Free Will, Health, Addiction, Guilt, and the Sense of Fair Play

March 29th, 2011


I have a friend whose health has been wrecked by multiple addictions and ignorance. I was lucky enough to have my own addictions removed before my physical health suffered much—my mental health was undermined enough to get me into treatment. That’s a long story, and I’ve told it elsewhere, but since the last conversation with my friend, I’ve been re-thinking the whole process and came up with a new slant which I’m hoping might be helpful.

I got clean and sober in Alcoholics Anonymous, and I think one of the key aspects of the program is making amends to people who have been harmed by our actions—whether they were drug-related or not— “except when to do so would injure them or others.” When I was 11—when sugar was my only drug—I shoplifted the occasional candy bar from the gas station where I picked up the newspapers for my route. At the age of 40 I sent the station owner a check as part of making amends.

That might seem too trivial to bother with, but since I remembered it as something I had felt ashamed of, both then and later, I thought it worth doing. By the time I finished the process of making amends I felt cleansed, absolved, guilt-free. I no longer had to get high to feel good about myself, although my transition to the straight and happy life was far from over.

Few of us reach adulthood without having harmed someone along the way, and despite our tendency to rationalize all our unsavory acts, I think there is a memory of transgression at some level of brain machinery that is unreachable by rationalization. Research with dogs, monkeys—and perhaps other animals I’ve missed—indicate that even they have a sense of fair play. No doubt the roots of our own run deep, right down to the DNA.

We certainly note when someone treats us unfairly, but it’s likely that we also note our own acts in violation of that sense as well—whether we want to or not—and that they undermine our self-esteem at some level. We are not as nice as we’d like to think.

When rationalization fails to immunize us against our bad opinion of ourselves, drugs and alcohol may be more successful. Dopamine levels rise, pleasure centers are stimulated, and all is right with the world, no matter what we may have done. The brain compensates for increased neurotransmitters by decreasing sensitivity in one way or another, and addiction is under way.

If we get to the point that the addiction is too painful to continue, stopping then involves two problems: the lack of self-esteem which the drugs temporarily eliminated, and the changes the drugs made in our brains.

While our lack of free will means we could not have done other than cause the harm we did, and therefore we lack ultimate responsibility, the fact remains that harm was done, and our organism was the agent of that harm. Eleven-year-old Norm could not have done other than steal those candy bars, but adult Norm is capable of paying for them, plus interest, and can’t help but feel better for having done so.

My earlier take on guilt was that it was a cultural mechanism that had evolved for promoting social conformity, but I had not considered that social necessity might have selected for fair-playing/guilt-prone organisms. I had not considered that my understanding of natural causation in itself might not be enough to counter those built-in genetic tendencies, that they might demand satisfaction on other than a strictly intellectual level.

Perhaps it will take more than diet and exercise to put my friend on the road to better health. Perhaps he needs to understand the nature and origin of his addictions, and the necessity of undoing, in so far as possible, the harm his organism has done on its naturally programmed journey. From there he can begin rebuilding non-drug activated pleasure networks. (Smiling helps.)

It occurs to me that there may be a parallel between making amends and the blood sacrifices of our primitive ancestors. Although there are no supernatural gods to appease, perhaps our current selves must of necessity make some sacrifice to undo the harm caused by prior selves; to appease the mechanisms of DNA—the “gods” within.

condensation on window pane

Refurbished Pleasure Centers

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No Free Will; What Difference Does it Make?

March 14th, 2011

Many people come to the realization that they don’t have free will and mistakenly conclude there’s nothing they can do about it, so forget it and get on with life. They don’t realize that even though the feeling of having conscious control of their thoughts is illusory, something is controlling their thoughts, and finding out what that something is can have positive effects.

Just this morning I had a gratifying example of the advantage of understanding the causal chain that produces thought. I was doing the first of my Tai Chi warm-ups, which involves rotating the upper torso first one direction and then the other, and I was doing more than recommended, of course—a fairly consistent trait that’s a product of my personal history—rotating as far as I could for twice as many reps. About halfway through I realized I had forgotten to take off my glasses, which get in the way during post-Tai-Chi stretches, and when I stepped forward to put them on the desk I found that the twisting had made me dizzy, which brought on a little rush of fear. Several bouts of vertigo have married dizziness to fear, thanks to the zealous efforts of my amygdala.

I had recently read a column, “Vital Signs” in the April 2011 issue of Discover magazine, in which Mark Cohen discussed the activity of the amygdala and its likely role in the phenomenon of selective mutism. He brought up the possibility that cognitive-behavioral therapy could modify the amygdala’s association of emotion to a particular situation, since it gets feedback from cortical centers.

Primed by the Discover article, when I experienced that little rush of fear this morning it was accompanied by the thought, “Ah, my amygdala is arousing the sympathetic nervous system because it has paired fear with the sensation of dizziness.” That thought brought on a smile, which cancelled the fear.

My brain continued with that line of thought, considering that when I get my next real bout of vertigo/fear, it might remember that the amygdala is at work, and that fear makes the discomfort worse, not better. Maybe the next time I wake up and find the room whirling, my brain will produce the much more helpful phenomenon of smiling.

As the brain comes to understand itself better, a change in perspective occurs; when feelings arise they seem less personal. One part of the brain can monitor what another part is doing, and can alter the sense of self accordingly: I am not afraid, a part of my brain is mistakenly arousing an emotion that is disadvantageous to the organism as a whole.

When the brain realizes it has been bamboozled by society into thinking that it has free will, it gains an effective new strategy for optimizing its organism’s adaptation to reality—the job for which evolution selected it. This new strategy requires some effort, though. To make the best use of it, the brain needs to study its own processes, to get at least a basic understanding of neuroscience and psychology. PhD’s in those disciplines are not required; Wikipedia and the popular media offer enough education to allow huge improvements in adaptive skills.

Many of my earlier posts have explored some of the implications of new knowledge in these areas as I’ve encountered it. Other excellent sources of information are Tom Clark’s book, Encountering Naturalism, his web site, naturalism.org, Cris Evatt’s site on Brain Biases and my book High School Zen.

Realizing that we don’t have free will opens a whole new world of adaptive opportunity: a chance for the brain to construct a more effective, reality-based version of itself.

yellow and green fractal

Expanding Opportunities
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