You're pretty much spot on. We already have names for those parts of the brain: The conscious and the subconscious. Though perhaps your explanation is more effective as people might have preconceived notions of what the conscious and subconscious is.
One thing I want to add is that your inability to convince someone using "facts and logic" is actually a useful defense mechanism on their part. It's how the brain protects itself from easy manipulation by others. If I could change your behavior by citing some statistics, I could just as easily make up numbers on the spot to get you to do what I want.
Let me give you an example. Yesterday I had a conversation with a friend. I know him well, I do business with him, he is smart and knows a lot about a lot of things. But, he lives in an area where 100% of the information on radio television, newspapers, literally everywhere is pro mrna gene therapy propaganda. Yesterday he letrally told me that the gene therapy doesn't work but you will be less harmed when you get sick and that everything will go back to normal when we force the last 10% of the unvaxxed to be vaxxed so we have to drop the hammer on them and even put them in camps, prisons or worse.
I've had family members, who are otherwise intelligent people, tell me something similar. What so pernicious about it is the smarter the person, the better they are able to trap themselves. They take the facts they are given by the media, analyze them, and arrive at the only logical conclusion. Since they are logical, thorough and methodical people, they are sure of the answer. Their logic is foolproof. Of course, what they fail to consider is that the data they are working with is fabricated, designed in such a way so that they arrive at the inevitable conclusion. How do you even begin explaining to them that the very foundation of their worldview is built on lies?
>One thing I want to add is that your inability to convince someone using "facts and logic" is actually a useful defense mechanism on their part. It's how the brain protects itself from easy manipulation by others. If I could change your behavior by citing some statistics, I could just as easily make up numbers on the spot to get you to do what I want.
Aha! Holy shit, so I'm not the only one that has seen this. I JUST FIGURED THAT PART OUT A FEW WEEKS AGO. I had most of the pieces, but the entire writeup is based around the final piece of the puzzle being precisely as you described it. I finally realized that that the pre-frontal cortext (us) acts as a kind of firewall for exactly the reason that you describe.
It is also an absolute requirement in a social species like ours that is basically a genocide species. We basically organize into war parties and genocide other human tribes. It's just want we do. In order to war party, you have to have a kind of persistence of belief that cannot be overridden by the other war party you are going against. Evolution built the firewall into our genome as a survival strategy.
> I've had family members, who are otherwise intelligent people, tell me something similar. What so pernicious about it is the smarter the person, the better they are able to trap themselves. They take the facts they are given by the media, analyze them, and arrive at the only logical conclusion. Since they are logical, thorough and methodical people, they are sure of the answer. Their logic is foolproof. Of course, what they fail to consider is that the data they are working with is fabricated, designed in such a way so that they arrive at the inevitable conclusion. How do you even begin explaining to them that the very foundation of their worldview is built on lies?
Once again, another remarkable statement. I thought I was the first one to kind of frame it that way. I guess there are no new thoughts under the sun. That is exactly what I am starting to notice as well. Smart just means the pre-frontal cortex is better trained for the job that it is designed to do: act as a firewall / interface for the 95% hidden brain and consequently it just does a better job of rationalizing the internally inconsistent data that the hidden brain absorbs as it doesn't have any data correction mechanisms.
What an excellent post, glad to see others have figured this out too.
Smart just means the pre-frontal cortex is better trained for the job that it is designed to do: act as a firewall / interface for the 95% hidden brain and consequently it just does a better job of rationalizing the internally inconsistent data that the hidden brain absorbs as it doesn't have any data correction mechanisms.
Just look to doctors. A highly prestigious profession wherein every person must follow the current trends, no matter how many people they personally kill. A profession that takes many decades of learning and practice to become good at, requiring a certain amount of intellect and dedication to follow through with that isn't present in the average populace.
And still, there they are, intubating people with the common cold, prescribing incredibly addictive opioids to idiots with a slight pain caused by being fat when they could buck the trend and assign them to a dietician.
You reminded me of this post today on .win: nobody dies at home of covid (patriots.win)
I think you are totally correct. It never occurred to me that I have never heard of a single person being found at home dead from covid in almost 2 years.
The fucking doctors are literally killing people.
In the ex-mil world there's a term "Sheep or sheepdog?"
The vast majority of folks are better served, at least in a primitive violent world, by allowing the strong chemical reactions in the primitive part of the brain to override prefrontal rationality because running and hidding or staying in the middle of the pack is quick and easy decision. No deliberation required. Sheep.
Some folks, either via temperment or training, can prefrontal their way out of dangerous situations at similar speeds to a gut/knee jerk fear reaction. Kudos to them. I would like to think I occupy that spot in the herd most of the time.
It's impressive that you were able to deduce all of this on your own. I've read a book or two that pointed me in the right direction. One that I recommend is On Intelligence (amazon.com) by Jeff Hawkins. It's from 2005 so not exactly cutting edge, but the main ideas hold. It will help you fill in the gaps.
Your post raises many interesting points for philosophical discussion. One point is how brain stores information. It's easy to abstract away the brain as an information storage mechanism akin to a hard drive or flash memory. But the brain's way of storing and retrieving information is very different. It's a physical organ made up of cells that form connections to each other, and each cell is a very complex object (each cell is like a city) that has memory. With a hard drive you can easily reformat it or rewrite large parts of it. But how do we do that with the brain and is there even an API to do it? Connections in the brain are strengthened through use and weakened through disuse. When you ask someone to fundamentally change their worldview, those changes must be reflected in the physical structure of the brain. Strengthening the right connections and weakening others takes time and repetition, and the bigger the change, the more work it requires.
Great points. Added book to reading list, thanks!
Your questions about how the brain stores information is precisely how I understand it as well. And, now that you have written that down, it starts to become obvious that we need to start building out social, technological and cultural mechanisms to start re-inforcing what is basically either hidden knowledge, forbidden knowledge or forgotten knowledge.
Conceptually, all of us traveled the same psychological road to get here. I don't think anyone here was born feeling white and looking for a space to think and speak freely. We were all part of normal social groups that eventually became poisoned by parasites and this poisoned environment pushed us out of these groups where we all (probably) tripped on pieces of information and clues that eventually led us here.
I mean, I can literally watch people post on patriots.win little observations of the bits and pieces of information and clues about what is really going on and think to my self, I know EXACTLY where they are in their journey of discover and how long that road will take and how much work it will require to finally get here and see the matrix for what it is.
So, as you said, understanding how the mind stores information is unbelievably important. On all of these alt platforms, most of them are not quite here yet, not quite accepting of the brutal nature of reality. But, all of them are out of mainstream pool of reinforcing behavoiurs and reinforcing ideologies and they ALL are now in a new self directed set of self re-inforcing information and ideological paths.
We have to figure out how to keep on building and strengthening those out and get our people out of the psychological cattle ranches they are locked in.
That being said, you can override that protective mechanism by doing exactly what you said if you sound convincing enough. "Making up numbers on the spot to get one to do what you want" as you said. Another way to override their protective mechanism is to ask leading questions and dropping a subtle redpill here and there, and then getting them to redpill themselves via answering those questions. If you push too hard, they'll fight back against it, but if you're subtle enough that doesn't kick in.
Even if you cite a study in a well respected journal like Nature, if it doesn't fit with their worldview they will find reasons to reject it. The desire to reject that which does not fit comes first, and motivated reasoning follows. They will find some way of rejecting your data no matter how many data sources you cite.
I believe that a technique used in street epistemology could be effective. From how street epistemology is used, it's mainly a tool to get people to doubt their religious beliefs. And that's pretty much what we are facing. The first step is to open their mind to the possibility that they could be wrong. To sow that seed of doubt that will hopefully grow.
It goes something like this:
Q: On a scale of 1 to 10, 1 being not sure at all, and 10 being absolutely sure with no doubt in your mind, how sure are you that your belief is true? A: 10 Q: How do you know it's true? What do you base your belief on? A: Faith. Q: I talked to a Muslim the other day. He believes that your god doesn't exist and that Allah is the one true god. He's also at a "10" and he also got there through faith. What would you say to him? Follow up Question: Is faith a reliable way to get at the truth?
It's Socratic dialog adapted to a specific purpose. I'm sure it can be adapted to weaken the NPC brainwashing about covid and mainstream media.
For example, we could work the Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect into the script:
“Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray’s case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward — reversing cause and effect. I call these the “wet streets cause rain” stories. Paper’s full of them. In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.” – Michael Crichton
Thing is, their control over people isn't complete. Their control of all media/info that a person gets is only about 85% and getting people to start questioning anything plants a seed that just won't go away. It's part of why they are angry all the time, the cognitive dissonance between the current zeitgeist and what they thought was true yesterday causes problems between the conscious and the unconscious.
Some continue in their anger and hate, always feeling bad and upset, while others, a very few of us indeed, will stop and ask why they feel this way all the time. Then they start looking to those seeds planted long ago, or not so long ago by friends/family/un-controlled media.
My point is that a huge number of us used to be one of those who believed the zeitgeist and have since broken ourselves out of it. The seeds of doubt absolutely help, though it can be difficult to trace and enumerate. Though I admit that it is a painful and incredibly difficult process to change your own programming.
Haha. That Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is so apparent with things I've read in the past, I never knew there was an actual term for it.
(post is archived)