(2) Cognitive therapy (e.g., Beck’s work, as well as Meichembaum’s, Ellis’, etc.) does not suggest that self-talk per se is detrimental to self-control. Instead, it shows that some individuals misuse inner speech by either overusing it or by distorting it (by engaging in negative thought patterns), which leads to poor self-regulation indeed. These individuals are «self-ruminators» as opposed to «self-reflectors» — see Trapnell and Campbell (1999). Healthy use of inner speech translates into highly effective self-regulation.

… except that the brain itself is a machine, a network of cells that computes its choices….

If you start by asserting that this metaphor is simply the fact of the matter, your subsequent argument rests on quicksand. If you are right about the centrality of “the complex circulation of molecular information,” you should address why virtually none of our actual computing machines work by circulating “molecular information.”

If men were solely driven by their pleasures and pains, women would have centuries ago taken total control of men’s minds. Really addressing the question of free will doesn’t consist in showing the neural correlates of the “pleasure principle,” but rather in showing how conscious human beings are so often (even if not all or most of the time) capable of transcending it.

Answering that question would produce a plausible model of free will. Denying the question of transcendence - claiming that all behavior is merely the end result of calculation against projected sum results of an equation of pleasure and pain - misses the question of free will entirely.

It’s also simply incoherent. It assumes that all pleasures can be neatly mapped onto an intensity scale. Yet any aesthete knows that subtle pleasures can be preferable to strong pleasures, and that the flavors and complexities of pleasures can hardly be reduced to a scale at all - or even multiple scales. To the extent different pleasures - say of fine food or fine scenery - can be scaled, it’s not to the same scales across pleasure kinds either. Nor are pains differentiated simply in linear intensity.

You also should contend with Aaron Beck’s findings suggesting that self-talk, lodged presumably in working memory, often leads to a neurotic lack of self-control, which can be improved precisely by training subjects to gain psychological distance from the self-talk - what his well-proven “cognitive therapy” consists in.

In folk psychology, of course, inner speech just is self-control, and there’s a homunculus over there producing it, or is it that we’re supposed to be the homunculus? All the standard arguments against a homunculus need to be disarmed, perhaps by better separating your claim from the folk psychological picture.

Also, even if better self-control capacity correlates with better verbal (as compared to visuo-spatial) working memory capacity, you need to show that it isn’t the other way around: that better self-control capacity produces better working memory capacity. Keeping something within working memory is itself arguably an instance of self-control.

The latter hypothesis beyond lame since if such an entity existed, which is totally devoid of proof, the “neurotheological” circuit would be 1. present in all and 2. lead to perfect communion with this occult, ephemeral being.

Whether it’s the “god gene” or Persinger’s “god machine”… or OOB’s… or religious hallucinations induced by drugs or schizophrenia… it is crystal clear to me that man has created god out of ignorance of the natural world, fear of death… and the wish to be demigods and live forever.

The fact that the belief in a god that has left not a trace in the physical world is a fixed delusion speaks volumes of a clear link between mental illness and the attendant hallucinations which often take on religious themes. I had a friend once who literally went crazy on drugs… a brilliant,jewish muscian during the late 60’s. He was later arrested and in court defended himself in the person of jesus christ. Clearly, our culture determines the dialog and narrative these “visions and voices” will take.

Cheers to all who seek.

I would add that along with researching dream-states during sleep… progressive levels of anesthesia and brain/mind altering drugs are fertile ground which have been sadly abandoned until only recently.

Regarding one commenter pontificating that QM has slayed any notion of a deterministic universe… and without a shread of evidence asserts free-will (FW) exists… I think absurd. Like evolution, the great weight of evidence has demonstrated the utter lack of FW, whether from mountains of reasearch in neurobiology or interrelated genetics. The alleged randomness of QM does not equate in any sense with some notion of FW. Quite the contrary, it would be a strong argument against it. Someone as eminent as Gerard t’Hooft has authored a paper on the “determinism underlying QM” as I recall!
I challenge anyone who desires to escape the determined Natural world (but certainly NOT the simplistically “mechanistic”) to explain the nature of this “free-willing agent” which somehow, by some means, supervenes on our physical brains. When did this supernatural agency appear in the context of human evolution, apart from the evolution of our physical brains? When during our embryological development does FW appear? Does FW operate at the synaptic, neuronal level… or is it some kind of ethereal super-identity, which comes from who-knows-where… for who-knows-why?

Cheers.

Arnold Trehub