Too Short for a Blog Post, Too Long for a Tweet 485

 

Here are a few excerpts from a book I recently read, "Determined: A Science of Life without Free Will," by Robert Sapolsky.

Thus, delayed maturation isn't inevitable, given the complexity of frontal construction, where the frontal cortex would develop faster, if only it could. Instead, the delay actively evolved, was selected for. If this is the brain region central to doing the right thing when it's the harder thing to do, no genes can specify what counts as the right thing. It has to be learned the long, hard way, by experience.

Where do these differences come from on a big-picture level? As discussed in the last chapter, East Asian collectivism is generally thought to arise from the communal work demands of floodplain rice farming. Recent Chinese immigrants to the United States already show the Western distinction between activating your ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) when thinking about yourself and activating it when thinking about your mother. This suggests that people back home who were more individualistic were the ones more likely to choose to emigrate, a mechanism of self-selection for these traits.

In the early 1990s, about a third of the soldiers deployed in the first Gulf War complained of being "never quite right again." with a constellation of symptoms - exhaustion, chronic unexplained pain, cognitive impairments. "Gulf War syndrome" was generally viewed as being some sort of psychological disorder, i.e. not for real, a marker of psychologically weak, self-indulgent veterans. And then science trickled in. Soldiers had been administered a heavy-duty class of drugs related to pesticides as protection against the nerve gas that Saddam Hussein was expected to use. While these drugs could readily explain the neurological features of Gulf War syndrome, this was discounted - careful research in the run-up to the war had identified what doses could be given safely, would not damage brain function. But then it turned out that the drugs became more damaging to the brain during stress, something that was not considered beforehand. One of the mechanisms implicated was that stress - in this case, body heat generated by carrying eighty pounds of great in 120-degree desert weather, coupled with basic combat terror - could open up the blood-brain barrier, increasing the amount of drug getting into the brain. It was not until 2008 that the Department of Veteran Affairs officially declared Gulf War syndrome to be a disease, not some psychological malingering.

We're at loggerheads. There's no such thing as free will, and blame and punishment are without any ethical justification. But we've evolved to find the right kind of punishment viscerally rewarding. This is hopeless.