Alfred Mele: Free Will – Key to Consciousness?
FREE WILL? Let me be clear.. I do not want to be misinterpreted… We must all be held accountable for what we do….. Praise for what we achieve through genuine hard work and altruism, also criticism and penalty for doing wrong.
We simply do not have complete control of who we turn out to be though. Ongoing research on paedophilia for example offers some very interesting findings…… 10% of the ‘normal’ population are left handed, however, up to 35% of paedophiles are left handed (one of many indicators). When their brain is scanned, more often than not unusual patterns of white matter are found in comparison to a ‘normal’ brain and cross wiring between areas that are for showing empathy towards children instead activate the attraction / sexual response towards an adult… Through no fault of their own a paedophile’s brain wiring seems to create this attraction towards a child, the brains cables and pulleys out of place… (billions of interactions within a brain)
Research is ongoing, and a long way to go before a full understanding is reached but this is what a paedophile has to contend with…. brain wiring that heavily dictate their thoughts, very sad and unfortunate circumstances. Extreme behaviour
….however, ‘Normal’ people have a very intricate brain too which pulls the strings for day to day thoughts and actions. Those who start a diet every single Monday, offering excuse after excuse after each failure are considered ‘normal’ in western society, maybe they should think themselves lucky that the brain wasn’t wired for extremes such as paedophilia and wired instead for ‘normal’ and accepted bad habits instead.
We are in an era where we can begin to truly understand ourselves and others much more clearly. We all too often fall into traps of offering praise or criticism but actually have no real clue about human behaviour. We just follow cultural memes blindly without question… We are much closer to our ape cousins than we think if we continue to be so automatic with our perceptions and don’t step back to consider all possibilities which includes future research that will unravel real reasons and not convenient judgements. The world is a mess with ‘know it all’ mentality fixed together with ego glue. Isn’t it?
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