Another Tuesday, with Sorry

Now for that question that has been praying on everyone's mind; "yadda yadda yadda" According to The Straight Dope site, Jerry was not the source but Lenny Bruce. It goes on to explore the various spellings and their possible derivations.

Except for one.

Enter Yaddah and see what you get.

I know Lenny was Jewish, and the site makes reference to Jewish comedians. You'd think the connection to Hebrew would be obvious. "Facilitating shallow investigations since 1973?"- that year alone should point out the obvious limitations of "dope."

This brings up at least two points; the first being Abe Maslow's famous dictum, "When all you've got is a hammer, everything looks like a nail." Like Calvin we are simply little kids with their first hammer, looking for anything nail-able, such as Mom's coffee table. And as Hobbes mentioned elsewhere, "In the past you've been a remarkably poor judge of what your mother cares about."

The second is the power of the human will. We see what we wanna see.Our filters are as close to omnipotence as any fleshly thing we are likely to know. We pay attention to things that remind us of things we like, or with which we are familiar. Which explains, apart from DNA, why the older we get, the more we act like our parents, the very people whom we swore never to imitate or follow when we first smelled independence....Default mode. Feelings come and go, ideas come and go, people and spirits of people come and go----

But I have yet to meet a person without a strong will. I think this decision-making organ is very close to the pith of a person, and it certainly tends to define a personality. Psychiatry using a multitude of approaches is modestly successful at dealing with feelings and thoughts. Programmers and deprogrammers come and go; but as Mr. Carroll said, "The question is, who is to be master, that's all." I guess that requires a decision of some sort- or the decision to decide not.

"People can snow me, which is why we grant so few interviews," said an interviwer at U of Ill during an exception granted to me in the Vietnam era, and said interview may have been was one reason why I ended up at their medical school. Plus it was cheap. And it is quite possible I did snow him, because I had not-so-good reasons for going into medicine and had only the vaguest idea that since it involved science, I could probably do it. (It reminds me of a lesser-known Donovan song in which he chides one of his friends who got involved with medicine- "The doctor bit was so exciting,wasn't it? --or something to that effect. Not really.

People can have the worst possible reasons for doing something, and yet, defying reason and their own feelings, they often completely make it happen by an act of a persistent will. In my case I found better and better reasons for doing medicine rather than "art," for example; to the point now where I can't imagine doing anything else.

On the negative side, psychiatrists are terrible at managing personality disorders. Psychology has very little of practical value to add to the treatment of even the most-studied personality disorder of all, alcoholism. When I was in training for detox etc. it did not take me long to realize that the only thing that could change a personality (will) was an act of God--but only if and when the sufferer gives permission to be changed on a very core level. Fellow recovering alcoholics are much better at detecting bull and sham change than the sharpest counsellor. In fact, I found that the more advanced the intellect, the fewer practical results. And, I might add, I have never once seen drug treatment to be the slightest help towards recovery. Because the will cannot be treated by drugs. One of the standard excuses alcoholics offer is, "I guess I just don't have enough will power, Doc," when the near-absolute power of an intractable human will is simultaneously looking me in the face.

Of course we are now told that "science proves," that there is no such thing as the soul, and in particular that evolutionary biology and neurobiology have ruled out free will. However, now we are back at the tool problem. "The Pope? How many divisions does he have?" asked Joe Stalin. Joe had a big Hammer which turned out to be ludicrously small. But it's all he really had- besides a few major personality disorders .

In order to come to conclusions such as these, one has to assume that the universe consists only of Hammers (with energy) and Nails(that matter) and things that are permeable to Nails given enough space and time. But such a hypothesis is not provable or even falsifiable on our level or any conceivable level, leaving us with Isaac Asimov's final comments about the God hypothesis: --I might possibly be wrong, but it's not worth my time to pursue it--. Not worth his time!

Perhaps another scientist or three can help us here-- but science as it now exists is a culturally driven phenomenon and can only offer us a few brands of hammer and nails and not much time to decide whether or not we have a free will or not. Joyce knows the folk song, "Hammer and Nails," I am sure. Feel free here to sing or hum--I like Mavis Staple's version.....