How much mental freedom do humans have?

[MedleyMisty]

I really wanted to post this in GD, but then I realized that it'd drop like a stone there because discussing the Sunday political talk shows that no one really cares about is much more interesting than philosophical discussion about the things at the heart of our problems.

But it applies to this forum quite a bit too, so hey.

I have been told that I shouldn't hate humans for their weaknesses so much. I have read that humans are a product of their cultures mentally and emotionally. I have read that I should excuse fascists because they're good people who've been misled or couldn't help being brain-washed or whatever.

And I am disturbed by my own attitude - it seems rather like the Republican attitude toward economic situations. I can totally get how the financial situation of your parents determines your financial destiny most of the time and how you can't just randomly choose to be rich and how you can work hard all your life and just barely scrape by because there is so much chance and things that you can't control when it comes to economics.

But I do tend to think that people can control their own minds and that they choose to be selfish and bigoted and fascist and destructive. Or in the case of this forum's topic in particular - that they consciously choose to deny reality in favor of myths and superstition and then use those myths as the reason to control other people's lives or torture and kill other people or whatever.

Generally people who hold the magical bootstraps theory of economic success and failure were born into rich families and can't understand poverty. I think that I was born into mental and emotional wealth and therefore I have a problem understanding mental and emotional poverty.

For instance my mother never indoctrinated me with anything and pretty much just let me run wild and free and be myself and think and feel my own thoughts and feelings, which she unconditionally accepted. At six when I asked her how God could have created the world in seven days when dinosaurs existed for millions of years before humans, she just said, "Uhh...days were a lot longer back then." Which I could tell that she was just saying that to shut me up and went on my merry born atheist way.

If she'd yelled at me and spanked me for blaspheming, would I be a very different person today? Or if she'd forced me to go to church or had been consistently racist around me or whatever?

I know that people don't tend to read and respond to walls of text, so I'll stop here.

Essentially - how much do humans choose to suck a lot and be bigoted and selfish and destructive and all that? Is it really something that they can't help and therefore I shouldn't hate them even though their selfishness and greed and desire to force everyone to conform to their magical myths have such disastrous consequences?

[notadmblnd]

1. My parnets made us attend church, yet I don't believe.

Racism was abundant in our household, yet I married a black man. I've always kind believed one either becomes just like their parents or they rebel against it, and that bigotry can't be helped, but it is wrong and we need to recognize it in ourselves and rise above it.

[tibbiit]

2. unless you are a vulcan

we sometimes have mental freedom, and sometimes in theory have free will... that is until we dont have mental freedom or freewill.
this happens when emotions get involved and they can not be totaly stamped out. sO it works when it does and doesnt when it doesnt lol.

I call it the bag o donuts theory. When on a diet you can walk by that bag of donuts for days/weeks/months until you cant; Then you eat the bag o donuts.
tib

[TZ]

3. My perspective on this

I know scientifically that behavior and thought are influenced both by environment and by genetics.
Some people are just born with the tendency to be mean nasty and selfish....Others have grown up in environments where that was the only way to survive.
I think people do have a certain amount of freedom, but also are born with certain limitations. I convinced that there are genuine physiological differences between people who tend to be atheistic and people who are more likely to be religious..However given the right circumstances I think either party can "convert" or "deconvert".
There are also very good evolutionary reasons why people have religion and faith.
You should read some Dawkins I think. The God Delusion perhaps, but even better is "The Selfish Gene" and "The Blind Watchmaker".
They are excellent books on sociobiology and I think it might help you understand some of these issues better.

[Beregond2]

4. People have been going around on this issue forever.

We aren't going to solve it here. But my position (as of this moment) is this:

There is no logical or scientific justification for the concept of free will. Obviously, every thought and acion is determined by the prior one. And yet, the sense that we have free will is so convincing. I think that free will could only exist for a consciousness that exists outside of our determined reality, and for us insofar as we embody that consciousness. Hence, God.

[Jim__]

5. You might start with your own presumptions.

For instance, Essentially - how much do humans choose to suck a lot and be bigoted and selfish and destructive and all that? Is it really something that they can't help and therefore I shouldn't hate them even though their selfishness and greed and desire to force everyone to conform to their magical myths have such disastrous consequences?

Do you really think that if people are stupid, you have somehow managed to escape their fate? Do you really think that if you come to the conclusion that they can help it and therefore you should hate them, that your hatred is somehow different from the hatred of all the other hating people?

[Silent3]

6. I think of free will as a useful, but possibly fictional, concept

Free will is whatever is left over after eliminating that which is completely deterministic, and can't be changed, and that which is entirely random, happening for no particular reason whatsoever.

I suspect that leaves nothing left at all for "free will" to be, nevertheless, I go about my life as if I have the power to make decisions for myself, as if I own some degree of responsibility for those decisions, and I judge others on how they act as if they have this same "free will", whatever it might be.

[iamahaingttta]

7. Our brains are self-programming machines.

To a degree, anyway.

And the first step is to understand that, so that you can do the work to program your brain the way you want to. And it's a hell of a lot of work! A lifetime's worth, and then you're still not perfect.

You might want to start with yourself, since you're the only one who's brain you can program:

"I have been told that I shouldn't hate humans for their weaknesses so much..."

Pretty telling right there. You have a lot of work to do. Don't worry about everyone else, just worry about yourself...

[HamdenRice]

8. You might want to look into structuralism/ post-structuralism, deconstruction and post-modernism

Now that would take a dissertation to explain, and these terms are so broad that in some contexts they have become meaningless.

But I was deeply influenced by structuralism/post-structuralism in anthropology and linguistics. One application in that area is that we are in a sense pre-programmed to see "binary oppositions" and express them in our culture even where they may not exist: black vs white, night vs day, male vs female, raw vs cooked, good vs evil and so on.

For example, there really is no such thing in our species as exclusive categories of "male and female" and yet it would be almost impossible to convince most people of that. By "no such thing" I mean that if we took a full football stadium of say 100,000 people and closed off all exits except two, and marked them "male" and "female" there is no single criteria by which we could sort every single person into "male" and "female": sexual preference (no, gays and lesbians); height, strength (no, some "women" are stronger/bigger than some "men"); sexual identity (no in a sample that big there would be at least a few trans people); genetalia (no, there would be at least a few hermaphrodites or people of ambiguous genetalia), and so on.

Even if you did genetic testing, at least some people in a sample that size would be XXY or XYY or XXX.

At this point, you might say that everyone who is not XX or XY with normal genetalia is basically a result of some mutation from the "norm"; but you can only conclude that they are mutations from the norm if you pre-assume the norm. That is how binary structural confines our thinking about things.

The same could be said of race (there is no genetic basis for the races, because there is genetic variation within races as well as between them).

It is our pre-existing "structural" "binary oppositions" that force us to put things in binary categories.

The question structuralism asks is: now that we know about structuralism, to what extent does our analytic power allow us to think beyond the structures we are predisposed to think within?