Selfhood and Subjectivity Continued

Benedicamus Domino!

When last we communed, I began a discussion about what the self really is. I divided the self into two parts: the ego, which is the part of us which desires to possess and is angered when it cannot have what it wants, and the deep self, which is the part of us that is underneath the froth, the tide of soul which truly forms our unique personhood. Here is a bit of writing which reduces several thousand years of philosophizing about the self and its relation to the world around it to nothing more than a bunch of brain-waves which happened by some mere trick of chemistry to be put down on paper by a few people who were nothing more than collections of brain-cells and neurotransmitters. I think I'm stating that without bias, but judge for yourself. This was printed in The National Post.

"Exerpt from Free Will by Sam Harris
The question of free will touches nearly everything we care about. Morality, law, politics, religion, public policy, intimate relationships, feelings of guilt and personal accomplishment - most of what is distinctly human about our lives seems to depend upon our viewing one another as autonomous persons, capable of free choice. If the scientific community were to declare free will an illusion, it would precipitate a culture war far more belligerent than the one that has been waged on the subject of evolution. Without free will, sinners and criminals would be nothing more than poorly calibrated clockwork, and any conception of justice that emphasized punishing them (rather than deterring, rehabilitating, or merely containing them) would appear utterly incongruous. And those of us who work hard and follow the rules would not "deserve" our success in any deep sense. It is not an accident that most people find these conclusions abhorrent. The stakes are high.
In the early morning of July 23, 2007, Steven Hayes and Joshua Komisarjevsky, two career criminals, arrived at the home of Dr. William and Jennifer Petit in Cheshire, a quiet town in central Connecticut. They found Dr. Petit asleep on a sofa in the sunroom. According to his taped confession, Komisarjevsky stood over the sleeping man for some minutes, hesitating, before striking him in the head with a baseball bat. He claimed that his victim's screams then triggered something within him, and he bludgeoned Petit with all his strength until he fell silent.
The two then bound Petit's hands and feet and went upstairs to search the rest of the house. They discovered Jennifer Petit and her daughters --Hayley, 17, and Michaela, 11 - still asleep. They woke all three and immediately tied them to their beds.
At 7: 00 a.m., Hayes went to a gas station and bought four gallons of gasoline. At 9: 30, he drove Jennifer Petit to her bank to withdraw $15,000 in cash. The conversation between Jennifer and the bank teller suggests that she was unaware of her husband's injuries and believed that her captors would release her family unharmed.
While Hayes and the girls' mother were away, Komisarjevsky amused himself by taking naked photos of Michaela with his cell phone and masturbating on her. When Hayes returned with Jennifer, the two men divided up the money and briefly considered what they should do. They decided that Hayes should take Jennifer into the living room and rape her - which he did. He then strangled her, to the apparent surprise of his partner.
At this point, the two men noticed that William Petit had slipped his bonds and escaped. They began to panic. They quickly doused the house with gasoline and set it on fire. When asked by the police why he hadn't untied the two girls from their beds before lighting the blaze, Komisarjevsky said, "It just didn't cross my mind." The girls died of smoke inhalation. William Petit was the only survivor of the attack.
Upon hearing about crimes of this kind, most of us naturally feel that men like Hayes and Komisarjevsky should be held morally responsible for their actions. Had we been close to the Petit family, many of us would feel entirely justified in killing these monsters with our own hands. Do we care that Hayes has since shown signs of remorse and has attempted suicide? Not really.
What about the fact that Komisarjevsky was repeatedly raped as a child? According to his journals, for as long as he can remember, he has known that he was "different" from other people, psychologically damaged, and capable of great coldness. He also claims to have been stunned by his own behavior in the Petit home: He was a career burglar, not a murderer, and he had not consciously intended to kill anyone. Such details might begin to give us pause.
Whether criminals like Hayes and Komisarjevsky can be trusted to honestly report their feelings and intentions is not the point: Whatever their conscious motives, these men cannot know why they are as they are. Nor can we account for why we are not like them. As sickening as I find their behavior, I have to admit that if I were to trade places with one of these men, atom for atom, I would be him: There is no extra part of me that could decide to see the world differently or to resist the impulse to victimize other people.
Even if you believe that every human being harbours an immortal soul, the problem of responsibility remains: I cannot take credit for the fact that I do not have the soul of a psychopath. If I had truly been in Komisarjevsky's shoes on July 23, 2007 - that is, if I had his genes and life experience and an identical brain (or soul) in an identical state - I would have acted exactly as he did. There is simply no intellectually respectable position from which to deny this. The role of luck, therefore, appears decisive.
Of course, if we learned that both these men had been suffering from brain tumors that explained their violent behavior, our moral intuitions would shift dramatically. But a neurological disorder appears to be just a special case of physical events giving rise to thoughts and actions. Understanding the neurophysiology of the brain, therefore, would seem to be as exculpatory as finding a tumour in it. How can we make sense of our lives, and hold people accountable for their choices, given the unconscious origins of our conscious minds?
Free will is an illusion. Our wills are simply not of our own making. Thoughts and intentions emerge from background causes of which we are unaware and over which we exert no conscious control. We do not have the freedom we think we have.
Free will is actually more than an illusion (or less), in that it cannot be made conceptually coherent. Either our wills are determined by prior causes and we are not responsible for them, or they are the product of chance and we are not responsible for them. If a man's choice to shoot the president is determined by a certain pattern of neural activity, which is in turn the product of prior causes - perhaps an unfortunate coincidence of bad genes, an unhappy childhood, lost sleep, and cosmicray bombardment - what can it possibly mean to say that his will is "free"? No one has ever described a way in which mental and physical processes could arise that would attest to the existence of such freedom. Most illusions are made of sterner stuff than this.
The popular conception of free will seems to rest on two assumptions: (1) that each of us could have behaved differently than we did in the past, and (2) that we are the conscious source of most of our thoughts and actions in the present. Both of these assumptions are false.
But the deeper truth is that free will doesn't even correspond to any subjective fact about us - and introspection soon proves as hostile to the idea as the laws of physics are. Seeming acts of volition merely arise spontaneously (whether caused, uncaused, or probabilistically inclined, it makes no difference) and cannot be traced to a point of origin in our conscious minds.
A moment or two of serious self-scrutiny, and you might observe that you no more decide the next thought you think than the next thought I write."

So, there we have it. There's a whole book out there which claims that we as human beings are nothing more than walking brains. The 'mind,' apparently is an illusion, and free will does not exist. This is patently untrue, and very disturbing! In short, I would take the Richard Dawkins form of humanistic atheism over this guy's form any day.

As a Christian, free will means a lot to me. It is free will which is the proof that God really created us to grow and to learn. He could have created us as moving machines, but he didn't. He gave us the ability to choose, and what's more, he lets us choose and lets us live with the consequences of our actions. The Fall, we believe, occurred because of a choice made long ago, a choice made by people who lived in a deeper communion with God than fallen man is able to do. Whether an actual fruit was involved, who knows? All I do know is what I believe, and I believe that we were created as more than we are now. Our senses did not exist separately from one another, for instance, but functioned in a communion which allowed us to perceive God as being active with us in our world.

Eden is given a place on a map in The Bible, but if man had not chosen to separate himself from God, then Paradise itself would have spread out from Eden, because Paradise was able to dwell with unfallen man. Unfallen man was stronger, less dependent on the needs of the body than we are. The resurrected Christ shows us this. He could move through locked doors, but he was still in his body. I don't know of unfallen man could do anything like this, but we believe that they were somehow more than we are now.

If free will didn't count for anything in God's eyes, then man would not have fallen. God would have forgotten the transgression which basically gave birth to the ego, and would have made it as though the act had never been done. However, the fact is that once the choice was made to gratify the self first, to become all-wise if it were possible, then this ego was born, and it became a barrier to man's knowledge and perception of God. Suddenly, God was to be avoided, to be placated with justifications. From the moment they made their choice, therefore, they were weakened, and all of God's actions after that were to help them to become stronger again.

Death came to man at this time, and so did hard toil and labour, but even so, God stated that man would not always be weak. He would, in time, tread on the serpent and crush its head. We believe that Christ's coming was the fulfillment of this prophecy.

If we really followed Sam Harris's logic, then no one would ever be held to account for anything. Psychosurgery would come back into fashion, and humanity as a reasoning species would cease to exist. By his logic, we are little more than rats in a maze, being stimulated to go in certain directions by electrical impulses. This, I refuse to believe! This, I challenge and will challenge as long as I am on this earth! Nietsche believed something of this kind, or at least he believed it about 'the herd.' There were 'supermen,' he thought, who were capable of willing, but general humanity, he said, needed moral and ethical constraints to help them to get through life. Without right and wrong, he said, humanity in general would not have the capacity to make choices.

And this, really, is the crux of the matter. What is left when you take away the very thing that makes us human? What is left when God and humankind are both reduced to circuits and wires? The answer is: nothing, and yet, that's not all the answer, because nature, as science has proven, abhors a vacuum. Nietsche knew this when he wrote the following: "when you look into the abyss, the abyss looks into you." He divorced himself from all other relations both human and divine. He admitted that he himself was nothing, that the self itself was an illusion, and yet even he, in this strange state, knew that something was looking at him, some emptiness which had sentience. In short, though God for him was simply a mask for the moral imperative which guides the mass of humanity, he recognized the abyss. He recognized some sentient power to which he had lain himself open. We call that power Satan, and he speaks to us very clearly through the ego.

So, in the end, it's the ego itself that has to die. It is only the true self, the unsundered self which can be unearthed and healed by God's grace that can see through all the lies that we tell ourselves in the darkness, and this is what I'm out to find: my unique personhood and that of all others. However, selfishness does tend to prevail, so that to begin to kill it, the eucharistic life is needed. Yet, baby steps are necessary, and there will be many stumbles and falls, but the important thing is to get up again as much as possible. Christ is the doorway back into Paradise. By His death, he showed us how to die to our egos. It's not enough to be good or respectable. It's not enough to go to church all the time or even to read The Bible until we know it backwards and forwards. God wants more from us than that. He wants us to become better people, to grow and learn in this life as a preparation for a more dynamic and a deeper communion with Him later on.

And what do I mean by 'later on'? That will be discussed tomorrow.

Deo Gratias!