Determined, page 27
Unconditioned stimulus
1. Muslims, according to European nationalists
a. Vermin, rodents
2. Jews, according to the Nazis
b. Thieves, pickpockets
3. Indo-Pakistanis, according to half the Kenyans I know
c. Opium addicts
4. Irish immigrants, according to nineteenth-century WASPs
d. A malignancy, a cancer
5. Roma, according to centuries of Europeans
e. Violent superpredators
6. Mexicans, according to Donald Trump (this is a freebie thrown in)
f. Rapists
7. Young African American men, according to swaths of White America
g. Shop owners who cheat you
8. Chinese immigrants, according to nineteenth-century America
h. Cockroaches
9. Tutsi, according to the Hutu architects of the Rwandan genocide
i. Drunken Papists
Yes, yes, it’s hard because there are overlaps but, come on, give it your best shot.[*]
The question now becomes how readily you come to associate Mexicans with rapists while undergoing Trumpian conditioning—how resistant or vulnerable are you to forming that automatic stereotype in your mind? As usual, it depends on what happened one second before hearing his statement, one minute before, and so on. Here are all sorts of circumstances that increase the odds of your being successfully conditioned by the man if you are your basic white-bread American: If you are exhausted, hungry, or drunk. If something frightening happened to you in the previous minute. If, as a male, your testosterone levels have been soaring over the last few days. If, in recent months, you’ve been chronically stressed by, say, unemployment. If, when you were in your twenties, your musical tastes led you to become an überfan of some musician who espoused that stereotype. If you lived in an ethnically homogeneous neighborhood as a teenager. If you were psychologically or physically abused as a child.[*] If your mother’s values were those of a xenophobic rather than a pluralistic culture. If you were malnourished as a fetus. If you have particular variants of genes related to empathy, reactive aggression, anxiety, and responses to ambiguity. All things over which you had no control. All things that sculpted the amygdala you will have in this instant of being exposed to a stereotype, all the way down to how many molecules of cAMP each neuron releases, how tight the brakes are on PKA, and so on. Because there are millions of neurons involved, with gazillions of synapses, the process is subject to a lifetime of influences that are staggeringly more complex and nuanced than what goes into conditioning an eyeblink or changing how an Aplysia protects its gill. But it’s all the same mechanistic building blocks that will determine whether your views will be changed by some demagogue’s toxic attempt to form a conditioned association in you.[*],[10]
Time to finally move to the sort of split in the road that this book is ultimately about, examining the biology of our moral behaviors being changed, rather than of our freely choosing to change our behaviors.
Speeding Up and Slowing Down
I’m driving down the freeway. I pass a car or truck here or there. Some pass me. I’m listening to music. And then a guy passes in a sensible electric car that I note has one of those commit random acts of kindness bumper stickers. In the next few seconds, I probably have the microexpressive start of a smile, along with a number of thoughts. “Well that’s nice.” “I bet I would like the guy.” “I wonder who he is.” “I bet he has an organ donor sticker on his driver’s license.” And then I tease myself for having such a macabre thought. I think that he no doubt listens to NPR. Then I think how ironic it would be if he were on his way to rob a bank. And then something on the radio catches my attention, and I go back to listening, thinking about something else.
Then, about thirty seconds later, the car ahead of me to the right signals that it wants to merge into my lane. Being a jerk, I think, “Oh no you don’t! I’m in a rush,” and am just about to put my foot on the gas when I briefly flash on the bumper sticker. I stop from pressing the accelerator. And half a second later, I shift my foot to the brake, allowing that car to merge, briefly basking in a sense of my profound nobility.
What went on in those seconds after I saw the bumper sticker? It’s deterministic Aplysia all the way down.
There’s that classic image of us in a moral quandary: an angel on one shoulder, a devil on the other.[*] We have a motor output, the neuron(s) that triggers our muscles to push down on the gas. And on a metaphorical level, there’s neural circuitry whose net output is to stimulate that neuron, a “Do it” signal, while a different circuit prompts an inhibitory “Don’t; slow down instead.”
What is the “Do it” circuit about? The usual—the outcome of influences from one second ago to millions of years ago. You’re hungry. There was just a mysterious throbbing pain on the left side of your butt, and you’re briefly worried that you have left-side-of-your-butt cancer, and thus feel entitled to drive selfishly. You’re going to an important meeting and can’t be late. You’ve gone a few months without getting a decent night’s sleep. In middle school way back when, the tough kids bullied you a lot, and from that you have a vague, unspoken belief that letting someone merge in front of you on the highway equates to your being an inadequate pushover. It’s the time of day when your testosterone levels are elevated, thus strengthening the signaling of neurons in the “I’m a weakling if I let someone merge in front of me” circuit (regardless of your sex). You have this or that variant of this or that gene. You’re male and a member of a species in which there’s a moderate but significant correlation between male-male competition and male reproductive success. All of those push in the direction of “Do it.”
Meanwhile, the “Don’t; slow down instead” neuron has its inputs: You like to think of yourself as a kind person. You went to Quaker meetings for a while in college. Something in the news this morning made you feel slightly less jaundiced and helpless about the idea that the incrementalism of small good acts can make the world better. There’s that Christian rock song that you really like, to your formless atheistic embarrassment. You were raised by parents who, each week on the Sabbath, gave you a dime to put in the charity box for an orphanage, and then, on behalf of the orphans, hugged you in a way that you can still feel sixty years later. Et cetera.
The two circuits sit there, prompting you toward opposing neurobiological outputs. At this moment, the “Don’t; slow down instead” prompt has a little more oomph than usual. Why? Because the neurons activated by that bumper sticker, still rumbling in a reverberating loop that cycles for a minute or so in what we call short-term memory, have added a faint but decisive voice that tips the balance in favor of the “Don’t” circuit.[11]
How did each of those circuits form to gain the collective neurotransmitter-ish power to influence our motor output? By a whole lot of neurons forming positive or negative associations with something or other. In other words, a whole lot of neurons where the likes of cAMP, PKA, or MAPK did this or that.
Let’s consider a hypothetical neuronal circuit, one straight out of the appendix that introduces the basics of the nervous system. Suppose we have a network consisting of two layers of neurons. Layer 1 consists of neurons A, B, and C, while layer 2 consists of neurons 1–5. Note the wiring pattern, in that neuron A projects to neurons 1–3, neuron B to neurons 2–4, neuron C to neurons 3–5. Stated a different way, neuron 3 gets inputs from three other neurons; neurons 2 and 4 from two; neurons 1 and 5, a single input each:
Now let’s give layer 1 some unlikely specializations. Neuron A responds to pictures of Gandhi, neuron B to Martin Luther King Jr., neuron C to the Mirabal sisters. Neurons don’t really come that way, but let’s allow those three neurons to stand in for three complex networks of specialized recognition:
What is going on in layer 2? At one extreme are neurons 1 and 5; each is as specialized as any of the first-layer neurons, responding to Gandhi and the Mirabal sisters, respectively. How about neuron 3, at the other extreme? It is a generalist neuron, sitting at the intersection of knowledge among the three layer 1 neurons. What does it know about? Out of the overlap of projections from layer 1 emerges a category of people who died for their beliefs.[*] It is the neuron that stores the overlapping knowledge and commonality of those three examples. Neurons 2 and 4 are also generalist in this sense but are less skillful in their knowledge, having only two exemplars each to fall back on. You can make a generalist neuron with categorical knowledge even better with more examples—it would not be difficult to imagine layer 1 containing more examples and neuron 3 thus at the intersection of Gandhi, MLK, the Mirabal sisters, plus, say, Socrates, Harvey Milk, Saint Catherine of Siena,[*] Lincoln. Neuron 3 is that much more knowledgeable about this category of people dying for their beliefs.[12]
Uh-oh, you have a slightly irreverent thought, recognizing that this network of Gandhi, MLK, the Mirabals, Socrates, Harvey Milk, Saint Catherine, and Lincoln is just as accurately described as concerning people who have been the subjects of biopic movies. In other words, the string of examples in layer 1 could simultaneously be embedded (a) along with Sid Vicious, in the biopic movie category or (b) in the people-dying-for-their-beliefs category, now including a great-uncle killed in Normandy, whose memory still evokes tears in his adoring little sister, your grandmother, age ninety-five.[13]
Thus, the same layer 1 neuron can be part of multiple networks. Forgo Sid Vicious and add Jesus to the layer and, according to lots of earth’s humans, we still have the category of people who died for their beliefs (as well as being subjects of biopic films). Meanwhile, Gandhi and Jesus plus Johnny Weissmuller could project as a trio on to a separate layer 2 array coding for guys in loincloths:
Let’s take things one step further. To make things easier, let’s ignore neurons 1, 2, 4, and 5 from the second layer, stripping things down to only the generalist neuron 3:
So we’ve got the Gandhi, MLK, and Mirabal neurons converging on the #3 “people who died for their beliefs” neuron. Adjacent to it is another network (again, ignoring neurons 1, 2, 4, and 5 for simplicity’s sake). What does neuron A in this second network code for? The time when, despite being terrified by heights, you made yourself go off that diving board and felt great about yourself afterward. Neuron B in that second network? That semester where you were close to failing in geometry early on but then worked like mad and wound up with a good grade. Neuron C? All those times when you were a kid when your mother would tell you that you could grow up to be anything you wanted, if you put your mind to it. What is neuron 3 in this second network about? A category that can be roughly framed as “reasons why I feel a sense of optimism and agency about life.” (See figure on the next page.)
Next to these is a third network. Its neuron 3 is about “peace has happened in some really unlikely places,” and its layer 1 A/B/C neurons are the Good Friday Agreement in Northern Ireland, the Camp David Accords between Egypt and Israel, and the Christmas truce of World War I.
Thus, three adjacent networks, where neuron 3 in the first network is about “people have died for their beliefs,” neuron 3 in the second is about “why I feel a sense of optimism and agency in life,” and neuron 3 in the third is about “peace has happened in some really unlikely places.”
And as a final step, the three different neurons, in turn, form their own layer 1, projecting onto their own über-3 neuron:
What’s at the top of this three-layer network? Some emergent conclusion along the lines of “Things can get better; there are people who have heroically made things better; even I can make things better.” There is hope.
Yes, yes, yes, this is crazily simplified. But it’s still an approximation of how the brain works—exemplars converging on nodes out of which emerge the capacity to categorize and associate. Each node being a part of multiple networks—serving as a lower-layer element in one while simultaneously serving as a higher-layer element in another, a central player in one, peripheral in another. All built on wiring principles identical to those of an Aplysia.
And where the events around us alter the strengths of various synapses—another tyrant seizes control in a country that was crawling toward democracy, and a network like this last one is weakened by this counterexample. You slow down to let someone merge into your lane and it is strengthened. There are even loops where there’s feedback, such that the positive affective content of the output of a hierarchical network motivates you to obtain more exemplars as inputs—“Hotel Rwanda was so inspiring that it made me start learning about truth and reconciliation commissions”—strengthening it further.
Change occurring, accomplished with the same molecules that make for a learned Aplysia, all without invoking the sort of willful agency and freedom that we intuitively attribute change to. You learn about how experience changes the nervous system of an Aplysia, and as a result, your nervous system changes. We don’t choose to change, but it is abundantly possible for us to be changed, including for the better. Perhaps even by having read this chapter.
13
We Really Have Done This Before
The preceding chapters have left us with a clear path that every one of us needs to take, in roughly the following sequence of events:
Step #1. You’re living a fine life. There are people whom you love and who love you; your days are filled with meaningful activities and sources of pleasure and happiness.
Step #2. Someone does something unimaginably awful, violent, destructive to a loved one. You are shattered, bereft of meaning in life. You barely function, will never feel pleasure or feel safe again. You will never feel love again because of the lesson that a loved one can be ripped from you like that.
Step #3. Some scientist sits you down and gives you a PowerPoint presentation on the biology of behavior, including violence; they go on and on in an irksome manner about how “we are nothing more or less than the sum of biology over which we had no control, and its interactions with the environmental circumstances over which we also had no control.”
Step #4. You’re convinced. While you hope the perpetrator of that nightmarish violence will be constrained from ever harming anyone else, you immediately stop hating him, viewing that as atavistic bloodlust incompatible with our time and place.
Yeah, right.
The previous chapter took on the common misunderstanding of the upshot of a deterministic world without free will—if everything is determined, why can anything change, why bother? After all, change, even massive change, happens all the time, which seems to turf us back to our starting point of faith in the foundational role of free will in the world. The last chapter’s point was that while change happens, we do not freely choose to change; instead, we are changed by the world around us, and one consequence of that is that we are also changed as to what sources of subsequent change we seek. Hey, here you are reading the next chapter.[*] And when you consider the biology of how behavior changes, and its mechanistic nature shared across the animal kingdom, determinism seems even more compelling. Hold hands with your comrade, the Aplysia, and march forward to a better future.
And then a monster does that unbearable thing to your loved one, and all the implications of the preceding umpteen pages seem like sophistry, vaporized by pain and hatred.
The purpose of this and the next chapter is to explore the theme of the second half of this book, namely that regardless of it seeming unimaginable, we can change in these realms. We have done this before, where we grew to recognize the true causes of something and, in the process, shed hate and blame and desire for retribution. Time after time, in fact. And not only has society not collapsed, but it has gotten better.
This chapter focuses on two such examples, the first showing the arc of such change stretching over centuries, the other that which has occurred in most of our lifetimes.
The Falling Sickness
You find yourself in the middle of that TV show everyone was all hot about the other year—what was it, Game of Thrones? No, not that. Game of Cuttlefish? Cuttlefish Game? Squid Game—yeah, that’s it. You’re in it, playing Red Light, Green Light. When the light is green, you run forward, while as soon as it turns red, don’t move; mess up, you’re instantly gunned down. Good thing your nervous system is handling this instead of your pancreas. Green light, one chunk of your brain is maximally activated while another is wildly, energetically silenced; red light, exactly the opposite, with the transitions ideally being lightning fast and accurate. Your nervous system is all about contrasts.
Neurons evolved a great trick for enhancing contrasts. When a neuron is silent, has nothing to say, its electrical makeup is at one extreme, where the inside of the neuron is negatively charged, relative to the outside. When the neuron is triggered into an explosion of excitation called an action potential, the inside of the neuron becomes positively charged. No confusing nothing-to-say with something-to-say with this sort of polarization.
Then there’s the trick. The excitation, that action potential, is over. The neuron no longer has something to say. At this point, does that positive charge slowly start meandering back to the original negative state? That sort of slow fading is fine if you’re a bladder cell without much on your mind. Instead, the neuron has a very active mechanism for the positive charge crashing back to negative as quickly as it rose in the previous thousandth of a second. In fact, to make the it’s-all-over-with signal even more dramatic, the charge crashes back to being even more negative than the original resting state for a bit of time, before reverting back to the original negative charge. So instead of a normally resting neuron being polarized in a negative direction, it is briefly hyperpolarized into what is called the refractory period. Yup—during it, the neuron has trouble getting it up to a positively charged action potential. It’s-all-over-with, indeed.
