Paul O’Mahoney considers the awful fate Nietzsche predicts for humanity.
Spot the key point here? Of course: "dimly understood though they are". And that's always my point, isn't it? We grapple to understand our own measure of autonomy given the staggering gap between what we profess to know about anything at all and how that fits into what we know very, very, very, very little about regarding the existence of existence itself.The second related but subtly different conception of our lack of freedom rests on the Nietzschean assertion that the body is the self. In other words, physiological processes (dimly understood though they are) contain or define the whole of the human person.
Thus: the whole of the human person?!!
And, yes, how utterly fascinating yet entirely perplexing this sort of thing can be. It's akin to all the other maladies our brains can be afflicted with: dementia, Alzheimer's, schizophrenia, clinical depression, bipolar disorder, PTSD, autism. All the bizarre conditions explored by those like Oliver Sacks.On this view, consciousness is merely a function of biological processes beyond our control. This contention could also find support in some recent research. For instance, experimental evidence lends support to the idea that the common parasite Toxoplasma gondii may inhibit risk-aversion in its host. In other words, playing host to this parasite makes people significantly more disposed to taking risks.
In other words, all that we still do not understand about the brain chemically and neurologically. For me, in particular, the part that revolves around dreams. The way the brain itself creates "realities" "in our head" that we experience as though in the waking world but utterly beyond our control.
Over and again: what to make of this? The moods that we flit from and the behaviors that we choose [over time] regulated and/or determined by "gut bacteria"?!Much more banal is the increasing evidence that gut bacteria play a role in the regulation of mood, and determine our cravings for food. This research into our physiology seems to erode the possibility of free will. The bacteria or parasites to which we play host determine our moods and behaviour, and so our beliefs and lives, even while we cherish the idea that we ourselves determine our fates. Recent research has even suggested that the great marker of our humanity, consciousness, might be the result of the long-ago binding of the genetic code of the Arc virus into the human genome.
By the Arc virus? https://www.scientificamerican.com/arti ... the-brain/
All of these [still mysterious] chemical and neurological interactions unfolding in our brain...and yet here most of us just shrugging that aside and insisting "I make all of my own decision!"