512. Discarding The Myth Of The Free Will

512.   Discarding The Myth Of The Free Will

While learning about evolutionary biology and evolutionary psychology, I got more and more aware of how much people are determined by subconscious instinctive urges and impulses. As a side effect, already for a long time I have been implicitly and slowly discarding the myth of the free will, but postponing to consciously think this through.   
Implicitly this entire blog is based upon the concept of finding a partner, whose fulfilling my own relationship needs is not a decision by an alleged free will of his.  Instead I am looking for someone sharing with me the same innate inclinations towards the same behaviors and activities, thus enabling both of us to simultaneously fulfill the own and the partner's needs.

But as often, someone else has expressed my implicit idea already much better than I can.   There is an excellent video, in which Sam Harris discards very convincingly the myth of the free will:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=pCofmZlC72g#!

Human behavior is very complex.   It is too complex to be sufficiently logically explained during social interaction.  The mere observable behavior of any human does not reveal all or enough of what contributes to determine it.   This makes the attribution of any behavior to a free will a very tempting fallacy.   But the mere inability to fully understand the complexity is no justification to accept the myth of the free will as a substitute for the lacking full explanations.  

  
Discarding a tempting fallacy is not enough without some rudimentary alternative.   By extreme simplification, all behavior can ultimately and theoretically be explained as serving to either reduce subjectively experienced dishomeostasis or to stimulate the pleasure center of the brain by what is subjectively believed to be appropriate methods. 

The limitations of this simplification are due to the complexity of many variables and influences.   

The following are some, but certainly not all:

1.  Physical Or Cognitive.

Dishomeostasis and stimulated pleasure can either be triggered physically and materially or caused and enabled by faculties of the human cognition.  

 
Examples:

• Physical dishomeostasis. 
  Hunger
• Physical pleasure. 
  Bubble bath
  
• Intellectual dishomeostasis: 
  Boredom; the curiosity to know something.  
• Intellectual pleasure: 
  Flow experienced during a creative activity; enjoying an art exhibition.  
• Emotional dishomeostasis. 
  Feeling lonely in need of a mate; feeling betrayed in need of justice. 
• Emotional pleasure. 
  Feeling happy with a partner or by an achievement.   

2.  Intrinsic Or Extrinsic

Dishomeostasis and stimulated pleasure can be either intrinsically triggered by innate needs originating in the person's brain or extrinsically by influences and impact from the environment.  

Examples:

• Intrinsic dishomeostasis: 
  Hunger.
• Extrinsic dishomeostasis: 
  Fear as a reaction to a situation of real danger.
• Intrinsic source of pleasure stimulation:  
  The joy of finding the solution to a problem or puzzle.
• Extrinsic sources of pleasure stimulation:  
  The fragrance of a flower; listening to music.
  

3.  Innate Or Acquired

Dishomeostasis and stimulated pleasure can be either experienced by basic human faculties or only experienced by applying learned skills or previously gathered information. 

Examples:

• Spontaneous dishomeostasis: 
  Hunger
• Learned dishomeostasis:  
  Worries about a predicted real hazard, like a flood or a storm.
• Spontaneous pleasure:  
  Listening to the birds; enjoying the warmth of the sun.
• Learned pleasure:   
  Reading, swimming.

4.  Immediate, Anticipated Or Delayed

Behavior can be either an immediate homeostation or an immediate reaction to noticing a source of pleasure, or there can be a delay, anticipation and preparation.  This is enabled by the human memory for past experiences and by the cognitive ability to anticipate future experiences.   

Examples:

• Immediate homeostation: 
  Eating as soon as hunger is felt.
• Delayed homeostation:  
  Distributing the consumption of limited supplies over a long time in an emergency situation.
• Anticipated homeostation:  
  Carrying provision on a hike.
• Immediate pleasure:  
  Entering a cinema at the moment, when the announced movie stimulates the wish to see it.
• Delayed pleasure:  
  Rewarding oneself only after having finished a task.
• Anticipated pleasure:  
  Buying a ticket for a theater play in advance.

5.   Reality Or Delusion

Dishomeostasis, anticipation of dishomeostasis, pleasure and anticipation of pleasure are subjective experiences.  The perception and expectation of its magnitude is independent of objective evidence of the existence of its cause or the probability of its occurrence.
The subjective belief is enough to determine people's behavior, even when there is no real source or cause at all.  

The religious delusion of the existence of deities supplies good examples:

• Delusional dishomeostasis:  
  Feeling guilt of breaking a religious rule, even though nobody is harmed, like a catholic eating meat on Friday.  
• Delusional anticipation of dishomeostasis: 
  The belief in the purgatory and in hell.
• Delusional pleasure: 
  Religious experiences.
• Delusional anticipation of pleasure: 
  The belief in a heaven, where all suffering is allegedly rewarded with pleasure.   

6.   Reality Or Manipulation

Anticipation of improbable dishomeostasis and of slight pleasure can be enhanced and magnified by manipulation to appear significant.  Dishomeostasis of fear, anxiety and worries can be artificially induced to create markets for profit.

Examples: 

• Artificial dishomeostasis:
  Selling safety equipment.
• Artificial anticipation of dishomeostasis:
  Selling insurances
• Artificial anticipation of pleasure:
  Selling products for consumption.

7.   Simultaneous And Competing Triggers

Dishomeostasis from more than one deficit can simultaneously exist and several stimuli can compete to have the strongest impact upon the pleasure center.    

7.1.  When there is full conscious perception of all options, the human cognition allows to choose on a long term basis between possible behaviors as the reaction to the competing urges and the available stimuli.

Examples.  

• The self-control during a diet, when the phyisical dishomoestasis of being hungry is competing with the mental dishomeostasis of being discontent with being obese.  
• The self-control of decisions to spend money or to save it for a purpose.  The marshmallow test is a good example.  

7.2.  Strong dishomeostasis can sometimes hide weaker dishomeostasis temporarily from being noticed. 

   
Example:

• A hungry person with limited money buys food and not a book.   The dishomeostasis of being bored only reaches the awareness after having eaten. 

8.   Attribution Of Causes
 

People often do not understand the real cause of dishomeostasis.  Therefore they fail in their attempt to cope with it. 

8.1.   Own dishomeostasis
Diffuse feelings of dishomeostasis are not understood or attributed to false causes.   Sometimes the attempts to cope replace one dishomeostasis with another.  

Examples:

• Overeating, physical addiction to drugs and emotional addiction to gambling are two examples of mislead attempts to cope with some other dishomeostasis like stress or unrecognized relationship problems.

8.2.  Other's dishomeostasis
People are often not aware of innate differences.   They project, that what is good for them is also good for others.   They are oblivious, that what stimulates their own pleasure center sometimes causes others' dishomeostasis.

Examples:  

• People getting pleasure from eating garlic or fish are unaware, that even the smell can cause nausea to others.    
• People playing their favorite music are unaware, that it can be annoying noise to others.  

8.3.  General expectation of dishomeostasis
External influences like social norms and desensitization modify or destroy the general perception, awareness for and recognition of the real and genuine innate dishomeostasis.   This distorts the expectations about how others are impacted by the own behavior and of how to best deal with the own dishomeostasis.   
 

Examples: 

• The desensitization by being exposed to too much sex and violence in the media has destroyed the dishomeostasis of feeling empathy and guilt as a deterrent to hurt and abuse others.
• The dishomeostasis of lonely nice guys in need of finding a companion is modified by the social norm of promiscuity.  They are manipulated to feel instead the artificial dishomeostasis of wanting to be oversexed studs.

As a consequence of discarding the free will, I do not expect anything from anybody, unless I get it either in return or as a side effect of an interaction, during which my behavior contributes to either the other's homeostation or to the stimulation of his pleasure center.  With strangers, this is trial and error based upon the tit-for-tat strategy.   

In a relationship, communication revealing the partner's most urgent dishomeostasis and special susceptibility of his pleasure center is very important.   Know this reciprocally is an important part of knowing the partner and of making a relationship last. 

407. Promiscuity Is The Real Cause Of Romance Scams

Promiscuity Is The Real Cause Of Romance Scams

"New online research led by the University of Leicester reveals that over 200,000 people living in Britain may have fallen victim to online romance scams"

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/09/110927192347.htm?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+sciencedaily%2Fscience_society+%28ScienceDaily%3A+Science+%26+Society+News%29

I claim, that the success of online romance scams is caused by the difference between what is available and what men are looking for driven by their instincts.    Male animal instincts and promiscuity are the cause of the scammers' success.    If the same portion of women as of men would want or accept flings instead of commitment, if there were an equilibrium of both genders looking for the same kind of relationships, there were no successful scammers.  

The basic of market economy is the simple fact, that the more something is scarce, the more people are willing to pay for it.  Nobody would pay for what is free and plentiful.  By their innate animal instincts, men have a much higher need for sexual homeostasis by using indiscriminately any haphazard female body than what is available for free.    

Therefore men can get sexual homeostation by force, manipulation or earn it, but it is not freely available.    They can 'buy' homeostation by giving a decent woman what she wants, monogamy, commitment, reliability.   They can otherwise buy homeostation by paying money.   Men with enough money and/or who are lacking the qualities to be accepted by a monogamous women prefer to just buy homoestation by money.   The flourishing markets of prostitution and pornography provide ample evidence of this.    If women were as promiscuous by instinct as are most men, there were no market.  

Unfortunately the tolerance and even positive general acceptance of promiscuity blurs the fact, that it is a man's problem, which is detrimental to women.     But the media responsible for the brainwashing of people are usually dominated by men.  Often they are influential enough to brainwash even women to lose all awarenes of what is beneficial and what is detrimental for themselves.  
Men's affliction to need sexual homeostasis is bad enough as it is by causing urges.   But the oversexation and growing tolerance and condoning of promiscuity in many modern societies has done a lot of damage even to men themselves, who deprive themselves of what would be most beneficial for them long-term.  I described this in entry 404 about men's marshmallow test.    

Many men, who are ignorant of evolutionary biology, have been brainwashed to believe the myth, that women are only repressed from being as promiscuous as men.    Instead of earning homeostation by self-control and monogamy, they annoy decent women with their attempts to use their bodies and then they are surprised to get rejected.    The tragedy of this myth is that the men, who project their own promiscuity upon women, are deprived of the awareness of the emotional damage of promiscuity upon monogamous women.    The women, who are brainwashed by this myth, are even more pathetic, because until they know better by experience, they reinforce men's belief in this myth.   


1.  Men as targets.

Scammers are taking advantage of this market situation.  Their male bait are bodies of women, that make the targets drool over their pictures.   The targets are made not only to believe to be able to buy the gratitude of the bait, but also to buy more control over her than they can expect to gain over women from their own country.   

2.  Women as targets.  

Being a woman, I myself have been either contacted by hundreds of scammers or have seen their profiles.   The scammers' baits are the fiction of monogamous, committing men, who have the morals and self-control not to be promiscuous.   Their targets are especially elderly lonely women, whom they expect to be most prone to have money and to be of a generation less tolerant to the uncommitted use of women's bodies.   
I know, how to recognize them, mainly because they are lacking the intellectual capacities of mature university educated men and because their fiction is created to attract their more typical targets, who are religious breeders.     
Those many men, who are brainwashed to believe in the myth of female promiscuity, express in their profiles not only, that they are looking for a long term relationship, but also their wish or willingness to have flings, non-strings-attached fun, friends with benefits and such.    They are ignorant, that this way they are repulsive to decent women and drive them to prefer the scammers.   The targets get attracted by the bait of the profiles of those fictitious monogamous men, who seem to be the rare pearls in the gutter of promiscuity.   Tragically they are scammers instead.   

In entry 101 I already declared promiscuity as a scourge of humanity.   Male promiscuity and the male delusion of female promiscuity are also enabling the romance scams.  That is one more reason to call it a scourge.            

404. Men's Marshmallow Test

Men's Marshmallow Test

The marshmallow test was developed for researching children's delayed gratification.   

There is one marshmallow on a plate available to be eaten at any time.  Children are sitting at a table looking at the marshmallow.   They are told that if they postpone eating the marshmallow for a certain predefined time, they will be rewarded by getting a second marshmallow.  

Due to their animal instincts, men's lives are a kind of a marshmallow test, in which homeostation is the marshmallow.  
The weak instinct driven fools indiscriminately use every female body, over which they gain temporary control.  They get superficial satisfaction from promiscuity in their never ending recurrent hunt for another prey.   
The wise, mature, and intelligent men know the value of monogamy.  By refraining from using bodies and instead carefully choosing a companion, they not only get a long-term subscription for sexual homeostasis, but addisionally they also earn the reward of the non-physical joy of emotional and intellectual intimacy.