Michael Mitchell: Archive

Humans exhibit remarkable resiliency in the face of seemingly insurmountable survival obstacles. Weather. Famine. Disease. Even war.

How?

Are those instincts wired into our brains, innate knowledge passed through genetics? Or are they the product of learning, of acquiring knowledge, from reality and each other, after we're born? There's no reason both can't be factual, of course, but we can't control the former, only the latter, and what we started with only matters insofar as it's consequential to our further development.

How do you distinguish the difference between nature and nurture, between a predisposition to something like clinical depression due to your brain chemistry and actually learning it habitually via familial and societal role models and other environmental factors?

If you study the brain, try to causally link something to depression, you're going to find it. If you interview my father and me, try to link his thoughts to my behavior, you're going to do it. I know no one's scientific method is that simple and subjective, that we have standards and "controls" for it, but my point is if you were to gather all the greatest minds throughout history and let them argue this shit, every one of them -- except for Objectivists -- will forget to include themselves, their own minds, the only actual source they have access to for the particular data required to answer this question.

In order to look at someone else and say they do or don't have free will, for instance, you have to rely on your own. From an external perspective it looks like everyone's just responding differently to stimuli, simple cause and effect, like dominos, and you simply need to identify and verify all the causal links, but in your mind you know that's not what you're doing, that you're not just allowing yourself to blindly react to shit. The idea of nature versus nurture is actually offensive. (Hello?!) You know there are an incalculable number of possible actions you can take, that you control an incredible power over yourself and reality, even though you can only choose to take one action at a time. Free will, volition, self-determination, agency, whatever you want to call it, it's a form of causality, not a violation of it. The law doesn't break because we're in control of it. It breaks us when we're not. The next time you flip a light switch, would you bet your life the bulb will light up?

A long, long time ago, religion sold us on a meaningful life. (Read that again.) We think we need something "greater" to keep us in line, to hold us down, a standard to use to determine how we should act, but who's choosing the standard? Who's determining if we're acting consistently with it? If I get a flat tire on my way to work, was it because I didn't sacrifice a lamb to God last Sunday or because I ran over a nail? Which is "greater"? The nail or God?

If only individuals can make choices, how can we effectively study human behavior? We can't read minds. We have no direct experience of anyone else's consciousness. How do I know other people are even conscious at all?

Humans exhibit remarkable resiliency in the face of seemingly insurmountable survival obstacles. Weather. Famine. Disease. Even war.

You have to believe in the efficacy of your own mind before you can believe in anything. If I pulled some Sophist mindfuck right now and convinced you you're wrong about everything you know, you had to believe me to determine that conclusion.

• Socrates: The unexamined life is not worth living.
• Also Socrates: I know that I know nothing.

That's rationality. You can't even be wrong without it. When you're thinking or acting irrationally, you're still a rational being. There's no escaping your nature, how your mind works. You can't follow someone else's commandments without choosing to. No matter what principles you choose to guide your life, whether they're ones you think have worked for thousands of years or ones you created on your own, you chose them.

The truth? Religion itself is a myth. It never worked. It was always philosophy. And just as we give socialism credit for capitalism's achievements in our "mixed" economy, we give altruism credit for egoism's in our "mixed" morality, and religion credit for philosophy's in our "mixed" world view.

If I advise you to honor your father and mother, that's based upon my experience with my own parents and any other similar experiences I've seen and judged. That's all I personally have to go by. No one's God. All knowledge is contextual. If your parents abuse you you have to be able to rethink that advice on your own. You can't blame me for sharing advice that was good for me but bad for you when I had no knowledge of the abuse. The added information changes the conclusion, the original evaluation that all parents are worthy of honor. I had no way of knowing I was wrong.

Now apply that to the ten commandments.

There's no alternative to moral independence. Religion can't help us, nor can science as a religion, because the concept of religion itself requires not questioning man's laws, as if they're universal laws, because it conflates morality and politics. It was designed to keep the peace and, until we separated church and state, failed disastrously every damn time for a reason. There's no alternative to moral independence.