our diagnostic tool is functioning, and everyone is running different plug-ins, so we can't compare to each other.
I think there's a good chance that Douglas Adams was right, and the checksum is 42.
This is brilliant! Like you, I reject the notion of biological imperative, and therefore love the way you tear it apart here. The idea of a biological imperative is one of the most common excuses for rape; ie. he did it because he was a man, so it's not his fault. I appreciate the fact that you point out that although we have irrational biological drives, we also have rational cogito.
ReplyDeleteGreetings. I am a friend of Osmie and Hundun. I recommend Walker Percy's Lost in the Cosmos, and The Moviegoer. I would also recommend his Message in a Bottle and Signposts in a Strange Land, but these are hard to find.
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