Feelings
What is happening in your mind when you try to remember something? You think, “What’s the name of that actor who co-starred with Schwarzenegger in Predator? I can picture his face, but I just can’t remember his name.” Nothing happens for several seconds. Then, suddenly you have the name — Carl Weathers! What was going on while you were “trying to remember” it? The answer is probably that a very complex process of searching and data matching was going on among billions of nerve cells, and when the information was found, it was “served up” to the part of the brain that asked for it — the part that you are experiencing. You see nothing of the search process; it happened in other parts of the brain that you aren’t experiencing.
When I was growing up, and well into my teens and a little bit beyond, I had a very hard time believing that being tired affected my judgment and mood. Now, after long and bitter experience, I know that not getting enough sleep massively changes the way I feel about things. I know that my thought processes and attitude are hugely dependent on having had enough sleep lately.
For years I suffered from insomnia, taking an hour or two to fall asleep on a typical night, and often staying up until the wee hours because I didn’t feel like going to sleep. Then, in the mid-’90s, melatonin — the same chemical your own body uses to put your brain to sleep at night — became available as an over-the-counter pill. I’ve been using it ever since, and now have little trouble falling asleep each night. And I feel so much better about life the next morning.
Our best information about mammalian sleep is that its primary purpose is to give the brain needed downtime during which it can process information out of short-term memory, store that information in long-term memory, and freshen up short-term memory in preparation for a new day.
An individual I heard about on the news many years ago was permanently stuck in the day he suffered a head injury. He could function just fine as long as he stayed in the same house, with the same belongings, essentially as they were on the day of his injury. He started each day with no recollection of anything that happened the previous day, or any day after his accident. It was Groundhog Day in reverse — the world would advance day after day, but for him, every day was the first day after his accident. Apparently the accident had destroyed his brain’s ability to file information into long-term memory, so each night, his short-term memory was simply cleared out, and all information in it was lost, leaving only what his long-term memory already contained before the accident.
Living the Life of a Human Brain
What all this is describing is the condition that the thoughts, feelings, perceptions, etc. of the human mind are all functions of the human brain. In effect, you and I are human brains, at least in this life. That doesn’t mean we don’t have consciousness. We do. It just means we don’t have free will. Often we want to believe we have free will, just as I, when a child, wanted so badly to believe that I was freely choosing to be angry at some toy that wouldn’t work right, and the fact that it was hours after my bedtime had nothing to do with it.
If you play a movie in an empty movie theater (even the projectionist goes out for a smoke and doesn’t come back until the movie’s over), then nobody experiences the events described by the movie. It may as well have been any random sequence of lights flashing on the screen, or nothing at all — just an empty screen.
But if even one person is sitting in the theater watching the movie, then conscious experience of the events it describes does occur. But there’s no free will — even though the audience member(s) don’t know with any certainty what’s going to happen next, it is all laid out in the film running through the projector.
How easily our feelings are manipulated by anything that messes with the brain. One gene in the wrong place, and you’ll be mentally retarded, forever trapped at the level of a four-year-old. Or if you’re not the victim of such misfortune, you still had to be a four-year-old during your development, and had no more true “choice” over your actions than you would today expect of any four-year-old. So did you acquire free will sometime in your young childhood? Do persons of lesser intelligence maybe not really have free will? If, hypothetically, humans advanced to a much greater level of intelligence at age sixty than any human today has at thirty, would those sixty-year-olds think that the thirty-year-olds have free will? I’m guessing not.
Some think their assessment of their world and their life is based on logic. But logic is only a tool to figure out how to do something — it doesn’t tell you what that something is. Logically, there’s no reason for humans to exist at all. And now that we’re here, there’s no logical reason for us to stay here and keep reproducing. There’s no logical reason for us not to all immediately kill ourselves like the toxin victims in The Happening. Wanting to stay alive, to explore the world, and to reproduce, are preferences1 built into our brains, written in our DNA.
Some think that staying alive and reproducing is a free choice. But if it is, why do most people just happen to choose to stay alive and reproduce? Why hasn’t humanity expired when some generation or two chose, en masse, to die, just as they are currently “choosing,” en masse, not to?
And how easily this “choice” is manipulated by the addition of a simple chemical to the brain. A little cocaine and voila the individual suddenly “chooses” to live and thrive and make the most of life. A little heroin and the individual “chooses” to sit around and stare the wall all day. A little anti-depressant and an individual who was “choosing” to hate life and yearn for death is suddenly “choosing” to behave as a normal person, enjoying and participating in the daily activities of a typical human.
Sometimes I find it a scary thought that I don’t truly “choose” my preferences, my desires, my goals. But the experience of life isn’t diminished by the possibility. The things I do, the places I go, the sensations I feel — they’re all just as vivid, just as captivating, whether I have free choice or not.
1The term “preference” is, unfortunately, tinged with social confusion. In the parlance of gay activists, a “preference” is chosen, and an “orientation” is built-in. While I agree completely with their position that being gay is built-in, not chosen, I disagree with the choice of terms. To me, an orientation is mutable, as in “Welcome to Freshman Orientation,” or, “Steer the ship to a west-pointing orientation.” And a preference is a built-in affinity, as in “I prefer chocolate over strawberry,” or, “I prefer Monica Lewinsky over Julia Roberts.” That last example, by the way, is how I know that being gay isn’t chosen — I didn’t choose to think Monica’s hot and Julia’s not. I just looked at them and I knew.
Update 2009.05.23 — “prior to” corrected to “the previous day, or any day after”
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