vehemently oppose punishment (I favor rehabilitation and re-education), and I strongly oppose the death
penalty (deterrents don't work after all, and if you believe what I outlined above it is no wonder they don't
work). If we cannot consciously make sense of the stimuli it is no wonder we have the illusion of free
will.
Sincerely,
Greg
Dear Greg:
Now it's my turn to be sick-aches, pains, clouded brain, stomach in disarray, etc. But as always, your most
recent note is provocative. Here are my thoughts:
Of course you're right that "all intellectual questions revolve around biology." Given a certain type of
brain injury, I could cease to have the capacity to feel love for my daughter; given a certain unbalance in
brain chemistry, I could come to think that I am Napoleon or the lead singer of Bad Religion.
But I think it can't be correct to say that behavior is just the stuff of biology. Chinese people see the
world in a very different way from Oklahomans, who are themselves different from Icelanders. The
behaviors and views different people hold are obviously arrived at via biological routes (external stimuli
affecting the central and peripheral nervous systems), but the biological routes are themselves affected by
external forces (e.g., heavy TV consumption alters the development of a young child's brain). To put the
thought in a clumsy way, ideas transmitted through the air are free of biology until they take hold and
shape how a person thinks, which in turn may in subtle ways change how a brain is "wired."
If biology alone explained all of human behavior, then wouldn't one expect people everywhere to be
basically the same since, with minor exceptions (such as vulnerability to sickle cell anemia), human
biology is the same? New Yorkers' belief that it's a mark of freedom to spit all over the place in the
subway doesn't exist in Singapore. If behavior only bubbled upward from biology, and if New Yorkers'
and Singaporeans' biology is the same, then wouldn't one expect the memes to be the same? The different
memes Singaporeans and NewYork- ers possess couldn't exist apart from biology, but it doesn't seem that
they can be explained only by biology.
Memes house themselves in biology (more clumsy language) but also float in the air (clumsy!) and are
sometimes rejected. The subway behavior you describe exemplifies a rejection of an earlier meme-at a
time not so long ago New York's subways weren't so disgusting. I'm amazed when I see pictures of New
York subways taken in the 1940s and all the men are wearing coats and ties!
Monozygotic twins are quite similar, but there are always personality differences. If one monozygotic
twin develops schizophrenia, the other is quite likely to do the same, but this isn't a given, especially if
the twins are raised in different environments.
Here's what makes no sense to me about your position: Let's assume you're right, that humans are
basically highly sophisticated "robots" and they are that way just because that's the way they are (as a
result of a purely materialistic evolution). Then logically it wouldn't make sense for people to want to