Sunday Thoughts...

Todays thoughts have included...


- Winning big in the lottery and employing teams of people on giant art projects.

- A literal conspiracy amongst mathematicians to take all students in post-calculous and initiate them into a giant bullshit hoax that all these equations we see written everywhere are in fact made up by a team in Geneva that sends out example "figures" to all members to use when in public.

- Reading John Ganz on the conspiratorial mind and thinking about the effects on one's political assumptions of the degree to which they believe in libertarian free will.

Thinking reading this about how much one's belief in free will might correlate with their political assumptions.  If person X believes in libertarian free will, there's a sort of epistemological  black hole located in man's homunculus from which no inference of causality can emerge.  What does this do to their notions of systems and power and cultural and other external forces that shape us?  

OK, granted this is maybe an extreme view, and most people Y believe in a compatibilist idea that we have some ultimate internal causality, yet also experience the various forces within tugged by interactions between our genetically programmed phenotype and our history of learning (I'm a bad Behavioral Analyst - trying to the complimentary term to phenotype but for behavioral selection.  If one inherits a genetic phenotype that allows them it interact with the world, what is the term for the environmental-behavioral pro​gramming that continuously shapes them as they move through life?  I've been working clinically for too long!)

But the problem there is where do you draw the line between learning and the homunculous?  This seems an awfully convenient "trap door" that allows you to place responsibility/blame however or however much you'd like to on a guy.  "Oh, he was a real product of his upbringing... but in the end he knew right from wrong", etc.  In politics, it might look like, "Sure, there is XXXXX problem facing that group, but each of them can make a choice to do XXXXX."  How much is view now able discount the effects of systems, structures and power?

Then person Z is a determinist through and through and sees only systems - from the macro to micro, all behavior caught in an endless sea of environmental responding.  They are required to see nothing but the systems.  How much weight to give to any one system is also an assumption to make, which complicates things.  But I'm curious as to whether one's free will position correlates in some way with one's politics.  

I've know more than one conservative who has leaned on "personal responsibility" when speaking of economic, criminal justice, or social justice issues.  If one tends to embrace tradition and eschew the "unintended consequences " of progress, the epistemological black hole of appealling to tradition might collide easily with the black hole of homuncular action.  Talk of upending hierarchies or other power structures, said to built from systemic inequalities, becomes irrelevant if man is free from their grip.  The conservative tradition of eschewing effeminate (read: socially bonded and high EQ) "eggheadedness" and  "nuance" in favor of Manichean, manly (read: individualist, gut-oriented) action bears this out.

But homuncular belief is found by many on the left as well.  My guess is they simply turn up the dial on structural learning, pointing not to the unequal individual but to the extent to which the system has them caught.  As a determinist, this seems very slippery and ultimately paradoxical.  Sociological analysis, however each of us come to it, is the bedrock of our political philosophy.  Whether we want more or less government has a great deal to do with what effects it may have, but a compatibilist can move the sliders every which way to make a particular case.  The right says government would limit freedom for personal action, but then decries the myriad ways it teaches people to be lazy, dependent, etc.   If we could find a correlation here, between our most basic assumptions about man's behavior, it might strengthen the case that there is indeed a link between politics and belief in free will.*

Ganz notes, in regard to what is said of the conspiracy minded, that complexity becomes simplified.  And who doesn't like simplicity?  A Paper in Nature and Human Behavior (Imhoff, et al 2022) finds:  "We conclude that conspiracy mentality is associated with extreme left- and especially extreme right-wing beliefs, and that this non-linear relation may be strengthened by, but is not reducible to, deprivation of political control." Are the extreme right and left (but maybe more on the right) craving simplicity?  

And what of the cravings that might drive persons X, Y or Z?  A case could be made that either the homuncular view or the determinist view is either simple or complex.  A free individual is infinitely complex, but in a way simple too:  the complex effects on man of systems and structures evaporates. 
 FREEDOM!  If right wing thought comforts the privileged who don't want to lose their status,  the simplicity of a world that doesn't need fancy social programs or new pronouns, or ponderous abstract art is there for the taking.

* I admit here as a leftist behavior analyst, I am rubbing my palms feverishly at the thought that the connection not only exists but bends toward my own ideological favor.