Reply to comment

I’d like to return to the concept of “choice” that we were covering in Tuesday’s class. Isn’t anyone else disturbed by this idea that many of the actions we take that we thought were acts of free will and of choice may actually be behaviors, or responses to patterns of action potentials, automatic responses to a stimulus coded for by the pattern generators pre-existing in our bodies?! There must be some actions we take that are external to these needs and demands of our bodies and outside of the direction of our nervous systems. Right? I mean, I have always been taught that I make my own choices and direct my own life, but what if all along, our bodies are driving us in a certain direction, and when we resist that direction (somehow) and overcome these demands is when our body rejects us (we get sick?).

 I considered eating as an example: so, up until now I thought, I choose to eat breakfast and dinner daily, and  sometimes lunch; I choose what I eat and how much; technically, I could stuff myself until I puke. But, what if our bodies are saying “I’m hungry” and our  response is “I will eat now.” This is not far-fetched and makes a lot of sense, i.e. this is probably what we actually do. But, what if our bodies also say “I  need protein,” and that “choice” we made to  eat steak for dinner is actually a behavior response to the firing of some pattern generator, signaling the body’s need for protein? Well then, it’s no longer a choice right? Like the example in class: the pleurobranchea—the act of retracting its nose is not a choice if under the condition of chewing, the only response is to not retract the nose; this is a result of pattern generators inhibiting the retraction; but  by definition, there are no longer 2 or more possibilities, right? There is only this one response of the pattern generators put in place to act when certain conditions (i.e. chewing) are occurring.

Well, maybe a simple, everyday act like eating is the same. I am reading a book about a woman who suffered from eating disorders much of her life (Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia, by Marya Hornbacher) and she writes a section that seems somewhat appropriate to this specific question of eating: “I decided to eat once a week, in penance for the minimal eating I’d done at home. I ate on Sundays. Rice. I did this until I began bingeing and purging almost autonomously. This sounds very odd to people who haven’t been malnourished […] but scientifically speaking, your body will actually override your brain and make you eat.” She continues to describe uncontrolled fits of eating and then realizing what she had done, and throwing it up. She describes something almost like a blackout: she cannot remember how she got to a restaurant or ordering the food, but comes too half way through a plate. If in these extreme cases one’s body can take charge, is it so crazy to think that maybe it does it on a daily basis to keep these extreme cases from happening?

Back to one of my original thoughts, this woman (Marya), somehow rejected her bodies demands and went along her own path of not eating and  denying her body nourishment; and her body rejected her—she almost died. But then, starving herself was her free will, right? Because it is most obviously not what her body demanded. Or, was it a response to some other input, whether it be a society that promotes the model-like body type, or a mother that called her fat, that triggered something else in her brain (like a pattern generator) that caused her to starve herself—and as long as she perceived that input of “I’m fat; she thinks so, and he thinks so, and my own mother thinks so,” then this response is elicited. Now, I know this isn’t exactly evolutionarily beneficial, and so such a mechanism (this specific one) should not have survived natural selection, and this entire proposition is a bit outlandish, but if I can reason this, than I should be able to reason other, more plausible examples as well.

I haven’t made much progress on my original question, but I have had more time to think and so I am more terrified of the possibility that everything I do is dictated by some biological mechanism—even writing this post may not be a choice I am making; it may be voluntary because as far as I can tell, I want to be writing this right now, but may have been the only possible response to the discussion we had in class (the input), which triggered thoughts in my mind that resulted in this.