I was reading about Mel Gibson’s anti-semitic rants, and his apology about being drunk* when I remembered this meme. I agree with the meme, that our brains tend to feed us what we’ve heard from our environment, but our conscious mind overrides that with our processed thoughts.
People use “he didn’t mean it, he was drunk/high” as an excuse for racist/misogynist/whateverist comments. The response is typically “you don’t become racist when drunk, you just drop your inhibitions and reveal who you are.”
But if you agree with the First Thought meme, what if being impaired isn’t revealing what you really think, but is preventing you from thinking at all, and just getting stuck on your conditioned response?
*Gibson is just an example. This post is not about litigating whether he personally is racist, but about this sort of behavior in general.
I am also in the no-free-will camp. This whole discussion was sparked for me by reading Incognito by David Eagleman, where he makes a good case for lack of free will from a neuroscience perspective. He mentions the studies where people’s unconscious biases are shown by how fast or slow they respond to positive or negative words in conjunction with human characteristics like race. We may be outright anti-racist, choosing to engage in activities that help achieve racial equity, yet still have biases that our conscious mind has no control over.