Feeling of Freedom
"The responses are neurobiologically real responses. They are just not how you say you felt." (Tor Wager)
"In the first days after the tragedy, alongside the hunt for bodies and people to blame, some voices described 9/11 as a uniquely evil act. But of course, as others quickly pointed out, it was not. Not only had there been an earlier attempt to destroy the World Trade Centre (linked to Al-Qaeda , the same radical Islamic group which would be blamed for 9/11), but America had previously suffered terrorism on its own soil and from its own citizens. Timothy McVeigh's politically motivated bombing of a government building in Oklahoma on 19 April 1995 killed 168 government employees and civilians and injured over 500. And McVeigh's attack was itself only the latest in a genealogy of terrorism driven by political and/or religious motives, a worldwide genealogy stretching back far beyond 1950. Elements of that dark lineage have triggered renewed discussion of brainwashing ever since the term became available; 9/11 was no exception." (Kathleen Taylor, Brainwashing).
The sorcery of the religious veil is cooked up again in the recent discussion of epigenesis and the brainscape in last week's New Scientist, and in far more depth in Kathleen Taylor's 'Brainwashing'. Maybe the resurgence of the Intelligent Design debate has offered a new plane of understanding of religious activity in cybernetic culture - true belief as the limits of society. More importantly, though, as these articles highlight, is the underground circuitry which runs through the geosocial into our physiological make-up. Modulation of sensation occurs via vast cog-webs according to Taylor - neural nets which cross people, societies, and the globe. Focusing on how the media are plugged in to the modulation of these cog-webs, she suggests that: "stealth is an easier option than force, especially when the belief change need only be temporary."
People have been engaged in affective programming for aeons, as well as other life forms; as Richard Doyle points out, "The ethnobotanist and "shamanologist" Terrence McKenna was a proponent of the "stoned monkey" theory, whereby primates learned to use tryptamines (especially psilocybin) as adjuncts to more perceptive and effective hunting." With the advent of nanoengineering, neural networks become infinitely programmable in visions such as Kurzweils (www.kurzweilai.net). Andy Clark, a neurophilosopher states that "The human mind, I wanted to argue, is naturally designed so as to co-opt a mounting cascade of extra-neural elements as (quite literally) parts of extended and distributed cognitive processes. Moreover (and hence the techno-futurism) this ancient trick looks poised for some new and potent manifestations, fueled by innovative work on human-machine interfaces, swarm intelligence, and bio-technological union." (www.philosophy.ed.ac.uk/staff/clark)
The extended cog-web crossing cybernetic culture with its feedback soft-belief mechanisms hides behind the mask of the 'feeling of freedom' - religious transcendence is swapped for the 'pure value' of the self, locked in to the oedipal ego system of hypercapital.
"I at once started to my feet, trembling convulsively in every fibre. Perspiration burst from every pore, and stood in big cold beads upon my forehead." (Edgar Allen Poe)
"In the first days after the tragedy, alongside the hunt for bodies and people to blame, some voices described 9/11 as a uniquely evil act. But of course, as others quickly pointed out, it was not. Not only had there been an earlier attempt to destroy the World Trade Centre (linked to Al-Qaeda , the same radical Islamic group which would be blamed for 9/11), but America had previously suffered terrorism on its own soil and from its own citizens. Timothy McVeigh's politically motivated bombing of a government building in Oklahoma on 19 April 1995 killed 168 government employees and civilians and injured over 500. And McVeigh's attack was itself only the latest in a genealogy of terrorism driven by political and/or religious motives, a worldwide genealogy stretching back far beyond 1950. Elements of that dark lineage have triggered renewed discussion of brainwashing ever since the term became available; 9/11 was no exception." (Kathleen Taylor, Brainwashing).
The sorcery of the religious veil is cooked up again in the recent discussion of epigenesis and the brainscape in last week's New Scientist, and in far more depth in Kathleen Taylor's 'Brainwashing'. Maybe the resurgence of the Intelligent Design debate has offered a new plane of understanding of religious activity in cybernetic culture - true belief as the limits of society. More importantly, though, as these articles highlight, is the underground circuitry which runs through the geosocial into our physiological make-up. Modulation of sensation occurs via vast cog-webs according to Taylor - neural nets which cross people, societies, and the globe. Focusing on how the media are plugged in to the modulation of these cog-webs, she suggests that: "stealth is an easier option than force, especially when the belief change need only be temporary."
People have been engaged in affective programming for aeons, as well as other life forms; as Richard Doyle points out, "The ethnobotanist and "shamanologist" Terrence McKenna was a proponent of the "stoned monkey" theory, whereby primates learned to use tryptamines (especially psilocybin) as adjuncts to more perceptive and effective hunting." With the advent of nanoengineering, neural networks become infinitely programmable in visions such as Kurzweils (www.kurzweilai.net). Andy Clark, a neurophilosopher states that "The human mind, I wanted to argue, is naturally designed so as to co-opt a mounting cascade of extra-neural elements as (quite literally) parts of extended and distributed cognitive processes. Moreover (and hence the techno-futurism) this ancient trick looks poised for some new and potent manifestations, fueled by innovative work on human-machine interfaces, swarm intelligence, and bio-technological union." (www.philosophy.ed.ac.uk/staff/clark)
The extended cog-web crossing cybernetic culture with its feedback soft-belief mechanisms hides behind the mask of the 'feeling of freedom' - religious transcendence is swapped for the 'pure value' of the self, locked in to the oedipal ego system of hypercapital.
"I at once started to my feet, trembling convulsively in every fibre. Perspiration burst from every pore, and stood in big cold beads upon my forehead." (Edgar Allen Poe)
posted by hyperflow at 10:35
Care to comment?
