March 5, 2008

Freewill and human behavior.

by Sixkiller @ 8:59 pm. Filed under General

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.

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3 Responses to “Freewill and human behavior.”

bwhite Says:
March 10th, 2008 at 10:29 am
Hey Sixkiller,

Have you ever heard of the term “repetition compulsion”? If not, and please don’t think I am talking down to you if you have heard it. It’s just that if you haven’t it is hard to progress through my meandering and faulty thought process.
Anyway, back to repetition compulsion. The way it works is, when we are kids events take place that make an impression on us. Maybe our parents drank too much, maybe we got beat up at school, maybe one of our parents beat up the other or had affairs or whatever. These events make an impact and generally they are terrible to us. The good events make an impact to but are not included in the repetition compulsion discussion.
So, bad things happen (a vast understatement I know but it will have to do for now) and we are hurt or scared or something else bad. So then we grow up. When we were kids we had little or no ability to successfully protect ourselves from bad things. As adults we have more of an even playing field. We have some input into the bad things that we allow to happen to us. So repetition compulsion is our adult selves trying out those bad situations from childhood in what may be a representative way or maybe something more literal. We want to master the bad situation where daddy used to hit mommy and we couldn’t protect her. So we marry someone who will hit us. That way we can stop them from hitting us and symbolically stop daddy from hurting mommy.
That is the repetition part, but the compulsion comes in when we are unable to master that situation from childhood. We can’t stop daddy from hurting mommy because it already happened and when our partner hits us we freeze with terror or shame or whatever because we become that little helpless kid again. We want mastery over a situation we can’t have mastery over. And since we can’t gain mastery in our adulthood, we just keep on trying.
Your friend keeps trying to work through whatever it is that she is trying to work through with these beautiful, angry, uneducated men. She fails every time so she keeps going back to try again. But she gets the same results because she doesn’t change her behavior.
That is another possibility.
Given that, I guess we are who we are for whatever reasons we are that way. Maybe we’ll change in this lifetime, maybe we won’t. If I can come to understand myself a little bit before I let go of this life, I will feel I have done pretty good. I may never stop my bad behavior but maybe I will; and if I can figure out why I do that bad behavior I will be grateful.
I guess.
Russ Says:
March 17th, 2008 at 2:38 pm
I agree with the flavor of what I think Bwhite is saying here. For myself, in my youth…..I was arrogant enough to think that I could ‘remake myself’ in a certain spiritual image. After YEARS of dealing with my repetition compulsion and my shadow, I have come to the peace, that I will do my level best to:

“understand myself a little bit before I let go of this life”

If I can do that, then I win. If I can help others to do that for themselves, then I’ve grossly exceeded my expectations.

I don’t know if that is my free will or not……but I think I’m ok with that.
Anita Says:
April 11th, 2008 at 10:05 am
First, I will give you hope in saying I believe we have power over ourselves.

As someone who has overcome undesirable behaviours of my own, I can tell you it takes much fortitude, a little professional help, and focus on new desirable behaviours.

This may sound simple, but keep a journal of goals and ways you could achieve them. Write down who you want to be, tell yourself you are this person already and slowly you will become the person you want to be.

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