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Thursday, October 26, 2006
9:20 PM This Things I Believe Well, since Miss T posted her little rant about the perceived gender divide on her blog, I thought it was about time I pulled my thumb out and penned some of my thoughts on life. So here goes... Identity There are about 6 billion people in the world today (and about 100 billion that have ever lived on our little planet) and we are all unique. It's pretty much a given that who we are is identified as our personality, and that our personality is a composite of nature and nurture- or basically our physical body and how we were raised. Let's look at nature first. Our bodies are fantastically complex, and different parts affect the way we act. Some people are naturally more aggressive (or horny!) than others because their bodies produce more testosterone than your average joe. Some people are smarter because they are born with bigger brains. Others are mentally ill because of the way their brains are. It all comes down to genes, and everyones genes are different so they produce different people. And it's all inherited from your parents, your parents' parents, and your parents' parents' parents. No higher than that though; it's not that complex. To quote Troy Mclure "Ever wondered why fat people have fat children? Or Chinese people have Chinese children? It's no coincidence, it's all because of D. N. A". There are so many differences between you and the next person. Your genes may have produced a slightly different tongue, which have more taste buds in the sweet region meaning that you're more sensitive to sweet things. I personally have found that me, my dad and my uncle don't tend to feel hunger when going without food. It's entirely possible that we've all inherited certain characteristics that mean we don't feel hunger, wheras other people have more hunger receptors meaning they get more hungry. We don't all feel sensastions the same as everyone else, so try not to be too judgemental the next time a lardarse sits next to you on the bus; maybe you'd be as big as them if you experienced hunger the same. The same applies to so many other characteristic of the human body, and these characteristics boil down to your genes. Then we get to nurture. We're all raised differently. I don't mean raised in the traditional sense of "brought up by mum and dad" raised, but in terms of receiving every single little stimulus we've been exposed to. I mean, you could have two kids raised in the same way by their parents, but they'd have different personalities because one may have got in with a bad crowd, or one happened to have been left back in class (a la Ace Rimmer from Red Dwarf). Just like above in nature, where every little difference in your genes will result in a slightly different personality, so too will every little piece of stimulus that a body receives- every little thing you see, hear, touch, smell, and whatever the other sense is (grope?). Have you ever thought about something, then thought about something else, then something else etc and then wondered how you got to thinking about that? A quick backtrack and you may have realised how each thought linked to the other. Imagine if thought #1 was something simple like "Wow, she's hot! She reminds me of Mischa Barton" and the subsequent thoughts led to thought #12 "That would be a brilliant business idea!". In the space of a few minutes you could have gone from perving on someone to becoming a millionaire! And that might not have happened if you hadn't have happened to glance at the Mischa Barton-a-like. It's just like that theory about a butterfly flapping its wings and creating a hurricane on the opposite side of the world. You may not even notice life changing stimuli, it could be buried in your subconcious and change the way you act without you realising. Everything you have ever seen or heard has in some way changed your life to some extent. Bring the two together and what do you have? Different people not only receive different stimuli, they also reactto this stimuli differently because of their different brains. There's no such thing as Nature versus Nurture- they go hand in hand and can't exist without each other. It's an iterative process; you receive stimuli, change, and that changed person receives stimuli differently, and so on. You are the person you are because of the genes you were born with + the way you were 'raised'. These are two things that you have NO control over, meaning... dun dun DUH! THERE'S NO SUCH THING AS FREE WILL!!!!! Your average person likes to think that they hold a choice over who they are, but it's not really true. Scary thought #644: If you were born with exactly the same genes as a suicide bomber, and received exactly the same stimuli as a suicide bomber, then YOU would be a suicide bomber! Whoever invented that old phrase about walking a mile in someone elses moccasins REALLY knew what they were talking about. Morality Who is to say what's right or wrong? We're all taught what is right and wrong from our parents/surroundings/government/religion etc. Surely someone who gets taught different things as being right/wrong has a different moral compass to other people? Again, take suicide bombers as an example; they may believe what they are doing is right. They have a different moral compass to others. I used to know a really 'moral' guy called Merv (I posted about him during the World Cup- he's the breakdancing gospel singing Christian) and he was a really nice guy. He wasn't a vegetarian, and I asked him whether he thought it was bad to kill and eat animals- he thought it was fine. This view would clash with a Buddhist. Merv and the Buddhist were raised differently, so different compasses. That's not to say that someone born a Christian will always hold Christian values; they may change because of the stimuli they were exposed to. Even someone who is traditionally viewed as being 'evil' doesn't really have themself to blame; there could be a plethora of mitigating circumstances from mental illness (nature) to the way they were raised (nurture). Some people recognise themselves as doing 'wrong' and try to change, but yet again their capacity to change depends on who they are and how they were raised- their received personality. You can't run away from who you are; if you can, it's because of who you are. Soul A lot of people (when confronted with the above argument) have said that your 'higher self' (super-ego?) is your soul, and that it's your soul that makes all the important decisions in your life. Well, there's no evidence for a soul existing in humans. Even if it exists, what does it do for our morals exactly? And if we did have one, it's not like we ever got the chance to choose what type of soul we got!! There's no choice in any of it. How would you even separate where a human brain ends and where a soul begins? Does your personality affect your soul? If so, changes to your soul are not your fault because there's no such thing as free will. Do animals have souls? Is it just 'higher' animals? Do ants have souls? Single cell organisms? If one has, so do all the rest, after all we're all living things. What use does an amoeba have for a soul? When you think about it, this abstract thing called a soul is an absurd idea. The Rakes had it down- we are all animals. Some are just more complex than others. Also, bonobos ROCK. Fate Well, so far we've got to the stage where we know we're all just animals and that there's no such thing as free will; if you had my DNA and received exactly the same stimuli as me at exactly the same time as me then you'd be sitting here typing this all out. The next stage is physics. We know a little about the laws of physics, and in that we can predict how certain forces will act using certain calculations. Let's say we have a computer and are modelling how two atoms will react when they hit each other. It won't be completely accurate, because we don't precisely know all the variables that would affect an atomic collision. The more we know about the atoms and the surroundings (atmosphere, gravity etc) then the more accurate our result is. Let's say some super-duper computer knew every single little thing about the laws of physics and our two atoms- surely it would come out with a perfect result? Extend that possibility to the Big Bang- suppose our supercomputer knew every single possible thing about the cosmic soup we all started out from, surely it could build a model and play out how the galaxies and planets formed? Not only that, but also play out how we came about, and everything that happened in human history? Here's the point; if the computer to was speeded up, it would play out what happens in our future. In Terminator, Kyle Reese said "The future is not set, there's no fate but what we make for ourselves". Well, sorry to burst your bubble Kyle, but the future is set; we just don't know enough about our universe or physics to predict it. So there we have it... nobody is truly to blame for what they do, there's no free will, there's no such thing as a soul and our futures are set. Sounds kinda gloomy, doesn't it?  Not for me, I like it. Leave a comment ::
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In a Keanu Reeves stylee:
yes, yes all very interesting, but where do you stand on the very important issue of spermicide?
Tim - It's not all whoa! The post title is a Homer Simpson quote! 10 points for guessing where from without googling.
"we just don't know enough about our universe or physics to predict it."
It's the episode where-
Nice post. Very nice. I'm not sure what I think about free will, concerned with day to day life and then the big picture. But this puts things down nicely.
Actually, I followed J-Man's link to Heisenberg's thingie and found it interesting reading. I didn't understand a whole lot of it - but I think I got the general gist. Fascinating.
Heisenberg's refers to the innaccuracies in measuring, J. This is a theoretical concept.
That 'Isaac Asimov stuff' actually supports your arguement. It's ostensibly about creating a mathematical formula to predict the future through social trends and other factors, indicating that we don't neccessarily have a whole lot of free will.
I only know about those books from peeking at J's Amazon Wish List, I never actually looked into what they're about. I may have to investigate though, as it sounds pretty interesting.
They use Heisenberg compensators in Star Trek.
nasty cough you have there tim, want a Locket?
Asimov's Foundation series is the greatest work of Science Fiction ever. If you remotely like sci-fi then you should read at _least_ the original trilogy. I own pretty much every novel he ever wrote and a few short story collections. Borrow them when you're up at my PARTY at the weekend. Yay!
I may have to, but my reading list is pretty long at the mo and I probably won't end up reading it till all the stuff in there becomes reality.
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