Solipsis: Escape from the Comatorium

by Jeff Pollard

  “Let's look closer at psychopathy. Dr. Lazarus is a psychopath, as he readily admits, and yet I'm not frightened of him, not worried he's going to start shooting up the place. Psychopathy is just a different form of brain function, Psychopaths often have an inability to connect with others and this sometimes leads to a life devoid of real human connection. The circuitry responsible for feeling empathy is not fully working. We wouldn't say it's not working 'right,' since there is no such thing as correct or incorrect brain function. In the average person, empathy causes them to feel some degree of suffering when they see others suffering. A fully functioning empathy circuit won't let you do things like scam the elderly out of their retirement funds. Take away this circuitry, or turn it down, and suddenly you won't feel bad or guilty for taking advantage of others. Psychopathy in small doses is kind of a super power.”

  Renee is taken aback by the last remark.

  “How many of you have ever been in a long term relationship, maybe you're living together, you were married, perhaps even had kids, but were unhappy and were thinking about ending it, getting a divorce, dumping them etc. I've been there, and that's an incredibly difficult task. I still think the most difficult thing I've ever done is break up with a significant other who loved me far more than I loved her. If I had some psychopathy in me, then I would have just said, see you later, and totally guilt-free I could have just moved right along. I'm better off moving on, she's better off in an equitable relationship, this is a clear decision, it just has short term suffering, and thus it makes it very difficult to dump someone. It's incredibly hard to inflict that emotional pain on someone you care about. But it has to be done. Now imagine not caring if it temporarily hurts that person's feelings. Not so hard to dump them anymore is it? Psychopathy allows you to skip the empathy and go right to a more objective way of looking at things.”

  “Don't get me wrong though, nearly all people who exhibit psychopathy, are actually pretty good, normal, productive people,” she looks down to the audience to measure their response. “Don't believe me? Would you rather your neurosurgeon be emotionally invested in you? Maybe a little, you would want them to care about whether you lived or died. But would you want them to care about you so much that they were terrified of making a mistake? Or would you want a cold, composed, machine operating on you? Psychopaths do the dirty work, they do the really tough jobs most people don't want to do. They are a necessary evil. If you put the average person in the White House and asked them if we should use the atomic bomb on Japan, they would completely freeze up and be paralyzed, unable to make such a decision. You put a person with some psychopathy in that seat, and they won't panic, they weigh their options, consider possible actions, and they make decisions, undeterred by factors that would paralyze the ordinary man. They can make a calm decision to bomb a city, to execute a prisoner, or to put lives at risk. Whether we like it or not, we need these people. The fact that psychopathy exists at all is evidence that it serves some purpose, evolutionarily speaking. Perhaps it's a method we've stumbled onto out of a need for leaders that can be ruthless and unemotional.”

  “There are several examples of genes and traits that in small doses do incredible good, but when we get too many of those genes, we get a serious side-effect. A little psychopathy makes you into a cold, machine-like, clever, manipulative, intelligent, decisive, unemotional, charismatic leader. Too much psychopathy and you're a serial killer who can't connect with anyone. There are other examples. The African people were subjected to malaria for thousands of years, and evolution found a solution. Their blood cells started forming in a different way which limited the effects or made them totally immune to malaria. Then the European explorers visit and drop like flies. Clearly this adaptation is good right? Well, if you get too many of those genes, today we would say you have sickle cell anemia. A long-term study of schizophrenia was done in Sweden, a very secular society. They noticed that the families of those with schizophrenia were almost all religious. This is remarkable in a country made-up mostly of atheists. So it stands to follow that there are some genes that enable you to 'hear voices' at the appropriate times, in church, when praying, etc. But if too many of these people breed together and someone gets too many of these genes, they end up hearing voices all of the time and it drives them crazy and we call that schizophrenia. So for these religious relatives, they believe because they really do hear voices in their heads.”

  “So what happens when you get too many psychopathic genes? Those with more advanced psychopathy are obsessed with power, not just in terms of being presidents and dictators, but in social situations. They like to humiliate others, they like to abuse their power, to teach people lessons, to feel in control. Nearly all of these psychopaths exhibit serious sexual dysfunction. They fixate on their own desires, unchecked by empathy, they relish in sado-masochism. They derive sexual satisfaction from either inflicting pain or having it inflicted on them. According to Dr. Lazarus, these people are choosing to be sado-masochistic. They chose to be aroused by pain? Does that make any sense? We're in control of our sexual desires no more than we are in control of what music we like, what catches our eyes, or what nation we were born in. So don't let Dr. Lazarus fool you. When you look very closely, you can see that serial killers are who they are because of their genetics, their environment, and the results that those prior causes have. You don't need to then insert some supernatural idea of free-will that exists outside of the physical measurable world to explain their behavior, it is all explained by a strict scientific viewpoint.”

  Nellie returns to Renee's side. The audience claps a little more favorably for her this time. Dr Lazarus jots several notes, delaying in taking his podium.

  “How was that?” Nellie asks Renee.

  “You kicked his ass,” Renee replies.

  “Yeah?” Nellie asks.

  “Yeah,” Renee replies enthusiastically.

  Dr. Lazarus takes to the podium.“My opponent keeps using the logical fallacy 'post hoc ergo propter hoc.' It happened after it therefore because of it. She says that if we can show a physical reason why someone does something, then that means the person has no control over it. Obviously we can't control our DNA, so how can we be responsible for the DNA chosen for us? Well, this line of reasoning only makes sense if you share her solely materialistic meta-physics. In other words, she's claiming that the self, the 'I' that thinks, is just a certain aspect of consciousness, and if this aspect of consciousness is produced by and manipulated by physical measurable processes in the brain, then the I isn't in control. Well, if you think of the I as being the entire set of the brain, the energy, the consciousness, the soul, the karma, the aura, and whatever else you might believe in, then this argument no longer makes sense.”

  “Please ask yourself which is more likely. A series of mechanical connections creating nothing but ones and zeroes is all it takes to produce a person, all of their memories, their hopes and dreams, their inner beauty, their everything, the human being is just this lump of gray matter, this series of switches. Or is it more likely that the most complicated, and capable thing in the entire universe, the human being, is a combination of things and cannot be reduced to only the physical processes that current scientists have been able to pin down. Perhaps the character of our souls influences our DNA. Perhaps the depth of our character is manifested in our brain waves. Perhaps our choices to do good or evil, are made by something deeper, bigger, or beyond the limited concept of consciousness my opponent laid out.”

  “I told you I would give you a competing view of free will and here it is. The universe is test. God has put us here to test our character, to judge our souls. Why? We cannot know. Nobody can know or understand God's mind.” Dr. Lazarus pauses to let his words sink in. “I don't know which is worse, admitting to a conference of neuroscientists that you're a psychopath or that you're a Christian.” The audience laughs tensely.

  “Let us suppose that my opponent is right, and that we can be indoctrinated, our physi
cal brain can be manipulated into making us do anything, and we have no control of it. Now let us suppose that we go around teaching everyone, forming in their minds the circuitry to go along with this notion, that there is no free will. Wouldn't that create a self-fulfilling prophecy? If everyone believed that they weren't in control of their actions, then they wouldn't have to justify anything, they wouldn't think twice, they'd rape, murder, steal, etc. Clearly this idea wouldn't be good for civilization. And yet my opponent is up here trying to plant the circuit in our minds that tells us we aren't in control and our decisions don't matter. This is clearly not something we should be teaching people. Even if it were true, I think we all agree that we'd be better off not knowing it, just as the world may have been better off not discovering the secrets to atomic weaponry.”

  “That doesn't make sense,” Renee whispers to Nellie as she takes notes.

  “Why?”

  “He's not arguing about facts, he's just trying to say that his ideas seem nicer,” Renee says.

  “You want to go up there and tell him that?” Nellie asks.

  “What?”

  “Yeah, go ahead and go up there.”

  “I can't do that,” Renee insists.

  Dr. Lazarus finishes up a point and takes his seat. Renee's wide eyes hope desperately that Nellie takes the podium. They sit silently in an agonizing battle of wills. Finally Nellie stands up. Renee breathes a huge sigh of relief.

  “I'm joined on the stage by my daughter Renee. She's here at this debate because she's being punished. So if you want to call me a hypocrite for arguing that free will doesn't exist, and then punishing my daughter, you've got a fair complaint. However, she just made a point I found interesting, so I'd like her to come up here and say a few words. Please don't go easy on her, remember, she's being punished.”

  Renee tries to find a worm-hole she can slip into and disappear from that stage. The entire audience looks to her frightened face. She has no choice, she stands up and puts one foot in front of the other.

  “Hi,” Renee says quietly into the microphone. Her words echo of the pyramid ceiling and bounce around the atrium a dozen times. “I hate my parents.” Renee tries to back away from the podium, but Nellie, standing at her side, holds her shoulder and keeps her from leaving.

  “I just want to say that Dr. Lazarus's arguments are not based on the facts,” Renee pauses, the silence is excruciating. Part of her wants to just stop right there. “He's not trying to convince us that the facts support his theory. Instead, he's trying to convince us that the world would be better off if he's correct.” The words come much more easily now, “It might be unsettling to realize that we're not in control of ourselves, but there's no law of the universe that says we have to like the truth. Just because we might want to believe we'll be reunited with our dead loved ones when we die, it doesn't make that likely to be true.”

  Renee takes a step back from the podium. Nellie pats her on the back and says, “keep going.”

  “I don't know what else to say,” Renee insists, pulling away. Nellie relents, taking the podium.

  “She just turned sixteen, can you believe it?” Nellie announces. Renee tries to bury her face in the table. “A moment ago Dr. Lazarus appealed to probability,” Nellie says at the podium in the center of the atrium. “He asked if it was likely that a human being is nothing more than physical matter, ones and zeroes. Since we're playing the likelihood game, Dr. Lazarus, ask yourself which is the better explanation. That free will is an illusion and we are the product of our genes, environment, upbringing, and luck. Or is it more likely that an all-powerful god created a universe fifteen billion years ago so that he could have human civilization on one of the trillions of planets for a few thousand years, just so he could play some parlor game of judging whether some souls are good or bad? Keeping in mind that an all-powerful god both created these souls in the first place, and therefore is more responsible for their character than the souls are, and he doesn't need to run his experiment to judge the souls, since he's all-knowing and could foresee how we would be judged. So then he grants us free will so that it makes sense to judge us, only to have our free will dependent on prior causes which we don't control.”

  “On one hand we have an all-knowing, all-powerful god who runs poorly controlled experiments for dubious reasons so he can reward or punish creatures that he made for being exactly how he made them. On the other hand we have a materialistic universe where everything happens because of a prior cause, one after another in an unbroken chain back to some beginning. The only thing we can't explain is just how this all got set into motion, and we can't travel back in time or out of the universe to examine the first cause. Other than that one event, fifteen billion years ago, we can pretty much explain everything else. We scientists are quick to say that we don't know how or why that happened, or even what exactly it was, though we know to some extent. But Dr. Lazarus somehow knows who was responsible for that event, why it occurred, and what the meaning of all of it is. How? Where do you get the evidence that the universe is a moral experiment to allow a supernatural being to judge our soul? We can't find the soul, we can't find the free will, and we can't find this god. So whose story is more likely? The one based on scientific evidence, or the one based on bronze age superstitions-”

  Dr. Lazarus leaps to his podium, “I find this offensive! Right there, madam, you have demonstrated the arrogance of science. First of all, we aren't debating theology, cosmology, eschatology, or anything of the sort. You've attacked me not for what I say, but for my beliefs which are unrelated to the topic of this discussion.”

  “But it is relevant to the topic. You brought up your theology a few moments ago in defense of your views on free will.”

  “That was a tangential point, not the thesis of my theory. If you're going to attack me, attack my argument, not my beliefs.” Most of the audience roars in support.

  “I didn't attack your belief-” Nellie tries to defend herself, but her words are met with boos from the audience.

  “You called Christianity a bronze age superstition, you better believe that is an attack. Now I believe it's my turn to speak, so move along,” he patronizingly waves his hand at her. Nellie takes her seat.

  “See, I told you this wouldn't be boring,” Nellie whispers to Renee with a smile. Renee listens intently as Lazarus delivers a sermon on the arrogance of secular science and how offensive many of Nellie's claims were. His tone grows increasingly hostile.

  Dr. Rendrow interrupts the passionate sermon to allow Nellie to give a final statement.

  “Dr. Lazarus finds it offensive that I would even mention his religiosity. However, if you look at the human brain the way I do, then it's clear to see that Dr. Lazarus's thinking and his arguments and theories are influenced by his environment, his upbringing, genetics, epi-genetics, indoctrination, and so on and so forth. From my perspective, Dr. Lazarus believes free will exists not because he examined it objectively and found that it does. He believes that it exists, and that belief is apparently unshakeable. This is the problem with religious beliefs and faith. Faith asks you to believe in something despite a lack of evidence, or even evidence to the contrary. In religious circles, as many of you know, faith is a virtue. It's made virtuous to distrust hard evidence and scientific theories, and to instead just have faith in an idea because it must be true. Dr. Lazarus's worldview breaks down if free will doesn't exist. Humans are naturally resistant to the idea that we are wrong. We don't want to wake up and realize that we've wasted our lives pursuing the wrong goals for the wrong reasons. Instead of being objective, taking in all the evidence, and making a truly informed decision, many humans do something very counter-productive.”

  “This phenomenon is called confirmation bias. If you were raised by an overly-involved mother who told you every day that you were an amazing singer and really convinced you that you had the best singing voice in the world, and then you went off to a competition and finished dead last, you would be very resis
tant to the idea that you lost because you aren't talented. Confirmation bias is a bias in which we search for every bit of information that affirms what we believe, and then we dismiss any bit of information that suggests that we're wrong. Go to any talent audition and you'll find that many of those who are dismissed will have all kinds of excuses for why the judges are wrong. Many of these people, it's hard to believe they ever thought they had any talent in the first place, and you think, surely they must have been told. Where are their friends to tell them, come on, you can't sing, or you dance like some kind of meth-addicted zombie? But the reason they haven't objectively made an accurate estimate of their talent is that they've ignored all the information that goes to the other side, looking for all the little bits and pieces of information that agree with them.”

  “Any scientifically trained person who looks at anything to do with the science offered up for intelligent design, will find an encyclopedia of confirmation bias. Pick up one of these textbooks and you'll find that the bulk of their argument is based on the flimsiest of evidence. Then they address the scientific argument, which has the weight of literally billions of years worth of evidence, and they'll dismiss all of it because of a few contradictions or mistakes. They point to the times when a scientific theory needed to be changed, or to the few cases of forged or misunderstood evidence. Essentially, they've latched on to very flimsy evidence that agrees with them, and have reached for the moon for excuses to dismiss the evidence that doesn't agree with them.”

  “This is insulting! Offensive, shame on you!” Dr. Lazarus shouts from his chair.