Emotion and Motivation

Most of you who know me well know that for the past 2 or 3 years or so, whenever we start talking about serious issues, I somehow always wind up on one topic: Free Will.  The reason I do this is that I feel like it is a topic that’s at the center of almost every issue, though usually buried deep.  Religion, politics, science, economics, justice… many of the conclusions and beliefs we hold hinge upon the concept of free will.

I first started to really think about the topic when I learned about perception; about how the early parts of the visual system transduce light energy into chemical reactions that take tiny little pieces of information, and through neural connections and activity recreate our whole visual experience.  I took this one example of how the brain can perform extremely complex tasks with relatively simple mechanisms and began to think about how it may apply to the whole of human experience.

Before I really delve into it though, I need to talk about what free will means.  It’s one of these loaded expressions, and it means different things to different people.  To me, free will means that I, as an agent, am the one who is ultimately responsible for my actions.  While other variables may influence my decisions, in the end, I am the initial cause.  This means that I can take pride in my accomplishments and feel guilt over my shortcomings.  I can be either good or bad.  The choice rests on me.  This is the view of free will that I am arguing against.

Discussions of  free will attempt to explain the causes of decision making.  Everything that can be seen as good or evil, right or wrong, is the result of a decision.  We do not assign blame to individuals who take actions outside of cognitive control.  If I punch my wife in my sleep because of a bad dream I’m having, she may be physically hurt and surprised, but she’s not going to blame me for it.  However, if I’m fully awake and I punch someone in a bar, then I get the blame for that because I consciously made that decision.  Even if we acknowledge that I may have been in a bad mood or inebriated, the responsibility still rests on me and not on my circumstances.

My argument is that every decision can be explained fully by circumstances that are, ultimately, beyond an individual’s control; that the very idea of control is an illusion.  Now, as I said, free will is a loaded concept and a loaded subject (that’s part of the reason that I’ve decided not to use the term “free will” in my verbal arguments).  While you may already have some ideas about the topic, I encourage you to hear me out.  Ultimately, the view that I’m presenting may not even really change that much in the way we see the world and ourselves, with the exception of a few key points that I will get to at the end of this post.  The reason that this is so important to me, and the goal that I hope to accomplish, is that I hope to get people to look at human decision making in a more pragmatic manner, and I think that it is key to making the world a better place.  Even in my own life, this type of thinking has improved my interpersonal relationships, my conflict resolution skills, and my understanding of those with whom I disagree.

Early on, my arguments against free will came from a materialist, determinist perspective.  I would argue that the universe operates in a deterministic way; all physical interactions follow the laws of cause and effect.  The brain is no exception, and there is no evidence of any supernatural phenomena happening in the brain.  That is, you are your brain.  Every decision you make is a result of and carried out by neural activity.  There are some problems with this argument, though, and I don’t really use it any more.  First off, the universe is not deterministic! Sub-atomic particles behave in probabilistic ways, and the current view of physics claims that their behavior cannot be predicted with certainty.  The thing about that is that it is unclear just how much of a macroscopic effect the behavior of subatomic particles has.  In the right conditions and with the right tools, you can predict with certainty the way large physical bodies will interact.  That’s how we are able to shoot spacecraft millions of miles to hit tiny, tiny targets.  The macroscopic, physical universe is predictable.  This seems counter-intuitive; we can’t even predict the weather accurately, much less even more complicated systems (e.g. the human brain)! That doesn’t mean that these phenomena are unpredictable; it just means that right now, we do not have a way to measure all of the variables that come into play within the system, and our current methods for modeling the system are not complex enough to be an accurate representation.   It may be the case that the brain is deterministic and one day, with the right tools and the right models, its behavior will be as predictable as the rotation of the planets.  If it is, then my argument will be much easier.  However, we are not there yet, and ultimately it is unnecessary to present my case.

My argument against free will is, again, that every decision can be explained by psychological mechanisms: Most important to moral decisions, emotion (your mood, your emotional reactivity) and motivation (your desires and goals), but also working memory capacity and contents (what you’re thinking about, your ability to process information), and long term memory contents (life experiences, your access to those experiences, the emotional “weights” you’ve tied to those experiences).  As a disclaimer, while I am studying psychology, I am not an expert in decision making (nor physics or philosophy, for that matter).  I have had some training in cognitive psychology and decision making, and I do draw from that, but most of what I’ve learned about decision making has to do with decisions that have a “correct” and “incorrect” response, not so much those that have a “good” and “evil” response (that is, what I would call moral or ethical decisions).  There most likely are better models of ethical decision making than what I’m describing, and I would, of course, defer to those if someone else has a better understanding of them.

Let’s put this in the framework of an example.  Let’s say I have an opportunity to cheat on my wife, and I’m trying to decide whether or not to do it.  What goes into that decision? What’s the difference between someone who would cheat on their spouse and someone who wouldn’t? Imagining myself in that situation, all of these things would factor in (not an exhaustive list by any means):

• How content I am in my relationship.
• My libido.
• My mood.
• My stress levels.
• My relationship with this other person.
• The emotional weights I attach to the value of “faithfulness”.  This is a tricky one.  What does this mean? I have a collection of life experiences that have conditioned me to value faithfulness.  “Values” are ideas that have a positive or negative emotional weight.  You can think of these weights as multipliers to the emotional reaction that you will have to a specific concept.  I have a very negative emotional weight attached to the concept of adultery.  Values are not inherent; they are engendered through a lifetime of education and experiences, good and bad.

These are only a small handful of the things that would go into that decision, and many others can be added to the list.  But the thing is that I am not responsible for any of them.  They can all be explained by my internal and external circumstances.  Sure, decisions that I’ve made previously can have an impact on them.  For example, maybe I had decided earlier that day to escalate an argument with my wife, which may reduce my emotional aversion to cheating on her.  But my decision to escalate the argument is, itself, a result of circumstances beyond my control.  The same can be said of every decision I’ve ever made.  That doesn’t mean that my decisions don’t matter.  A lot of who and where I am is a result of decisions I’ve made.  But ultimately, those decisions are a result of my biology (my emotional reactivity, my working memory capacity) and my upbringing (my education and experiences) working together to create a set of values and an emotional state that is conducive to a certain decision outcome.

This same process can be applied to any decision that you feel proud of or guilty for, or to any decision that someone has made that has angered you.  Where is the room for the “self” in decision making? In fact, I would wager that you know this and believe it.  When thinking about a decision that we regret, we sometimes say, “I could have done this or that instead.”   But that makes no sense.  If you were in the exact same position, the exact same state of mind, the exact same contents in your working memory, the exact same long term memory, the exact same emotional and motivational state, literally that exact moment in time, then how is it possible that we could have made a different decision? Even if it was a decision you struggled with, you made the choice because of your thoughts and feelings at the time, even if you knew the decision was immoral.  Sure, you can imagine a decision that seems random as having a different alternative (i.e. heads or tails), but when we talk about free will we don’t really mean random actions, do we? We are talking about the causal pathways between the self and the decision, and attributing the cause to the self.  And that’s not unfounded; “you” in a sense are the cause of your decisions, but “you” are the result of your biology and your environment.  This is a good opportunity to briefly bring up the dualistic/monistic view of the self, but I will have to go into that in another post.  I will briefly say, however, that even if there is a soul actively involved in your decision making process, it doesn’t change anything; your decisions are still a result of emotional and motivational weights that you do not get to choose.

To put it another way, let’s think, again, about what it means to say, “I am the cause of my own actions.”  Even if you acknowledge the fact that external variables can affect your decision making, this statement can be shown to be nonsensical.  To act without biological or environmental influence would mean to act without motivation.  This is a paradox.  All intentional action arises out of a motivation to do so.  To lack motivation is to lack action.  Yes, you can change your motivations, but only if you are motivated to do so.  To put it another way, you can only change what you want to do if you want to.  You always do what you want to do unless there are external constraints.  I may feel like I want to eat an 19th brownie, but if I choose not to, that’s because my emotional state has been affected by various influences (social pressure to not eat 19 brownies, etc.) in such a way that what I actually want is what I always do.  This doesn’t mean that you don’t have conflicting desires, but whichever side of the scale has the most weight is what you always end up doing (again, in the absence of external constraints such as chains, locked doors, etc).  To be truly free from all influences on decision making would mean to stop acting… kind of reminiscent of Buddah, who, upon attaining enlightenment, sat beside a tree for a week.

What people mean when they say they have free will is that we have the ability to learn from our mistakes and to alter our values, and if presented with a similar decision in a future point in time, we would choose the other alternative because we’ve learned from our past.  This is true to an extent, but it varies by the individual.  Yes, some of us are emotionally responsive to the negative outcomes of bad decisions.  Some of us are not.  Some of us make the same wrong decision again and again, because when faced with that decision, the immediate emotional benefits of the “wrong” choice outweigh the immediate benefits of the right choice.  But we don’t choose those emotional weights, they are, again, the result of biology and a lifetime of experience, and it is wrong to think that everyone has the same capacity and motivation to change and adapt to decisions that you do.

Now, I get to the part where I list what I am not arguing.  I am not saying that your decision making processes don’t matter.  Many have the reaction of, “Oh, well if I don’t have free will then why struggle with any decision? If my actions are predetermined, why should I even bother?” Your decision making process is how you go about trying to figure out the best course of action for you.  It’s how you analyze the situation and make an attempt to predict how each alternative will impact you.  Yes, it may be predetermined, but what difference does that make? In fact, “predetermined” in this case doesn’t necessarily mean predictable.  If you had knowledge of how you would supposedly respond in a situation 1 week from now, that knowledge would influence your decision and probably change the outcome.  Maybe if you were an isolated system, an outside observer (also completely isolated) with magical knowledge of all of the variables that would affect you could predict your behavior, but if it has no impact on you, why should it matter?

I am also not saying that we shouldn’t hold people accountable for their actions or praise them for their accomplishments.  Often, praise or guilt can serve as powerful motivators that alter one’s future behavior.  When used appropriately and in a pragmatic sense, these can be effective for improving people’s lives.

Now we get to the crux of the issue, and that is the implications of all of the above, and why I feel that it’s so important.  For many, even if they find that they can agree on the premises of the argument, the implications push them away.

In my opinion, the most applicable and practical implication is that we should take a pragmatic approach to our relationships with others and in our conflict resolution strategies.  Realizing that everyone, no matter how angry they’ve made you with a certain decision, has done so because of a set of unique circumstances that is specific to them allows you to step back and empathize  with them before engaging with them.  Even if you still feel wronged, it allows you to see the decision from their situation and then decide on the best course of action to deal with the conflict.  Sometimes an angry response may cause the desired change, but usually it only makes things worse.  Anger is, in my opinion and with no empirical knowledge to back up the claim, the most damaging emotion.  People respond amazingly well to understanding and empathy, and it is often much easier to get a person to change their behavior by letting them realize that you understand why they did what they did.

There are a variety of social and political implications as well, which merit a much longer discussion than I want to bring up here.  It should be clear, though, that everyone’s situation is ultimately the result of their specific circumstances.  The rich are rich because they are intelligent, they were raised to value hard work and have the emotional makeup to make hard work acceptable.  The poor are poor because they were born and raised with a brain that left them that way.  For some, the suffering caused by poverty is enough to motivate them to take the actions necessary to change their situation, but most just live the life they were born into and stay in the same socioeconomic class that they were born into.  If suffering does not cause change, then it serves no pragmatic purpose.  The ideal state of the world is one that maximizes happiness and minimizes suffering (again, another topic for debate, but I think everyone would agree that if everyone was happy and content that would be pretty great).  Moreover, the effect of wealth on happiness is not positive above a certain point, so if there are a few with enough resources for many, and it’s not improving their happiness, why should they be allowed to keep what was randomly given to them?

The final implication that I want to bring up here is what this means for religion, specifically the idea of Hell.  If God created the universe, He knows all of the variables that are at play.  He would know every decision you would make from the moment he knocked over that first domino and created the great chain reaction that lead to your existence.  If He is a just God, how could He send someone to Hell because they didn’t make the right decision? If you are a Christian who believes that a person goes to Hell unless they accept Christ, all you need to do is look at basic facts about religious demographics to know that for some, the cards are just stacked against them.  If you are lucky enough to be born in a Christian household, you are far more likely to become a Christian.  Would a just God sentence someone to Hell for being born in the wrong part of the world, to the wrong parents, and with the wrong emotional makeup?

If God is just, and everyone has an equal chance to accept Christ, then Christianity would be distributed equally across the world.  Everyone would have a fixed % chance of becoming a Christian.  That is clearly not the case.  So either God is not just, or you don’t go to Hell for not saying the right words with your eyes closed.

That pretty much wraps it up! Lots of sub-topic that could be pulled out of this if I decide to do another blog post in 7 or 8 years.  Thanks if you actually read this novel, and as always, I welcome all comments and discussion points, and feel free to send me personal messages! I like to think I have an open mind, and I am persuaded by good arguments!

Where I Started, Where I Am Now

In this post I would like to tell how I've gotten to where I am spiritually: what I used to believe, the important parts of what I believe now, and how I got here.  I was raised as a Southern Baptist, and while our family wasn't as far right as one can be (dancing and rock n' roll were ok), we still fell on the right side of the fence on most religious and controversial issues.  I believed that the Bible was the literal word of God, given through men under divine inspiration.  I did not believe in evolution.  I believed that homosexuality was a sin.  I believed that everyone who did not accept Christ as savior would go to Hell.  Growing up in the South, these were pretty easy things to believe as most of my peers believed the same thing and most of these issues didn't really come up too much outside of church.  Nor were they really discussed when gathering with Christian peers; everyone was kind of on the same page, so we talked about things that we actually struggled with: being kind and loving to everyone, letting Christ shine through us, being in the world but not of the world, and setting a good example. The better parts of Christianity, in my opinion.

As I got older (late high school), I started to become what I think many Christians who are passionate about their faith become in young adulthood: an apologist.  I read a lot, and began to debate certain ideas with myself, for two reasons really.  I wanted to make it so that if I were ever in a position where I needed to defend my faith, I could do so rationally, and with intelligent and well thought out points.  Also, I wanted to be a good evangelist.  If everyone who doesn't accept Christ goes to Hell, then it is my duty as a Christian to try to convince non-Christians to accept Christ.

To me, reason and logic (logos) are and always have been the best tools to change belief, although evidence would suggest that pathos is far more effective (a fact that I hate and to this day willfully and belligerently ignore with all of my heart).  To that effect, I did my best to educate myself on my beliefs and the reasons behind them.  That's what ultimately lead to my beliefs changing.  The problem with being an apologist is that you begin with a foregone conclusion, and then build the facts and the arguments to support that conclusion.  This is bad logic and bad science, and it's not specific to apologists; we all do it all the time.  In psychology, we call it Confirmation Bias.  Any time we specifically seek out and give more weight to evidence that supports a conclusion that we already believe, we are victims of Confirmation Bias.  Even being aware of it doesn't make you immune to it.  It's something that I struggle with especially, being someone who feels very strongly about these issues.  Yet I always try to catch myself and keep an open, unemotional, and detached mentality.

Back then, while I didn't have a name for it, I recognized the problem of confirmation bias, and recognizing that allowing it to guide my reasoning weakened my argument, I tried to suppress it by looking at opposing arguments objectively (which is challenging when your goal is still to support a foregone conclusion).  I suppose the first big issue I struggled with was the issue of homosexuality, and why it was a sin.  The Gay Marriage issue was just starting to be a big thing around that time.  I knew that the Bible said that homosexuality was a sin, but I did not believe that something could be a sin if it was not chosen.  The simplest answer that Christians usually give is that sexuality is a choice, which is pretty much insane and not a response that I dealt with very much.  I could not choose to be sexually attracted to men.  Why would anyone choose those feelings, given the social stigma and persecution that they would undoubtedly face? Wouldn't it just be easier to "choose" to be straight? However, as I said before, pathos is far more powerful than logos, and many people have convinced themselves that sexuality is a choice, despite all common sense, to support their preconceived notions.

The second and far more reasonable response is that while being gay was not a sin, having sex with someone of the same gender was.  Ok... that makes more sense.  While I can't choose my sexuality, I can choose who I have sex with.  I could get behind that.  However, I had difficulty relating this to the issue of gay marriage.  Our legal system is based on a separation of church and state, and the idea (for the most part) that as long as my actions don't interfere with the rights of others, they are legal and up to the individual to decide what's right and what's wrong.  Why would Christians push to keep gay marriage illegal, but not push to illegalize porn, pre-marital sex, drunkenness, idolatry, etc.?

The second major thing that lead to me changing some beliefs was actually reading the Bible.  I realized that I had been supporting this book for years, but had never actually taken the time to read it myself.  If you are an adult Christian who hasn't read the Bible, how can you argue for it? Everything you've been taught about it has been told to you by preachers and parents, presenting tiny little snippets always taken out of the context of the book or letter that contains it? If you believe the Bible is the word of God, why are you putting your faith in the humans who read it to you and not taking it straight from the horse's mouth? Further evidence for the power of pathos is the fact that so many Christians will do just that: argue until they're red in the face, throwing out scripture that they've heard in church and memorized the numbers that go along with it.

I read all of the New Testament and most of the Old Testament, though admittedly some bits of the old testament were a real challenge (and most Christians pick and choose what they like out of the old testament anyway).  What really made me struggle with the Bible wasn't the miracles or the prophecy, or even the inconsistencies between books and letters (though I'll come back to that).  It was the fact that it doesn't read like it came from God, it reads like it came partly from spiritual men who were telling what they felt and believed in the best way they could, and partly from political regimes attempting to justify their actions by placing God into the context of tribal warfare and feudal politics that were common among ancient nations.  Moreover, most of the books never even claim to be the voice of God speaking directly through their authors.  When you actually learn about the Bible, you realize that its canonization and divinity were attributed to it long, long after the individual books and letters were actually written, by humans that were attempting to make sure that everyone was on the same page and teaching the same things in order to form a more unified church.

Back to the inconsistencies in the Bible.  Most of them are minor, some of them are major, but they all bring to mind this one unavoidable fact: that there is room for error within the Bible.  The apologists realize this, and have spent years attempting to explain them away or justify them, often to extreme and ridiculous ends and always with a complete disregard of Occam's Razor. If there is any room for error at all, how can you possibly tease apart truth from human bias and error, especially after all of the translations and interpretations that it's gone through?

The final issue (and one that I still focus on all the time) is the issue of free will.  Free will is essential to the idea of Hell.  If humans are not equally free to accept Christ, then what kind of a just God would send someone to Hell for not doing so?   I started thinking about it in my first year of graduate school with just a little mind game (I don't remember why I started thinking about it, maybe I was just bored).  It's a really simple question that I'm sure plenty of you have toyed with before and has been dealt within sci-fi plenty of times.  If you had a machine that could predict the future, and you asked it, "Will I raise my left hand or my right hand?", knowing that you intended to do the opposite of what it said, what would it say? It's a silly question, but it got me thinking about the issue of free-will and what exactly that means (which I'm sure I'll go into more detail about in a later post).  Since the physical universe seems to follow (for the most part, and at the macroscopic level) the rules of cause and effect,  if we are claiming that Humans have free choice, then we are saying that there is a non-physical aspect of humanity (a mind and/or soul) that interfaces with the brain at some point, but is not subject to the same laws that govern the physical part of us.  This would mean that there would be a non-physical element that is causing physical phenomena within the brain that are significant enough to completely govern decision making.  Despite the fact that there is zero evidence of this so far, why would God, who has gone to such great lengths to make himself hidden and unprovable, hide in such an obvious place? Moreover, if every human had an equal chance to accept Christ, then the likelihood of one becoming a Christian should not be predictable by any external factors.  Christianity should be distributed equitably across the world.  Yet that's not what we see.  It is very, very likely that you will stay within the faith that you were born into.  While there is always a slight probability that you can change, the cards are stacked against you if you were born into Islam or Judaism.  This doesn't apply only to religion.  Psychology is the science of destroying free will.  The more we learn, the more predictable human behavior becomes.  Yes, right now there is a lot of variation.  But psychology and neuroscience are still very young, and the brain is incredibly complicated, subject to a currently immeasurable number of environmental and biological factors.  But it's only a matter of time until we will be able to map your brain and fully predict how you will respond to any situation or stimulus.  Again, this is a very complicated issue and this post is already pretty long, and I know the free will thing is a tough pill to swallow.  I plan to do a longer post dedicated to free will some time in the next ten years or so, but if you're interested I highly recommend reading "Free Will" by Sam Harris.  Super short read, you can finish it in an afternoon.

One thing that I want to point out: none of these changes happened because I went to college, or because I let any influence come into my life.  In fact, it is very rare that I actually debate anyone on any of these points (which is really sad, I wish I had someone who felt strongly but believed differently and was willing to debate these things without getting emotionally invested).  I realize that many of the beliefs that I'm describing here are very specific to certain Christian ideologies, and do not represent all Christians or all viewpoints.  This is just where I come from and where I am.  The only person I'm really arguing against here is myself.

Growth means change.  If you ever stop changing, that means you have stopped growing, and that is a tragedy.  To consider yourself "good enough," or to think that your beliefs and ideas are complete is either extreme arrogance or worse, a willful ignorance and a cowardice that prevents you from facing your imperfections and challenging yourself to continue to grow.  I hope I never get to that point, and I hope I continue to be proven wrong and continue to change and grow.  I try my best to keep an open mind and to read and objectively consider opposing viewpoints on every issue.  No one should ever stop growing, and therefore changing, because no one is perfect.  This does not mean that I believe that if you don't wind up where I am, then you've stopped growing.  That's not at all what I'm trying to say.  All I'm saying is that you should never just accept that your current belief system is the right one with any level of confidence.  If any of these issues were clear or complete, then everyone would agree and there would be no room for debate.  At the very least, educating yourself about the flaws in your belief system and attempting to address all of the counter arguments will make you more able to argue for them, and if you intend to convince anyone of your ideas, this can be a very important thing.