Free will and other preverbal ideas

As deduced by developmental psychologists, fetuses and infants experience their environment as fully comfortable, safe, blissful and harmonious, that they are exclusive, the center of the world, perfect, glorious, invulnerable, inconvincible, all-powerful and with free will, have no boundaries in space and time and are one-and-the-same with their mother and one-and-the-same with all reality. 

With the help of a good-enough mother we can overcome the unrealistic parts of those preverbal ideas. But it is an enormous project and often a life-time job, hampered by imperfections in the genetic makeup and early child-mother relationship. To one extent or the other, we often keep some of our preverbal ideas alive at the visible level or push them back deep down into our subconscious, with its indirect consequences. 

In practical life we can find preverbal ideas as expressed in certain convictions and behaviors. A very powerful ruler may slide back into baby behavior. A mother may suppose that she perfect and feel she’s failing when not. An athlete or a president may envisage to be inconvincible and become disappointed with realities of the sports field or the political arena. 

In spiritual and religious circles the feeling of being one-and-the-same with everything is cherished, or the preverbal images of omnipotence, perfection and glory are projected in a god. Scientists search for a perfect, all-encompassing theory. People may imagine exclusivity and glory into their groups, organizations, communities, ideologies, religions or sports teams. Readers like texts that are comfortable. Stories and movies may be popular for the perfectly beautiful female star who dreams of finding an inconvincible, glorious hero to live a life of eternal comfort and harmony.

See for instance ‘The Psychological Birth Of The Human Infant: Symbiosis and Individuation’, the long-term empirical study of mothers and infants by developmental psychologists Margaret Mahler, Fred Pine and Anni Bergman. http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1G2-3406900380.html

Consumption more dangerous than population

Economic growth is faster than population growth in the world.
Therefore, if we want to save humanity, we best start to reduce our consumption.

Our unconscious leaves no room for free will

Our unconscious decides what we do, feel and think, including the idea of free will. See The Smart Unconscious (Het slimme onbewuste) by Ap Dijksterhuis:

‘We place consciousness on a pedestal, see it as the ultimate accomplishment of evolution and believe that it differentiates us from other animals: that it makes us sensible and rational, that it plays the deciding role in our brain and steers our behaviour.

Our unconscious on the other hand, is seen as subordinate. As no more than an assistant to our consciousness. Freud even described it as a reservoir of miserable memories and bestial urges that our consciousness needs to keep in check.

The Smart Unconscious demonstrates that this viewpoint is absurd and that it is in fact the unconscious which defines our being. It steers (with a digestive capacity almost 200.000 larger than that of our consciousness) our behaviour, our thinking, and our feelings. In this book Ap Dijksterhuis clarifies human behaviour in a surprisingly lucid manner.’

‘Ap Dijksterhuis (1968) is a professor of Psychology at the University of Nijmegen. He has written extensively on the unconscious, and his work has been published in the authoritative journal Science, among others. His research receives a lot of attention and has often been reviewed by the NYT. He has won numerous scientific awards, including the prestigious Early Career Award of the American Psychological Association.’

http://www.apa.org/science/about/psa/2009/10/sci-brief.aspx

The flexibilization of poverty

Far away from distracting spectacles presented by the regular media, modernization is busy pushing hundred millions of poor households into further misery.

These poor are no longer self-sufficiently living of their tiny pieces of land or small number of cattle. Nor are they anymore oppressed and exploited in personal relationships with large owners of land or cattle but at least kept alive to provide labor for the lord.

Instead, the poor are increasingly dependent on markets. By working for others at low wages the income earners participate in the labor market. By spending their small amounts of earned money on food items, medicines and clothing they participate in the consumer market.

Their income depends on the days or hours that they find employment and the wages they receive for their work. The relation between that income and the prices of goods they buy is their purchasing power (koopkracht, in Dutch). This purchasing power decides on their level of welfare.

But while at different markets the fluctuations in supply, demand and prices are influenced by the power centers of New York and Washington, Beijing and Riyadh, Moscow and Tokyo, London and Frankfurt, the poor have hardly any say in such fluctuations. The outcome is that many of them see their money income grow less than the prices of goods they buy. Their purchasing power decreases.

It is a slow-onset, large-scale disaster. The media might report on it at a daily basis. But it’s too slow for sensation-addicted audiences. And it’s too much about numbers. Statistics don’t attract audiences.

[Revised version of blog, 2015]

Free will like snow in the sun

The more we understand of our genetic makeup and the shaping of our subconscious in childhood, and the more we understand of the time and place where we live, the more we see our idea of free will melt like snow in the sun.

The more we understand of their genetic makeup and early shaping of their subconscious, and the more we understand of the time and place in which they live, the more we see the contribution of free will of Indian musician Ravi Shankar, American entrepreneur Mark Zuckerberg, Chinese leader Mao Zedong, Ethiopian runner Kenenisa Bekele or Russian politician Vladimir Putin melt like snow in the sun.

While fetuses and infants are guided by their subconscious narcissism, growing up means to give up those illusions, including our belief in free will. But we need perfect childhood conditions to help growing over our narcissistic illusions completely and who really had such conditions?

Sacred experience of uncertainty and morality

If we see ‘god’ as the sacredness that many of us experience, ‘god’ is everything that we know of and experience as sacred.

SACRED UNCERTAINTY

If we acknowledge the state of the art in cosmology that says the creation of the universe originated in the uncertainty of quantum dynamics, ‘god’ is the sacred experience of that uncertainty.

SACRED MORALITY

And if we acknowledge the state of the art in anthropology that says our inner moral guide is the internalization of social rules that help the community survive, ‘god’ is the sacred experience of that internalization.