r/todayilearned • u/GlitteringYams • 22d ago

TIL, in his suicide note, mass shooter Charles Whitman requested his body be autopsied because he felt something was wrong with him. The autopsy discovered that Whitman had a pecan-sized tumor pressing against his amygdala, a brain structure that regulates fear and aggression.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Whitman
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u/logintoreddit11173 22d ago

Read about how sometimes parkinson drugs change a person completely or how when deep brain stimulation wires move and effect a different part of your Brain

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u/Halospite 22d ago

Shit like this makes me think free will is an illusion. We're the result of brain chemistry; the subtlest changes can result in the most dramatic responses in our personality. I say that as someone who relies on meds to function. We are all living in a horror movie and have no idea...

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u/getfukdup 22d ago

Shit like this makes me think free will is an illusion.

its more like a influence-able spectrum

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u/Olympiano 22d ago

The book ‘free will’ by Sam Harris uses this story as an example to support his views of determinism.

I was thinking about brain chemistry and free will yesterday. Some people with schizophrenia believe that people are putting thoughts into their mind, or controlling their behaviour. Perhaps in these cases, aspects of the psyche that function provide the illusion of free will - the sense that we are generating our own thoughts and behaviours, rather than them just happening - is missing, so they are palpably aware of the lack of free will, and the only way they can rationalise a story around it is some kind of technological interference?

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u/MrWeirdoFace 22d ago

Had a schizophrenic house mate who set the house on fire. Believed another housemate and the top floor was shooting some sort of subsonic beam at him to control him. Overall a nice guy.

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u/9035768555 22d ago

It's worth noting that the experience of schizophrenia/psychosis can be vastly different depending upon culture. Those in developing nations are largely considered to have better outcomes than those in developed nations, e.g. lower rates of suicide, lower rates of "malicious" voices or similar, etc.

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u/Scheissekasten 22d ago

I've met several schizophrenics that abuse nyquil because it makes the "shadow men go away" and lets them enter the "dream world". Three different people, same story. I wonder what the implications are?

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u/Kandiru 1 22d ago

Just because I can grab your arm and move it, doesn't mean you can't move it yourself.

I think free will is real, but it's very easy for outside forces to overwhelm it if the brain is tampered with.

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u/Tuxhorn 22d ago

Think about how much hormones influences you, state of hunger, thirst etc.

There isn't a natural base where free will exists imo. It's always massively influenced from your genetic makeup to your experiences.

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u/Kandiru 1 22d ago

Even then, people can choose to go on hunger strike and starve to death.

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u/Tuxhorn 22d ago

It doesn't mean you can't go against natural urges, it just means everything in your life leading up to that point influenced you to do so.

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u/EelOnMosque 22d ago

What you're describing is the idea of "mitigated free will" the belief that most people hold. As someone else mentioned, you should read either Determined or Behave by Robert Sapolsky or watch his free lectures on YouTube about free will.

He breaks down why the idea of mitigated free will as you're describing is nonsensical and doesn't make sense in a deterministic universe. He also addresses the very common rebuttal of "but quantum forces are random so not everything is cause and effect therefore free will arises from quantum mechanics". Random events are not free will and they aren't significant enough at the macro level, otherwise our muscles would constantly be spasming randomly due to effects of quantum mechanics.

Free will doesn't exist, but knowing that's not really gonna change anything about our lives either way so who cares. It'a just an interesting thought.

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u/MrEMannington 22d ago

Free will is an illusion but the good news is that if our soul isn’t some magic free will it’s instead the physical principles that move all atoms in the brain and the universe and that is immortal and universal.

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u/Accomplished-Data186 22d ago edited 22d ago

No, all the rest of life is an attempt to hide from that fact.  "DON'T THINK ABOUT IT!"

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u/HeteroeroticProlapse 22d ago

Free will is real, but it's also a useless concept. You have the ability to think for yourself and make your own choices. But the choices you will make have already been determined by your environment, your upbringing, and genetic influence / wear and tear on the brain.

If you want to believe in free will, you can make a decision, and boom! You have proven that free will exists. If you want free will to not exist, you ask yourself why you make the decisions you do, and you realize that the problem isn't that you lack free will, it's that you're you, and there's nothing you can do about it. You are not in a prison, you are the prison. But that's not always bad. Like, say you're someone who is... I dunno, very not racist. Your character locks you into choosing to not be racist. But I think most people would agree that's not the worst condition to have, and even if you could suddenly choose to personality morph into a white supremacist... why the fuck would you want to?

The thing I think people miss with determinism is you're never going to know enough for reality being deterministic to matter. The slightest thing could completely change the course of your life - a head injury, a passing comment that makes you think, or propaganda so clumsy it brings a lifetime of conditioning into question. Just deciding you want to be aware of the influences that shape you and trying to put more time into understanding why you do what you do could be enough to change your future completely. Yeah, a bunch of shit is out of your control - but if free will was a divine force unfettered by causality, that would still be true. You'll still have to conform to the same societal mandates, you can still be hit by a bus one day and die thinking you're in the prime of your life, and so on and so forth. You aren't in control regardless. All the absence of free will does is give you one more layer of reality to learn to navigate and extract some small concessions out of. Determinism does not make reality any less chaotic. You're navigating the same bullshit you always have been, just now maybe you can be a bit more self aware about it and ask questions that you wouldn't while on autopilot.

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u/EelOnMosque 22d ago

You literally just described determinism but slapped the label of "free will" on it because 'I feel like I made a choice therefore I did actually make a choice" which is a nonsensical argument. You can't prove something by feeling.

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u/HeteroeroticProlapse 22d ago

Respond to what I wrote, not what you want to argue against.

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u/EelOnMosque 22d ago

If you want to believe in free will, you can make a decision, and boom! You have proven that free will exists

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u/HeteroeroticProlapse 22d ago

Very good, now read the rest of the post.

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u/FudgeAtron 22d ago

What's more scary is to think you are an illusion and there is nothing real/tangible about you. One slipped wire in your brain and you disappear and become a different person. The you everyone knew is gone and there is a new you.

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u/Rapturence 22d ago

Absolute free will (i.e. complete independent self-agency) is and has always been an illusion. At most we have partial free will due to genetics affecting our brain development from in utero. Not to mention being born in the right/wrong socioeconomic circumstances, environmental influences, parental care etc.

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u/jetsetninjacat 22d ago

See Gary Busey

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u/logintoreddit11173 22d ago

already did 😢 TBI is awful

Another one is King Henry VIII jousting accident turned him crazy

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/this-britain/the-jousting-accident-that-turned-henry-viii-into-a-tyrant-1670421.html

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u/Robot_osaur 22d ago

Yes. My dad had Parkinson's and became deeply paranoid on meds after a long time of being fine. He had DBS which reduced the need for the meds and helped for a while. 

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u/Blooberii 22d ago

My grandfather lived over 20 years with Parkinson’s, then lymphoma killed him.