Marvin Minsky in his book Society of Mind deals specifically with these issues, and the fact of the matter is that our desires and preferences even on such basic levels as sexual response are subject to change by the factor of personal choice given sufficient motivation and commitment. Examples abound to such a large degree that there isn’t really any room for debate. The statement “I am unable to change,” or “it’s not my choice, it’s the way I am,” are either self-serving copouts, or statements of personal incompetance.
I figure that if you were not your own master that mean’s that you are somebody else’s dog.
I can hardly imagine a reason why somebody who was homosexual would want to change to heterosexual, or vice versa. I see nothing wrong with either path, but to say that it’s not a matter of choice and can’t be done is just wrong.
Certainly some people do it. Some folks in prison embrace homosexuality within that context and heterosexuality without. Some girls at an all girls school nearby embrace Lesbianism exclusively during College and heterosexuality thereafter.
People can and do change and people can and do change as a function of choice. That some people cannot or will not is not a testament as to immutability of preference but rather a statement about a failure of self-knowledge, self-mastery, commitment and discipline.
I know for a fact that it’s possible to change deep-seated preferences because I have done so, as have many many others in many many contexts.
According to Minsky the mechanisms of preference are not directly within our conscious control but are a product of our inherent natures, our experiences, and our choices. Two out of the three are largely within our control.
Minsky is one of the cofounders of the MIT AI lab and arguably one of the smartest men on the planet. The proof of his concept has been demonstrated by the functioning of his robotic “insects” who demonstrate preferences based his models, and by such inventions as cochlear implants and artificial limbs. Ray Kurzweil (who knows a thing or two about AI) applied Minsky’s ideas to pattern recognition which is nothing more than a learned applied preference to train computers to recognize speech, and there are many other applications as well.
Minsky’s model works.
What the model is, is this:
What we think of as consciousness is nothing more than the interreaction of mostly autonomous thought processes (called “agents”) that interreact with each other in limited ways. Those agents however can be deliberately changed which results in a change in the gestalt they produce.
For example, if you’ve ever had a child and watched it carefully you’ll notice that it had to learn to see, and it took a lot of time and effort to do so. An infant spends a long time learning how to grasp and pick things up. Let’s examine that. When you pick something up do you actually think “contract such and such a muscle to rotate arm in such and such a way. Relax such and such muscle to lower arm. Extend fingers one through five. Perform feedback on tactile response to touching object… etc etc?” If you break it down into all the basic commands and functions the act of picking something up is horrendously complex. Try sometime to control a computer arm with anything approaching dexterity.
The fact of the matter is that when you decide to pick something up, you just do it. You make the conscious decision but you don’t consciously bother with all the details. You have an “agent” program that runs behind your conscience thought that takes care of all the incredibly complex details without “you” having to.
Once such an agent is in place it tends to stay in place even if it’s not super efficient simply because the effort to retrain yourself and create a superior program to replace the inneficient agent is much more effort than the inneficiency that it creates.
But it can be done. Magicians do it all the time. They retrain themselves and create new agents through painstaking work to allow them to perform different functions than one will commonly develop. Athletes and musicians do it.
“Naturally gifted athletes” are rarely that. A study by the author of Freakonomics examined elite soccer players and found that a disproportionate number of them were born in either November or December. Why would this be? It turns out that if you were born in November or December your typically get to be the oldest kid in your group in the youth soccer leagues which are structured by age groups. Having an extra year of experience and physical development, say, being a six year old competing in a five and under soccer league is a huge advantage. As the star soccer player you get the most attention and training and come to think of yourself as gifted, or the best. And, you become so.
Bulimics and anorexics connect their food preferences (which is about as basic as you can get) to matters of personal self-esteem and control, and are able to overpower and short circuit even the most basic and seemingly immutable function to feed themselves. With great effort they can change back and reprogram their desires to coincide with healthier choices.
People who become vegetarians may train themselves or become so committed to vegetarianism that the very idea of eating meat is repugnant may cause a physical gag reflex.
If I tell you to take a deep breath and hold it, chances are you won’t be able to make a minute and a half. However, if I were to seal your nose and mouth so that you couldn’t breathe you would struggle for 3 or four minutes. You have an agent that is programmed to make you very alarmed if you go for a short period without breathing. You have an agent that interprets the buildup as carbon dioxide in your lungs as distress and urges you to make the conscious choice to breathe by producing a pain response.
However, if you practice holding your breath you can retrain this agent to sound its alarm later and less shrilly allowing you to hold your breath much longer. You can do this in a matter of hours, doubling or more the time you can hold your breath. Nothing physiological has occured, you have simply retrained yourself in terms of the level of pain and distress you feel.
To quit smoking I basically retrained myself over time to respond and think about cigarettes differently than I had been. My desire to smoke seemed innate at the time I smoked, my repugnance to smoking seems innate now.
What you may feel changes all the time. Bite a nipple during sexual arousal and what may have been painful and discomforting in one context is pleasurable in another.
I’ve found that to physically run 50 or 100 miles in an ultramarathon requires much more mental conditioning than physical. You have to literally retrain the way you feel and respond to physical stimuli. In this respect a level of discomfort and fatigue that would be overpowering to another person is perceftly tolerable to me, not because I’m better or different, I’ve just gone to the effort to adapt myself in this fashion.
If I lived in a society where everybody was gay, I’m sure I would be gay too. I don’t so I’m not.
Who I am and what I like is a choice.
Certainly when you consider the extreme to which a bulimic or an anorexic is able to recondition such basic and forceful instincts as the ones to eat it would seem reasonable to concede that something as mutable and subjective as sexual response is similarly malleable. It’s simply unreasonable to think otherwise.
I really enjoy my long distance running because the act of will and self-analysis necessary teaches you a lot about yourself. Robert Twigger in his book Angry White Pajamas articulates it quite well. Robert is a nerdy englishman, a poet laureate teaching English in Japan. One day, for no real reason other than that he always had the childhood dream to be a badass, he manages to get himself enrolled in the toughest most difficult, most brutal, most demanding martial arts course in the world: The Aikido training for the Tokyo Riot Police. Only a very small part of the training is on technique. The vast majority of that training is simply extreme self-inflicted abuse. It seems pointless at first, but he sticks it out, and one winter morning while standing naked in a freezing waterfall he understands why it is this way. He is retraining the way his mind and body interract, and, he has an epiphany: “Your body is nothing more than a pressurized bag of crap, and once you really understand that you can make it do or feel anything you want it to.”
Ultra-running leads me to the same conclusion. I don’t really feel the pain and discomfort and fatigue the way I did before. They are simply data and I am able to process them and interpret them and I am able to chose to run and feel pleasure for having done so.
So, no.
Your preferences, even ones that seem innate are subject to change by your conscious.
No, really, I don’t think you’re hatemongering at all, but I do wonder how and why you think pedophiles choose to be sexually aroused by children. Really? Someone sits down one day and says, “I want to be hated and prey on the innocent, even though I’m not turned on by them. I think I’ll whack off and then look at pictures of children so the sexual feelings are transfered to the image of kids and maybe in a few weeks the sight of a kid will make my soldier salute.” Really? That doesn’t seem likely to me.