All human behavior is determined by the way in which a person’s neural processes assess experiences as positively reinforcing, punishing (aversive), or negatively reinforcing (termination of aversive circumstance).
People vary greatly as to the precise nature of their neural processes, which are determined by intelligence, behavioral inclinations associated with natural selection, features acquired from one’s specific familial heredity, and the nature of the experiences that one has had at the juncture in which an additional experience occurs.
People also have unique arrays of experience that, however similar, nevertheless are singular as to sequence and specificity.
Each experience for a particular person is received as positively reinforcing, punishing, or negatively reinforcing and recorded in the parts of the brain associated with the intellectual, emotional, and physical components of the experience.
At this point the precise state of the particular person’s neural processes is critical, determined by the amount of knowledge accumulated through reading, research, and experience as the person’s biological constitution interacts with the environment:
The individual’s neural assessment of those interactions constitutes the process of cognition.
Cognition, then, is the process of neural evaluation of experiences that activate neurons in the parts the brain stimulated by visual, emotional, physical, and intellectual components of experience. Experience is neurally evaluated and stored in the hippocampus, amygdala, and other memory centers for recall of factual detail and categorization as positively reinforcing, punishing, or negatively reinforcing.
The larger the information base a person has established, resulting from experience but also, critically, from breadth and depth of reading, research, and accumulation of factual knowledge, the better positioned one is cognitively to make decisions most likely to be maximally beneficial for the person at the upper levels of human aesthetic, intellectual, physical, and emotional sensibility.
Human beings do not have free will.
Human behavior is determined by experiences neurally evaluated as positively reinforcing, punishing, or negatively reinforcing.
But, though lacking free will, people do make decisions according to cognitive processes seeking reward and avoiding punishment. The quality of decisions made and outcomes experienced are determined by a person’s knowledge base and by both genetically acquired and experientially developed personal attributes.
We have, then, the paradox that the better a person understands the determinants of human behavior, including the absence of free will; and the stronger a person’s knowledge base and personal aptitude for making qualitatively beneficial decisions; that person then acts with an informed assertiveness that we associate with free will.
Such a person may be said to be acting with a level of self-awareness that we call consciousness.
The higher the level of consciousness, the more productively interactive a person can be with the environmental determinants of human behavior:
The best ship captain can never determine the motion of the seas; but knowledge and developed ability give the captain opportunity to steer the ship in such a way as to produce the best possible experience for that captain and for all of those aboard.
The above analysis follows the best information available from behaviorist, neural, and cognitive psychology in assessing the determinants of human behavior.
Philosophers, theologians, artists, novelists, and other creative human beings produce much of metaphorical value that may be recorded as experience for neural evaluation; such intellectually and artistically creative people are not as well positioned to explain human behavior as are behaviorist psychologists and neuroscientists, but their creations inspire and inform those who more precisely assess why people do what they do.
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