Biology is Destiny?

That renowned brain box and all round sane non fantasist L. Ron. Hubbard thought (very firmly) that the physical brain was quite apart from the personality.No one would contradict him any more than one would contradict a vicar who tells people they act in bizzare ways because of Yahwah or the Devil.Or, thinking that the brain is the root of all behaviour and leave it at that.

We have a predisposition towards behaviour but our executive functions review our actions so we could be seen to a a 'manager' keeping our behaviour in check.

If one's psychology changes as result of neural damage one will behave in a different way. This is well documented.Morality is just degrees of what the individual considers acceptable and desirable. If what one considers acceptable and desirable is altered by damage, what does that imply?Please don't tell me you are leading up towards 'absolute' morality.

Where do people get their moral compass from?It is bound out in the way we are conditioned. Affect the brain and this conditioning can be altered.Simple.

Pretty much.But when people plan their actions (in whatever mental state they are in) those actions seem logical to them.I once worked with a guy who believed that people were comming into his home (somehow) and moving his shoes around. Seems crazy but his rationale for this belief was that dust had been disturbed on them ergo someone had crept into his house and moved them around.From this piece of evidence he contruction a pretty consistant set of beliefs that were internally consistant (if his conclusion about the dust was correct).This lead to all kinds of paranoid anti social behaviour that ended with him being sectioned.All the time he had 'free will' but his actions were based off faulty reasoning from his disorder.It was his dodgy logic that was the problem, but once he accepted his conclusion his subsequent behaviour is what almost anyone would have done (if the guys fear were real).Someone who is schizophrenis interprets things differently and but then reacts (within their frame of reference) pretty logically.If one subjects anyone to gaslighting they pretty soon start behaving irrationally. Is that their fault?

I was ruminating about free will and the best I could come up with was akin the the ANS.We don't need to exercise conscious control when we breath (for example). We can go about our lives merrilly not thinking about controlling our diaphrams. It just works the way it is programmed to.I think, maybe our violition is somewhat like that: normally we go through life without really thinking about it and our personality template guides us through life and we don't really think about it.But just like breathing, if we need to, we can overide this 'auto pilot' at any time and exercise a higher degree of violition.I don't think we ever have the Aristotlian idealised free will because I'm pretty confident I could not drown a cat unless I was coerced: so my options on the cat drowning front are limted (so not trully free), (does this mean only psychopaths have true free will, in terms of behavioural options not inhibited by emotion?).But we can have a higher degree of violition by exercising conscious control. I've always though that maybe the only way a brain could deal with reality is to model it (this would be our experience) and react to the model (this is our violition).This would be our consciousness. A bit like running virtual weather patterns and making decisions based on the model.Perhaps the close approximation model we react to is close enough to reality to keep us functioning but not too overburden with 'too much reality' .I can't support this in any way, however.Edited by Larni, : more wisdom addedEdited by Larni, : No reason given.

Yeah, no, I totally see where you are comming from and I guess consciousness is not required for things to work.Could consciousness not simple be an emergent property of a sufficiently complex brain? Not actually required but an inevitable result of sufficient complexity.Or maybe our entire concept of being conscious is based on reviewing our memory and believing we made a free choice but in actual fact we would make the same choices 100%.We could be fooling ourselves about free will. We could be automatons but because we can review what we did in our memories, we kid ourselves to thinking we had any choice in the matter.

I would say it is the other way around. We overide our biological urges to not (for instance) kill all who would challenge us. Well, is that not the point? Damage the physical brain, morality can go out the window. If one view morality as a set of social behavioural limiters, once they are gone, you can do what ever is logical. Same thing happens when people play RPGs. Sometimes they become amoral psychopaths because the NPCs aren't real, to them. Bracketts mine.Inside the Brains of Psychopaths | Live ScienceThis is a really interesting article about psychopathy and brain injury. The last few sentences are particularly relevent, here. ArticleEdited by Larni, : No reason given.