That is a good story. I totally agree how life as a premie and especially ashram premie seriously stunted emotional and mental growth. It is something that is hard for someone who has not experienced that to understand. I remember very clearly that when I made my first non-premie friends how wise and thoughtful they seemed to me. I was so far behind.
About the book, it is not out yet, but knowing the author as I do, I think I know the gist of it. He is really interested in understanding the biological causes of behaviour and especially not getting trapped in one bucket (one particular field of study which can become uncritical dogma) and seeing the bigger picture. There is a great TEDTalk which I can link to, where he explains how a single action is caused by neural activity from seconds ago, hormonal activity from hours ago, patterns from days ago, and on and on until you get back to millions of years of evolution.
He gives a specific example in one of his books about epilepsy. In the middle ages this would have been thought to be caused by demon possession but it is still the fault of the person because the let the demon in. So he talks about the so called imaginary homunculus in our heads that is like another person that decides things.
But as science advances, this homunculus gets continually smaller, because we learn the real cause of behaviour to the inevitable point where it just doesn't exist. Ultimately we are all products of the genetics that made us and what the world has made us into. We all started out more or less as innocent babies.
The argument is not that the universe is all predetermined or predictable per se. There may be aspects of randomness or unpredictability as quantum mechanics suggests. But that people and the decisions they make are products of all that has made them. This addresses the idea that we should be careful about judging people and especially dehumanising them, because all behaviour any human is within the spectrum of human behaviour. We wouldn't have to have a commandment that says, "do not kill", if people were not in the habit of killing already. Of course the paradox is that the tendency to dehumanise people is also part of human behaviour. But for myself I try to avoid that and especially saying someone is evil or disgusting. (By the way, the most violent primate besides us is the chimpanzee, our closest cousin. That should tell us something)
I hope that makes sense. I have been caught lately with the dilemma of dealing with the new revelations of Prem Rawat. My intellect says the above, but of course I can't help but feeling he is evil. In the end though, he too was just a baby and I am sure his life growing up really sucked in many ways and made him into the sociopath or whatever it is he turned out to be. Probably a lot of factors there that I can't even speculate on since I don't know him other than the persona on the stage and what has been described.
Determined versus free will
