HOLLY DAYS

I am fascinated by the developing genres of amatuer film making and often find myself surfing the shorts which Youtube, FB and Twitter have all promoted in an effort to better compete with Tik Tok, which I have opted to avoid. One thing I’ve realized is that the amount of crap is part of the appeal, in that when one finally uncovers gem, it seems that much better by contrast, and feeds the desire to keep digging though the dreck. Sadly this has put me face to face with examples of the worst humanity has to offer, especially in the gleeful replies to tragedy and disaster, and the enthusiastic schadenfreude.

I have always felt compassion for all beings, even as a little boy I felt deep grief for the ants I washed down the drain, for the mosquitoes whose pitiful bodies I squashed even as they tormented me. I’d expect most of us would be driven to compassion by Carl Sagan’s tiny speck observation, the obvious fact that we are in the same boat, or that there but for the grace of fate goes each of us. I’m not sure why something that comes so naturally to me, and that seems so rational, should be so rare. Some of it is availability bias where the cruel minority gets an outsize influence in this warped media landscape; some in lizard-brain vengefulness: the cognitive sweetness of retribution; some just tribal bandwagoning. Revenge candy is probably an inescapable feature of our cognition. Bandwagons are likely a similar cognitive hunger, tho clearly there is some tipping point where everyone would be equally sated to join a celebratory throng on the compassionate wagon, leaving the deserted cruel one empty to rumble to a halt.

There’s a pretty deep divide between philosophers and neuroscientists on the issue of free will and it’s moral consequences. It’s become clear from cognitive science that the common metaphysical idea of free will is mostly an illusion. Functional MRIs, EEGs, and other brain scans can accurately predict your actions almost a second (in some experiments even longer) before you decide to act. This period, during which you still sense that you are free to make any decision you wish, your brain has already determined what you will do. You only become conscious of this “decision” and believe that you are making it after it is already made. There is much more convincing and concrete physical data making it clear that there cannot be a single conscious soul who can be held solely responsible for the consequences of how it chooses to drive our bodies around.

Many secular physicalist philosophers, having abandoned that idea of a unitary immaterial soul, still retain in varying degrees an idea of conscious free will as a central feature of the human mind. Most accept the concept of subconscious motivations, but even among those who grant that all decisions may be made unconsciously and that conscious thought is just ad hoc reportage (a troubling but well-supported proposition), they still assign for some level of free will to the whole being. Even more, genetic determinism, where we now know that our genes, crafted by billions of years of evolution, have a much larger affect over who we are and how we live our lives than we could ever have imagined and is certainly not compatible with the idea that the human mind is the expression of an immortal soul as a moral engine.

I suspect the total rejection of free will by more determinist absolutists like Robert Sapolsky and Sam Harris is more a rhetorical device pushing back against the almost insurmountable sense of free will that our conscious minds harbor. But I cannot imagine how this sense of agency, and all the cognitive machinery that supports conscious deliberation, would have evolved let alone allow we homo sapiens to exploit it with such spectacular success, unless that conscious decision making process could in fact have some small control over our behavior and its consequences. Even this highly attenuated free will — forfeiting most of its agency to genetic and haphazard contingencies — barely upsets most moral philosophy. And even if we accept the more determinist view, does this mean no one is responsible for anything? Of course not, each person is still the cause of their behavior, despite being the end result of that long chain of causation outside of their control, it is still unique to them and their total responsibility. Does this mean we cannot hold them accountable? Again, no. If setting standards, making rules, and rewarding or punishing people for their obeying or violating them could change their behavior, and we know it can, then even the strict determinist will acknowledge that these consequences are added to the complex causal chain that determines the behavior, and so holding them responsible and making them account for their actions offers collective benefits.

But back to the question at hand, compassion. The strict determinists obviously find no fault or blame, only this a moral framework as an empirical social construct to maintain order and safety, and so report feeling much deeper compassion for their evil cousins. Sam Harris asks us to consider these examples of violence:

“1. A four-year-old boy was playing with his father’s gun and killed a young woman…

2. A 12-year-old boy who had been the victim of continual physical and emotional abuse took his father’s gun and intentionally shot and killed a young woman because she was teasing him.

3. A 25-year-old man who had been the victim of continual abuse as a child intentionally shot and killed his girlfriend because she left him for another man.

4. A 25-year-old man who had been raised by wonderful parents and never abused intentionally shot and killed a young woman he had never met “just for the fun of it.”

5. A 25-year-old man who had been raised by wonderful parents and never abused intentionally shot and killed a young woman he had never met “just for the fun of it.” An MRI of the man’s brain revealed a tumor the size of a golf ball in his medial prefrontal cortex (a region responsible for the control of emotion and behavioral impulses).”

All of us, the determinist, the compatibilist, and the soul believer, will all agree on the variation of guilt among these examples, and will all feel some compassion for 1, and 5, likely even 2 and 3 to a lesser degree, But even the psychopath in 4 is a victim of a genetically fated mental illness beyond his control, and once we understand how limited each of these murderer’s free will is, it becomes hard to hate them, and compassion grows.