by Jeff Pollard
“It costs money to operate this station, we need power, technicians, doctors, internet, equipment.”
“So where do we get the money to pay for those things? I mean, do we pay rent for living here? If I don't make money are they going to evict me?”
“We don't kick anyone out,” Nellie says dismissively. “Come on, follow me.” Renee follows as they walk up several flights of stairs and emerge at one end of the glass atrium of the Solipsis ocean platform.
“So what are you doing?” Renee asks, following Nellie as she wades through a crowd and heads for a stage. She is swamped by people wanting to shake her animatronic hand, or have their picture taken. Renee had never realized the celebrity status her father had. Renee stops as Nellie starts up the stairs to a small stage.
“Come on, you're not leaving my side,” Nellie says. Renee reluctantly follows.
“What are you doing?”
“We're hosting a conference with a series of lectures and debates,” Nellie says, sitting down at one of two large tables that sit on either side of three podiums. Nellie pulls the chair out next to her and pats the seat.
“So I have to sit up here on stage in front of everyone?” Renee asks. Nellie nods. Renee sighs and takes her seat. “I thought you were a doctor not a debater.”
“I don't really like doing these, but I'm the big name so I have to do it.”
“So is this how we pay the bills?”
“Partially.”
“So if a poor sick person comes, will you turn them away?”
“No,” Nellie replies.
There is an audible gasp amongst the audience. A man enters. He's in his sixties, bald with a ring of short black hair around his head. He makes his way toward the stage, completely mobbed.
“Who is that?” Renee asks.
“Dr. Lazarus,” Nellie replies.
“Who is he, they're tripping over themselves to get his attention.”
“Dr. Lazarus is the leader of the Community of Christian Scholars. He's basically the poster-child of intellectual Christians.”
“There are people that are still Christians?”
“Yeah,” Nellie replies.
“And some of them are considered intellectual?”
“You were raised by atheists, we didn't indoctrinate you with any religion, so to you, all the religions are just ancient mythologies. But imagine growing up and being told over and over that there is a god and that Jesus loves you, going to school and learning more about Jesus, then going to church every Sunday, then going to a college that teaches the science of how god made the world. You can take a really smart person, subject them to that level of indoctrination, and they'll come out the other side believing in whatever you want them to. So don't call them stupid. You aren't inherently smarter because you're an atheist. Everyone is indoctrinated with something that they believe. It just so happens that you were indoctrinated with the truth.”
“But it is the truth,” Renee replies. “You make it sound like everyone's individual idea of the world is equally true.”
“I'm just saying that you shouldn't think of them as less intelligent, they can't help how they were indoctrinated. And almost every person on the planet is convinced that they know the truth.”
“So every religious person thinks their parents just happened to teach them the one true religion? Isn't that a nice coincidence?”
“But you're in roughly the same boat,” Nellie replies.
“Christian...scholars,” Renee muses over the concept.
Dr. Lazarus's progress towards the stage completely stalls as fans and followers swarm.
“Why do they like this guy so much?” Renee asks.
“As science reveals and explains mysteries, god keeps getting smaller. We've gotten to a point where it seems like you can either listen to reason, care about evidence, observation, and accept the scientific world view, or you can believe in your particular religion, but you can't have both. We know the age of the Earth and our place in the universe, and it's directly contradicted by the bible. So either god's inerrant word is wrong, or the scientists and evidence is wrong. But there are guys like Dr. Lazarus who come along and find ways to make it sound like you can have religion and science in harmony.”
“That sounds hard to do,” Renee replies.
“He gives people hope. He'll put on a big show, use tricks of language and bad logic to convince people that science is actually showing religion to be true. And anyone who has a lot of faith is going to be totally blind to his fallacies and his bullshit and think he's some kind of prophet.”
“That doesn't look like a community of scholars,” Renee adds.
“Technically it's a church,” Nellie replies.
“That looks like a cult.”
“The title of today's debate is free will and morality,” Dr. Rendrow announces to the people gathered in the glass pyramid atrium. “The speakers will begin with a ten minute opening remark. You all know the first speaker.”
Nellie takes the podium.
“Take in a deep breath. Hold it. Now breathe out. Keep it out. Breathe in, hold it. Now exhale. Now stop consciously controlling your breathing.” Nellie pauses and the audience collectively holds its breath. Renee participates even though she doesn't need any oxygen.
“Now I want you to stick your tongue out. Go ahead, stick it out. Okay, now let it go back to normal, ignore it. Now I want you to blink once. Count to three then blink again. Count to three. Blink again. Now forget about blinking.” Nellie smiles as the audience awkwardly stares at her with eyes wide open.
“Is it just me, or are you now totally unsure of when to breathe or blink, and have no idea where to put your tongue?”
The audience chuckles, and Renee looks up at her father, wondering where she's going with this.
“We all seem to think that we, consciousness, I, the self, is a pilot that's in control of our bodies. As though there were a cockpit in our heads. However, our experience of consciousness is not objective, and is not detached from the brain. Consciousness is a product of the brain, and it just happens to think that it is the whole human being. But it isn't.”
“Without looking, can you tell me what time it is? You can all venture a guess, and there are people who can do this extremely accurately. But where does this information come from? Nobody is consciously counting the minutes, so how do we know what time it is?”
“There are mathematical savants who can do any calculation in an instant. They aren't doing this consciously or with some trick. The number just appears to them. Where did that number come from? The sub-conscious mind. A series of prior causes have created a neural network in their brain that does certain things to information and can upload the results of its calculations to some kind of attention. That's all that consciousness is: attention. It's some sort of brain function that simply decides what to pay attention to, what to notice, what information is important and what isn't. So most of the time you're breathing, blinking, smelling and hearing hundreds of different things, you have a sense of time, balance, orientation, movement, and all of these things are feeding an enormous amount of data into the brain, and the brain is sending a long list of orders out in response. And yet, we can space off and be totally unaware of any of these things.”
That catches Renee's wavering attention.
“We are just a function of the brain, a way of paying attention to data. But do we even have control of what data we pay attention to? Remember when I told you to breathe? Once you started concentrating on your breathing, you couldn't then make a choice to stop paying attention to it. You awkwardly keep controlling it, and only return to the normal state when you're distracted by something else. Notice that you don't choose something new to pay attention to, something came along and distracted you. We're no more in control of our thoughts than we are of our height.”
“You know this if you've ever meditated. Take ten minutes sometime and sit comfortably, close your eyes, and then repeat a mantra in
your head. Doesn't matter what the mantra is, just a sentence or a phrase that you can hear clearly. Then think of nothing but that phrase over and over. It's a lot harder than it sounds because in the middle of thinking your mantra, you'll start thinking about other things. I've meditated for years, and I am still side-tracked by my thoughts. I'm meditating, repeating my mantra, and then, from nowhere, I start thinking about something I saw in the news or that I should see the new movie that just came out. Even when I try my hardest to concentrate and control my thoughts, I can't do it. Meditation shows you that you aren't in control of your own thoughts. If I was really in control of my thoughts, then I would just repeat my mantra with no problem. But I can't. And so the thoughts that do occur to me, necessarily weren't by choice. So if I didn't choose to think about something else, then where did that thought come from? So you see, in order to think something, we'd have to first decide to think that thing before we think of it. So on close inspection we're not in control of our thoughts, so if we don't even have control of the most basic aspect of our consciousness, what do we have control over?”
“We can scan your brain, ask you to make a decision, pick up either the red pill or the blue pill. Monitoring your brain, we can tell the precise moment that you made the decision and which one you're going to pick. The really spooky thing is that we can tell what decision you made before you are even aware that you've made the decision. Think about that for a moment. The decision is made, and we can physically measure it in the brain, but several seconds go by before the person is consciously aware that they've made a decision at all. These kinds of experiments have been going on for fifty years. This shows that decision making is completely an illusion. The voice in your head, your stream of consciousness, is not the thing responsible for making the choices that you make. The choice is made elsewhere and then passed along as information. You merely receive the decision as stimuli, the same way we hear a sound or know what time it is. So if you can't control what you think or what you decide, then where is free will?”
Nellie returns to her seat and the audience claps pallidly. Renee is in awe, having never seen her father speak in such a way.
Dr. Rendrow introduces Dr. Lazarus and he takes the podium amidst a thunderous applause.
“I'd like to thank my esteemed colleague for the invitation, and all of you for attending. Many of you are probably very shocked by her opening remarks. I would be if I hadn't heard the same ideas spouted many times before. Apparently, if you breathe and flick your tongue around, you'll discover that you aren't really a person at all, but some kind of meat computer!” More than half of the audience laughs with Dr. Lazarus.
“At face value, this argument is obviously wrong.” He speaks precisely. Every word carefully chosen. Each pause deliberate. His stare penetrating. “We live in a universe where our actions have consequences. Anyone exercising their God-given common sense knows that if we didn't have the ability to control ourselves, to decide our actions, then we would live in a terrible world with rape and murder and theft at every street corner. Society would collapse. We couldn't hold anyone responsible for their actions, so they would do whatever they wanted. That's the idea that my opponent is supposing.”
“If we had no free will, then we would just be the product of our environment, and nothing more. We would never see people drastically change their lives. We wouldn't see dedicated atheists suddenly seeing the light and coming to faith. We wouldn't have anything but robots that were programmed by their indoctrination. The fact that people can change, can up and decide to do something different is proof. But really, the best proof is simply the experience of being a human, of having thoughts in your head. You know you're in control of your actions. You can buy into this philosophical argument all you want, but deep down, you know you are in control of your body.”
“Neuroscientists don't like to use the word evil, and I always sense my colleagues shuddering whenever I use the word. Most neuroscientists, people like my opponent, believe that a person who decides on a whim to chop their neighbor into fifteen pieces must have done this because of a flaw in their brain. There must be something wrong with the brain of a serial killer, so we should figure out what the problem is and fix it. They cannot believe that a person simply gets up in the morning and chooses to chop their neighbor into pieces, but they did this because their brains made them. So when we look closely at all these psychopathic brains, we find that they all function in this same way that's different from the rest of the population. It doesn't matter how, just that all of them shared the same brain pattern. Most neuroscientists say, a-ha! See, they don't choose to have a different brain pattern, it's the way they are. Well my scientist friends, isn't it possible that the brain waves of someone who chooses to be evil form a certain pattern? How do you know that the pattern precedes the behavior? How do you know it's not just a matter of thinking evil thoughts looks like this as a result, not the cause?”
“They ignored this question and they continued with their study and made a supposedly landmark discovery. They found that all psychopaths share a specific genetic marker. They shout again, a-ha! See, if all serial killers share a certain gene, then that means whether you are a decent person or a serial killer is largely determined long before you were born, when your DNA was first formed. So if whether you are evil or not is determined by your genes, then how can evil be a choice? They publish their landmark findings and claim to have defeated free will and shown that punishment makes no sense, we're just products of our environments, etc.”
“But you have to look closer. If you take a closer look at the math, you'll find that this gene that they say all serial killers have is present in about four percent of the population. One in twenty-four people have this gene, but the vast majority of those people do not become serial killers. You don't hear them mention that too often.”
“I was asked by a lawyer who was defending a serial murderer to help him prevent his client from getting the death penalty. I'm against the death penalty as many of you know. I don't believe we should grant any bureaucracy the right to murder. So I took my expertise and did the best I could to save this murderer from the death penalty. The defense attorney had a little flare for the dramatic, as many of them do, so he had an independent neuroscientist take a set of brain scans and made a lineup. So he puts me on the stand, in front of the jury, and shows me ten brain scans in a lineup, explaining that I've never looked at any of these scans before.”
“So I've got ten brain scans in front of me. I look them over closely, and find that nine of ten were normal. However, one brain had every single indication of psychopathy. That was clearly the murderer, and I picked it from the lineup, very satisfied with myself. I explain to the jury and the judge that subject #4 is clearly the killer since all the other scans appear totally normal, and this one is so drastically different, etc. So the defense attorney smiles and thanks me and is so happy that I would be able to help save his client from death row... Then he dramatically takes the brain scan down, to reveal that I've picked his client's brain out of the lineup. Except it turns out I hadn't picked out his defendant. In fact, I had just gone on and on about how his client had a normal brain.”
“So if this psychopathic brain didn't belong to the killer, whose was it? What do you do when you find out that there's a psychopath walking freely? The lineup was set up precisely so I wouldn't have access to the names, but maybe I have a moral obligation to find out, maybe this guy is a serial killer, maybe we should be paying attention to him. So that day I went and looked at the scans to figure out whose brain that was. I'm sure many of you are thinking that it's the evil defense attorney who fights to protect killers. But no, it wasn't the lawyer, I know, kind of shocking.”
“It wasn't his secretary, it wasn't the other neuroscientist, it wasn't even the janitor who we just picked out of the hallway because we needed another scan for the lineup. The pscyhopathic scan belonged to me.”
“Now before you run for the exits, just
know that I'm not a serial killer. That and your seats are rigged to explode if you stand up.” He looks at his audience with a creepy grin. “Just kidding. I'm not a serial killer, as far as you or I know, at least, I'm not a rapist, a killer, an adulterer, or any of these things. Yet if you show my brain scan to a neuroscientist, they'll tell you I'm likely to be a serial killer. And even I would have agreed with them, and did. But I know I'm not a serial killer, and in fact, the vast majority of people who show signs of psychopathy aren't bad people at all.”
“I might have been born with the genes and the brain of a psychopath, in fact, about ten people in this room are in the same boat as me. And yet, none of us are serial killers. Why? Because, ladies and gentlemen, we have free will. We are not merely passengers. The fact that there are good psychopaths as well as evil non-psychopaths confirms my suspicions that the question of good or evil cannot be answered by simple genetics or brain scanning. Thank you.”
Lazarus takes a bow and then returns to his seat amid a very warm reception. The atrium seems to have been occupied by his followers who have turned out in droves. Nellie waits for the clapping to die down before retaking her podium.
“It's true that two to four percent of the population has the genetic markers of psychopathy. But why do some of those people become serial killers and some don't? The answer is upbringing. Those with these genetic markers who had traumatic childhoods were complete psychopaths. Those who had the genes but were raised in good environments did not turn into serial killers and rapists and such. Dr. Lazarus seems to think that the difference between these two camps is choice, but if you examine the individuals, you find that it has absolutely everything to do with their childhood, their environment, and external factors. Simply having a bad environment won't make you a serial killer, and neither will having the wrong genes. It takes both. I didn't choose to not be a serial killer. I wasn't born with the genetic profile, I wasn't raised in a bad environment, and therefore I came out decent enough. Go look at the life of any serial killer and you'll find that they were unfortunate enough to be born in a family that both carried the psychopathic genes and provided an awful home, a violent, abusive upbringing, and this leads this child to end up an adult who has no empathy, who doesn't care what happens to others, and is extremely selfish. Does that sound like serial killers have a choice in the matter?”