Whats this? Two posts in as many days? Madness!

[lorimt]

I'm curious. How much do you feel beholden to biology? Not, oh wow, biology has done some great stuff, but rather things like instinct or such impulses. I tend to think of myself as fairly independant of such things, nurture and personal goals taking a much stronger role in most decisions I make. Anyone else? Any particulars where you do or don't obey some sort of natural or biological demand? What sorts of things? I'm especially interested in personal choices or ideas rather than observations about humans in general.

(It just occured to me, and I realize I have no idea how typical my approach to such things actually is.)

EDIT:
In rereading, I can see I danced around what on earth I was talking about. Things like bobbzman wrote about. For example, I know that I will do something different just because I'm scared, or unhappy or whatever, even when unrelated to mood. Stuff like that, if that makes sense. Not just emotional response, but things where I'm more rationalizing an action than rationally deciding to do something, or feeling an impulse to do something even when it seems like a bad idea. ::mutters:: I'm not really talking about emotion, I'm just not sure how to distinguish this case. Stuff like sithjawa are good examples too, and not ones that occured to me originally.

EDIT THE SECOND:
I'm still not coherent. I'll try again some other time when I've had time to think, and wave my hands about while talking at people.

Comments

[sithjawa.livejournal.com]

I was going to say something but then I realized I *still* don't know what you're asking.

So how about this: My dad's Japanese, my mom's some version of white (I suspect dutch). I was raised entirely by my mom - my first exposure to Japanese culture was in 7th grade when our middle school started trying to teach us to behave ourselves in Japan for the field trip (rich middle school). Despite this, I have a huge number of characteristics that resemble Japanese culture. When we started learning how to be polite in Japan, it was like "oh, now I won't stand out so much." I was repeatedly told by my teachers "stop it, we're not in Japan yet!" when I really wasn't trying at all to follow their rules.

I also found out (post deciding my major) that my dad is also a computer scientist.

I tend to like eastern religions better than western ones, though not to the point where I could say "oh, this religion is a good fit for me, I shall convert." That one, though, could just be what happens to someone with spiritual tendencies who's raised agnostic.

[bobbzman.livejournal.com]

Interestingly enough, I just saw Gattaca this evening (great movie, if you haven't seen it)...

I think my initial perception is that I act independent of my biology and that most of my priorities, fears, etc. can be accounted for by my upbringing. But at the same time, I have to ask myself if these are not in turn built upon a non-apparent foundation of biology. Is my interest in visual and intellectual activities over athletic ones simply because I am built better for them? Do I remain single as a result of low sex drive? Does my rare haplotype account for my weirdness? In the end, I don't know the answer to these questions. However, I suspect that we owe more to our biology than we'd like to think.

[meep.livejournal.com]

Everyday, I get the urge to go to the restroom... and I do it. And I get the urge to eat... and I do it. And then sex.... if that ain't biology, I don't know what is.

Let's see, I also talk in my sleep, and grind my teeth (used to sleepwalk) -- these are also obviously biology, because I sure as hell am not choosing to do it.

And then don't get me started on the whole pregnancy/childbirth/motherhood thing. One has reactions that definitely aren't conscious choice, and have a lot to do with the hormones (and other things). I remember having to tell Stuart sometimes that I wasn't really sad, it was just the hormones making me cry and we should wait for it to pass...

Really, it's hard to tell what you're trying to get at here. Most of life is actually biology, not conscious choice. You're tired, you sleep. One has visceral reactions to emotional things. One takes dislikes to people for no conscious reason. All that jazz.

[meep.livejournal.com]

Here's something interesting about biology and brains:

http://www.rochester.edu/news/show.php?id=1898

[regisman.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure I completely understand what you're asking, even after the edit, so I don't really have anything to say. It does sound like you're on the verge of a very interesting point, and that's why I'm rambling here at all. Maybe sitting down and talking about it would help me see where you're coming from.

You did mention instinct, though, and I will say that I'm a huge proponent of following instincts. I trust my gut, as cliched as that sounds. I could toss Bean's argument (from Shadow of the Hegemon) out, but then I'd have to look it up, and the book's like 4 feet away, and I don't want to get up. Meh. =o] The nutshell of it is that, though maybe he's really trusting his subconscious mind's ability to gather seemingly inocuous information and discover danger more readily than otherwise, it doesn't matter--it still "feels" like instinct (and, in fact, it's still arguably biological, as intelligence is genetically encoded, too). Okay, I'm rambling now, so I'll just close here. =o]

[squirrelloid.livejournal.com]

(1) Read Pinker's "The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature". Its totally awesome, and i think gets at what you're asking.

(2) A number of neuroscience and psychology studies have documented people creating post-hoc justifications for doing something *immediately* after doing it, and then claim they planned to do it all along. Eg, our brains are good at convincing us that we have chosen to do things. So any feeling we might have about why we did something is also subject to a 'because my biology said so' response.

(3) A surprising number of social traits are heritable with strong support. Such as political party, which is somewhere between 60% and 80% heritable. Thats approximately as heritable as height, which no one contests is gene-based. Don't be surprised if during our lifetimes DNA-screening becomes standard for a diverse array of things from marriage (check for potential spousal abusers, etc...) to jobs (personality-type matching) to admittance to institutions of higher learning. Certainly if such technology were available tomorrow, there are no laws prohibiting it.

(4) Not everything is directly dictated by biology, but rather general features relating to specific decisions may be dictated: pessimism or optimism, pacifism or hawkishness; these general features lend themselves to particular decisions. And as anyone who has extensively debated philosophy should know, the axioms a person starts with are not held because of necessarily rational reasons, and no amount of argumentation will change their mind; reasons they give are post hoc justifications for believing it, not reasons to believe it.

(5) effectively, this comes down to the evolution of behavior. Because it can evolve, it must at some level be dictated by biology. And we know behavior in every other organism is related to their genotype. The only reason this isn't widely claimed for humans is because it isn't politically correct to do so. It may suggest unsettling things like "not all criminals can be rehabilitated" (empirically true as well, but evidence doesnt deter liberal ideologues).

(6) from a different tack, if humans are the only entities with free will, where did this come from? How does 'free will' evolve in a biological system where behavior has always been tightly regulated? How does the will become unconstrained by the biological architecture of the brain and the non-randomly laid out neural pathways that are created before a single thought is formed?

(7) I'd also redirect you to my earlier post in which i asked what free will would look like from an omniscient perspective, and proved (to my satisfaction) that free will is impossible. Briefly: either all possible actions have equal probability at a decision point or there must be constraints on the decision. If there are constraints, then the will making the decision is not free because it cannot choose every choice or is predestined to choose some with greater probability than others. If there are equal probabilities, the decision is random, and while free, is not rational. Nothing exists that makes totally random decisions (barring the existence of some obscure and thankfully rare mental illness).

[bobbzman.livejournal.com]

Political party affiliation is strongly associated with geographic, ethnic, religious, and economic classes. Since these tend to remain moderately constant in most families between single generations, producing a "heritable" effect, I'd suggest that the case for a genetic basis is fairly weak (unless studies using actual marker genotypes across different populations have been done, in which case I'd be very interested in reading the paper).

[bobbzman.livejournal.com]

And by ethnic class, I mean in terms of social identity. Obviously there are strong genetic biases correlated with ethnic ancestry, but that's not what I see going on here.

[boojum.livejournal.com]

I've been calling this the "fruitcake recipes are heritable" definition of heritable. The original idea is someone else's, but I've forgotten who.

[boojum.livejournal.com]

I realized I was unclear. It's a perfectly valid type of heredity -- it just has nothing to do with genes, unlike blue eyes or a tendency to be tall or whatever.

[jibb.livejournal.com]

Memetic heritability?

[squirrelloid.livejournal.com]

well, these are all correllation arguments though, just like heritability is. Its not possible to claim that political party isn't inherited (at some level) in a true genetic sense; that hypothesis isn't refutable on the basis of 'it also corresponds to these things'. Now, i'm not going to argue that there's a neuron in our brain thats either republican or democrat, but i would argue that its likely there are ideological premises that push us towards one party or another, and these are heritable in a biological sense. Just think of some of the very axiomatic assumptions made by the ideology of each party. Those are probably tied (vaguely) directly to brain chemistry and genes.

[boojum.livejournal.com]

It feels like sometimes I decide what to do, sometimes already-existing bits of my mind control what I do, and sometimes my body controls what I do. I vividly remember one time when I wasn't angry any more, but my body still was, and I could tell that if I did anything more complicated or social than sitting in a quiet corner and reading something bland, then I'd get furious and try to hit things. It was odd to have them so separate like that.

A lot of my moods feel more biological than mind-based or stuff-around-me-based, and even when it is me-based, it's often based on my long-term choices and external things that I've chosen to have happen. (If I stay on a sleep schedule and eat food other than candy, those are choices I've made and I'm better off for them, but those are very externally measurable and physiological things, not like trying to have a nice day or thinking upbeat thoughts would be.)

[easwaran.livejournal.com]

As someone pointed out, our "rational reasons" for doing things eventually make reference to some axiomatic principles that aren't acquired rationally. These would be things like "if I'm hungry I should get food" and "that thing over there looks yummy" and "I have a bad feeling about this person". Whether or not those are biological, I can't really tell from the inside.

Someone mentioned free will, and I think that's the right thing to take into account here. We "tend to think of [ourselves] as fairly independant of such things, nurture and personal goals taking a much stronger role in most decisions [we] make" - but then how does one separate nurture and personal goals from biology? I have a goal to get some food right now - but that's for biological reasons. I have a goal of getting a tenured spot and being in a good academic community - but that comes from things like wanting companionship, intellectual conversation, and security, all of which seem like human instincts to want. Remember, all my actions are physical motions of my body caused by chemical and physical interactions in my brain and other places. So everything I do is determined through some combination of biology and external inputs. But some of those processes going on in the brain really are my goals and desires, and if those processes play a significant role in my action, then I call the action "free", even though it's just as biologically determined as anything else. "Nurture" just means that some of these processes and internal states are reshaped by external forces, so the proximate cause of the action is still biological, even if the initial cause is social or otherwise external.