Why Materialists Cheat

The 2008 Shift Report: Changing the Story of Our Future, published by the Institute of Noetic Sciences, recently arrived at the offices of WIE. Among its many other compelling facts, we were struck by this description of an experiment conducted by Kathleen Vohs of the University of Minnesota and Jonathan Schooler of the University of British Columbia that investigated the ways in which believing, or disbelieving, in free will affects moral choices:

• [W]hat one believes about free will has an important social consequence.... In the Vohs and Schooler study, [some] participants read passages from The Astonishing Hypothesis by Nobel laureate biologist Francis Crick, which promotes the idea that free will is an illusion: “Who you are is nothing but a pack of neurons.” Others read more neutral statements as a control condition. The results of the study showed that participants who read [Crick's] anti-free will statements were significantly more likely to cheat on several experimental tasks. If exposure to [anti-free will messages] increases the likelihood of unethical actions, then what does this same message, repeated by authoritative scientists and promoted by the media, do to societal behavior?

This shocking e-mail dumped into my inbox this morning and I've not been able to relax properly since I read it. Perhaps blogging about it will make the unpleasant feeling go away.

What does this mean? It means that it does not matter wether we have free will or not, what matters is whether or not we believe we do! How about that?

But to be fair. Surely materialists aren't all determinists? I don't have any trouble seeing materialism hand in hand with rational free will. Some of the most hardcore objectivist/materialist people I know are avid proponents of, not just the softie "yes you can influence your choices, even though biology sets you up quite good" but hardcore 100% free will, which again is a bit on the extreme side making homeless junkies and alcoholics people  who just happen to choose that kind of lifestyle.
Still this research does support the latter view.

Hm. I feel better now.

Thanks for listening.

About a month ago, I decided to explore wether it is possible to switch my dominant side. Being traditionally right-handed like most people, I commited myself to using my left hand as if it was my right.

The goal is not to switch the dominance, not after I've read the research which suggestst it's next to impossible. Rather it is to train my motor skills in my left hand so that it closely matches the ones in my right. In theory, this should reduce "hemispheric dominance" and increase "synaptic exchange between hemispheres", and thus rendering my subjective experience of reality richer and more pleasurable.

After reading "The End of Faith" by Sam Harris a few months ago I've been following the atheism vs. religion debate in the US with great interest.
Living in Scandinavia, which according to Harris himself is one of the most atheistic societies in the world, it is difficult to really  grasp the kind of religious milieu this debate is taking place in.
I have come to gain tremendous respect for his courage and the level of articulation he displays, after checking out on youtube of some of the people he is up against.

One of the objections his thesis comes from Integral circuits, is that he is guilty of a pre/trans fallacy. That in criticising non-rational modes of awareness he then also bears down on the genuine transcendental states of consciousness, and thus tossing the baby out with the bathwater.
But when I read his work and listen to him talk I find he always makes very clear distinctions on what he means to criticise. From my perspective, he seems to strike downwards exclusively, attacking mythic dogmatic belief structures whilst leaving the higher ones alone. He also openly advocates meditation and even mysticism.

I think the most interesting problem Harris adresses is ethnocentrism (although he doesn't use that word). And he believes that the most important factor that keeps this ethnocentric belief structure from growing into a more healthy world-centric one is mythic religion. From an integral perspective it does sound reductionist, indeed. But even so, cracking the dome of religious dogma that shelter the happy ethnocentric mean blue meme campers is too important to not be acted upon and nobody else seem to be doing anything significantly helpful.

The fact is that on estimate 70% of the worlds population is at an ethnocentric or lower stage of development. That means that the 30 remaining percent are in for a long wait for the rest to catch up. It is obvious that simply cutting God out of the card game and say we should all be rational will not do the trick. It would be like cutting the bottom 3-4 rungs of a ladder and then asking a child to climb it.

Harris' cure is that we raise the bar for public discourse, so that it no longer becomes acceptable to hold beliefs about the world that are irrational, say, that the Creator of the universe hates gay people etc. The ideal is that it would be as unthinkable to put forth such unjustified belifes as it would be if someone would claim astrology to bear an influence on policy making today; people would be embarrased about it. And that all beliefs and truth claims people make about the world should be challenged by logic and evidence just as in virtually all other areas of human knowledge today. Will this solve the problem of ethnocentrism? Probably not, but I honestly think it will help.

In Europe (Northern Europe at least) we have achieved a significantly higher level of honesty and decency in the public debate. In Norway we've even had a former priest(!) as prime minister and even he was very careful when mentioning god. And he would always speak in secular language when addressing political issues.

Today America is the most Christian country in the world., and I would guess Europe is the most secular society. I don't know what has made it so. What strategy will most effectively bring about this change for other nations? I don't have the answer.
But considering Harris' goal, him seeing Europe's model as more desirable - his strategy of writing books appearing on telly and bashing the nation over its head again and again with the logical fallacies of their beliefs might not be too bad of a strategy at all, even though it is not very "integral".

In development the cognitive line is said to be a sort of arrowhead paving the way for development of other lines, if that is so, repeating the message of a secular world centric model of reality over and over again and exposing people to the force of it's logic, will at worst drive Christians nuts and at best jolt them into re-valuating their mythic beliefs at about the world.

Go Harris, go!


 

Sam Harris on Scarborough Country - Oct 28, 2004