false heart 7

The idea of how much of our so-called “free will” is actually programming is one we don’t think about enough. I mean, who wants to acknowledge the possibility that the things we do, the ‘choices’ we make are in fact remnants from earlier actions and thoughts and beliefs that were passed down to us?

Of course, it’s silly and weak to blame every single thing we do in our adult lives on our parents or our upbringing. On the other hand, our choices – not only those that have been made for us by parents, school, church, etc. – but even the ones we made ourselves in how we dealt with the very natural pain and struggle of this world have by necessity written a number of programming shortcuts into the matrix of our behaviors and thoughts. By necessity, we can’t work through our entire process for, say, dealing with the boss, or a rude person on the sidewalk, or a friendly bank teller every time we encounter such a person. We have shortcuts, we have mental hotkeys that allow us to deal with these types of situations with a minimum of fuss and awkwardness.

Our emotional lives are perhaps laden with these scripts as well, these shortcuts to previous ways of understanding previous relationships. This is especially dangerous and pernicious, as we’ve discussed, because it can define new people and situations by old rules that no longer apply. It’s a way of treating every human being one encounters as a sort of extra in one’s life, as an automaton subject to the same rules and biases and personality flaws as every other person we’ve ever met who happens to resemble them.

So my question for today then, is if it’s possible to acknowledge that, for instance, ‘this girl isn’t that girl,’ and that in the past I have had a tendency to judge the entire female species by the actions of a very few very fucked up ladies I met early on in my life, and that I have lived a great deal of my life on autopilot as it were, then isn’t it also possible to conjecture that there are other areas of my life where I do the same? Isn’t it possible to imagine that we spend a great deal of time — a great deal more time than we would like to think — on autopilot, going through motions that seem to fit the stimulus of today, but which in actuality are merely knee-jerk reactions to past encounters?

Of course we never think about this possibility. It is mind-numbing and terrifying to think that we ourselves may have short-circuited our own brains in the name of convenience. That in order to make it easier on ourselves, to require less thoughtfulness and care in how we deal with the world, that we might deliberately have snapped off certain connectors in our own minds.

That we have self-lobotomized.

Our fiction throughout history contains all manner of automata – zombies, vampires, werewolves, golem, robots – man-machines that lack free will. And we are rightly terrified at the thought of becoming one of them.

But what if we already are? How would we know if our free will was actually someone else’s? Or at least not that of our current selves, but rather scripts passed down to us from the people we used to be and the people we encountered years ago?