OSScast

“Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.” - Philip K. Dick

A challenging concept.

I have friend who always dates the wrong type of guy; usually extremely good looking sometimes violent steroid abusers with very little education. Every relationship she has always ends horribly. She consistently chooses the same type of guy to date, and she has expressed to me that she knows she keeps making the wrong choices, to the point that as she makes the choice she knows its wrong. She says that in any social situation she will find herself drawn to the one guy who turns out to be exactly like all the other guys she has dated, without even trying. But she seems to be powerless to act in any other way.

A lot of people (me included) have weight problems. These people cannot seem to control their eating habits for any length of time. They know that eating certain foods is bad, yet they are also powerless to act in a different way over time. The same thing applies to drug abusers and gamblers.

I think the opposite end of the spectrum may be true as well. Maybe successful people are driven to succeed by the same force as those who are driven to fail. People who excel will tell you how hard they work to achieve their goals, but do they really have a choice other than to push harder? Could a successful person make a long term change to not be successful and stick with it?

In any given population, there is a range of success. There are winners and losers. In every wolf pack there is an alpha and an omega. So maybe in the human population there are those who are going to succeed and there are those who will fail. And no amount of intervention will change that. This is a societal component of what it means to be human. Its part of what we are and how we function in groups.

I’ve always been fascinated by FBI profiling. These people can look at a certain number of behavioral characteristics and extrapolate an entire person’s life. I think I have seen it explained as “the human mind behaves abnormally in predictable ways”. There are certain ways that a serial killer will act, depending on what type of conditioning was received in his early life. Shouldn’t a human mind behave normally in predictable ways as well?

I think the concepts used in FBI profiling could be developed into something to predict the behavior of everyone. There could be a database that if given a few facts about a person, could tell you all kinds of things about that person’s choices, down to the label of beer he drinks and the car he drives. Maybe the choices I make are completely predictable by our imaginary database as much as a serial killer’s are to the FBI database.

I think these two ideas about human behavior are interrelated. The behavioral profiling based on a few facts about your life is a good predictor of other choices in your life, but your overall station in life is part of how you relate to others in society. And you don’t have a choice in either one.

I’ve always thought of Freewill or the lack thereof as a function of time. If time is linear, then every decision I think I make has already been made. If I could step outside of time, I could look at my lifetime as a series of events laid out from beginning to end. All the choices I have made or will make are already there on display in my timeless view of myself.

But now I think that my choices may be made by my role in the human group; my pecking order in our pack. Anyone with a big enough database of human behavior and a few facts about my past could know exactly how I will react in any given situation.

If this database is built in the future it might not be able to tell us why we are here, but it may be able to tell us what we are going to do about it.