Bushmen Benefits

In the 1930s John Maynard Keynes, writing from the perspective of and influenced by the Great Depression, penned an essay titled “The Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren.” He was struggling with the financial doldrums of the times, but looked optimistically to the future. He believed in the American democratic and economic processes that he observed at the time, and thought that, due to (1) technological innovation, (2) productivity, and (3) long-term capital growth, the future looked good. America and the world would soon realize what he termed “economic bliss”.

Keynes predicted that his grandchildren would be able to satisfy their material needs by having to work only 15 hours per week. What would we do with all that extra time on our hands? He said it would free us up to pursue rewarding interests such as art, philosophy, music, religion, family, etc. He believed that soon we'd realize a life that would be four-to-eight times richer than that of the 1930s. 
 
On the one hand, Keynes predicted correctly, since our productivity has increased by a factor of four. On the other hand, he was wrong about working hours, as today Americans work longer hours each week than they did in the 1930s. The result is that, instead of turning to leisure, we've turned to accumulating things. We grasp for more.

What happened? One reason we still work long hours is that Keynes and other economists at the time (and over the next half century) assumed that economics is a rational science, which implies that people make rational economic decisions. That assumption has been discredited in the last few decades, as psychologists and sociologists have shown that most of our choices are anything but rational. Neuroscience confirms these findings and has added its own discoveries into the mix. From neuroscience, we now know that people's decisions are impulsive and often made subconsciously, without their even being aware of what factors led to them. The result: we are often slaves to our desires and are thus literally driven to accumulate. To do so, we seem to be willing to labor long hours to get what we want.

Keynes was not crazy, however, as there is a society that long ago learned to curb its cravings and achieve all its needs, with indeed about 15 hours of work each week: the Bushmen peoples of Namibia's Kalahari Desert region. Also called the San peoples, they have populated southern Africa for some 200,000 years as hunter-gatherers. The Bushmen had achieved Keynes's economic promised land long ago, and they did it without having any interest in labor productivity or capital accumulation.

Think about that. The Bushmen (still around today, although they're struggling with the interference of modernity into their lives) are the most successful, long-lasting human civilization in Earth's history! Their culture has prevailed for some 800 times the length of America's existence as a country and 20 times longer than the period of time since humans turned from hunter-gatherers to agriculturists (about 10,000 years ago). I will be looking at the astounding success of the simple-living Bushmen in future blogs.

[Based on the book Affluence without Abundance: The Disappearing World of the Bushmen, by James Suzman, 2017.]

Do We Have Free Will?—Part 3

So what control do we really have over our actions? Is our brain's neuronal firing activity just going along on its own, with no input from us? If so, we appear to be shaped by a lot of influences beyond our conscious control. It can even seem as if we are pawns in a game of arbitrary brain electrical activity. Neurons fire and we simply respond.

These recent findings of neuroscientists are rather upsetting to many of them. It has caused some of them to be very cautious about becoming too visible and vocal about their results. If they were to cast doubt on our ability to act freely, maybe they'd play into people's bad behavior. If some people toss out the idea of having free will, they might conclude that their choices—particularly their moral choices—are irrelevant. Why try to behave ethically, when we're not really in charge? My brain made me do it; I'm not responsible! And furthermore, my brain may have made me do it, because my parents did not give me a nurturing home life, or because their brain chemicals were screwed up and they passed them on to me. It's not my fault!

So where do we go with this issue? What is the real story? Is it free will or determinism? Am I responsible or not? I will weigh in here and propose that it is not a case of either/or, but a case of free will and determinism. It's both. Neither one really excludes the other. These recent neuroscience experiments do seem to show us that free will plays a smaller role than what we've previously believed. But where does this leave us? What do I do with the possibility that it might be both? How do I decide which is which?

Humans have historically believed that free will reigns. So let me explore what we might come to conclude if we were to go to the other extreme: that we are fully under the influence of determinism. In other words, what might the implications be if we maintain that only determinism reigns.

If we choose to believe that determinism rules—that our firing neurons completely control our choices—we then must conclude that our actions are not our responsibility. Thus we are not morally responsible for what we do. There have been documented cases of people behaving immorally when they believed that free will does not exist. What are their lives like? Research has shown that they feel less blameworthy. They are less likely to be generous or volunteer to help others. They experience more stress, are less committed to making relationships work, are more likely to feel that life has no meaning, perform less well academically, are less creative, less grateful, and are more likely to conform. That's a pretty lengthy list of undesirable and unprincipled behaviors!

The propensity of people who deny they have free will and then act immorally, as I wrote above, has many neuroscientists very wary of publishing the truth about the fact of our limited free will. They're concerned that their findings may instigate bad behavior. Some even advocate that we should go along with the illusion of free will, while others feel that this is dishonest. They struggle with the dilemma.

There is a positive side to to accepting the role (if not the domination) of determinism, however. Our criminal justice system—which is based on free will—does not recognize the fact that some offenders simply inherited unlucky genes, or that their brain chemistry might have been altered by an injury. Their crimes are not always completely their fault. This is an explosive criminal justice issue! It would make a dramatic change in our penal system, if we accepted it. It might even humanize the system. And it could make us less likely to pursue a path of vengeance, when someone commits a crime.

If society allowed a degree of determinism, it could foster a softer view of criminal justice. It could prompt society to be more likely to improve the environment of disadvantaged people, so they'd be less likely to offend. It could lead us to revolutionize our education system and help people be better able to realize their full potential. People in a bad situation might be seen as needing help, rather than punishment. And when punishment is called for, we might levy it with more kindness and compassion.

When a natural disaster strikes—such as an earthquake or a hurricane—we do not think of extracting revenge on God or nature... we just rebuild. The calamity was beyond our control, so who's to blame? Could we possibly adopt some of this attitude toward those who commit crimes? And the biggest stretch of all: could we more constructively respond to terrorism? Our first gut reaction—influenced by our tendency to believe in free will—is vengeance. The United States responded to the 9/11 terrorist acts with retaliation, and then caused far more damage around the world by doing so. It could have been different, if determinism had been allowed to influence our viewpoint.

So let me return to the age-old question of whether it's free will or determinism. I've already said that I believe it's not an either/or situation. Neuroscience is demonstrating that determinism plays a bigger role than we've historically believed. This is a very important lesson. But it does not imply that we trash our opinion that we act with free will. It's a mixture of the two. It's complex. We must open our minds to acting in various mixtures at various times.

We make choices—sometimes within our conscious control, sometimes beyond our conscious control. I think the point is to examine our choices and subsequent actions—however they come about—and evaluate them. How can we learn from them, so that we do a better job next time? How do we show ourselves—and others—compassion? Won't that help us all to become more moral?

Do We Have Free Will?—Part 2

Our Western social systems—criminal justice, welfare, and education—are primarily based on the assumption that we possess free will. This is particularly true of our criminal justice system, which is founded on the principle that we are responsible for the choices we make. If we choose poorly, we can expect negative consequences to occur (from the state), and we expect to bear the burden of those mistakes. Conversely, if we make good choices, we expect to reap the benefits and take credit for our accomplishments.

Evolution has encouraged us to make good decisions. Those critters in the deep past who made poor choices, tended to die out, and those who made smart choices prospered. All animals must possess the ability to generate options in a given situation, to weigh them, and then to choose the more favorable one. This ability implies some quality of free will on the part of all critters. As our human brains evolved and grew in size, we were able to conceive of additional and more complicated options when confronted with situations and thus make even better choices than most animals. This seems to suggest that we are freer than most animals. Yet evolution has also provided us with many innate choices; such as a tendency to jump and run from a snake. We do not weigh options in such an emergency... we just jump.

So how free are we, really? I may wish to believe that I act at my own discretion, but is that really the case? How autonomous am I, really? And, furthermore, how moral am I? When I take some action, how much credit or culpability am I entitled to? These are free-will philosophy questions that have been argued for millennia.

Recent scientific research in the field of neurology is changing and updating the free will/determinism debate. Neurology has cast a new light on this ancient argument—bringing us information that our forebears were lacking: details about what's going on inside our heads as we evaluate and make life's decisions. And they've found that what we formerly believed about the mental process that leads us to do things, to think, to dream... is wrong. We've previously imagined that a spirit or a soul is at the core of us—something immaterial and even transcendent that is the very essence of who we are and what we do, and that is mostly unchanging over the years. It turns out that that idea is not really right.

Neurology is giving us a very different picture of what's going on. What is being discovered is that our thoughts, our hopes, our memories, and our dreams do not emanate from the immaterial spirit within, but are simply the result of material neurons firing inside our skull. Researchers are able to show that so much of who we are and what we do actually stems from electrical and chemical activity within the brain... not an immaterial soul.

This is a profound result! It suggests to me that what I do and think are controlled by neuronal activity—not my immaterial soul or thoughts. Who am I? What's more, neuroscience has demonstrated that my brain actually changes—and thus my behavior changes—when my brain chemistry changes. Experiments that interfere with or promote certain brain chemicals literally make me a different person. This is not my soul changing, but my physical brain. These findings were often discovered when researchers examined people who had experienced some sort of brain trauma. When their brains became damaged, they became different people. Military veterans return from war zones, where they've experienced brain injuries, with significantly altered personalities.

In the 1980s some ground-breaking experiments were conducted by neuroscientists on subjects in the lab. One astounding result is that, when our body responds to some external physical stimulus, only later (maybe one-half second later) have we consciously decided to take action. The message: our body often responds on its own—unconsciously, without any intent on our part—and we later think that we chose to do so. In addition, these experiments showed that when people behaved rather irrationally in given situations, when asked why, they often made up silly excuses that made no sense—excuses that arose because they needed to feel that they were really in control of what they did, when in fact, some unconscious process had caused them to do what they did.

It's a fact that some 90% of our brain activity is below the level of consciousness—activity that is beyond our intentional control. Thus my brain is constantly making many decisions without “my” involvement; without any intent on my part at all. For example, when do I choose to breathe in? What and how do I choose to digest my meal? When and how do I choose to instantly withdraw my hand from a hot stove? When do I choose to blink? These are all automatic activities that my unconscious brain takes care of all the time. I'd be tied up in immobile knots if my conscious mind attempted to make these decisions.

Conclusion of free will next time...

Idle Activeness

We modern humans often find ourselves frenetically engaging in one activity after another. Modern life pushes us to multitask and be constantly on the go. Our smart phones keep us ceaselessly in touch with a wide variety of people and events, threatening to rob us of any “down time” or quiet time, during which we can rest our mind and rejuvenate. Thus many of us go to great efforts to take a break to come down from our high alert state.

This is one reason why yoga and meditation have come to have so much appeal to moderns. People consider these practices to be of value to them, because the mind is considered to be doing nothing when we meditate; to become idle, to become blank, to rest. Once we go into mental idle mode for a while, both body and mind become refreshed and we're ready to jump back into the fray. It's as if our brain is connected to an on/off switch, that either allows it to be busy or renders it dormant. We flip from one mode to the other, as if our mind is polarized—it's either doing everything or nothing. There seems to be no gray area (sort of like American politics: it's either right wing or left wing, with no middle ground). Our life continues in either case, but nothing changes; no progress can occur, because we can't escape inhabiting and getting stuck in either extreme.

Modern neuroscience is bringing us a new understanding of what's going on in our mind while we rest it in meditation (or sleep). Even when we believe we've entered a blank, meditative state, magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) machines show that certain parts of the brain (those that are mostly below the level of consciousness) actually become more active during meditation. These various regions of the brain do their own kinds of business and problem solving, autonomously, so that when we reengage with the world, we may find ourselves more creative, happier, and more effective.

But it's not that we've allowed the whole mind to “veg out” and recharge; we've let the conscious part of it become idle, as the unconscious part cranks up to do some work on its own. So we have more than just the binary on/off situation in our brain; it has other modes wherein the subconscious part automatically keeps chugging away, even during meditation, sleep, or idle times.

Creative people know that some of their biggest insights come when they are on idle, or even while daydreaming. Many of them have found that, after actively banging their heads against a wall, trying to figure out a problem, the solution comes unbidden after they go into idle mode.

So meditation is not just a process of turning the mind off, so we can let go our stress for a while—then jump back in, refreshed and ready to do battle again, just as we did before. It's more a process of getting the conscious “higher” part of the brain to turn activities over to other regions that can engage with life's issues and concerns, find ways to connect those regions and get them collaborating, so we can bring insightful and fresh ways to manage life.

Outwitting Ourselves

There is a barrage of new findings currently being published by psychological researchers. It's even sort of a golden age, as constantly-improving brain-scanning techniques allow neuroscientists and psychologists to probe deep into the brain and make connections between our behaviors and our brain states.

One area that has yielded some fascinating findings is the manner in which we can be deceitful. We all know that honesty is the best policy—we've had this message handed to us throughout our lives by parents, teachers, and religious leaders. Yet every one of us has to admit to behaving deceptively at times. Why do we do this? Primarily to fool others, to take advantage of them. We often find ourselves in competition with other people—for food, sex, winning games, etc.; and we want to win. If we strut around in a posturing manner, we may hoodwink our competition into concluding that we're much more gallant and fierce-some than we really are. We've gotten the upper hand, before any real competition has begun.

An interesting twist on this game is that we're really not quite as dishonest as we appear to be, because we're not always intentionally deceitful. Sometimes we do it because we've deceived ourselves first. We tell ourselves lies, in order that our lies to others don't seem to be quite so unscrupulous. If we ourselves believe this stuff, others will be more likely to swallow it, and we won't feel all that guilty.

But how can we be so disingenuous, and how do we manage to live with ourselves, when we deceive other people and ourselves as much as we do? If we know that honesty is the best policy, won't our conscience tend to bother us? Well, if we've fooled ourselves into believing our own falsehoods, we don't even realize we're being dishonest.

What's the mechanism going on here? How can we not comprehend that we've duped even ourselves? (Of course, we don't do this all the time, or our lives would be phony and unreal.)

It all begins with our senses, which have evolved to give us a very accurate view of reality. If not, we'd probably not survive, and evolution would have done away with humans long ago. So our senses provide us with a good sample of the world. The problem occurs in the brain. Our ultimate perception of our world is what our brain makes it out to be—what it decides all those electrical signals delivered to the brain mean. Accuracy is not maintained if the signals get degraded or scrambled. And accuracy is lost in the process of making memories. How?

Much of our conception of our world is based on memories. Something happens. We perceive it in some manner, and then stash it in memory—to later retrieve it when we need it. The experiences we have range all over the place—from good to bad, painful to thrilling, sad to joyful, scary to comforting. Our brain will sometimes distort our memory of these experiences—by making them more to our liking. We repress painful memories, create false memories, sugar coat memories, and choose to notice only those things that feed our biases.

These distortions of our memories are often unconsciously formed, so that our conscious mind—unaware of the falsification of a memory—hangs onto it, as if it were valid. We've outwitted ourselves, and in the process, we may fool others as well.