Complexity of the Human Mind Allows for Reality and Ethics to Be Rendered Simple Enough to Be Understood

Yet Those Who Deny Free Will and the Human Capacity for Intellectual Originality Try to Reverse That Fact



Stuart K. Hayashi

On this blog I have previously written of two fallacies. In this essay, I will say how I think the two are related. I will also discuss the manner in which I think they are connected to a third fallacy that I have also addressed. And I will conclude with an iteration of how I think my rejection of the third fallacy is the result of my having a conclusion that is the perfect inverse of the implicit premise of advocates of the first two fallacies.

These are the first two fallacies: (1) the denial that humans possess free will, and (2) the denial that humans are capable of originality in art and invention.

There are deniers of free will who deny it on the basis of supernatural claims. They pronounce that God, gods, prophecies, or the “movements” of stars directly determine the entire courses of our life. But here I am thinking of those who deny free will on an allegedly secular basis. Following in the tradition of the philosopher Baruch Spinoza, they purport to show that Aristotle’s Laws of Identity and Causality themselves preclude free will. I have refuted the argument in more detail over here, here, here, and here. For the purpose of this new essay, I will say that they presume that because the human brain can be reduced to flesh and chemical reactions, it follows that there is no free will. And they continue that if your decision-making is influenced by any preexisting context, then that precludes free will. They would have it that in what you mistake for decision-making on your part, you are really a machine that is made out of meat and is ultimately running on the programming of chemical reactions and conditioning from environmental stimuli.

There are also those who deny that anything in artwork or invention is truly original. They propound that any artwork or invention that is initially praised for being original turns out not to be. They say that their reason for concluding as much is that every allegedly-original artwork or invention was at least partially inspired by other, preexisting artworks or inventions. The mere existence of any influences prior to the new artwork or invention, they assert, precludes any originality to be found in the new artwork or invention. They say that the idea of “originality” is misleading at best and quite illusory. As a substitute, they continue in their rhetoric, we should concede that any artwork or invention that we value should be praised simply as a competent “re-mix” and nothing beyond that. We are to settle for believing that everything we value is no more than a “re-mixing” of long-established conventions, and resigning ourselves to that conclusion is the best we can do. I have refuted that fallacy over here.

It is not unusual for deniers of originality to be, at least implicitly, deniers of free will as well. I have noticed this pattern over the years in philosophically-utilitarian Libertarians on Facebook. This has been especially a pattern in utilitarian Libertarians who stitch together very trite straw-man arguments against the validity of intellectual property rights. Now I think I know the connection.

Intellectual originality is something that requires the deliberate taking of initiative. The capacity for producing something original is incumbent upon someone being proactive in willingly choosing to venture into areas of thought that do not have well-established precedent. And the secular denial of free will is something that denigrates, from the outset, any acknowledgment of the very same proactivity. When a man downplays and denigrates acknowledgment of the necessity of free will in producing works of originality, that man encounters cognitive dissonance insofar as he celebrates artworks or inventions that he senses, at least implicitly, to demonstrate a sizable degree of novelty.

The attempted solution to that cognitive dissonance is to denigrate these praised-as-original works as a fortuitous result of people still doing something that, when it comes to how they use their nervous systems, is much more passive than what proactive originality would entail. In this interpretation, people passively “re-mix” the same conventional practices in art and engineering that have always have been “re-mixed,” and the works that stand out the most are the most serendipitously beneficial “re-mixes.” In lieu of acknowledging the proactiveness — the free will — in originality, the deniers of free will and originality pronounce that our favorite artworks and inventions came about as the most-fortuitous effects of relatively psychologically-passive “re-mixing” of traditions that humans have always practiced. Hence, the explicit denial of originality is the logical corollary to the irrational presumption that an adult’s actions cannot be attributed accurately to the proactively volitional choice-making of the adult herself.

Now we come to the third fallacy, the fallacy I most want to address in this essay. Many of the same deniers of free will and originality have another favorite stock-conclusion. They tell me, “You Objectivists want to believe that reality — even ethics — can be understood in terms of relatively simple principles. Yet reality itself is too messy and complex for your nice-and-neat logic. And that means reality is, in turn, too messy and complex for your simplistic principles.” 

You may note that part of the third fallacy is largely a simpler restatement of Immanuel Kant’s fallacious “Analytic-Synthetic Dichotomy.” I have already refuted the “Analytic-Synthetic Dichotomy.” over here. That is the part that says that the material reality you experience is too chaotic for Nice-and-Neat Logic to apply to it. Rather than refute that fallacy again, I here want to address how I think it stems at least partially from the other two fallacies, the denials of free will and originality. I find it ironic when the deniers of free will and originality say that reality is so complex that to live by principles is to try to oversimplify life. It is ironic, as the deniers’ pseudo-definitions of “free will” and “originality” are the actual oversimplifications. As a faculty of the human mind, free will is complex enough that it is not precluded if decision-making is influenced by factors external to the decision-making consciousness. Likewise as an important function of the human mind, intellectual originality is complex enough that the originality within an artwork or invention can still be recognized and appreciated even as that artwork or invention was inspired by previous works. Yet in their proclaiming reality as too complex for logic, the deniers’ implicit message is that logic and rationality themselves are too existentially simple even to begin to become applicable in the face of the complexities of reality and ethics.  

People who accuse Objectivism and me of oversimplification in my trying to make sense of reality and ethics are the ones doing the actual oversimplification. They are trying to push an interpretation of human volitional consciousness that is oversimplified to the point that it cannot countenance the factual existence of free will or originality. I find that when public commentators like Sam Harris try to portray the mind as so simple that free will and originality are presumed not to exist, those commentators can conclude that human behavior is explained not by complex internal psychological phenomena but instead simpler and more-predictable unconscious bodily functions and environmental stimuli. That is, when a man denies the complexity of the mind and its volition, that man can “explain” (pseudo-explain) human actions as though they are relatively simple and predictable. But that oversimplified interpretation of human behavior does not leave room for addressing the seeming nuances of ethics. That leads these people to write off the discipline of ethics as too complicated to be understood in terms of principles anyway. (Of course, that is an internal contradiction: if science “proved” that the chemical processes of the mind are too simple for the mind to possess free will and understand reality in terms of consistent principles, then the mind would not be capable of knowing that science “proved” as much!)

I think I know how to phrase it now: in its necessarily volitional nature, the human mind is complex. And it is the complexity of that volitional nature that allows the mind to induce relatively simplified principles by which Nature and even ethics can be understood accurately. But the deniers of free will and originality try to reverse that: they presume the mind to be too simple even to possess the capacity for original thinking and the free will that intellectual original thinking requires. And the corollary to that presumption is the conclusion that reality and ethics must be too complicated for that same overly-simple mind to comprehend in the form of consistent principles.

For Sam Harris-type deniers of free will and utilitarian Libertarian economists who deny originality, it is the mind that is simple — too simple to exercise free will and originality — and the mind being simple makes material reality and ethics too complex to be understood in the form of principles. By contrast, my interpretation is that the human mind is complex, and that complexity allows for the mind to study the complexities of material reality and ethics to the point where they can be understood terms that can be made relatively simple. Those relatively-simple terms are the valid principles.

The Real Climb Needed Is the Climb Toward Mental Health

Stuart K. Hayashi

Unironic trigger warning: discusses child sexual abuse and someone’s suicidal ideation.

After many years, this still haunts me. Years ago I would, on a daily basis, talk in person with someone who, out of nowhere, would bring up the topic of adults sexually abusing prepubescent children. She didn’t directly tell me the reason for this fascination. But now I have a strong suspicion for the reason. At first it started as a joke. She said that her favorite signature on internet message boards was “The internet is where men are men, women are men, and small children turn out to be undercover FBI agents.” The last part refers to the police’s sting operations to catch child molesters.

Later she said that I reminded her of an ex-boyfriend back in her native Europe. She said, “He was very sweet.” Then she stared into space, giggled, and said, “He would always joke that he was a pedophile trying to trick little kids into having sex with him.” Suffice it to say, I don’t appreciate being compared to that guy.

Then one night she said to me, “When a convicted sex offender moves into a neighborhood, why do Americans get so irrational about it?” My eyebrows raised. I stammered, “Wh– What do you mean?” She replied, “When a man who had sex with a little girl moves into their neighborhood, Americans want to run him out. They should learn to accept that she consented to it.” I was so flummoxed that I could not respond other than by staring with my mouth gaping open. She changed the subject.

She also mentioned that she had a long history of wanting to be dead literally. She blamed much of this on an incident when she was thirteen. She was mistreated by a boy who was also thirteen at the time. I don’t doubt that this happened. Even then, I thought that this didn’t explain completely why she was so fixated on full-grown adult men in particular preying upon prepubescent children in particular. Then my friend said to me, “Promise me that you will always protect me.” I replied that I would.

When she was not in Hawai‘i with me but was in her native Europe for the summer, she got mostly uncommunicative. But during a short interruption from that uncommunicativeness, she told me that she was having a panic attack every day. Greatly concerned, I made contact with her paternal aunt in the USA. Her paternal aunt soon started telling me about other topics, such as that, as a small girl, the paternal aunt was sexually abused both by my friend’s paternal grandfather and one of his brothers, the latter of whom killed himself later. She also said that when she told her mother (my friend’s paternal grandmother) about this, her mother denounced her and feigned ignorance about it. She also mentioned that she finds it doubtful that my friend’s father knew nothing of this.

My friend then had an “internet-famous” artist guy go through the effort of photoshopping her pictures to make her look like a recently-deceased corpse with a chalky-white face. That was his specialty: he would take photos of himself and photoshop himself to look like a dead body with chalky-white skin. To this very day, many people across the world enthusiastically re-upload his corpse photoshops on their social-media accounts. Everyone around my friend found her corpse photoshops concerning. But it was of especial worry to me because she had previously told me of her long history of wanting to be dead literally.

Corpse Artist said he wished she would dye her hair a particular different color. When she returned to Hawai‘i, her hair was dyed that color.

It turned out later that my friend has another relative who is a celebrity among Ralph Nader/Noam Chomsky-type Socialist activists. Her son and daughter-in-law were supporting actors in very famous movies; her daughter-in-law was even the main supporting actress in an Oscar-winning drama. A Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist even wrote an entire mainstream book about this socialist activist. In the book, she is quoted saying that, as a small child, she was sexually abused by stepfather. On my own, having read some important obituaries online, I learned that the stepfather is my friend’s grandfather’s other brother.

That means: My friend’s paternal grandfather and two of his brothers were all accused of sexually abusing small girls whom they were supposed to be watching over. It took me an embarrassingly long amount of time to face that this consideration might be connected to my friend’s insistence on repeatedly bringing up the topic of grown men molesting prepubescent girls. The aunt gave me the impression that my friend probably didn’t know of these accusations from her aunts and other relative. If my friend’s fascination with child molesters came from her family, it was something she learned about, not from her aunts and other relative, but horrifyingly more directly.

One day my friend stopped uploading the Corpse Artist’s pictures of her photoshopped as a dead body with a chalky-white face. She looked alive again and wasn’t dyeing her hair the color that Corpse Artist said. She was instead touting herself as a businesswoman and uploading photos of herself on the peaks of mountains. But then she did something else. Up until that point, my friend’s legal last name was not her father’s. There is an odd story about that, which relates to further trauma on her father’s side I haven’t mentioned. And now, with great fanfare, she legally changed her last name to that of her father. That’s much more subtle than uploading photos of oneself photoshopped as a dead body. But it looks to me to be a try-too-hard attempt to convey to everyone that her relationship with her father is just fine; great even.

When in Hawai‘i, she was especially manipulative in that she expected me to play along with her morbid gestures. I was to act as if everything with her was just fine and safe. I remembered what an immigrant from Russia had advised: “Do not help them to fake reality.” On my birthday, of all days, I summoned enough courage to confront my friend about these matters. I told her that I cannot, in good conscience, see her face-to-face and help her feign normality when she’s refusing to return to seeing a mental health professional on a regular basis. She told me that my saying this to her was more intimidating, threatening, and evil than all the times that men had assaulted her — sexually and otherwise — and threatened to murder her.

Minutes later, she feigned memory loss. She acted as if she didn’t remember anything said previously in that conversation, and casually asked me about my day. That’s when I learned the hard way: it might be fun to watch an Alfred Hitchcock movie, but it’s the opposite of fun to live through one.

I have often considered trying to reestablish contact with her and reconcile. But if she greets me warmly — not with hostility — and still refuses to return to regular psychiatric care, then this entire cycle is going to repeat. Recently I let my curiosity get the better of me, and I looked at Corpse Artist’s social media again. Corpse Artist actually stopped making the dead-body photoshops, but he uploaded other really pretentious photoshops where his self-image is literally distorted. His sister-in-law and especially brother also make art portraying people — apparently modeled on themselves — in a grotesque, morbid fashion. I feel sorry for those who see themselves, and even humanity, that way. (Their father is a genuinely competent portrait painter.) That my friend still makes a big show of using her father’s last name, and continues to enmesh with Corpse Artist, his sister-in-law, and his brother, all remain very bad signs. When I consider an attempted reconciliation with my friend, I remember those bad signs and the danger of what would happen if she welcomes communication only for her to maintain her refusal for the regular professional treatment that is needed.