A Theory of
the Human Mind and its Disorders: Against Spiritualism, Genetic Determinism and
Racism
Henry H.
Lindner, MD
All the evidence indicates that we humans are animals and
that our minds are a natural function of our brains. Now that we have some
experience with artificial intelligence (AI), we can begin to understand the
mind. Like any computing machine, the mind has hardware (brain), firmware
(instincts and experiential programming), and software (linguistic
programming). All higher animals have a consciousness similar to our own that
is just a biologically produced form of virtual reality. Language is the tool
that differentiates human consciousness from that of other intelligent mammals,
allowing us to create a much richer, more powerful virtual reality. This AI
analogy helps us to understand the various types of mental disorders. The
author argues that modern psychiatry and racism make the identical mistake of
reducing human behavior to our hardware, inappropriately ignoring the role of
firmware and software.
The nervous system of higher animals functions as a primary representational
system. The input of their senses is processed to create an experience of
the world very similar to our own. This world of conscious experience is a
virtual reality an indirect and selective picture of the world. The most
closely related species have feelings and emotions much like ours, with similar
instinctual desires and aversions.
As a result of our inventions of computer and software, we now have some
understanding of what it takes to create computer-generated virtual reality. The
most sophisticated virtual reality systems simply substitute computer-generated
sensations and feedback for natural sensations. 3D goggles provide the visual
input. The subject s body is wired so that his movements are fed into the
computer. The computer reacts to the subject s motions and changes the visual
environment accordingly. Feedback devices provide sensations of movement. The
effect is to give the person the experience of being in an environment that
seems real but is actually artificial. All animals mental experience of Cosmic
reality is similar to this.
We
know very well that we do not experience reality as it is. Our minds
reconstruct reality on the basis of the inputs our brain receives from the
senses. The Cosmos, the external world, exists and interacts with our senses
but what we see, feel, and experience of this physical Cosmos is a facsimile, a
virtual reality the product of the interaction of our central nervous system
with the rest of the Cosmos. Our mind s eye experience is an analogic
representation of Cosmic reality honed by millennia of evolution to be
sufficiently accurate and complete so as to allow us to survive and thrive.
We human beings differ from other animals not only in intelligence and
dexterity, but by the fact that we also have a secondary representational
system language. Our acquisition of language some time around 50,000 years
ago provided our minds with a new tool that greatly increased our information-processing
ability. With language, we use words to represent things, actions, intentions,
and more complex ideas. It s no coincidence that language and tool-making
appeared at the same time, for words helped humans to organize their actions in
a way that other primates cannot. A human who never learns language experiences
life in essentially the same way as a chimpanzee, only with greater
intelligence, discrimination, and adaptability. This fact was illustrated
historically by the life of Helen Keller dramatized in The Miracle Worker. Helen
was essentially a very intelligent primate until she grasped the trick of
language.
Think about the power of language. It was brought home to me when I began to
study vertebrate anatomy in college. We opened up the belly of a preserved cat,
and saw this menagerie of colors and shapes the abdominal organs. Without
language, my knowledge of these organs simply could not advance beyond a very
simple acquaintance. The only way to start to know this anatomy was to assign names
to these different objects. Once they had names, I could remember them, catalog
them, think about the different connections and functions of the named organs.
I could begin to know the abdominal organs. This is why humans needed language
to make the first tools. Without names we couldn t keep an object in mind, plan
to make it, and persist in the task through its many stages. Without language,
human tool making could not have advanced much over what chimpanzees are
capable of today. With language came the explosion of human culture eventually
leading to our attempts to explain the origins of the Cosmos and ourselves. This
endeavor evolved from primitive myths into today s religions. We can do better.
There are several good books that develop similar theories as to just how
language evolved and how it changed human life.[i] Consciousness does not
require the spirit hypothesis. We are apes that learned to talk. We are not an
immortal soul added to a human body. This old mystical theory of Mind stands in
the way of understanding ourselves and improving our lives and the lives of our
children.
With our invention of and experience with computers, we now have a useful model
for the functioning of our minds. Our brain functions as our
information-processing hardware. Its neurons are grouped into specialty
areas that handle different input, output, and information-processing tasks. The
brain and nerves are analogous to a computer s disc drives, motherboard,
central processor, peripherals, input/output devices, cables, etc. Of course,
the brains of higher animals and humans differ substantially from man-made
computers in certain ways. The brain has evolved naturally over many millennia
and has added new layers and functions on top of old ones. Unlike computers, we
are animals with a rich endowment of instincts evolved to survive and thrive in
this world.
The
deepest layers of our brains are reptilian containing our most primitive
reactions and emotions. On top of this reptilian complex are the more highly
sophisticated layers (paleocortex and neocortex) that give us our much greater
information-processing abilities and adaptability. Situated in the left
neocortex are the most distinctly human neuronal complexes the speech centers.
Given this multi-layered mind, we humans face a unique challenge we must
integrate the functioning of the various layers of our mind. Our linguistic
formulae our theories and ideas must correspond to the facts of our internal
and external realities. If they do not, our mind is literally short-circuited
and its adaptability and functionality disrupted. Should we be surprised that
the ancient, ignorant, and false religious and political doctrines that we
cherish are disrupting our minds and leading us to destruction?
Back to hardware: Disease or trauma involving various regions of the brain
produce known neurological syndromes these are the specialty of the
neurologist. There is perhaps no more fascinating and intellectually
challenging medical specialty than neurology. When confronted with a person s
complaint or signs of disease, the neurologist must always ask: Where is the
lesion? Damage or dysfunction in
specific areas of the brain produce known constellations of signs and symptoms.
For instance, there are two regions in the left hemisphere of the brain that
control language. A lesion in one area causes a Wernicke s aphasia (receptive
aphasia), which destroys the person s ability to either understand or produce
speech. He can make speech-like sounds, but all that comes out is gibberish.
The victim of this disorder is very frustrated by this loss of language, he
loses even the ability to think with language.
A
lesion in the other area produces a Broca s aphasia (productive aphasia): the
person can comprehend language but cannot speak. Now with the quintessentially
human faculty of language so dependent on the function of specific small areas
of the brain, what is left of the theory that the mind is an eternal spirit
inhabiting the human body? If the spirit can’t think in words or produce words
all by itself, then what can it do? Where is this spirit located within the
brain? In the pineal gland? (Descartes’ theory) If the mind is an eternal
spirit, why does mental functioning depend so completely on an intact brain?
As
a young psychiatry resident, I spent four months on the neurology service of a
Veteran s Administration hospital. As I observed the various effects on the
human mind of trauma, strokes, infections, diseases, epilepsy, and vitamin
deficiencies I soon lost my religious belief in the spiritual theory of the
human mind. I realized that the mind is wholly a function of, and dependent
upon the brain. As parts and functions of the brain go, so goes the mind. When
the brain dies, so does the mind. Most people, unfortunately, do not have the
benefit of such experience. They continue to indulge in the delusion (with
which they've been indoctrinated) that their own minds, and the minds of their
loved ones, are eternal entities that only temporarily inhabit bodies here on
Earth and will later exist for eternity in the spirit world. This belief is
not beneficial, nor is it benign; it contaminates their understanding of the
Cosmos and themselves and causes them to believe in and to do many harmful
things. It leads to a false psychology, as we expect infants to have some
knowledge of "right and wrong" because they are eternal spirits. So
we discipline them for being "wrong". To draw out all the false
implications of spiritualism will take another essay.
A
computer is not just hardware. In order for its hardware components to work at
all, they must have built-in programming. They must have chips that govern
their internal functions and that allow them to communicate with each other.
This kind of basic programming these chips and components require is called
firmware. Let us identify two kinds: permanent and programmable. Our
permanent firmware is our genetically determined instincts programming that
is built right into our hardware, without which we couldn’t function and which
cannot be changed. In less complex animals, most behavior is instinctual
firmware genetically programmed. In a computer, one form of permanent firmware
is the ROM or read-only memory. Another form is programmable, like the computer
s BIOS (basic input/output system). The BIOS can be adjusted and even updated
(flashed) to allow the computer to handle knew types of hardware or software. Our
human programmable firmware is the result of early life experience during the
maturation of the brain up to about age 14 years. During this period of
maturation, the brain is actively deleting and forming inter-neuronal
connections in response to experience. The child is permanently programmed by
its interactions with its parents primarily, and with other humans and its
environment secondarily.
Much
of this programming occurs in the infant s pre-verbal period which makes it
much less amenable to later modification by language-based methods. The younger
the child, the more powerful and lasting are the effects of experience for the
less mature brain is more easily programmed and less capable of understanding
or reasoning about experience. It must simply incorporate experience by
more-or-less permanent firmware programming. For instance, we know that emotional trauma
of certain types at certain ages can produce psychoses, depression, and
paranoia. Contrary
to the popular spiritualist delusion, infants are extremely sensitive and
programmable, and parents must be highly solicitous of their wants and needs.
(It s called love .) Unfortunately, most parents today, believing their infant
s mind to be an eternal spirit, are ignorant of their child s mental nature and
needs, and so they treat him in a way so as to program him with the same
pathological firmware that they carry.
Example:
Humans infants are programmed to feel intense fear and to cry if they are
separated from their mother. Yet Western mothers have been taught to toughen
their infants by placing them alone in separate rooms and letting them cry
until they stop. The infant is thus forced to repress his fear and anguish. This
traumatic memory and its feelings are isolated from the rest of the mind producing
a lifelong disruption of his mental functioning. If the mother screams at,
hits, or abandons an infant, then he again must resort to repression and he is
programmed with, among other things, the idea that he unlovable or bad and that
other people cannot be trusted. This firmware will remain with him for the rest
of his life, only slightly amenable to change by later, more positive
interpersonal experiences, and hardly amenable at all to linguistic cognition
(software programming).
Let me add here that we have evidence that emotional and physical trauma also
damage or distort the brain’s hardware.[ii] Researcher have found that
childhood trauma correlates with atrophy of the left hippocampus, the amygdala,
cerebellar vermis, and the corpus callosum that connects the two cerebral
hemispheres. Abnormalities in the cerebellar vermis have recently been reported
to be associated with various psychiatric disorders, including manic-depressive
illness, schizophrenia, autism, and attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder.
Epileptic disorders, particularly temporal lobe epilepsy, are also correlated
with trauma. The researchers speculate that these hardware changes are
adaptive.
For
instance, if the child enters a world where they are neglected and harmed,
their brain changes in order to cope with this world. The victims become
paranoid and aggressive. Conversely, adequate nurturing and the absence of
early life stress appears to permit our brains to develop in a manner that is
less aggressive and more emotionally stable, social, empathic, and
hemispherically integrated this process enhances the ability of social animals
to build more complex interpersonal structures and enables humans to better
realize their creative potential.[ii]
So we cannot draw a clear line between firmware and hardware. I will use the
term firmware to designate both inasmuch as they are changes in the hardware
and programming brought on by experience. The firmware disorders vary from the
severe to the mild: from psychoses, to the personality disorders, to the
neuroses. Psychosis is a flagrantly delusional state, where the person holds
false beliefs about obvious facts. It results from severe childhood
emotional trauma and resultant adaptations. Powerful negative emotions, when
repressed, prevent the person from living a normal life in relationships to
himself or other persons. In order to explain his emotions and experiences, he
creates false theories (as humans have always done and still do!). He may
believe that he’s Jesus Christ, or that aliens are speaking to him via a
transmitter in his brain, etc. If his psychosis is less severe, he may believe
that Jesus Christ is living inside of him a more socially-accepted delusion. In
addition, he may hear his own thoughts as voices a mechanism that appears to be
a regression to a primitive mental experience of language.[iii]
In personality disorders the basic orientation to the natural world is
remains intact, but the person has false and self-defeating delusions about his
own and other persons personality and behavior. He may think he s
unlovable, and therefore will not believe anyone who claims to love him. Having
been mistreated at an early age, he may believe that all other persons are
filled with bad intentions towards him (paranoia). He may not be able to
understand other people at all, and can only class them as bad or good
(splitting). He may be chronically despondent and depressed. He may be
chronically anxious and lack confidence in himself. The hallmark of personality
disorders is that they are such severe disturbances of firmware programming
that the person cannot even observe that they have a problem. They believe that
they’re OK, but that their partners, other people, and society in general are
screwed-up. Psychologists know, by long experience, that they can do little to
help persons with psychosis and personality disorders.
Neurosis is our term for the least serious firmware pathologies. In
neurosis, the person is aware that their actions or beliefs are inappropriate
and self-defeating. They may hate the fact that they are so afraid of
crowds or open places. They may hate the fact that they constantly think about
or repeat certain actions they know it s crazy. People with neurotic disorders,
unlike psychotics and personality disorders, realize that they have a problem and
will often seek psychological counseling. Lest the reader make the mistake of
thinking that he has no firmware disorders, I must state my opinion that 99.999
percent of people, including myself, have mild firmware disorders, and 90% have
moderate to severe firmware disorders. These are all caused by the pathology of
our childrearing and schooling practices. These disorders can be improved with
therapy, positive relationships, and better software (ideas and beliefs) but
can never be cured. The key is prevention through proper childrearing
practices , a
healthy social environment , and a realistic, working philosophical system
(good software). Keep in mind also that all mental diagnoses are just
approximate descriptions that are useful for certain purposes. Every individual
s mind is a unique interaction of different hardware, firmware, and software.
Genetic Determinism
Any parent who has had two or more children knows the differences exist between
people that are purely genetic in nature: as a result of genetically determined
hardware and firmware. From birth, one observes infants to vary greatly in
sensitivity, activity levels, tendency to complain by crying, need for visual
or physical stimulation, motivation to learn new skills, etc. etc. (Some of
these characteristics are also programmed firmware due to the intrauterine
environment and birth experience.) These differences certainly influence how
other people interact with the child, and they influence how that child will
respond to trauma, neglect, or abuse. Genetics certainly has a big role in one’s
personality but its role is a specific one, it must be understood for what it
is, not generalized to explain all thought and behavior.
Genes
produce types of personalities, people who will have very different abilities,
faculties, and tendencies. Contrary to the psychiatrists and racists
assertions, there is no evidence whatsoever that genes cause psychological
health or pathology, or good or evil behavior. There is no evidence that any
psychological or behavioral disorder is sufficiently caused by any genetic
endowment. By sufficiently I mean that the genes produce the disorder
regardless of the quality of mothering or level of emotional trauma.
Indeed,
in practice we call our firmware and software disorders psychological or
psychiatric precisely because no brain disease has ever been found in such
cases. The psychiatric literature makes much ado about tiny
differences in certain neurotransmitters or in variations in activity in
certain parts of the brain in people with certain mental disorders, but such
differences are more easily explained as the result of the pathological firmware
and disordered mentation than as the cause of same. Genetic disorders of brain
hardware and firmware are the province of the neurologist, not the
psychiatrist. The payoff for reducing all mental pathology to brain disease is
clear: our society wants to blame all mental suffering, disordered thinking,
and aberrant behavior on our brain and our genes in order to it ignore, evade,
or suppress the psychosocial pathology of our culture!
As
long as we’re talking about brain diseases, we don’t have to talk about the
pathologies of our childrearing practices, our schooling of children, our
racism, or our over-controlled society! We can continue to indulge in the
delusion that our beliefs and our society are just fine! Everyone would be
happy and productive if only we didn’t have these pesky brain diseases!
(Attention-deficit disorder--doesn't sit still and do what we say; Defiant
disorder--refuses to obey; depression--refuses to perform, is not happy, etc.).
(Update:
In recent years I have realized that many children are born with parasitic
infections, acquired in utero from their infested mothers. Other persons are
infected early in life. These infections, Bartonella species and Babesia odocoilei,
cause brain inflammation and dysfunction. They have been, until recently,
completely invisible to physicians. These are brain diseases, they are common,
and they present as various psychiatric disorders. The understanding of these
infections will open up a whole new chapter in medical psychiatry.)
Schizophrenia
I know you’ve heard all about how schizophrenia is a clear case of brain
disease. Well, let’s take a look at the evidence. About 1% of people in our
society receive this diagnosis although you have to realize that all mental
disorders exist on a continuum from normal to very sick. Many people have some
features of schizophrenia, but never get diagnosed. There’s no magic cut-off
between non-diseased and diseased for any of the so-called psychiatric illnesses.
Now the psychiatrists are telling everyone that schizophrenia is a clear case
of a genetically-induced brain disease. Parents of patients, and society as a
whole are made to believe that it has nothing to do with the child s
experiences or the parenting he received therefore there is no need for society
to concern itself over how children are treated in general right?
The
primary treatment offered for this chemical imbalance is drugs. The fact that
drugs alleviate certain symptoms is taken as proof that a biochemical imbalance
was the cause of the disorder, when in fact no such conclusion is warranted.
The fact that aspirin relieves pain doesn’t mean that the person has a genetic
deficiency of some aspirin-like chemical, does it? Neither do small differences
in brain biochemistry or function prove genetic causation. So what proof do the
psychiatrists offer that genetics causes schizophrenia? Well, proving genetic
causation is very difficult as one has to design a study that controls for both
for genes and environment! If one is raised by a schizophrenic parent, one
receives not only their genes, but their firmware programming as well they
treat or mistreat their children the same way that they were treated as
children they may be neglectful if not abusive parents. One has to somehow
control this environmental aspect. Obviously, no researcher can observer an
infant s life every minute of every day from birth through adulthood.
The
only way to see whether the same genetic programming produces the same mental
disorder regardless of early life programming is to study identical twins
separated at birth and raised by different parents (randomly selected). These
studies are fraught with difficulty and possible bias as the psychiatric
profession does not understand the importance of proper parenting and is
hell-bent to prove that our genes cause all mental disorders. (They can then
sell themselves as real medical doctors treating real brain diseases!) In
addition, the early life experience of any infant separated from his biological
mother and raised by others is bound to be traumatic so separated twins are
bound to have higher rates of all mental disorders than infants raised by their
biological mothers. If the disease rate is higher, this will produce a falsely
elevated concordance rate.
However,
even if we trust the psychiatrists’ own conclusions from their studies, we see
that, at most, they can produce only a 50% concordance rate for schizophrenia
among identical twins! Even when both parents are schizophrenics, their children
have only a 30% incidence of the disorder. This means, quite simply, that
genes have some role in this disorder but they do not cause schizophrenia! This
finding attests to the very crucial role of early life firmware and software
programming. At most, what the literature[iv] tells us is that monozygotic
twins people born with genetically identical brains, have a kind of personality
that can result in schizophrenic symptoms and signs in certain circumstances.
It is reasonable to postulate that they have a special sensitivity to emotional
trauma.
Yet,
our National Institutes of Mental Health (NIMH) calls schizophrenia a brain
disease! I quote Dr. Hyman, This disease, once thought to be psychological, is
clearly a brain disease In some ways, schizophrenia is like other diseases. People
who develop diabetes or heart disease have a genetic vulnerability, and then
external circumstances convert this vulnerability into disease. Rather than
being unusual and mysterious entities, mental illnesses are real diseases of an
organ in this case, the brain. [v] This is a false analogy, since diabetes is a
simple cellular-biochemical disorder, not related to the complex human brain or
to emotional experience. Furthermore, we needn’t be the least surprised that
schizophrenics, depressed people, and highly anxious people have (very) subtle
differences from normals in activity levels in certain areas or the brain, or
in levels of certain neurotransmitters.
These
differences are explicable as the results of severe experientially-induced
brain dysfunction, and also may reflect differences in underlying hardware in
the brains of people who are prone to particular these type of dysfunctions
only if traumatized. We must maintain the distinction between programmed mental
disorders and primary brain diseases. The brain-firmware-software model
presented here is obviously superior to Dr. Hyman s reductionist model. He is
like a computer engineer, who, seeing that Windows isn’t working well, declares
that the motherboard is defective and indeed, because if the Windows software
is defective, he will find abnormal patterns of activity in the CPU and
motherboard to confirm his diagnosis!
So the evidence tells us, unmistakably, that genes determine only a certain
type of personality that can exhibit signs of schizophrenia under certain
environmental conditions. This is hardly surprising since we know that genes do
produce people with very different personality characteristics. But is this
schizophrenogenic genetic endowment actually pathological? Or is it perhaps
supernormal in some ways, perhaps a greater general sensitivity? In fact, it is
prejudicial and unwarranted for researchers to conclude, as they uniformly do,
that this type of predisposing personality is pathological! One can say that
the schizophrenia-prone person has a very high sensitivity to emotional trauma
and the tendency to react to this trauma in certain ways that we label
schizophrenia. This schizophrenogenic person s traits may be highly adaptive if
the child does not suffer emotional trauma (like the trauma of being abandoned
by his mother to an empty room or to day care).
Inasmuch
our culture’s childrearing practices are uniformly bad, then one will see
higher rates of schizophrenia, and higher concordances among monozygotic twins.
Other persons with other genetic endowments will react to identical early
childhood parenting environments in very different ways, including anxiety,
depression, acting out, tuning out, etc. Additional evidence that schizophrenia
is a firmware and not a hardware disorder is that it flares up in the teen
years when the child needs to define who they are and is forced to separate
from their parents. The symptoms tend diminish or even disappear altogether as
a person ages and their life situation changes. This is not how a brain disease
would be expected to manifest itself. Good studies have shown clear
environmental influences on the production of schizophrenia.
Dr. Clancy McKenzie is one of
the few psychiatrists actually studying the role of early childhood emotional
trauma in schizophrenia and other mental disorders. He has found that parental
abandonment is a major measurable cause of the severe firmware disorders. One
of the simplest traumas to document is the rather mild abandonment that a child
experiences if a sibling is born while they are less than 18 months old. A
large study showed a significantly greater incidence of schizophrenics in
person with siblings less than 18 months younger. Imagine the influence of much
more serious abandonments. Dr. McKenzie believes that mental disorders like
schizophrenia occur in life when an earlier abandonment trauma, with its
repressed content and emotions, is re-awakened by current events such as when a
teenager leaves home. This is experienced as a re-enactment of the earlier
abandonment experience. Thus firmware programming that was necessary and
adaptive in infancy later corrupts the mental functions and produces the
schizophrenic break. (I will not discuss other mental disorders here, but let
it suffice to say that their genetic component is generally similar to or less
prominent than in schizophrenia, and the firmware and software components more
apparent to those who care to look.)
Race
What about the human racial and ethnic groups? Are there genetic differences
among them that make some groups good, other bad? Are some races genetically
programmed to be lazy, slothful, unintelligent, disorganized, slow, or
criminal? Well, those who believe our psychiatrists will be inclined to be
racists, for if behavioral disorders are genetically determined, then all
behavioral differences among races are also genetically determined! Like
spiritualism, genetic determinism assuages certain human fears, but because it
is false, it produces many negative side-effects. So if people find certain
ethnic or racial groups to have certain less desirable or even objectionable
traits, who s to blame them for being racists? They re just following the psychiatrists
lead! We adults benefit from blaming our childrens supposed brain disorders for
all their problems that gets us off the hook doesn t it? Likewise if we can
blame a group s racial genes for their problems, then we don t need to question
our own role in their suffering or violence, DO WE? In both cases, the
unintended side effects of ignoring natural causation are very damaging.
In fact, there are big differences in how children are raised in different
familial, ethnic, and racial groups in general. Different cultures clearly
produce different early childhood and later social firmware programming. We
also see vast differences in the accomplishments of different groups over the
centuries. All these differences are liable to be interpreted as genetically
determined, but if one cares to look, if one studies the matter carefully, one
can see how all these difference between groups can be explained by their
differing environments and histories. For instance, Jared Diamond has
demonstrated, in his Pulitzer Prize-winning book Guns, Germs, and Steel that
the varying technological achievements of different races and cultures are
explicable by differences in environment; making genetic/racial explanations
unnecessary. The resort to genetic determinism reduces to an argument from
ignorance. (Since we don't know how the difference arose, we can say it's
somehow encoded in the genes.) We fall back on simplistic, reductionist
explanations because we simply don t know about, or don t care to know about
the historical, environmental, cultural, and psychological background!
Let s address the terrible race problem in America today: there is certainly
some severe psychosocial pathology among many African Americans in the
underclass . I deny that this pathology is genetic and challenge anyone to
prove that it is. How can one ignore the specific environment, history, and
childrearing practices in this disturbed group? How can one resort to a genetic
explanation when there exists clear evidence of environmenta, historical, and
childrearing pathology! Consider for a moment the legacy of slavery and
discrimination. These produced negative ideas and attitudes (firmware and
software) that the enslaved parents passed on to their children, who passed
them onto their children, etc. There is an extensive literature on the
psychosocial pathology of such people. Look at the lives of the underclass.
They know that they are labeled as inferior from birth, their own parents think
that they are inferior like themselves. They know that they look different from
whites and live in much poorer circumstances. They will obviously tend to
believe that they are inferior human beings. For many reasons, they rarely have
a stable home life. The father is absent, the single mother has to work for a
living or is raising too many children.
Mothers
thus stressed tend to treat their children harshly, imposing on them the same
negative firmware that they received from their parents that they received from
their parents that originated in their ancestor s degrading, humiliating
slavery. Are there bell-curve genetic differences in intelligence between
Africans, Europeans, and Asians? It’s not impossible, but imagine what effort
would be required to prove that any such difference was indeed genetic and not
at all environmental! You would have to place many children from different
races into randomly selected homes of parents of all races! You would have to
analyze all this data involving thousands of experimental subjects looking for
a statistically significant difference in measures of school performance,
behavioral disorders, life achievement, drug abuse, etc. This study has never
been done and will not be done. One could, however, compare anecdotal evidence
of intelligence and achievement in African-American children raised from birth
in European-American families compared with African-American children raised in
African-American underclass families.
I
personally have little doubt that, if the Euro homes are stable homes with
affluent, careful parents, then the Afro kids will do as well as Euro kids
raised in that same home; whereas Afro kids raised by shame-based, overstressed
Afro single moms in housing projects would do worse. So let s just stop talking
about race and genes and start dealing with the real sources of our problems. Let
s talk about racism, psychosocial pathology, the needs of children, and the
requirements for good mothering. Let’s work to eliminate the causes of
psychosocial pathology instead of attributing it to race and making the
situation worse.
The bottom line: We cannot rule out a genetic bell-curve variation in
intelligence, but neither do we have any convincing evidence of same. And we
know that what makes us human is our incredible malleability the dominant role
of our firmware and software programming. Our use of language is our highest
and most distinctive quality. No matter what subtle differences our brains or
genetic firmware may have, we are all highly programmable. So what if some
persons or even groups are a little more intelligent on average than others? Is
an slower computer bad while a faster computer is good? Of course not! They
differ in processing speed, memory, etc., but what they can do and how well
they perform their functions is mostly dependent on the quality and types of
firmware and software they run!! I’d rather have a stable old computer than an
unstable fast computer any day! I'd rather have a slow computer that was loaded
with intelligent and useful software than a fast computer loaded with junk.
Wouldn’t you!
Language
and the Problem of Inappropriate Software
We have yet to touch on the problems in human society caused by our software,
the ideas that our minds holds, the programming we have received in words. With
language, we create words that represent things and actions, and we create
sentences that represent causation and intention. These words and linguistic
ideas allow us to understand and manipulate our environment to a much greater
extent than the non-linguistic species. Even if our hardware is intact, and our
firmware is healthy, our minds can still fail to function properly if our
software is old, inappropriate and corrupted. We have neurologists to
diagnose and treat brain diseases, we have psychologists to diagnose and treat
firmware disorders, but who diagnoses and treats software disorders? There is
no one in our society who fulfills this function! It should be the task of
Philosophers.
Unfortunately,
as I have explained in several essays at this site, philosophy is all but
non-existent in our culture. The authorities in our society parents, schools,
politicians, doctors, the wealthy elite banking/corporate class all have a
vested, short-term interest in maintaining the status quo. Philosophy the
discipline that abhors contradictions, analyzes ideas, and creates better
theories to explain the causes of things is the greatest threat to the status
quo, and their wealth and power, and is therefore suppressed. The academic
discipline called philosophy is but a shadow of the real thing. Without a
working, realistic theory of the Cosmos and of human nature, we are bound to
live in error. We are bound to believe in lies that destroy our happiness and
our security. False ideas can only lead to suffering.
Lacking
a higher understanding or purpose, we are bound to resort to the lowest common
denominator, to the immediate gratification of material wealth and pleasures.
and we are bound to resort to force to achieve our goals. In order to have a
healthy, functioning society, we need ideas and theories that correspond to
reality. To see just how bad our programming is, just look at the old
software of the Old Testament that has determined so much of our culture! We
must reject all such old, contradictory, and superstitious ideas. We must admit
that all our holy writings were the writings of men who understood far, far
less about this world and human life than we do today! Our knowledge has
advanced tremendously in the last 500 years, yet our fundamental ideas are over
3000 years old, and obviously pathological to boot!
[i] Julian Jaynes, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the
Bicameral Mind (Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston, 1976); Derek Bickerton,
Language and Species (The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1990); Merlin
Donald, Origins of the Modern Mind (Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1991);
Daniel C. Dennet, Consciousness Explained (Little, Brown and Company, Boston,
1991); John McCrone, The Ape That Spoke (William Morrow and Company, Inc., New
York, 1991).
[ii] Martin H. Teicher, Scars that Won t Heal: The Neurobiology of Child Abuse,
Scientific American, Vol. 286, No. 3, March 2002, p. 68.
[iii] Julian Jaynes, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the
Bicameral Mind (Houghton Mifflin Co., Boston, 1976)
[iv] http://www.nimh.nih.gov/research/genetics.htm#gen3
[v] http://www.nimh.nih.gov/events/locschiz.cfm/