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 our understanding of the
Cosmos and ourselves and causes us 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. 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 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, etc.)
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
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”. he 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 the minds holds, the programming it has 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 determines 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/