Psychology.

Homo Homini Lupus Est.

The overwhelming scientific consensus is that complex life evolved from simple life. It began with a bubble of lipids in a chemical soup that was struck by lightning, or else some sort of heat related reaction that occurred near valves of boiling water in the ocean floor. The science of abiogenesis isn't settled but the rough idea is well agreed upon, nonliving molecules combined into structures that can react to their environment. It's theorized that structures that met the bare minimum requirements for all life were also the most efficient way of hydrogenating carbon, which is a process of going from a high energy carbon state to a low energy hydrogen state. In a biological sense, then, the purpose of life is to hydrogenate carbon.

Things were complicated by the emergence of DNA, a molecule that seems maniacally bent on self replication. When Dawkins titled his book "The Selfish Gene", critics mistook this to mean that our genes make us selfish as individuals. In fact the book is mostly dedicated to explaining altruism in nature. He covers the notable example of ants, who are mostly genetically identical within the colony, who readily sacrifice themselves to save larger or more vital sections of the colony. Dawkins explains that, while the individual ant dies, it's actions cause its genes to be preserved. Hence it is the genes that are selfish, lifeforms are merely the vehicles driven by their selfish genes. Cooperation, as has been pointed out by multiple biologists and leftist thinkers, is a very common survival strategy throughout species and that selfishness is frankly not a good strategy for most organisms. Human beings are no exception to the process of evolution and while (as always) there are murky details, we have a rough idea of how we came to be. We have adapted large brains compared to what physiologists would expect for a mammal our size. Natural selection, as it does everywhere, rewarded mutations that benefitted survival and discarded those that encumbered survival. It should be noted that the majority number of mutations are benign, neither helping nor hurting the individuals in which they occur. Even our altruistic impulses are limited by what ultimately benefits the long term reproduction of our genes.

A surprising consequence of this is that our brains, impressive as they are, are primed for survival rather than objective truth. A more advanced organism doesn't necessarily have a more accurate view of the world (in fact the idea of an organism being more or less "advanced" is misleading. There is not some sort of value-hierarchy of beings but a range of organisms more or less complex and more or less suited to their environment.) Imagine a creature that is adapted so that it can perceive atoms and understand the unthinkably complex atomic structure, (think Laplace's demon) of an apple. This information overload would be of no benefit for beings that simply need to identify food and eat it. We need to know how to avoid predators and catch prey. Being able to perceive every single blood cell involved in running from or chasing after other creatures simply would not have any benefit in the game of survival. There is a trade off between information processing and metabolism, evolution selects for the optimum balance.

An interesting consequence of this thought is that the qualia of colors we perceive is totally arbitrary. We need to be able to make distinctions between different wavelengths of light, but so long as the colors we perceive are consistent with the rest of our personal experience, it doesn't matter if what I see as red is what you see as blue. Bats don't primarily perceive the world around them by sight or color at all, they use echolocation. The exact range of electromagnetic waves that humans are sensitive to is also the same range as the lightwaves given off by our sun, meaning that aliens from another star would likely perceive a part of the spectrum of electromagnetic radiation we aren't sensitive to (infrared or ultraviolet.) Technically speaking, you don't see with your eyes, you see with our brain. Your eyes collect data and your brain creates a functionally accurate representation. Same with the other senses. If a tree falls and the forest and there are no observers, it still causes vibrations in the air but those vibrations are never represented as sound.

My point isn't to lead you into solipsism, rather to illustrate the way and the depth of evolutionary effects upon us. It goes all the way down to our very perceptions and you can guarantee it affects the way we think. Psychology is riddled with findings of human bias and instinctive fallacies in our thinking. We have the capacity for logical and mathematical thinking but for the uninitiated, it is a rough adjustment and unless there is a specific reason to learn it, most don't undertake arduous and pointless journeys. Most often our emotions influence and alter our ways of thinking, sometimes even from moment to moment.

Sheldon Solomon has conducted many experiments by simply priming one group of participants to think about death by simply interviewing them outside of a funeral home, or having them read a passage regarding mortality. As per the scientific method, he compares this group's responses to another group which has not been primed and there are invariably significant differences between the two groups. Solomon was interested in Terror management theory, first discussed by Ernest Becker in "The Denial of Death." It is the idea that the fear of death is a major subconscious influence in our behavior. Becker, who was a part of the psychoanalytic tradition, wrote about all of the symbolic meaning of words and actions to our subconscious and while he was on to something, did little to verify his theories with scientific research. Solomon et al set out to accomplish just this and as such, TMT has become one of the most well confirmed theories in social psychology. 

Human beings are unique among the animals in that we are aware of our impending deaths and as such we have developed ways for coping with this uneasy truth. Our cultures provide us with values and meanings that, combined, give us a narrative by which we live our lives. Workers view themselves as humble and productive members of society, leaders see themselves as shaping the future of mankind, the pious are serving the true God, scientists are seeking knowledge and the advancement of humanity, possibly towards transhumanism. Our heroic narratives justify the strife and death around us and before us and when threatened with the possibility of these views being wrong, we become intolerant and anxious. We're more likely to vote for fascist leaders who are seen as decisive and strong, we become more prejudiced against foreigners or different races or different creeds. In the face of death, we are more likely to use up limited resources than to preserve them for future generations (you can't take it with you, after all!)

These tendencies in humans, while far more sophisticated than in any other known creature, are shaped by the same early environments that shaped every other aspect of us. We emerged in a world that was hostile to our survival and our instincts reflect that. Animals hunted in the night while we barely slept, food had to be won in competition, the landscape was treacherous and foreboding. Aggression was beneficial to our survival, opportunities to act aggressively are even associated with the same reward centers in the brain associated with drug addiction. Males, fighting to compete for females, developed broader hands and more upper body strength compared to females. (This sexual dimorphism is hypothesized to be due to early division in labor in hunter-gatherers; however it is also seen in chimps, gorillas, and orangutans who do not have a similar division in labor.) In humans, there is an eerie feeling that can be elicited by images of beings that look very similar to ourselves yet not fully. This is called the uncanny valley and one hypothesis about why we evolved such a primordial response is that at one point in time, there were creatures similar to ourselves that we needed to be instinctively afraid of: Neanderthals. This would be impossible to prove but one suspects there is a high likelihood of its being true. That fear in humans is a large part of what led to the ultimate demise of our competition, just as it is with all of the animal species that tend to be wiped out everywhere humans spread. We've been driving species extinct ever since we began hurling stone tipped spears at woolly mammoths 71,000 years ago.

BESIDES UNCONSCIOUS DEATH-ANXIETY THERE ARE MANY OTHER COGNITIVE BIASES WE ARE AWARE OF…

Among the more complex animals there is the evolved ability to veto certain impulses in favor of other impulses. This ability to delay gratification is often confused for freewill, despite it being nothing over or above the function of competing portions of the brain. In the end our brains are made of the same chemicals and tissues as most other life on earth and every single particle within it behaves according to the differential equations of quantum physics. Spinoza, with his gift for articulation, said "Men are mistaken in thinking themselves free; their opinion is made up on consciousness of their own actions and ignorance of the causes by which they are determined." We know that consciousness, somehow or another, supervenes on the brain. Plato, in the Phaedo, described the theory this way: the mind is like the harmony of a chord made up of individual notes that taken separately lack the character of the whole. He also rejected this idea because it would mean that the behavior of the notes would ultimately determine the behavior of the harmony. Free will cannot be defined, we know there are unconscious impetuses behind our behavior and supervenience precludes free will; but there is also the problem of denying determinism known as the Horns of Determinism. The dilemma is that the alternative to determinism isn't free will, but noncausal randomness. This true randomness differs from the statistical nature of quantum mechanics, which can still be defined by differential equations in that it is completely unpredictable and unpatterned. 

The issue of freewill is further settled by the growing number of neurologists who agree ith Thomas Metzinger that the "self" is merely an illusion. Descartes, writing in the 1600s, thought that the pineal gland was the part of the brain associated with the human soul. His reason for thinking this is that the rest of the brain was symmetrical while this gland alone was central and unique. He was wrong, naturally, and no subsequent scientists have found any single structure in the brain that would by itself operate like a homunculus. Instead there are separate, competing regions (notes in a chord) in the brain that fight for expression in consciousness (the harmony). Many regions could even be eliminated without fully annihilating the "person" they make up.

Metzinger argues that our first person perspective is another functional representation, the same as the virtual simulation our brain generates of the external world. He defines this first person perspective by 3 key features, the feeling of ownership, self-narrative, and perspectivalness. Metzinger points to phantom limb patients who can still feel missing limbs and are generally unable to move them, unless tricked by a mirror. The brain has a representation of the limb, that it what is actually experienced, and through some neurological defect it remains despite the annihilation of the limb. Further, through mirror synesthesia it is possible to manipulate the brain into thinking the limb is moving. You don't see with your eyes and you don't feel with your hands, "you" only ever experience the hallucination generated by your brain. Our sense of ownership can be mistaken in other ways as well: schizophrenics may not believe certain of their thoughts belong to them, patients with unilateral hemineglect may wake up believing their right leg does not belong to them and patients experiencing extreme depersonalization may feel as though their volition does not belong to them.

Our self narrative can be mistaken. In "Free Will", Sam Harris describes individuals who are highly suggestive to hypnosis, who may be compelled to do jumping jacks out of nowhere and when asked why they are, they will come up with some vivid rationalization. "I've been meaning to workout more for weeks." Patients with anosognosia may be unaware that they're blind. A doctor might ask them "How many fingers am I holding up?" and they will refuse to answer or claim the room is too dark, but jingle some keys and ask what that is and they believe they're seeing keys. Simple studies where subjects are to press 1 of 2 buttons at random intervals show the brain deciding to push the button nearly 7 seconds before the subject is consciously aware. This latter experiment is often taken by itself to disprove free will, but at the very least the conclusion to draw is that our decisions are often made unconsciously and then narrativized into a story that meshes with our self narrative. That narrative is not always correct. In many ways, it is necessarily incorrect since we are unaware of our neurology. What we are left with, seen outside of any illusory self narratives, is an unthinkably complex series of conditioned responses to our material environment and the ideas we have invented or been exposed to.

Finally, our sense of perspectivalness can be mistaken. Perspectivalness is the sense of "where" we are in our bodies. When asked, most people point to their foreheads, almost no one points to their thigh or their spine. This, like every other process of the brain, can be altered by drugs or injury. Some patients feel their sense of perspectivalness to be boundless and feel as though they are doing everything, from setting the sun to puppeteering traffic.

This is all to say that even our internal senses are hallucinations just like our external senses. They are functionally accurate, our sense of ownership tells the brain that the body is intact, our self-narrative regulates social roles and perspectivalness gives us a sense of orientation. There is no necessary connection between our representational properties and the objective properties they are representing and unlike redness, which is correlated with electromagnetic frequencies around 430 terahertz, selfhood is not a physically describable property. The best we can say is that our sense of self is the representation of complex, physical processes going on within the bodies we call our own. There is no one over and above the meat sacks fumbling around the Earth eating, fighting and fornication until the process itself ends. 

If there was a soul that could be detached from the body's sense organs, it would have no access to information about the external world and would likely carry out its existence in a state of blank delirium; without being attached to the brain's memories it wouldn't even be able to hallucinate a dream world or a dream body. It's hard to see how such a thing would be distinct from nothing at all. While the debate over freewill is forever unsettled, despite the concept of freewill having no coherent definition or any empirical support whatsoever, it is safe to say that without a unified "self" there is no one to have freewill to begin with. We are ultimately puppets with the illusion of being some "one" when in reality, we are just a microcosm of competing impulses and entropy.

The implications of all of this are seemingly disastrous for morality and moral responsibility. If natural selection favors survival over truth (that is, where these two are mutually exclusive) what guarantee, or what reason do we have at all to think our moral intuitions aren't manipulated by our genes? There's no way to empirically verify ethical values, the best we can do is start with some common, arbitrary premise(s) and examine other ideas or actions in reference to a single or multiple values. Further, if there is no free will and no self, moral responsibility is utterly meaningless. Neurologist Jeffery Burns had a patient with an egg sized brain tumor that caused him to compulsively consume child pornography and desire to participate in pedophilia. Upon discovery, his tumor was removed and so were his perverse tendencies. No one faults the man because his actions were not his own, but ultimately the judgments of those who faulted him and the judge who sentenced him prior are likewise beholden to their own neurology.

Bruce Hood, in his book "The Self Illusion" points out a very common misunderstanding about the consequences of determinism. There are studies demonstrating that participants primed to believe there was no free will were more likely to engage in antisocial behaviors and it's easy to see why. Who could blame them, literally? They had adopted base animality as part of their self-narrative and began to act on it. However this is because determinism is often confused with fatalism and there are just as many studies showing that those who were primed to believe in free will engaged in prosocial behaviors. Put another way, our behaviors being determined does not prove that we must act in the worst way. It is possible to behave compassionately and intelligently even in a predetermined universe. Near the end of his book, Solomon points out that all of his findings regarding death anxiety only applied when people were subconsciously reminded of death. When participants were consciously engaged in thinking about their own mortality and the loss of loved ones, they showed more compassionate and intelligent tendencies regarding others and resource use. 

However predetermined we are, compassion and prudence is within the realm of what humanity is capable of and it happens all the time. We are not beholden to our basest impulses and the value of understanding cognitive biases is that once we do, we are in a better position to overcome them, including what may be our most powerful inclination, creating new vehicles to carry our genes marching onward to oblivion.