At the April 20th Meeting:

. . .In this issue.

Quote of the Month – William Rehnquist.

"The Ides of March and Three Recent Books Related to Free Will" by Dr. Peter Anderson.

AHA Action Alert: School Prayer Amendment" by Jende Huang

At the April 20^th Meeting:

Open Forum

Every once in awhile it is good to have an open forum where members can talk about anything they feel is important. As an example; what should the AHA be doing better and what is it doing well? Humanists want to build a better society and we would like your ideas on how to do that.

Quote of the Month

"The 'Wall of Separation of church and state' is a metaphor based on bad history; a metaphor which has proved useless as a guide to judging. It should be frankly and explicitly abandoned."

. . . William Rehnquist (1985)

The Ides of March

And

Three Recent Books related to the idea of Free Will

By Dr. Peter Anderson

At the March 16 meeting, I discussed three recent books related to the idea of free will (see below). An interesting discussion resulted. We seem to have a mixture in our group of those who accept the idea of free will, those who think it is a myth, and some

who, while accepting the idea of a basically deterministic universe, argue for a "compatibilist" form of free will.

The Illusion of Conscious Will, by Daniel M. Wegner, Bradford Books, MIT Press, 2002

Daniel M. Wegner is Professor of Psychology at Harvard University.

(From the dustcover) Do we consciously cause our actions, or do they happen to us? Philosophers, psychologists, neuroscientists, theologians, and lawyers have long debated the existence of free will. In this book Daniel Wegner offers a novel understanding of the issue. Like action, he argues, the feeling of conscious will is created by the mind and brain. Yet if psychological and neural mechanisms are responsible for all human behavior, how could we have conscious will? The feeling of conscious will, Wegner shows, helps us to appreciate and remember our authorship of the things our minds and bodies do. Yes, we feel that we consciously will our actions, Wegner says, but at the same time, our actions happen to us. Although conscious will is an illusion, it serves as a guide to understanding ourselves and to developing a sense of responsibility and morality.

Approaching conscious will as a topic of psychological study, Wegner examines the issue from a variety of angles. He looks at illusions of the will—those cases where people feel that they are willing an act that they are not doing, or, conversely, are not willing an act that they are in fact doing. He explores conscious will in hypnosis, … The result is a book that sidesteps endless debates to focus, more fruitfully, on the impact on our lives of the illusion of conscious will.

We Don’t Think the Way We Think We Think, a review by James Kennedy in the 14June2002 Science magazine of the American Association for the Advancement of Science:

The cognitive revolution of the 1960’s and 1970’s brought psychology back from the dark ages of behaviorism to allow again the study of the mind. Cognitive science, however, arising as it did in the hybridization of psychology and computer science, developed a paradigmatic set of assumptions and methods that emphasized certain aspects of mind and ignored others. Within this heritage, many of the most widely read books about the mind have been written by physicists, engineers, mathematicians, and computer scientists.

Thus, it is a cheery surprise to see social psychologist Daniel Wegner step up with this new volume, bravely entitled The Illusion of Conscious Will. In bright, facile prose, Wegner walks us through an encyclopedia of research into intent, volition, agency, automatism, and the various dimensions and degrees of these concepts.

Some Excerpts

p. 50. Lifting a Finger. At some arbitrary time in the next few seconds, please move your right index finger. That’s correct, please perform a consciously willed action. Now, here’s an interesting question: What was your brain up to at the time? (Experiments measuring the electrical activity in the brain seem to show an increase in activity before the subject is aware of the intention to perform the action)

P. 94. The external causation of one’s action is not necessarily limited to real agents or forces. What about spirits? Once the possibility of outside agency is allowed, it becomes clear that people can imagine or invent outside agents to account for actions of themselves or others. The assumption that one’s actions or thoughts are being introduced by outside agents is a common theme in schizophrenic thinking. However, the appeal to hypothetical outside agents is far too common an experience in human life to be attributed to schizophrenia alone. The occurrence of spirit possession or channeling, for example, is so widespread across cultures and so highly prevalent in some cultures, that it has become a major focus of the field of anthropology.

p. 156. Unconscious Action. Not all human actions begin with conscious intentions. Much of what we do seems to surface from unconscious causes, and such causation provides a major challenge to our ideal of conscious agency.

Free Will: A Philosophical Study, 2000, Westview, by Laura Waddell Ekstrom, Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the College of William and Mary.

From the Preface: Among the other great philosophical issues – the nature of truth, the foundation of ethics, the existence of God, the source of political authority, the possibility and scope of human knowledge, and the nature of meaning, causation, and consciousness – the problem of free will takes its place prominently as one both vigorously debated through philosophical history and to this day largely unsolved. Philosophers continue to debate not only the empirical question of whether or not we have free will, but also certain deeper and more fundamental theoretical questions: What is the essence or nature of a free act? Is our having the ability to act freely consistent or inconsistent with certain other propositions about the nature of the supernatural and the natural world? Would our having free will be, in fact, a good? And if so, what kind?

Chapter 1 – The Problem of Human Freedom: p. 5 … There seems to be some genuine randomness in the direction our lives take, or at least some room for agency not accounted for in a purely deterministic picture.

p.6 …C.A. Campbell once remarked that "to ‘account for’ a ‘free act’ is a contradiction in terms," for, he thought, "free will is ex hypothesi the sort of thing of which the request for an explanation is absurd."

The Significance of Free Will – a section on this.

p. 16. Scientific Determinism – Compatibilism and Incompatibilism – Can we have free will in a deterministic universe?

The rest of the book is a quite technical exploration of these ideas.

Synaptic Self: How our Brains Become Who We Are, 2002, Viking, by Joseph LeDoux, Professor at New York University’s Center for Neural Sciences.

LeDoux is the author of The Emotional Brain: the Mysterious Underpinnings of Emotional Life, and the coauthor, with Michael Gazzaniga, of The Integrated Mind.

(From the dustcover) In 1996 Joseph LeDoux’s The Emotional Brain, presented a revelatory examination of the biological bases of our emotions and memories. Now, in Synaptic Self, LeDoux follows that path breaking work with a new book that tells a larger and more profound story; how the brain, and particularly its synapses, creates and maintains personality.

Challenging the common view that regards the self in terms of self-awareness, LeDoux emphasizes the importance of both conscious and unconscious processes in its construction. Rather than taking sides in the age-old debate of whether nature or nurture is the determining factor in human development, LeDoux also shows how both contribute to synaptic connectivity and personality. Nevertheless, because memory plays such an important role in maintaining our personality over time, much of Synaptic Self concerns the mechanisms by which synapses store information, and how learning is coordinated across the many systems involved in encoding a given experience. Ultimately, it is at the level of the synapse that psychology, culture, and even spirituality meet, where memory joins with genes to create the ineffable essence of personality.

Review from Science magazine, journal of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, by Richard J. Davidson, of the University of Wisconsin: In his opening chapter titled "The Big One," neuroscientist LeDoux defends his choice of the self and personality, rather than the now more fashionable problem of consciousness, as the outstanding issue in neuroscience.

Davidson concludes with: "The final principle—‘Implicit and explicit aspects of the self overlap, but not completely’—is difficult to overemphasize. LeDoux concludes by noting, ‘Our brain has not evolved to the point where the new systems that make complex thinking possible can easily control the old systems that give rise to our base needs and motives, and emotional reactions…Doing the right thing doesn’t always flow naturally from knowing what the right thing to do is’".

LeDoux describes:

The structure of the brain.

Brain development.

How memories are formed.

AHA ACTION ALERT: SCHOOL PRAYER AMENDMENT

By Jenda Huang

The issue of school prayer is making waves in Congress again. Though no bills have yet reached the stage of being a true threat, this e-mail will bring you up-to-date so we can head-off challenges to the first amendment.

The best current example of a bill designed to thwart the constitution through the introduction of school prayer is House Joint Resolution 7, which was referred to the Subcommittee on the Constitution in March.

The bill, simply put, would permit individual or group prayer in public schools or other public institutions. As the bill does not stipulate who can and cannot lead prayer, it is a backdoor to letting administrators lead students in prayer.

Its seemingly innocuous language reads: "Nothing in this Constitution shall be construed to prohibit individual or group prayer in public schools or other public institutions. No person shall be required by the United States or by any State to participate in prayer.

Neither the United States nor any State shall prescribe the content of any such prayer." (See the full text at: http://thomas.loc.gov/)

Lets work together to stop this bill in committee before it gets a wider hearing. While this bill may be overshadowed by others in the House, we send a strong signal to our representatives by letting them know each time they try to legislate religion.

Like all school prayer bills, this bill is unnecessary, as the freedom to pray or not pray is already protected. The Constitution already permits voluntary personal prayer in schools. This bill is a backlash to perceived hostility to religion, and should not be passed.

Call the subcommittee members today!

The House Subcommittee on the Constitution is chaired by Steve Chabot.

Contact him at his Washington office at (202)225-2216. His constituents

(only) may send him an email via http://www.house.gov/writerep/.

The committee member from California is Adam Schiff, CA (202) 225-4176 http://www.house.gov/schiff/as_sub_contact.htm

Its also worth a call to your representatives in both houses to let them know you are square against the imposition of school prayer, regardless of whether its at the behest of Representative Emerson's so called "Voluntary Prayer" bill or Ernest Istook's "Pledge and Prayer" bill and "Religious Freedom Amendment" proposal.

Don’t let the Religious Right slip this bill past the American public.

Prayer is a personal issue and should remain as such. Write to Congress today and let them know you oppose House Joint Resolution 7.