www.nomorefakenews.com June 3 2013
Researchers, pundits, and academics look for metaphors to describe the mind. For at least 50 years, the favorite analogy has been the computer.
“Well, both the mind and a computer employ logic. They store data. They use strategies to solve problems.”
Is that it? The mind is merely a problem-solving machine? Of course not.
That’s where the metaphor breaks down.
By the way, a metaphor is way of describing one thing in terms of another. It’s not literal. People used to learn that in school.
Two days ago, I wrote and posted an article headlined: “150 million Americans go to Mexico, swim back, become instant millionaires.” Some people apparently thought I was reporting a fact. Or misreporting it.
It’s called satire. That’s when you take a metaphor and stretch it beyond the breaking point of exaggeration. In that case, I was commenting on current immigration/welfare policy.
Metaphor isn’t fact.
The metaphor of “mind as computer” isn’t a fact, no matter how hard technocrats wish it were true.
Behind the moronic and childish presumptions of technocracy, there are indeed people who want to treat the mind as a computer for a very simple reason: they want to control it.
Looking at the mind as an input-output machine suggests tactics for modifying, controlling, and weakening it.
That’s what Pavlov was after. Applying a stimulus and getting a predictable and unvarying response. That was his holy grail.
There are projects underway to build a simulated model of the human brain. This takes us one step further away from the truth, because the brain is not the mind.
The mind (consciousness) isn’t a physical object. It isn’t a container. It isn’t a machine. It isn’t a thing.
The CIA’s infamous MKULTRA mind-control program is widely misunderstood. Its original experiments were much more about controlling behavior through coercion. High-dose panic-inducing LSD, threats, intimidation, hypnosis applied in a climate of fear.
Of course that can work on many people, but it’s not sophisticated or mysterious. You can pound somebody with a hammer and make him obey orders if you keep it up long enough.
Waterboarding can control behavior. So can long periods of isolation.
And when it comes to electromagnetic stimuli or creating “voices in the head,” the elements of fear and disorientation play a central role.
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