"Continuous discursive tinnitus"

An excellent New Yorker long-read. Totally timely.

The person who should have been best able to explain how we got here was the great German philosopher Jürgen Habermas, who illuminated how a feisty, principled public sphere is integral to democracy. But Habermas died in March, at the age of ninety-six, and, although he remained active until his final months, commenting on Ukraine, Gaza, and Eurobonds, he struggled to understand the turn history had taken. As a teen-ager in 1945, he had witnessed American soldiers enter his home town of Gummersbach, near Cologne, carrying messages of freedom and openness. Eight decades later, he watched American voters choose a leader who had advertised his fascistic bent in blood-and-soil rhetoric, fantasies of punitive violence, and a taste for bombastic architectural kitsch. The far right was making inroads across Europe, including in Germany. The print-based media culture that once anchored Habermas’s public sphere had devolved into a digital sludgefest that proved better at circulating racist memes than at fostering morality and dignity. A couple of years before his death, in a conversation with the historian Philipp Felsch, Habermas said that his world was being dismantled “step by step.”...
____ 

...The medieval philosopher al-Farabi, who considered democracy the least imperfect of imperfect governments, is mentioned only in passing. A similar Western bias contributed to one of Habermas’s last, and least effective, public interventions. In November, 2023, after Hamas’s massacre of Israelis and the onset of Israel’s brutal counterstrike on Gaza, Habermas signed a statement that reasserted solidarity between Germany and Israel. After a glancing mention of Palestinian suffering, the authors write, “The standards of judgment slip completely when genocidal intentions are attributed to Israel’s actions.” It’s one thing to deny that genocide has taken place in Gaza; it’s another to imply more broadly that the topic is out of bounds. At a crucial moment, Habermas’s cherished pluralism failed him.

“If no dread remains, the monsters return,” Habermas wrote early in his career. They’re back, on several continents. Earlier this year, in Germany, the Sachsen-Anhalt branch of the far-right Alternative für Deutschland party released a platform containing such demands as “Think German!,” “Promote patriotism—no state money for anti-German art and culture!,” and “Build more beautifully!” This dumbed-down Goebbels gobbledygook revived talking points that Habermas had tried to quash during the Historikerstreit. Not surprisingly, AfD representatives could barely contain their glee over the philosopher’s death. Hans-Thomas Tillschneider, one of the Party’s nastier voices, posted a YouTube video in which he said, “Habermas is dangerous. He is one of the greatest enemies of the German nation.” Tillschneider’s inability to put Habermas into the past tense was somehow reassuring.

An equally obnoxious obituary came from the billionaire pen of Alex Karp, the C.E.O. of Palantir Technologies. Before Karp turned to hawking surveillance systems that have assisted ice in its murderous roundups of immigrants, he studied philosophy under Habermas in Frankfurt. In an article for Politico, Karp recounted how Habermas provided fierce but fair criticism of his papers: “It was his very willingness to be so productively unsparing that reminds me of what we have lost as a culture.” Alas, the losses that Karp has in mind don’t seem to involve learning, rigor, or reason. Waving away Habermas’s cosmopolitan ideals, he says that discourse “must be rooted in a more corporeal and traditional—and indeed national and cultural—source.” This is the language of maga and the AfD, not to mention Heidegger circa 1935. Karp’s ideological atavism is all too typical of the current bent of Silicon Valley...

 

When the A.I. chatbots march in, the “colonization of the lifeworld,” to use another ungainly but apt Habermas phrase, enters a terminal stage. Horkheimer and Adorno had concluded that advanced capitalism, far from being a technocratic monolith, had an inherent tendency toward chaos and madness. A.I. is at once a consummation of technological control and a new level of cultish delirium. The designers themselves are often incapable of explaining what their systems are doing. Habermas’s entire world view was premised on the idea of people learning from one another; A.I. annihilates communicative action in the name of hallucinatory conversations with sycophantic machines. The social effects have proved instantly disastrous: rampant disinformation, mass student cheating, cases of users becoming addicted to A.I. or killing themselves with its help. Meanwhile, to the joy of investors, untold thousands of jobs have vanished. As an added coup, A.I. managed to deliver a personal affront to Habermas a year before his death. In 2024, Google DeepMind unveiled a “Habermas Machine,” which has been described as a “scaffolded pair of LLMs designed to find consensus among people who disagree.” The philosopher had not given Google permission to use his name, and he was horrified when he heard about the scheme...

 

Philosophy is a discipline of abstractions, yet it raises achingly elemental questions. The august Kant asks, “What can I know? What should I do? What can I hope for?” The answers are seldom simple or bright. The seduction of despair can be intense, whether on the personal or the political level. But the fact that most of our hopes remain unrealized should not revoke the reality of our fitful, painful progress.

This was Habermas’s core conviction; he was an incrementalist, though a radical one. On the other hand, in his almost manic drive toward consensus, he blunted the edge of his critical inheritance. If we are to say no to the monstrosities that we have unleashed, we need the uncompromising fury that the Frankfurt School writers invested in their work. We need Adorno to tell us that the confusion of truth and lies “makes it a Sisyphean labor to hold on to the simplest piece of knowledge.” In the end, we need both voices: the critical and the reconstructive, the savage and the sage. The dialectic moves between crashing despair and hovering hope.

That's just a tad.

 

Academy Awards 2026

  

All of this mindless Trump war stuff of late has really put some enervating dings in my topical focus. So, I thought I'd just veg out for a whole evening and watch the entire Academy Awards show. Worth it, in ways I'd not anticipated. to wit:

What Bugonia reveals about the real search for aliens
In the Oscar-nominated film Bugonia, Emma Stone’s character is accused of being an alien. But would we know extraterrestrial life if we saw it on Earth?

[Scientific American] In Bugonia, it all starts with bees. A warehouse worker, Teddy (played by Jesse Plemons), accuses high-powered CEO Michelle (Emma Stone) of being an extraterrestrial who is secretly killing bees, disrupting the ecosystems humans depend on for food.

“The signs,” Teddy says, “are obvious.”

It’s a funny and gripping premise. But at the center of the movie is a compelling question that scientists all over the world are working to answer: How would we know if we saw an alien?

To identify alien life, scientists must be able to tell that the thing they are considering is alive. But there’s not as much consensus about what “life” really is as you might think.

"We don’t have a really clear theoretical and experimental program to ask questions about the nature of life,” says Sara Walker, an astrobiologist and theoretical physicist at Arizona State University. Essentially, our working criteria are based exclusively on life on Earth. But across the vastness of the universe, life might present as radically different from what we’ve seen on our planet.

Walker theorizes that life may not have to be based on organic molecules, cells and DNA, for example. Rather it might be easier to identify life using what she and her colleagues call “assembly theory,” which means spotting complex systems that stem from traceable lineages and that have changed their environment in a way that only a living entity could…

What might that look like beyond Earth? Well, we have no idea—yet. “The vast possibility space [of] life far exceeds both what has been actualized here on Earth in our one single biosphere and also potentially our imaginations,” says Mike Wong, an astrobiologist at the Carnegie Institution for Science’s Earth & Planets Laboratory.

Every living thing on Earth has been honed by millions of years of evolution and coevolution alongside all the other creatures and the planet’s different environments. It’s reasonable to assume that an alien probably won’t look anything like an Earthling, Wong says, because its evolutionary history could be determined by a radically different world with unique pressures and environments.

And as for Bugonia, “I think it would be highly unlikely that aliens would look like Emma Stone,” Wong says…

"Sara Walker," 'eh?

 

Yes, indeed. Sara Imari Walker. Swoon...

 

 

OK, "OTHER SENSES, OTHER WORLDS?"

 

Yep.
 

I'll get back to prior post topics ASAP.apropos,

 

Lots of concerns focused on AI and toxic social media of late. Jacob Ward is on it big-time. See here as well.

 

ERRATUM 

Ugh.

 

CODA: A "TRUTH SOCIAL" MESSAGE FROM YOUR FAVORITE PRESIDENT

"Iran has long been known as a Master of Media Manipulation and Public Relations. They are Militarily ineffective and weak, but are really good at "feeding" the very appreciative Fake News Media false information. Now, A.l. has become another Disinformation weapon that Iran uses, quite well, considering they are being annihilated by the day. They showed phony "Kamikaze Boats," shooting at various Ships at Sea, which looks wonderful, powerful, and vicious, but these Boats don't exist—It's all false information to show how "tough" their already defeated Military is! The five U.S. Refueling Planes that were supposedly struck down and badly damaged, according to The Wall Street Journal's false reporting, and others, are all in service, with the exception of one, which will soon be flying the skies. Buildings and Ships that are shown to be on fire are not—It's FAKE NEWS, generated by A.l. For instance, Iran, working in close coordination with the Fake News, showed the Lincoln Aircraft Carrier, one of the largest and most prestigious Ships in the World, burning uncontrollably in the Ocean. Not only was it not burning, it was not even shot at—Iran knows better than to do that! The story was knowingly FAKE and, in a certain way, you can say that those Media Outlets that generated it should be brought up on Charges for TREASON for the dissemination of false information! The fact is, Iran is being decimated, and the only battles they "win" are those that they create through Al, and are distributed by Corrupt Media Outlets. The Radical Leftwing Press knows this full well, but continues to go forward with false stories and LIES. That's why their Approval Rating is so low, and I can win a Presidential Election, IN A LANDSLIDE, getting only 5% positive Press—They have no credibility! I am so thrilled to see Brendan Carr, the Chairman of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), looking at the licenses of some of these Corrupt and Highly Unpatriotic "News" Organizations. They get Billions of Dollars of FREE American Airwaves, and use it to perpetuate LIES, both in News and almost all of their Shows, including the Late Night Morons, who get gigantic Salaries for horrible Ratings, and never get, as I used to say in The Apprentice, "FIRED." Thank you for your attention to this matter! President DONALD J. TRUMP."

"Trajector(ies)?"

AGI? Transhumanist evolution?

 

 

Just randoomly ran across this bright young fellow He's posted a lot of work. Interesting, in light of my recent posts on AI stuff like the DeKai Wu Raising AI book and similar things.

 

Then I got onto this via a Substack post. 

Why Science Hasn’t Solved Consciousness (Yet)
To understand life, we must stop treating organisms like machines and minds like code.

Much of our current discussion about consciousness has a singular fatal flaw. It’s a mistake built into the very foundations of how we view science — and how science itself is perceived and conducted across disciplines, including today’s hype around artificial intelligence.

Great piece. Includes an AI audio narration, ~22 min). Well worth your time. BTW: He had me at Shannon Vallor.

Well, then that essay.led me here:

 

… Our scientific worldview has gotten stuck in an impossible contradiction, making our present crisis fundamentally a crisis of meaning. On the one hand, science appears to make human life seem ultimately insignificant. The grand narratives of cosmology and evolution present us as a tiny contingent accident in a vast indifferent universe. On the other hand, science repeatedly shows us that our human situation is inescapable when we search for objective truth because we cannot step outside our human form and attain a God’s-eye view of reality. Cosmology tells us that we can know the universe and its origin only from our inside position, not from the outside. We live within a causal bubble of information—the distance light traveled since the big bang—and we cannot know what lies outside. Quantum physics suggests that the nature of subatomic matter cannot be separated from our methods of questioning and investigating it. In biology, the origin and nature of life and sentience remain a mystery despite marvelous advances in genetics, molecular evolution, and developmental biology. Ultimately, we cannot forgo relying on our own experience of being alive when we seek to comprehend the phenomenon of life. Cognitive neuroscience drives the point home by indicating that we cannot fully fathom consciousness without experiencing it from within. Each of these fields ultimately runs aground on its own paradoxes of inner versus outer, and observer versus observed, that collectively turn on the conundrum of how to understand awareness and subjectivity in a universe that was supposed to be fully describable in objective scientific terms without reference to the mind. The striking paradox is that science tells us both that we’re peripheral in the cosmic scheme of things and that we’re central to the reality we uncover. Unless we understand how this paradox arises and what it means, we’ll never be able to understand science as a human activity and we’ll keep defaulting to a view of nature as something to gain mastery over. 

Each of the cases just mentioned—cosmology and the origin of the universe, quantum physics and the nature of matter, biology and the nature of life, cognitive neuroscience and the nature of consciousness—represents more than an individual scientific field. Collectively they represent our culture’s grand scientific narratives about the origin and structure of the universe and the nature of life and the mind. They underpin the ongoing project of a global scientific civilization. They constitute a modern form of mythos: they are the stories that orient us and structure our understanding of the world. For these reasons, the paradoxes these fields face are more than mere intellectual or theoretical puzzles. They signal the larger unreconciled perspectives of the knower and the known, mind and nature, subjectivity and objectivity, whose fracture menaces our project of civilization altogether. Our present-day technologies, which drive us ever closer to existential threats, concretize this split by treating everything—including, paradoxically, awareness and knowing themselves—as an objectifiable, informational quantity or resource. It’s precisely this split—the divorce between knower and known and the suppression of the knower in favor of the known—that constitutes our meaning crisis. The climate emergency, which arises from our treating nature as just a resource for our use, is the most pronounced and catastrophic manifestation of our crisis. 

In short, although we have created the most powerful and successful form of objective knowledge of all time, we lack a comparable understanding of ourselves as knowers. We have the best maps we’ve ever made, but we’ve forgotten to take account of the map makers. Unless we change how we navigate, we’re bound to head deeper into peril and confusion.

Regrettably, the three best-known responses to the crisis of meaning in our scientific worldview are all dead ends. 

First, scientific triumphalism doubles down on the absolute supremacy of science. It holds that no question or problem is beyond the reach of scientific discourse. It advertises itself as the direct heir of the Enlightenment. But it simplifies and distorts Enlightenment thinkers who were often skeptical about progress and who had subtle and sophisticated views about the limits of science. Triumphalism’s conception of science remains narrow and outmoded. It leans heavily on problematic versions of reductionism—the idea that complex phenomena can always be exhaustively explained in terms of simpler phenomena—and crude forms of realism—the idea that science provides a literally true account of how reality is in itself apart from our cognitive interactions with it. Its view of objectivity rests on an often unacknowledged metaphysics of a perfectly knowable, definite reality existing “out there,” independent of our minds and actions. It often denies the value of philosophy and holds that more of the same narrow and outmoded thinking will show us the way forward. As a result, theoretical models become ever more contrived and distant from empirical data, while experimental resources are applied to low-risk research projects that eschew more fundamental questions. Like Victorian-era spiritualism and pining for ghosts, scientific triumphalism looks backward to the fantasized spirit of a long-dead age and cannot hope to provide a path forward through the monumental challenges that science and civilization face in the twenty-first century. 

Science denial on the right and so-called postmodernism on the left represent a second response. These movements reject science. They particularly reject its capacity to establish truths about the world that can be used as a basis for further knowledge and wise policies and actions. Worse still, they provide an opportunity for certain groups to manipulate how facts are interpreted for their own selfish and ideological ends, thereby spreading intentional disinformation in the form of so-called alternative facts and alternative truths. Although the motives of these two movements undeniably differ, both undermine the values of modern society on which they themselves depend, offering nothing but skepticism and negativism, or willful disinformation, in return. 

Finally, the new age movement uses fringe science or pseudoscience to justify wishful thinking. Although this movement has had less impact than the other ones, it has muddied the waters for those of us who look for new perspectives on the scientific endeavor. Its uncritical embrace of various misrepresentations of Asian or Indigenous worldviews takes reductionistic science as the norm of all science, and thereby fails to understand the scientific ideas and practices of these other cultures. As a result, constructive dialogue with other cultural traditions about their epistemic practices becomes rare, if not impossible. 

Given that these three responses fail to address the crisis of meaning in our scientific worldview, how can we find our way forward? First and foremost, we need to know where the crisis comes from. Our goal is to identify the source of the crisis, offer clues to a new path forward, and present a new perspective on some of the biggest issues science faces today. These issues include time and cosmology, quantum physics and its measurement problem, the nature of life and sentience, how the mind works and its relation to AI, the nature of consciousness, and, finally, climate change and Earth’s entry into the new human-shaped epoch called the Anthropocene. The range of topics touched by our new perspective is indeed broad, and the vista is equally expansive. We believe that our perspective can help transform and revive our cherished scientific culture as it faces its greatest challenges while reshaping our worldview for a sustainable project of civilization. 

We call the source of the meaning crisis the Blind Spot. At the heart of science lies something we do not see that makes science possible, just as the blind spot lies at the heart of our visual field and makes seeing possible. In the visual blind spot sits the optic nerve; in the scientific blind spot sits direct experience—that by which anything appears, shows up, or becomes available to us. It is a precondition of observation, investigation, exploration, measurement, and justification. Things appear and become available thanks to our bodies and their feeling and perceiving capacities. Direct experience is bodily experience. “The body is the vehicle of being in the world,” says French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty, but as we will see, firsthand bodily experience lies hidden in the Blind Spot.

Frank, Adam; Gleiser, Marcelo; Thompson, Evan (2024). The Blind Spot: Why Science Cannot Ignore Human Experience (Introduction). Kindle Edition.

So many smart people. 

 

REGARDING EVOLUTION AND "TRANSHUMANISM."

... Intelligence begins with the sensitivity of a single cell, and by a process of biological accumulation and selection, transmitted genetically, reaches a current culmination in the complexity of the human brain. In the same way, the first chipped flint, by a process of cultural accumulation of knowledge passed on verbally and subjected to the selection of experience, reaches a current culmination in spacecraft, cyclotrons, and satellite-relayed television. At the same time, the natural and necessary playfulness of the young mammalian as it explores its environment and learns how to live in it, over time, and also by a cultural process of imitation, memory, and the transmission of knowledge and skills from generation to generation, reaches another apotheosis in the high cultures and great arts.

For the comparatively weak creature who must cope with an environment and rise to any situation or perish, the resources of mental equipment are applied first to the most urgent exigencies. The earliest application of intelligence is devoted to devising tools as weapons; those that follow aid the amenities of life; finally, religion, philosophy, and the arts make their appearance.

The kind of tools that are made will depend on the material that happens to be available, be it leaves, branches, stones, clay, or the presence or absence of minerals. Thus an interaction exists between environment and creature that affects the development of tools and culture as well as of senses and intelligence.

In ancient Egypt, for example, the presence of the papyrus plant led to the fabrication of ropes, mats, sandals, and eventually paper; the presence of flax made possible the eventual perfecting of supremely fine linens. In Central America the presence of lava led to cutting tools of obsidian. Once a cultural habit becomes established, however, it remains impossible to predict either the route it will follow or its ultimate outcome. Who could have foretold that the sweet potato-washing habit established among the members of the famous Japanese macaque colony, and the subsequent sifting of sand from grain in the sea, would so accustom these forest animals to playing in the water that they would eventually begin to swim? And in the face of this unlikely outcome of a recently established behavior pattern, who would dare to predict to what the new-found ability to swim might lead?

Yet strangely enough—or perhaps not so surprisingly, in view of the basic uniformity of mankind's cerebral mechanisms—no matter where, geographically, nor when, over the entire span of human history, local cultures have developed into advanced civilizations, we find that mankind's greatest thoughts, as epitomized in the writings of philosophers, show remarkable similarity. Some views on the nature and value of knowledge, intellect, and intelligence propounded by wise men of China, so distant from us in place and time, are stunning in their modernity and still current validity.

In the misty beginnings of China's long cultural history, Lao-tze, expounding his concept of Tao, the Way (of nature and of wise living), is reported to have insisted that knowledge is not virtue and neither is it wisdom, for nothing is so far from a sage as an "intellectual." The worst government would be one of philosophers, he is said to have averred, for they botch every natural process with theory; their ability to make speeches and multiply ideas is precisely the sign of their incapacity for action!

At a later period the philosopher Chuang-tze, who lived about 370 B.C., showed a sophistication of thinking that we find difficult to credit to those early times. He wrote that problems are due less to the nature of things than to the limits of our thought; that it is not to be wondered at that the effort of our imprisoned brains to understand the cosmos of which they are such minute particles should end in contradiction.

He spoke of the limits of intellect; the attempt to explain the whole in terms of the part has been a gigantic immodesty, forgivable only on the ground of the amusement it has caused, for humor, like philosophy, is a view of the part in terms of the whole, and neither is possible without the other. The intellect, said Chuang-tze, can never avail to understand ultimate things, or any profound thing, such as the growth of a child. In order to understand the Tao, one must "sternly suppress one's knowledge": we have to suppress our theories and feel fact. Education is of no help toward such understanding: submission in the flow of nature is all-important.

And Wang Yang-ming, who lived from 1472 to 1528, practically summarized our present thesis when he wrote: "The mind itself is the embodiment of natural law. Is there anything in the universe that exists independent of mind? Is there any law apart from the mind?"

Experts feel certain that the human brain has not undergone any significant biological change since the time of the Neanderthals, who, as evidenced in the excavations at the Shanidar caves high in the mountains of Kurdistan in northern Iraq, built fires, cared for their sick, conducted funeral rites, and put flowers with the bodies of their dead. In the last twenty to thirty thousand years, we know from archaeological findings of both historic and prehistoric periods, a high degree of intellectual accomplishment has been uniformly present in all the branches of our species throughout its existence. The brief excerpts we have given of ancient Chinese thought about thought would certainly seem to bear out this opinion.

There is, however, an outcome of the cumulative nature of culture that we must not overlook. Increasingly, as intelligence adapts a living creature to its environment by the use of artifacts and through the cultural transmission of knowledge, the creature and the environment modify each other at an exponential rate. Perfect adaptation, of the order of the ants' or the termites', which has existed in a balance between being and habitat unchanged over hundreds of millions of years, is not possible for mankind. The rapidity of change in our cultural habitat presents a perpetual and continuing stimulus to bodily and, above all, to mental adaptation, which of necessity increases the demands on the new brain to devise accommodation, and in the process speeds both the rate of change and the need for new changes.

And so, although we recognize that we have been mistaken in thinking that the technological advances of Western man might indicate new departures in the human brain's capacities, yet we have also to recognize that that technology is rapidly creating a totally new environment for our species. This new environment may well ultimately affect our species' future development; precisely this technology may prove to be the turning point through which, in negotiating it, we may find ourselves in a process of extinction as Homo sapiens and in a stage of transition toward Homo neocorticus. 

There are, of course, far too many imponderables involved to feel confident in predicting the future course of our species. Among these are the course of technology itself and how far from natural processes it can carry us before it becomes subject to its own limitations. There is the matter of human population density and whether it will be adjusted by natural means or can be adapted to the biosphere that is our habitat by cultural or social means. There is the question of the medical preservation of the "unfit" and whether we can remain viable at all as a species with the increasing maladaptive dilution of our gene pools. And there is the possibility that ecological interference may ultimately make mankind's existence untenable.

Our evolutionary development may be reaching the end of a line for biological if not for cultural reasons, but we ourselves are inclined to discount this. We believe subtle biological factors to be operating that are not yet clearly discernible, but which may be recognizable in retrospect. Another factor as simple and probable as the advent of another ice age, for instance, would effectively alter and reequilibrate the balance between man and nature, and must also be kept in mind as a possibility.

We believe that the possibility and even the likelihood remain for a true evolutionary progression in the anatomical and physiological configuration of the brain, much like the progression that occurred between apes and man. In that case the departure would be just as radical, and it would have as a consequence new behavioral response patterns that at this point we cannot visualize and about which we can only speculate.

To assume that this new superintelligence would occupy itself with creating a new, weird, and wonderful technology is a naive exercise of human fantasy. Ultimately technology exists to serve the greater comfort of individuals, and a superintelligence may well find other means of achieving this end. Thus, were such a superintelligence to be found in some other planetary system, we might be confronted with something totally alien to our understanding, and even to our imagination.

It seems to us that we can predict as a next development the extension of an actual and currently observable trend. We see in mankind the persistence of a brain function that has lost its original purpose. This function is seated in the brain's so-called limbic system—the areas of the brain that govern our emotions. This still active part of our brain mediates all those built-in and semiautomatic responses that enhanced an ability to survive in our remote animal past. It achieves those responses by setting up in the animal (and, vestigially, in us) an emotional state that promotes the performance of the necessary actions. It is an inherent property of animal behavior patterns that they are coupled with governing emotions.

As human beings, we tend to regard our own emotions, coupled with our social propensities, as a particularly high and noble facet of our behavior, and it may well be that this is so, but we have to assume that an animal has far more specific feelings and passions than are known by humans, since a generalized "mood" must precede any action it takes. Konrad Lorenz has quoted Heinroth as saying, "Animals are emotional people of low intelligence," and he himself observed, "We should assume that the realm of human feelings must exhibit a similar process of simplification and abolition of differentiation to that known to have occurred in human instinctive behavior."

The limbic area of our brain still regulates our emotions, and so it is, in effect, the seat of our "humanity." Because of it we feel parental and sexual feelings, know pleasure or distress, fear or anger, start at strange sounds, dislike unfamiliar sights and smells, experience love and hate and the entire complex of emotions of which human beings are capable. It is perfectly apparent that the limbic system is still very much in operation, and yet we nevertheless find equally apparent a growing tendency for the newest part of our brain, the neocortex, to overtake and usurp many of its functions.

The neocortex is the seat of our reasoning abilities. It mediates our capacity for judgment, for making decisions based on logical thought, for solving problems, for evaluation and choice. In human beings there is an increasing propensity for neocortical reason to impinge upon biologically older limbic emotions in determining our ultimate behavior. Indeed, there is hardly an area of human function that is not now, at least to some extent, subject to neocortical control.

If we feel a surge of anger, we are able, if we will, to stay it and to question whether it is a justifiable response. It goes so far that such basic functions as sex and reproduction may be modified by our reason. Even as we feel a biological attraction to an opposite-sex person, our reason is questioning: Will he or she enjoy the things we enjoy? Will he fit into our social scheme? Will she be as interesting a companion as she is good to look at? Whether or not we follow up that initial attraction with invitation or acceptance of further acquaintanceship is often determined by our answers to those promptings of reason.

To dramatize and highlight the coexistence of the two conflicting bases of contemporary human brain function, we have only to look at our scientific community. On the one hand, those engaged in the so-called pure sciences, like mathematics, physics, or astronomy, rigidly exclude emotional involvement and stress logic in the conclusions they arrive at and in every aspect of their work. On the other hand, practitioners of the psychological sciences, especially those concerned with mental health, place inordinate importance on "freeing" the emotions from the shackles of the reasoning mind, in the belief that the reasoning mind is the culprit and chief cause of mankind's maladjustments.

The dual and often conflicting mental motivations indeed reach as far as the ultimate purpose to which our natural life is geared—the production, sustaining, and rearing of a new generation, which today is also subjected to the processes of reason. We ask ourselves such questions as how many children we can afford to raise and, indeed, whether we wish to have children at all. No longer do our emotions alone mediate even the continuity of our species.

Of course, in the vast diversity of human beings, there are many who still are governed in their actions more by their emotions than by their reason; those who are more neocortically controlled are still a minority among us. There is a whole spectrum between these extremes, but no aspect of the old brain's function except the purely autonomic is not to some extent influenced and in the process of becoming dominated by the new.

The most likely next phase of intelligence in our own species, then, is toward the total control of our emotions by the neocortex, that is, by judgment, reason, and logic. Such a process would eventually eliminate entirely such responses as love, hate, maternal feelings, anxiety, and also many of the derivative mental consequences of those emotions, such as elation, joy, enthusiasm, as well as depression, psychosomatic diseases, and so on. With this development, should it materialize, everything that makes us what we are would disappear and our descendants would appear to us to be feelingless automatons. They, on the other hand, from their vantage point in time, would look upon us as primitive forerunners of their species, much as we regard apes and monkeys.

Naturally, in saying that the neocortex would eliminate our basic emotions, this does not imply that all emotion would necessarily be expunged from the repertoire of our posterity. The brain has pleasure centers, and these, if denied the stimulus of the old emotions, would surely find new material in purely neocortical responses. The brain's pleasure centers might then find new function in elaborating such neocortical pleasures as aesthetic appreciation, scientific research and theorizing, the special joys of puzzle solving, and similar satisfactions of the judgmental and reasoning mind.

It could well be that when the neocortex finally takes over completely and is instrumental in producing our hypothetical new species, they will be better adapted to life than we—freed, as they would be, from mankind's unabating internal dissonance between feelings and reason. The apes are admirably adapted to the circumstances of their lives by the operation of their limbic system and with but little demand upon the resources of the budding neocortex of which they are possessed; this future race will equally experience the benefits of having only one dominant cerebral function—in their case, the reasoning neocortex. The whole course of human history may prove to have been but a comparatively short stage of shifting between these two states of balance.

All other species have no option but to be at ease in the niche of life in which they find themselves: the ape does not question its reason for being or its destiny—it simply lives—and the future race will be unlikely to experience such mixed feelings as we know. In the final count, Homo sapiens may be distinguished not for "brain" and "culture," but as the creature that knew dissatisfaction, that lived in "divine discontent," precisely because, in our line, the emerging neocortex has reached in us a stage where it challenges and to some extent controls the old brain, but does not yet have the field to itself. We are in our minds and in our whole being basically dual, and this, beyond any of our technical achievements, is the mark of Homo sapiens.

Whether such a line of development as this occurs in other parts of the universe, where higher intelligences have evolved, is open to speculation. It could be that it is a development that is idiosyncratic to ourselves, but we are not inclined to postulate unique phenomena, and we think it more likely that a stage similar to ours is inevitable in the development of any very high intelligence anywhere. Transitional phases are unavoidable in any line of evolution, and so we believe we should expect to find stages like ours wherever higher life forms and intelligences emerge.

Any transitional stage, of its nature, is not very stable and record does not provide extensive evidence of linking forms. Hence, the long search for the transitional forms—the so-called missing link—that bridged the gap between the apes and ourselves, a gap that is only now being filled in by very recent discoveries in Africa of the australopithecines and other linking forms.

If, however, we look back at the whole line of primate development less anthropocentrically, we or our descendants may yet find that the australopithecines were a comparatively stable form when compared with us, Homo sapiens. The future may well reveal that we, along with Neanderthal, Cromagnon, and other comparatively recent forerunners, were each and all of us "trial runs" in nature's progress toward a more stable form to house high intelligence. The very fact that we find in ourselves competing mental systems within one brain should alert us to the probability that we ourselves are a kind of "missing link" between the apes and an eventual, more harmoniously adapted Homo neocorticus.

This, of course, poses tremendous problems in planning to establish interplanetary communications. Perhaps it is only in the transitional and transitory stage peculiar to our species —and at that, only for a short phase in the course of its development—that any feeling of need exists at all to reach out and explore. It is a propensity that has marked our progress. Where other creatures have found circumscribed habitats and have adapted to them, mankind has found challenge in new horizons and constantly searched to find them, whether in papyrus-reed craft, balsa-wood rafts, sailing boats, airplanes, or interplanetary rockets.

Now that we begin to understand the vastness of the universe, we feel lonely and isolated on our speck of a planet in one far corner of it. But for interplanetary communication to eventuate, we probably have to seek the long odds that another world has produced another species that reaches our own stage at about the same time as we, or rather at the time that would allow for the journey's distance to reach them. It is not impossible—indeed, it is probable—that in the vastness of the universe such worlds exist.

And where do we go from here? What kind of brain will supersede ours?
The superbrain of Homo neocorticus, as we have said, need not be markedly larger than ours in order to produce a mind of a completely other quality. It must, however, be somewhat bigger, both in the number of its neurons and in the axon and dendrite connections between them—and therefore to a certain extent in absolute mass—to achieve that change.

From the ready-made laboratory we have available on earth, we can see in the progression from an apelike brain to the human one, first, a fuller use of the potentialities of the smaller brain. The australopithecines—the so-called man-apes—for example, retained brain dimensions no greater than those of modern apes, yet they fabricated primitive tools and took the first steps toward a human way of life over long ages, before environmental circumstances put a premium on still greater intelligence. Only then did larger-brained species emerge. Among ourselves, in our own species, we are aware of a notable difference in brain performance all the way from the dull, to the average, to the very bright, and up to the genius, while all these brains are objectively of the same dimensions and potentially all capable of performance equal to that of the genius.

It may be illuminating to look at another organ, or organ system, rather than at the brain, to realize how far one can go in utilizing what already exists before it becomes necessary to increase size for additional performance. The muscles of a 90-pound weakling, for instance, are physically no different at birth from those of a 200-pound weight lifter, and they have the same potential for development. The eventual difference lies in the fact that the weight lifter has exploited his muscle power to its fullest possibilities, while the weakling has failed to do so.

In this respect, the brain is no different from any other organ. Its constant use and exercise fosters better performance at a progressive rate. And so we must visualize circumstances in which the demands made upon human brainpower are such as to foster the full use of the tissue already at our disposal—in fact, a time when what we now think of as "very bright" or "genius" performance becomes "average"—before we have to contemplate any increase in size to facilitate greater powers. If we can imagine a society in which what we now think of as genius becomes dull-to-normal intellectual performance, and try to visualize the geniuses of that society, we then catch a glimpse of the first step toward Homo neocorticus.

We can also get a second glimpse of that distant creature in our contemporary earth-laboratory through another of the existing trends we have mentioned: that the area of increased development and growth of brain will surely continue the present tendency of the expansion of neocortical function at the expense of the limbic system. After all, what is our present image of a "civilized" person as opposed to a "wild" one? It is of a person who has control of his emotions, one who exercises reason and judgment, and who does not get "carried away" by personal passions. Again, if we can visualize a society in which the behavior of the most highly "civilized" of us has become the norm and in which a new, far more highly civilized elect has begun to make an appearance, we may then fill in a second color in our picture of the future of intelligence.

We may project that the brain stem—that part of our cerebral accoutrement that governs the autonomic functions of the body (such as breathing, circulation, and digestion)—may well take over some of the currently more primitive response patterns of the limbic region, while the neocortex absorbs its higher "emotional" functions. Thus, Homo neocorticus would arrive at a truly dominant neocortex—a condition that is now only partly the case, but that may be seen as en route in Homo sapiens.

Given such a brain, let us take a closer look at it. Its enormous capacity to integrate information must eventually make our conventional languages almost obsolete. Our words and sentence structure would become too cumbersome to express the increased speed of the flow of thoughts and too imprecise to frame the increased refinement of perception.

We do not think that language of our present type would ever become totally obsolete, because we believe it to be a strong element in mother-child attachment and bonding, and therefore a stage through which the future infant would have to pass, but we do foresee it becoming less useful as that child gets older. We can imagine scientists of the future studying their infants' language as a clue to their understanding of the psychological processes of their distant predecessors, much as we study embryology to confirm our ideas about anatomical evolution.

We imagine that in that future time, adult communication will be effected by a new type of "language," one much more condensed than ours, and also more precise—perhaps something along the lines of our present mathematical symbolism, extended and made more versatile. After all, our present brain—that is, the brain of Homo sapiens—evolved to meet the needs of our species over the ages before the time of written language. One of its especially important functions in our development was its ability to "package" knowledge in a form that could be stored, and thus enable our forerunners to pass on the experience of their lifetimes to each rising generation. Today, the sheer quantity of information available to us has become so vast that it is quite impossible for any single mind to encompass all of it in the space of a lifetime, either in its extent or in its precision. We imagine that the Homo neocorticus brain will be able to do this.

This means that their increased brain capacity will be put to work encompassing a body of knowledge that increases geometrically within each generation. This will probably not be achieved by the addition of larger storage capacity, for huge increases in storage capacity must eventually become cumbersome and in any case limited by physical factors. Rather, we think, it will be made possible by an increase in the ability to digest far larger quantities of data simultaneously and to deduce solutions in an instant.

We now have to commit large bodies of information to memory to see their connections and to match them with experience in order to utilize them appropriately, whether in conversation or in social endeavor. Homo neocorticus, on the other hand, will probably be able to rediscover over and over again, without effort, all that the combined efforts of countless scientific minds of our type have cumulatively been able to produce over lifetimes. They will not have to learn and commit to memory, say, a theory of relativity, but would see the principle clearly and immediately, and have the means to be able to express it, any and every time it might be needed. In fact, the concept would be as self-evident to them as the fact that a rose is a rose is to us.

All these things we can see to some extent from the ways in which our own brains are tending. But even in this we must be cautious. Apes, for instance, when they are tested in laboratories, show a great reserve of intelligence and ability that they are never called upon to exploit in their natural habitats. They have also shown remarkable adaptability when experimentally transferred by scientists to other natural habitats greatly different from their own.

In one such experiment, observers removed five chimpanzees to a desolate island in a lake in the northwest of Russia—an area that they described as a "cool jungle." Although night temperatures there often dropped as low as 10 degrees above freezing, the observers reported they adapted so well that "they might as well have been back home in Africa." They made cozy shelters out of branches resembling armchairs and hammocks, reported Leonid Firsov, director of the anthropoid center of the Academy of Sciences of USSR, I. P. Pavlov Institute of Physiology in Leningrad. The temperature of their "beds," warmed by their bodies, reached about 97° F. They found half of the 180 varieties of plants edible, and they dined on leaves, seeds, mushrooms, ants, and dragonflies. Even more fascinating, experiments showed that the chimpanzees skillfully used sticks, branches, and stones as working implements, and that they had a rich memory of association.

An ape could never know which of its own potentialities would prove useful and become exponentially developed in a higher form. Similarly, we ourselves can hardly know what circumstances will bring a more powerful new brain into being, nor what purposes it will eventually serve. We can only be aware of the enormous reserve capacity that resides in us, and speculate about its direction.

We take it as an axiom that an organ seldom develops, and never persists, unless a function is or becomes apparent for which it can be used. At that point we know that an organ will take on any function that it can perform, and that its use will improve its performance. Indeed, this reserve power that seems to lie dormant in some species until environment provokes its potential into actual use, has been called by anthropologists preadaptation. In the primate line, it was the dormant potential of the simian brain that permitted the evolution of the human.

Nevertheless, since we like to speculate, we may fairly entertain the thought that perhaps some of the extreme intellectual feats that are now being accomplished by humans may in turn reach their apotheosis in a descendant species. What seems to us now to be a comparatively useless predilection for, say, philosophy, or for so-called pure science, may eventually turn out for them to be the basis of an entirely new way of life, and in that context they may well think of it as a preadaptation. Thus, a genius of today may turn out to be an advance guard, or the embodiment of a preadaptation that is even now paving the way to future Homo neocorticus. Among that future species, what we now consider as the highest, and even unnecessary, levels of mental activity will be commonplace.

In this context it is not without interest that in our time, too, there is a cultural practice that certainly must have an effect of reinforcing by sexual selection the trends that we discern as being brought about by natural selection. The practice is unicontinue their general education through school and on into universities, advanced technical training centers, and other institutions of higher learning.

In these places those of our young people who have shown superior mental abilities are brought together and segregated for several years just at that period of their lives when they are physically and emotionally ready for breeding, so that the natural outcome of this social practice is to foster mating between individuals who to a certain extent have been preselected for their intelligence. Over comparatively few generations this inbreeding of our more gifted young people must have some effect on the mental abilities shown in the succeeding generations of their offspring. Thus, two powerful forces, natural selection (by which the more adaptively endowed survive in greater proportion whenever competition between breeding groups arises) and sexual selection (by which males and females in their choice of mates tend thereby to fix in the opposite sex those traits that they find desirable and attractive), in our species and in our time, give indications of being mutually reinforcing.

Is this as far as we can extrapolate from what we know of Laboratory Earth in our attempts to see into our own future or into other worlds?

Actually, it is not. It is within the realm of our reason and imagination to catch glimpses of still more distant possible descendants.

We see that in nature successful solutions often arise by what is called convergence—that is, they arise independently in different lines that are often separated in time and place and are in no way related to each other, because these lines have encountered similar environmental problems and have coped with them in a similar way precisely because that solution is an efficient one. Prehensile tails, for example, have developed in many kinds of monkey (although not in all), in the common opposum, and in several related species, in the true chameleon and a few lesser genera, and in a fish, the sea horse. Similar needs in these disparate creatures have evoked a similar response in the structure and function of the tail.

In earlier pages we have from time to time described what amounts to a group brain as it exists among earth's social insects, which produces intelligent solutions, although the individuals comprising the groups are separately only capable of comparatively stereotyped actions. What if a group brain were to evolve where all the individuals were possessed of the kind of superbrain and superintelligence we are attributing to Homo neocorticus?

Utilizing the concept of convergence, we see that the social insects, by the use of chemical substances—the pheromones—that give off distinctive odors, have achieved almost instant communication, an important element in their cooperative actions. In a mass brain of cooperative superbrains that might evolve from Homo neocorticus, we could imagine an absolutely new type of communication emerging, no longer either verbal or even more refinedly symbolical. It could be a direct brain-to-brain awareness promoted by an individual brain's electric charges that might be intensified or modified so as to constitute an instant transmission without any kind of language, receptor mechanisms being evolved within the brain itself.

In order to conceptualize this thought, we paid a visit to a modern laboratory where electroencephalograms of patients being tested for brain disturbances are being recorded and processed all day long. We saw there a technician in her middle years who had spent all her working life recording and interpreting the "squiggles" registered by inked points onto long rolls of papers as they responded finely to the electric emanations of the patients' brains. The lengths of paper were subsequently folded into bound volumes.

This technician could open any of those records and read them, understanding all they implied, as easily as we read any page printed in our own language, and she was teaching her young assistants to do the same. In other words, the direct electric emanations from half a dozen different areas of the patient's brain simultaneously, with their respective periods of excitement and calm, had clear meaning for her, and she could read like a book any of the volumes in the large library of records of brain activity that were assembled on the shelves of her office.

If we can imagine these inked lines of the EEC squiggles as an extremely primitive and crude form of what might ultimately evolve as a form of direct brain-to-brain communication, we believe we have a plausible model on which to base our speculations about our descendant species-after-next. Such instantaneous communication could easily suffuse an entire group and make possible intelligent mass action of an order that we can no longer imagine, or even speculate about.

The question that remains is: Why such a brain? What possible environmental circumstance could ever evoke it?

And the answer is that once a higher intelligence appears on the natural scene, it makes its own environment. It is a matter of common observation among ourselves that every human being leaves a mark of his or her own personality upon surroundings. A housewife's individuality can almost be read by the condition in which we find her house—the order or disorder in which it is kept, the way it is furnished and decorated, the implements and equipment she uses. A man's fields or garden, office or workshop or den, also reveal much about him.

It would seem that something of the brain and perhaps of the whole nervous system of each of us is displayed in the environments we make for ourselves. Even the little bowerbird reveals his individuality in the small objects he uses to decorate his bower and in his arrangement of them. And so we feel we are justified in assuming that as a brain evolves in complexity, it will surely be to the accompaniment of an increasingly complex ambience.

Human beings originally lived in the same "nature" as all other animals, and many still live very closely with it. If we camp in a forest, we do not actually need our superior mental equipment—that other creatures live out their lives in that forest is evidence of this. But most of us no longer live in natural settings, and even those who do, modify them with such artifacts as fire, weapons, and tools.

Today, all of mankind, some to a smaller but most to a larger extent, make our own habitats, and our man-made environment becomes more and more complex. Moreover, in the process of adjusting to our increasingly artificial surroundings, we become less and less fitted to live in natural ones, and so the course upon which we are embarked is far more likely to continue than to be reversed. For Homo neocorticus we can project a habitat of, to us, incredible complexity, and we can imagine that this will provide the spur that could eventually produce the Group-brained neocorticus, whom we could no longer designate as Homo.

At this point we pass our project over to our reader to use his or her imagination to visualize a meeting between Homo sapiens and Group-brained neocorticus, or its prototype as it may exist somewhere in the vastness of the universe. 

 

That is excerpted from "Beyond Human Intelligence" Chapter 11, Other Senses, Other Worlds, 1976. Doris & David Jonas. It has been out of print since 1989 when the publisher went bankrupt and closed its doors. I read it in 1976 via a “new nonfiction book release” copy from my local library (and I have subsequently acquired a hardbound copy). It has aged quite well topically.

 

 

BACK TO THE BLIND SPOT

 

From The Afterword

 

Donald Trump takes Gaslighting to a whole new level.

In a word: "Gasphxiation."

   

“How do we as citizens participate in a democracy when disinformation is so prevalent, and when so many seem so willing to believe the lies and ignore the reality that is right in front of us? When so many are willing to abandon all values to choose their side, every single time?”

People who feel more and more powerless have asked me a version of this question: “What can I do practically as a citizen, apart from vote and call my representative, to help preserve American democracy against Trump’s assault against our institutions and truth itself?”

I’ve struggled to offer an answer; so have those I’ve reached out to for counsel. I have yet to receive a menu of compelling options. But I am certain that what needs to inform the answers to these questions, and what needs to precede a comprehensive plan of action, is knowledge.

That means turning to experts on the history of disinformation, such as Thomas Rid, who can talk about how societies have addressed these questions in the past; political psychologists, such as Australia’s Karen Stenner, who can help develop the language for how to reach people awash in distortions and deceptions; and experts in psychology and neuroscience, such as Jay Van Bavel, whose work addresses issues of group identity, social motivation, cooperation, intergroup bias, and social media. It includes turning to cognitive scientists such as Steven Sloman and Philip Fernbach, who study how people reason, make decisions, and form attitudes and beliefs; philosophers of science such as Cailin O’Connor and James Owen Weatherall, who argue that social forces explain the persistence of false beliefs; Peter Pomerantsev, who specializes in overcoming the challenges of digital-era disinformation and polarization; and political scientists such as Brendan Nyhan, who works on subjects including misperception and conspiracy theories...

Click for the full article

 

THIS WEEK'S CULMINATION OF TRUMP'S "LIBERATION DAY"

 

TIMELY NEW READ

 

 

Read a review in the new issue of my Science Magazine. Yeah, of course I bought it.

For my PhD, I researched human and social engineering in the mid-twentieth century, spending years peering into leather-bound journals at articles that described rats running through mazes millions of times. These seemed like the least-sought-after things in the library. Making my way along the shelves, I looked into radical behaviorist experiments that were first dreamed up in laboratories before World War II and then streamed into the world (as I argued) after World War II. I titled the resulting dissertation “The Laboratory Imagination.”

When I graduated in the spring of 2000, just as a new millennium began, I looked around myself. The dot-com bubble had just burst in the California Bay Area where I lived. The bubble’s “irrational exuberance,” as then Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan put it around this time, had meant huge tips for my waiter boyfriend who worked at a celebrated place with end-grain wood tables where they made upscale corndogs for the employees in the afterhours. Suddenly, when the exuberance drained away, so did the outsized gratuities (not to mention the corndogs, which slipped in quality). I had no permanent job and was considering an academic post—my doctoral supervisor had arranged a one-year stint at a private college a few states away—but I felt unequipped for the job, which scared me. I decided instead to dedicate myself to a year of yoga by enrolling in a teacher training program. Studying esoteric practices and working as a (very) part-time legal secretary to support myself felt like a way to address the sterility of a world where social control procedures were proliferating—the way everything was so managed, from your Starbucks order to your health insurance (had I been lucky enough to have any).

All around me, I was seeing the experiments I had studied come to life. Some of the most sophisticated of my scientist subjects, the ones whose previously neglected work I had exhumed, called their goal “canalizing.” The point of canalizing was to channel people’s impulses into desired responses by crafting their outer surroundings and even their inner psychology. (The “transformation of duty into desire,” as one put it.) People must be taught to want what was best for them. This was human engineering through behavior modification, and it was the opposite of neglected.

Canalizing appeared to be everywhere in the 1990s. Uniqueness was just starting to be mass produced. The slogan for a cell phone company around that time captured the nascent vibe: “You’re a unique individual. This phone is just for you . . . and everyone like you.” Even the Army was recruiting based on scripted individualism rather than social duty in those days, debuting a new slogan, “An Army of One,” in 2001. “I am an Army of one,” declared a corporal running across the Mojave at dawn while carrying a thirty-five-pound pack in a widely run TV advertisement: “Even though there are 1,045,690 soldiers just like me, I am my own force.” As in the military, so in the academic world: Aspiring to be a bold free thinker around that time in Berkeley, California, led to quandaries. Aiming to be a “thinker of one” was full of pitfalls. You were unique but simultaneously part of 1,045,690 others who were “just like me.” There was an acceptable way to be “different.” Norms expanded to incorporate this quirkiness. And so was born, or reborn, the hipster.

I had spent almost half of my twenties studying the long-forgotten records of a huge experiment in inculcating unfreedom. At Yale’s Institute of Human Relations, a well-funded program of running rats through mazes, with the objective of establishing a universal science of behavior control, flourished during the 1930s. It featured many scientists announcing breakthroughs in what they described as “the maze that a human must learn” in order to live decently and capably in society. But not every experiment was a success. In a 1934 study by psychologist Neal Miller, one particular small Norwegian rat—an animal that had been “variable throughout,” according to its handlers—suddenly refused to run at all after facing myriad electric shocks in an alleyway. The animal’s recalcitrance sabotaged the data for the whole experiment, and the umbrage-filled note in the scientific publication—“Unfortunately . . . [t]his [refusal] spoiled the statistical reliability of the outcome”—piqued my interest. Even in a huge program like Yale’s, one that sought to apply its animal discoveries to humans, a lone two-ounce creature could derail an experiment. I wondered: How did the past, with its seemingly unrealized stakes, contend with the bigger stakes of the present?

To bridge the gap between past and present, I started to think about brainwashing, a topic I had not covered directly in my dissertation but was implied. Brainwashing was a well-worn term, and certainly everyone could recognize it—yet I found I didn’t really know what it meant. It was over-the-top, scandalous, frightening, possibly silly. But it also struck me as possibly the most successful method in history to mold a human being into some new form. It was not just a matter of compelling someone to do something they didn’t want to do or breaking a person down. After all, brute force had a long history, a lot longer than brainwashing. Brute force did not really change people’s minds and sometimes it actually inspired resistance. Sheer physical punishment (“getting medieval on your ass” was the way the character Marsellus Wallace put it in Pulp Fiction) was not reliably successful. The Central Intelligence Agency’s MK-ULTRA program would prove this. Even an average man of the late seventeenth century, the priest Urbain Grandier of Loudun, France, managed to resist making a forced confession at the hands of his tormentors as he was burned alive.*

What concerned me were modern methods, in which physical force was involved but was not the primary driver of change. As Czesław Miłosz observed in his 1953 classic, The Captive Mind, “We are concerned here with questions more significant than mere force.” The scarier thing was people gladly volunteering for terrible outcomes—begging for the gallows or sacrificing their previous beliefs and blindly embracing new ones. Observers from Aldous Huxley to a notorious Communist interrogator agreed that whereas it was possible to resist torture, new methods of the mid-twentieth century were close to 100 percent effective in attaining compliance. Just about no one could withstand them. “If God Himself was sitting in that chair we would make him say what we wanted him to say,” claimed the interrogator. No one was exempt anymore. Said Huxley in Brave New World Revisited: “Government through terror works on the whole less well than government through the non-violent manipulation of the environment and of the thoughts and feelings of individual men, women and children.” Breaking the will, Brave New World style, was possible using behavioral technologies of modern mind control. Not only pain but a targeted mix of pleasure and pain would ensure adherence. Brainwashing is neither pure persuasion nor sheer coercion but both: coercive persuasion.

What was this method? Was it possible that, to have a rate of compliance nearing total, the subject must—on some level, in some way, even subtly, even unwittingly—agree? And what did this all have to do with me and my concerns with being a unique and free individual—like everyone else—at the dawn of the internet age? This was not just a random cell phone campaign or a bohemian style of conformity but hard evidence of an extreme process.

The natural place to begin was during the early Cold War. Any proper discussion of brainwashing, I thought, must commence with its entrance into the English language. And even this was hazy…

Lemov, Rebecca. The Instability of Truth: Brainwashing, Mind Control, and Hyper-Persuasion (pp. 11-15). (Function). Kindle Edition. 

Stay tuned. Lotta book here...

 

Random web definition

 

 UPDATE:  A BIT OF ONLINE CROSS-REFERENCING CURIOSITY

 

PREFACE

I WAS WORKING IN the library when I bumped into one of my former patients. I hadn’t seen her for maybe five years. We sized each other up. I was a retired professor of psychiatry lugging a pile of books. She was a bright young scholar carrying lots of baggage from her past. We chatted for a bit, surrounded by shelves of books in the stacks, and she asked what I was working on. I told her I had gotten interested in brainwashing.

“Umm,” she said. “Isn’t that kind of a stale, musty topic—Communists, bad science, and all that stuff?” As I said, she was bright and inclined to come right to the point—tact had never been her strong suit. Why was I spending so much time on this arcane topic? Granted, I am eccentric; but what made me think anybody else would be interested in this subject?

Then I came home to watch the evening news, which featured its usual dose of suicide bombers and mass shootings, followed by political leaders making preposterous statements (“Vaccination causes autism,” “Global warming is a myth,” “The COVID-19 virus is not a problem”). It is bad enough that leaders can propound such nonsense; the bigger problem is that they persuade so many other people to endorse their misunderstandings of the world. I thought about my patient again. How did she make sense of a world where people could be persuaded to believe rubbish and follow it up with self-destructive violence?

As a psychiatrist, I should be one of the last people to believe the world operates rationally. I know better. Leaders have all too often been pied pipers, but something new emerged in the twentieth century. I still don’t know what to call this phenomenon. Brainwashing, coercive persuasion, thought control, dark persuasion—all these terms refer to the fact that certain techniques render individuals shockingly vulnerable to indoctrination…

Dimsdale, Joel  (2021). Dark Persuasion: A History of Brainwashing from Pavlov to Social Media (Function). Kindle Edition.

Hmmm... From a prior post; #OnDisinformation.