a dangerous truth

The Eagleman programmes about the brain are not easy to find on the BBC and this causes me to wonder if there is a conspiracy.

Why do you wonder about that?

I don't know so I will follow the thought trains as they appear from the unconscious.

Go for it.

Shakespeare's Julius Caesar reckoned that “Yond Cassius has a lean and hungry look. He thinks too much. Such men are dangerous.”

Ah yes – conspiracy, thinking, danger, threatening authority

When I was a teenager I reckoned that I had 'a sermon that never will bear preaching'. There was also the idea that 'he rationalised his thought about everything he sought and so he annihilated pleasure'.

Ah yes – adolescent angst.

And those ideas were linked to the cultural classics – 'no pain, no gain', and 'the devil finds work for idle hands'. And there is the notion that I should respect the cultural 'good and great' who were my 'elders and betters'.

Ah yes – Scottish Presbyterianism.

But then I was inspired by the thoughts of anarchists while studying psychology, chemistry, botany and zoology.

So what was the gist of the unpreachable sermon?

The merits of thinking in terms of evolution and the scientific method as the 'true' road to 'truth'.

This links to a group of other linguistic bombshells:

The only constant thing is change.

The only certainty is doubt.

God is dead.

There must be better ways to be human.

Make the world a better place.

Progress is possible.

Whose reality counts?

The reality that can be described is not the real reality.

So what does this have to do with Eagleman and the brain?

Neuroscience and evolutionary psychology are causing a paradigm shift. Before Freud, at least in the west, the unconscious was mysterious and under rated. During Freud there was special talk so as to subjectively figure what was happening in the unconscious. After Freud there are neurologists with brain scanners who are objectively mapping the neural correlates of consciousness (NCC). Social psychologists are uncovering the many ways that the unconscious is really in control most of the time; and evolutionary psychologists are figuring why and how the various mind/brain interactions came into being.

There is a lot going on!

And I think that the BBC, or parts of it, are trying to bury the Eagleman programmes because of their potential to radicalise people. The truth shall set you free.

But you were suggesting that there is no real reality, no true truth.

Evolution and science don't need 'truth'. They operate in terms of the best working hypotheses given the evidence presently available.

That seems reason-able.

Yes – but - The patronising, hegemonic elite are quite happy to keep the peasants in ignorance as they are then easy to rouse by propaganda and to exterminate in wars.