Solipsis: Escape from the Comatorium (8 page)

“
Dr.
Lazarus is the leader of the Community of Christian Scholars. He's
basically the poster-child of intellectual Christians.”

“
There
are people that are still Christians?”

“
Yeah,”
Nellie replies.

“
And
some of them are considered intellectual?”

“
You
were raised by atheists, we didn't indoctrinate you with any
religion, so to you, all the religions are just ancient mythologies.
But imagine growing up and being told over and over that there is a
god and that Jesus loves you, going to school and learning more about
Jesus, then going to church every Sunday, then going to a college
that teaches the science of how god made the world. You can take a
really smart person, subject them to that level of indoctrination,
and they'll come out the other side believing in whatever you want
them to. So don't call them stupid. You aren't inherently smarter
because you're an atheist. Everyone is indoctrinated with something
that they believe. It just so happens that you were indoctrinated
with the truth.”

“
But
it
is
the
truth,” Renee replies. “You make it sound like everyone's
individual idea of the world is equally true.”

“
I'm
just saying that you shouldn't think of them as less intelligent,
they can't help how they were indoctrinated. And almost every person
on the planet is convinced that they know
the
truth.”

“
So
every religious person thinks their parents just happened to teach
them the one true religion? Isn't that a nice coincidence?”

“
But
you're in roughly the same boat,” Nellie replies.

“
Christian...scholars,”
Renee muses over the concept.

Dr. Lazarus's progress towards
the stage completely stalls as fans and followers swarm.

“
Why
do they like this guy so much?” Renee asks.

“
As
science reveals and explains mysteries, god keeps getting smaller.
We've gotten to a point where it seems like you can either listen to
reason, care about evidence, observation, and accept the scientific
world view, or you can believe in your particular religion, but you
can't have both. We know the age of the Earth and our place in the
universe, and it's directly contradicted by the bible. So either
god's inerrant word is wrong, or the scientists and evidence is
wrong. But there are guys like Dr. Lazarus who come along and find
ways to make it sound like you can have religion and science in
harmony.”

“
That
sounds hard to do,” Renee replies.

“
He
gives people hope. He'll put on a big show, use tricks of language
and bad logic to convince people that science is actually showing
religion to be true. And anyone who has a lot of faith is going to be
totally blind to his fallacies and his bullshit and think he's some
kind of prophet.”

“
That
doesn't look like a community of scholars,” Renee adds.

“
Technically
it's a church,” Nellie replies.

“
That
looks like a cult.”

“
The
title of today's debate is free will and morality,” Dr. Rendrow
announces to the people gathered in the glass pyramid atrium. “The
speakers will begin with a ten minute opening remark. You all know
the first speaker.”

Nellie
takes the podium.

“
Take
in a deep breath. Hold it. Now breathe out. Keep it out. Breathe in,
hold it. Now exhale. Now stop consciously controlling your
breathing.” Nellie pauses and the audience collectively holds
its breath. Renee participates even though she doesn't need any
oxygen.

“
Now
I want you to stick your tongue out. Go ahead, stick it out. Okay,
now let it go back to normal, ignore it. Now I want you to blink
once. Count to three then blink again. Count to three. Blink again.
Now forget about blinking.” Nellie smiles as the audience
awkwardly stares at her with eyes wide open.

“
Is
it just me, or are you now totally unsure of when to breathe or
blink, and have no idea where to put your tongue?”

The
audience chuckles, and Renee looks up at her father, wondering where
she's going with this.

“
We
all seem to think that we, consciousness, I, the self, is a pilot
that's in control of our bodies. As though there were a cockpit in
our heads. However, our experience of consciousness is not objective,
and is not detached from the brain. Consciousness is a product of the
brain, and it just happens to think that it
is
the
whole human being. But it isn't.”

“
Without
looking, can you tell me what time it is? You can all venture a
guess, and there are people who can do this extremely accurately. But
where does this information come from? Nobody is consciously counting
the minutes, so how do we know what time it is?”

“
There
are mathematical savants who can do any calculation in an instant.
They aren't doing this consciously or with some trick. The number
just appears to them. Where did that number come from? The
sub-conscious mind. A series of prior causes have created a neural
network in their brain that does certain things to information and
can upload the results of its calculations to some kind of attention.
That's all that consciousness is: attention. It's some sort of brain
function that simply decides what to pay attention to, what to
notice, what information is important and what isn't. So most of the
time you're breathing, blinking, smelling and hearing hundreds of
different things, you have a sense of time, balance, orientation,
movement, and all of these things are feeding an enormous amount of
data into the brain, and the brain is sending a long list of orders
out in response. And yet, we can space off and be totally unaware of
any of these things.”

That
catches Renee's wavering attention.

“
We
are just a function of the brain, a way of paying attention to data.
But do we even have control of what data we pay attention to?
Remember when I told you to breathe? Once you started concentrating
on your breathing, you couldn't then make a choice to stop paying
attention to it. You awkwardly keep controlling it, and only return
to the normal state when you're distracted by something else. Notice
that you don't choose something new to pay attention to, something
came along and distracted you. We're no more in control of our
thoughts than we are of our height.”

“
You
know this if you've ever meditated. Take ten minutes sometime and sit
comfortably, close your eyes, and then repeat a mantra in your head.
Doesn't matter what the mantra is, just a sentence or a phrase that
you can hear clearly. Then think of nothing but that phrase over and
over. It's a lot harder than it sounds because in the middle of
thinking your mantra, you'll start thinking about other things. I've
meditated for years, and I am still side-tracked by my thoughts. I'm
meditating, repeating my mantra, and then, from nowhere, I start
thinking about something I saw in the news or that I should see the
new movie that just came out. Even when I try my hardest to
concentrate and control my thoughts, I can't do it. Meditation shows
you that you aren't in control of your own thoughts. If I was really
in control of my thoughts, then I would just repeat my mantra with no
problem. But I can't. And so the thoughts that do occur to me,
necessarily weren't by choice. So if I didn't choose to think about
something else, then where did that thought come from? So you see, in
order to think something, we'd have to first decide to think that
thing before we think of it. So on close inspection we're not in
control of our thoughts, so if we don't even have control of the most
basic aspect of our consciousness, what do we have control over?
”

“
We
can scan your brain, ask you to make a decision, pick up either the
red pill or the blue pill. Monitoring your brain, we can tell the
precise moment that you made the decision and which one you're going
to pick. The really spooky thing is that we can tell what decision
you made before you are even aware that you've made the decision.
Think about that for a moment. The decision is made, and we can
physically measure it in the brain, but several seconds go by before
the person is consciously aware that they've made a decision at all.
These kinds of experiments have been going on for fifty years. This
shows that decision making is completely an illusion. The voice in
your head, your stream of consciousness, is not the thing responsible
for making the choices that you make. The choice is made elsewhere
and then passed along as information. You merely receive the decision
as stimuli, the same way we hear a sound or know what time it is. So
if you can't control what you think or what you decide, then where is
free will?”

Nellie returns to her seat and
the audience claps pallidly. Renee is in awe, having never seen her
father speak in such a way.

Dr. Rendrow introduces Dr.
Lazarus and he takes the podium amidst a thunderous applause.

“
I'd
like to thank my esteemed colleague for the invitation, and all of
you for attending. Many of you are probably very shocked by her
opening remarks. I would be if I hadn't heard the same ideas spouted
many times before. Apparently, if you breathe and flick your tongue
around, you'll discover that you aren't really a person at all, but
some kind of meat computer!” More than half of the audience
laughs with Dr. Lazarus.

“
At
face value, this argument is obviously wrong.” He speaks
precisely. Every word carefully chosen. Each pause deliberate. His
stare penetrating. “We live in a universe where our actions
have consequences. Anyone exercising their God-given common sense
knows that if we didn't have the ability to control ourselves, to
decide our actions, then we would live in a terrible world with rape
and murder and theft at every street corner. Society would collapse.
We couldn't hold anyone responsible for their actions, so they would
do whatever they wanted. That's the idea that my opponent is
supposing.”

“
If
we had no free will, then we would just be the product of our
environment, and nothing more. We would never see people drastically
change their lives. We wouldn't see dedicated atheists suddenly
seeing the light and coming to faith. We wouldn't have anything but
robots that were programmed by their indoctrination. The fact that
people can change, can up and decide to do something different is
proof. But really, the best proof is simply the experience of being a
human, of having thoughts in your head. You know you're in control of
your actions. You can buy into this philosophical argument all you
want, but deep down, you know you are in control of your body.”

“
Neuroscientists
don't like to use the word evil, and I always sense my colleagues
shuddering whenever I use the word. Most neuroscientists, people like
my opponent, believe that a person who decides on a whim to chop
their neighbor into fifteen pieces must have done this because of a
flaw in their brain. There must be something wrong with the brain of
a serial killer, so we should figure out what the problem is and fix
it. They cannot believe that a person simply gets up in the morning
and
chooses
to
chop their neighbor into pieces, but they did this because their
brains made them. So when we look
closely
at all these psychopathic brains, we find that they all function in
this same way that's different from the rest of the population. It
doesn't matter how, just that all of them shared the same brain
pattern. Most neuroscientists say, a-ha! See, they don't choose to
have a different brain pattern, it's the way they are. Well my
scientist friends, isn't it possible that the brain waves of someone
who chooses to be evil form a certain pattern? How do you know that
the pattern precedes the behavior? How do you know it's not just a
matter of thinking evil thoughts looks like this as a result, not the
cause?”