Ghost, Cyborg or Mystery – Fidere Aude

Nearly 400 years ago Rene Descartes dramatically changed our view of ourselves in ways that have caused problems ever since.  The change is caught in this famous image which illustrates what Descartes viewed as an obvious fact we could depend on.

If our foot strays too near a flame, an image of the flame runs up the recently discovered nerve fibres to the pineal gland where Descartes located our Soul.  Looking at the flame, the Soul decides to move our foot.

For Descartes, this wise decision demonstrated reflection – the action was full of a wisdom clearly based on reflection. He called actions like this reflexes, where the word reflex meant we had reflected.

This is where Descartes famous Cogito ergo Sum – I Think therefore I am – comes from. These three words created Dualism and a host of semi-insuperable problems for philosophy.

For Descartes, our Souls, each of them sparks from the Divine Flame, are caught in the unthinking machine we call our Body. The machine would disintegrate and stop functioning in due course, when Souls would migrate to Heaven or Hell depending on the wisdom or folly of their decisions.

A few years before Descartes, William Harvey had demonstrated that the Heart, previously the leading candidate for the place in which our Souls and Passions resided, was a pump, whose job was to pump blood around the body. Viewing the heart as a pump argued strongly for seeing the Body as a Machine. This gave rise to the Soul problem, more usually today called the Mind-Body problem.

Descartes located the Soul in the Pineal Gland because this seemed to be the only place in the brain that was not double – and the Soul as Indivisible could not have one bit on this side of the Body and another on the opposite side.

Body and Mind became radically different things, leaving us free to research how the body-machine worked.

One hundred years after Descartes, Julian Offray de La Mettrie proposed the first wholly mechanical view of man “Man a Machine”.  He said we all owe a debt to Descartes for conceiving the possibility of an almost desacralised man but he condemned him for his failure to follow his ideas to their logical conclusion, saying Descartes was “a genius made to blaze new trails and to go astray in them”.

L’Homme Machine (Man a Machine) was a succès par scandale. De La Mettrie’s ideas did not supplant those of Descartes, partly because he hadn’t solved the wisdom problem. .

A hundred years after La Mettrie, 200 years after Descartes, the wisdom problem was semi-solved, when reflexes in their modern sense – an automatic action that requires no thought – were discovered. The wisdom of the body takes care of things and removes our foot without any involvement from a soul or a brain.

Research in the decades that followed pushed automatic behaviours up and up the spinal cord, ultimately into the brain and its frontal lobes. There is no clear Soul-Centre anywhere. The higher centres seem to act more to inhibit actions – to block automatic and wise actions – rather than to stimulate or advise us to take certain actions.

This research opened the door to a new view of ourselves – Sentio ergo Sum – I feel therefore I am.  Our Bodies could now be seen to embody Wisdom. They were no longer simply mechanical as machines were understood before computers.

In recent decades discoveries linking the peripheral nervous system have developed our ideas about this Feeling Me. It has been called a Material Me but might be better viewed as a Mysterious Me.

As this research on reflexes took shape in the nineteenth century, William James and Carl Lange were among the first to put it all together when they independently said our Emotions aren’t in our Minds. They result from our Brains attempting to work out what our Body is Sensing – what our body is trying to tell us. A growing body of research now supports this idea.

An extra detail came into play over 60 years ago, perhaps assisted by early psychopharmacology, which is that our Brains when attempting to read our Bodies often get things wrong.

The idea that we could fool the brain into thinking we were not anxious by taking drugs which relaxed our muscles, as Benzodiazepines do, or drugs that slow our heart rate, reduce perspiration or eliminate the shake in our hand or quaver in our voice, as Beta-Blockers do, underpinned the early Psychopharmacology years.

But then along came Freud.

A decade after James and Lange, Freud claimed he could interpret the automatic and unconscious wisdom of the Body. Rather than listening to and learning from you like James and Lange and psychopharmacologists like Arvid Carlsson later, Freud created a Cogito ergo Tu Es – What I Think is What You Are.  What I (The Expert) thinks about what is going on in your Body is what You (who couldn’t possibly Understand Your Body) Are. See Images of Trauma.

Freud is Dead and Psychoanalysis has supposedly been replaced by Biological Psychiatry and Psychopharmacology. No more analytic mumbo-jumbo. Now we have hard objective science.

Freud based everything on Libido. In Freud’s hands Libido was a force that could mean anything he wanted it to mean. It couldn’t be measured. It was not real. But on the basis of his sense about our Libido, he could claim to know what was really going on in Us. What was going on with our libido when based on our own experience we might have figured we had a pretty good sense of what is up with our libido – and not just ours.

Today Freud’s Libido has been replaced by Biological Psychiatry’s Serotonin. But Psychiatry’s Serotonin is as unreal as the Tooth Fairy.  It can’t be measured.  As this word get’s used it has nothing to with the Serotonin System physiologists deal with.  Psychobabble has been replaced by Biobabble.  See Gulf War for the first hint of Biobabble or should that be Guff War.

Based on this Serotonin, however, Psych Experts now claim to know better than you what is going on in You. This underpins their scornful laughs when you raise things that contradict their theories.

And it’s not just Psychs. Everyone from Psychologists to the Media swallow this line. People pushing health food stuff want you to use their product to boost their serotonin.  See Serotonin and Depression, the marketing of a myth,  42 or Thereabouts,  So Long and Thanks for all the Serotonin.

This not Science. Like Psychoanalysis before it, it is better characterized as a Religion.

Programmable Me

Our brains, in the sense of what we call the Human Cortex, have been over-rated as the source of truth about ourselves, with our bodies downgraded to something primitive unable to contribute anything useful.

Our brain mistakes do not stem just from the difficulty the Cortex has in interpreting messages coming from a Mysterious Body but also because the Cortex is the place where powerful forces get to shape, or program, how they want us to think about our Selves and our Bodies.

In Descartes’ day, the Church did the programming, of what was called our Conscience. Church and State are very close to the same thing. Most States began as actual or de facto theocracies before becoming Nation (Tribal) States. In practice the main function of Religion has not been to foster holiness but to keep the Herd together.

In the case of Nation States, National Myths, along with political and military propaganda, have the same function as a lot of Religious stories. As Science developed Nation States, both Left and Right leaning, embraced Experts including Freud ad his very convenient SuperEgo concept – the reality principle (conscience) that essentially trumps whatever our pesky Id might be trying to tell us.

We can put it another way entirely.  Churches once collected Tithes which kept an ever growing clergy living in comfort.  States collected taxes to keep the ever expanding bureaucracy and their technical experts living in comfort.

Pharmaceutical companies now charge many multiples of what it costs to make drugs we don’t need, but which their propaganda has us hooked to, with the resulting riches beyond the dreams of avarice keeping a 1% as happy as any 1% on earth have ever been.

Pharmaceutical Companies have an even more effective grip on the Cortex of our physicians than Churches or States had or have on the rest of us.  They openly say that very few doctors have a thought in their head not put there by us or our competitors. In the Health domain, what gets branded as Science is mostly very effectively deployed myths – See So Long and Thanks for all the Fish.

We have lots of extraordinary technologies today from nuclear weapons to smartphones but nothing more effective than our propaganda techniques. US elections are wonderful places to see these in operation.  Many, perhaps most of the techniques, have been turbo-charged by Pharma, who have provided a marvellous laboratory for the military and others to further develop their skills in the wake of the Cold War.  Long before Trump began talking about Fake News, Pharma had ensured that the greatest concentration of Fake News on the planet centered on the medicines our doctors give us.

Cyborgs

Around 1960, ideas about Cyborgs and Transhumanism were born. Some older readers might remember The Six Million Dollar Man, which introduced some of us to a future in which increasing parts of us would be machines – with it was initially felt would be the person’s own Brain, own Soul providing a continuity with a humanity that had gone before. See Tail Wags God.

While there has been extraordinary progress in this direction, in terms of the control our Masters might want, there is no need for transhumanist fantasies now that we can program the Humans collective to operate as a machine.

If our Systems have got the point where Apple and Facebook pay prospective employees to freeze Eggs so that companies get the most out of them at their peak, we are fast approaching the point where our species has become a machine.

Apple and Facebook employees freezing their Eggs is likely beyond imagining for readers of these posts, but everyone Gaslit by their doctors when they mention the adverse effects of their treatment is in almost the exact same situation.

You get the sense you are not being believed, not even listened to, that there are other people in the Room with your doctor. You are absolutely right – See Strangers in the Room. S/he is run by a program that allows little deviation.

The programming operation in the Verwey cartoon above looks painful but many Docs are happy with the result.

The Medical Profession has a bad case of Guff War Syndrome. The problem is particularly acute in mental health, where the latest program is labelled ‘precision psychiatry’. The mutt chasing tail inanity here deserves a new word – BabbleBabble.

Fidere Aude

Our problems are beyond serious. Those faced with medical gaslighting are on the front line of one of the most important issues of our day.

One hundred and fifty years after Descartes, Immanuel Kant’s phrase Sapere Aude crystallized what the Enlightenment was about – or has become the Myth about what it was about. It means Dare to Think. Unsaid is Dare to Think for Yourself. Don’t just accept what you are told by Churches and States.

Descartes Cogito ergo Sum had a good side. He legitimized the Doubt that many figure creates Science. A thinking reflective Soul – Have I really got one of those? Gosh I should use it.  Doubt Everything, Challenge Everything, Descartes said.

The problem with our ideas about the Resulting Science have however got badly twisted caught beautifully in this quote from the Pope in Chile some years ago when addressing a crowd on the subject of child abuse in the Church.

Para creer en nosostros tienen que tener fe, pero para que yo crea en ustedes me tienen que traer puebras. 

This translates as:

To believe in us you have to have faith, but for me to believe in you you have to bring me proofs.

The Pope admitted afterwards that this was a bad mistake but just what the admission means is not clear.

In clinical care, Evidence Based Medicine (EBM) means you can never bring me proof you have been harmed/abused.  An algorithm that delivers a reading on one effect of a medicine – losing the several hundred other effects it has – in a non-existent average person trumps what you know is happening to you. This is not Science.

It cows the authorities and the clerics (doctors) from New Zealand to the Land of X and Home of the Y – the place where the Yes We can slogan has been reborn – into silence by telling them that to allow any mention in the media or courts of the harms medicines can do will cost lives. Cows people into submission by outright telling them there will be blood on your hands.

This is a beyond belief betrayal of the Enlightenment. But experience of those of us who are gaslit brings out the mistake in the usual Sapere Aude story. Knowledge and Science does not come from Daring to Know, from Doubting Everything, it comes from engaging with others in an effort to come to a consensus about tricky things – such as what the prompts from our Mysterious Bodies in response to taking SSRIs or other medicines, might be telling us about who and what we are.

Central to Clinical Science (and probably all science) is a challenge Fidere Aude – Dare to Trust Me.  Unsaid is Dare to Trust Me when I am telling you something not found in your books.

Science is not something an individual mind generates on its own – it involves coming to a consensus.  This cannot happen if we don’t have partners in the exercise that we listen to and trust especially when they are telling us things not found in the books.

The central question facing an increasingly irrelevant clergy and doctors, a soon to be irrelevant ex-profession, both of whom are too petrified to accept what we tell them is:

Why Do You not Trust Me?