Physicist Leonard Mlodinow writes
about a wide range of experiments on what has been called automaticity that demonstrate the enormously significant role the
unconscious plays in our behavior. As he points out, science has now confirmed
what advertising and public relations firms have known intuitively: decisions
are largely made by factors outside our awareness. Ironically, automaticity
theorists suggest that such automaticisty turns out to be very highly adaptive.
The mind operates most efficiently, they argue, by relegating a good deal of
high-level, sophisticated thinking to the unconscious.
Mlodinow points out that the
human sensory system sends the brain about 11 million bits of information per
second, yet our conscious mind can handle only about 50 bits per second! This
means there’s an enormous amount of processing before we can even become aware
of what has been sensed. One estimate is that we are conscious of about 5% of
our cognitive processes with the other 95% going on “under the radar” of our awareness.
We’d be paralyzed by the overwhelming amount of information if it were all
consciously available to us!
Yet, this raises the question, “if
our brains are making our decisions for us outside conscious awareness so
often, how can we be held morally responsible for our actions? How can our
legal system punish criminals who aren’t in full control of their
decision-making faculties?”
One argument as to how we can
still hold people morally responsible is to distinguish between regulative control which would be the
control that allows us to choose our direction in life through making open
choices from among truly open alternatives (for which there is no real evidence
and which buddhism and naturalism denies) and guidance control which is a sort of control that doesn’t require
open choices: I may not have any choice about my path, but I can be held morally responsible for how
I walk down this path. (This is a similar argument I’ve heard from some
contemporary buddhists who do not seem to fully comprehend the more profound
implications of anatta and dependent
origination). Epicetus used this argument, interestingly, in the context of
fatalism; the fates controlled your destiny, but the details as to how we
responded to our fate was up to us: “For this is your business, to act well the
given part, but to choose it belongs to another.”
John Martin Fischer offers a
contemporary naturalist version. From his perspective, I could not have been a
physicist because I could never understand calculus, I couldn’t be a hockey
player because I’ve never learned to ice skate and I couldn’t be a high-wire
aerialist because I’m afraid of heights. I did not exercise regulative control
in becoming a yoga/dharma teacher because it was the only path open to me!
However, according to his argument for guidance control, how I carry out my
teaching role is up to me: I can do it with good humor or with a stern
gravitas; I can do it with sharp precision or with an air of improvisational
whimsy. I can teach with gusto and élan or with slacker-laziness. However,
under what grounds can we justify isolating guidance control from the same
causal factors that shape all our behavior? My tendency towards more good
humored, improvisational whimsy was set – and most certainly not chosen by me – by myriad factors of
genetics, environment and life experience, so why should I be blamed or praised
for it?
To be absolutely clear, there are
truly important benefits from having guidance control. For instance, it has
been shown that while cancer patients cannot control the fact they have the
disease, those who feel they have some control over the treatment choices
available to them suffer less depression and anxiety. Research has shown that
elderly residents of long-term care institutions, who generally feel that
they’ve lost much control over their lives, often suffer depression, lowered
immunity and a higher death rate, but when given the opportunity to exercise
control over the care for plants, or even have control over the furniture
arrangement in their room have lowered rates of depression, better immune
functioning and lowered mortality rates.
But, there is no justification
for supporting moral responsibility provided by guidance control. Yes, if
someone handles their illness with grace and dignity they will experience
greater well-being psychologically, and those around her will respond with
respect, admiration and kindness that they most likely would not to a more curmudgeonly
patient, but to say that someone who exercises a more healthy and skillful
guidance control should be held morally
responsible for doing so is another question completely. That someone has the
inner resources to handle illness with such dignity and another patient does
not because of factors they have not chosen means that they cannot and should
not be held morally responsible.
If we cannot be held morally
responsible, and thus are without blame, how can we speak of “taking refuge”
and “taking” or “receiving” precepts? What does it mean to practice “atonement”
if we are not morally responsible? I hope to begin to approach these questions
in future posts.
Leonard Mlodinow, Subliminal: How Your Unconscious Mind Rules
Your Behavior, (New York: Pantheon Books, 2012)
Epicetus, Enchiridion 17
John Martin Fischer, The Metaphysics of Free Will: An Essay On
Control, (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994)
