The Abdication of Volition
by Michael F Dickey
On the Autodidactic list I am a member of I came across this article:
'Thirst for knowledge' may be opium craving
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2006-06/uosc-fk062006.php
This conception is a blatant reversal of cause and effect. Your brain does not give you an opium dose so that you will learn things, if that were true than all people everywhere would immediately become compulsive autodidactics, everyone compelled irrevocably to achieve, attain, and understand, and we would all be living indefinite life spans all ready and spreading among the starts because of the collective achievements of all these great, but right now idle, minds. The billions of man hours spent watching reality TV shows and bimbo heiresses clearly suggests otherwise.
The obvious flaw to me in this article is that the gestalts that produce this effect can only occur with things that have a significant meaning to the person who learns them. I could spend my whole life studying a great puzzle of nature, finally and ecstatically answer it, and get that neural opium shot, and then run through the streets shouting the answer. But even if I took the time to coalesce all the complexities of my discovery into a short conceptual statement, and people ‘got it’ when I said it to them, they are not rewarded by a neural opium shot as well, even though they have learned a new concept, because they don’t care about that concept in the first place, nor place any importance to it. I should think this would be obvious to anyone who spends some time reflecting on it. It’s not the grasping of a concept that we are rewarded for, it’s for answering a question that we have made important to ourselves.
This chemical mind \ body emotion causal reversal is something I find very common, especially in areas pertaining to love, where the tendency that seems at the forefront of academia today is for scientists to act on knowledge only as blocks of perception. Lacking conceptual descriptions of bodies of knowledge, scientists are led to make perceptions, that is observations, into causal proclamations! This is quite simply an abdication of our volition to the forces that guide blind automatons. They do so by making the measurements, and descriptions of affects they discern, into the actual causes of the variables they are measuring.
Consider in addition to this article, Dr. Helen Fisher’s book “Why We Love: The Nature and Chemistry of Romantic Love” where in this review http://www.firstscience.com/site/articles/love.asp they specifically sum up Fisher’s thesis as "...this fire in the mind is caused by elevated levels of either dopamine or norepinephrine or both, as well as decreased levels of serotonin." Note the book is called “Why We Love” followed by the answer of course, which is “The Nature And Chemistry of Romantic Love” clearly implying that nature and chemistry are the reasons why we love. It would be more apt to call such a book, if it did not confuse cause and effect, “How We Love” (That is, how a physical body manifests the emotions of love). Why is the ‘fire in the mind’ caused by the elevated levels of either dopamine or norepinephrine instead of the elevated levels of dopamine and norepinephrine being caused by the “fire in the mind”!
When a person who is in love exhibits elevated levels of these opium like drugs, the scientists then interpret that to mean that they are in love because the brain has produced that drug! Which is ridiculous, of course, you do not fall in love because your brain produces a chemical, your brain produces a chemical *because* you fall in love. The difference is superficially subtle, yet vitally important to all of our conceptions of humanity and emotions. It is the difference between being a slave to your emotional whims originated in the mindless mechanistics of your biological chemistry and having your emotions be the logical consequences of the deepest values you choose. It is the difference between being a robotic slave and a thinking, feeling person.
Similarly you do not seek to answer questions because your brain will give you a fix, your brain gives you a fix because you have sought so hard to answer something that’s important to you. The pre programmed emotional response is to reward the discovery of hard sought information, but what you seek and whether you seek it at all (since the question must first become important to you) is decided by you, and valued by you.
Your body is a physical entity which exists in the real world and your mind is an intangible pattern that can not be weighed or touched. The latter must then have a physical mechanism by which it can interact with the former, and these mechanisms are primarily hormones and drugs. When you identify values important to you, and integrate them fundamentally into your person through habitualization and repetition, your emotions respond in kind. That is what emotions are in a healthy brain. They are automatic responses to stimuli based on your deeply ingrained fundamental values. The response of your emotions is automatic and instinctual, but what they respond to and why is up to you. Your emotions are a complex neurological and biochemical program, but you decide what variables that program focuses on.
If you value honesty and integrity, and you integrate those values wholly (which necessarily includes becoming an honest person of integrity yourself, since you can’t honestly value something you flagrantly violate) and you recognize those virtues in person, your mind responds by rewarding that recognition with a biochemical response that affects both your mind and body. You respect them. And to the extent at which you recognize and value other attributes, and to the extent that they are manifested in another person, you come to respect, admire, cherish, and even love them.
How much of a leap will it be for a society which frequently says “no one ever invents anything because they were inclined by society to do so” to take these kind of causal reversals and move to “all the great inventors and scientist of the world were only ever drug addicts and were addicted to the opium their brain released when they figured something out, the greater the inventor, the worse the addict who lost all control over his own functions and normal humanity” The same can and will be said of any great scientist, artist, musician, or poet. Can I help but think that an obvious implication of this is that they are saying the greats of humanity are weird and crazy drug addicts, while the average persons are really healthy and sane. The greats failed and gave in to their cravings, the mediocre and average, were strong and resolute. Of course there is nothing wrong with not wanting to achieve great things, it is after all your own life and you get to live it as you please. But to attack and belittle those who do, who have made all the great things that have made our lives so easy, pleasurable, and enjoyable, and to attribute their accomplishments to anything besides their hard work, dedication, and massive effort is not only beyond outrageous and insulting, it is entirely factually incorrect. Only the post modern scientific nihilist would assert that values are unimportant, that human emotions are deterministic and materialistic, that the great achievers of the world were slaves to cravings, that knowledge has no intrinsic value, and that rational intelligent beings don’t seek it because they live on earth and desire to survive and prosper on it, but only to get high.
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