Does the brain create consciousness or is consciousness driving brain function?
A COLUMN By Frederick Sinclair
Stepping back in time to the early 1930s we uncover a movement stirring among the intelligencia at Columbia University and described in the Technologist Magazine as Technocracy. “Technocracy is the science of social engineering, including operation and distribution of goods and services to the entire population.” For the first time, we find a conceptual molding of human nature into a scientific and technical engineering problem. The published book of the time The Technocracy Study Course concluded “The human body is composed chemically of ordinary substances, of which rocks are made, and obeys the same basic laws of energy transformation as a steam engine.” and “They are very far removed from the semi-supernatural creatures they have heretofore supposed themselves to be.” Operant conditioning experiments of Pavlov and Skinners’ subsequent behavior modification work, contributed to the development of techniques for managing the human population “so that they would do what you intend.” It is important to note that eugenics was also, at this point in history, gaining in popularity among the wealthy and elite controlling class. Eugenics relates to measures intended to improve the human population through selective breeding, allowing only particular people to reproduce and is reflective of the growing racism and Nazi theory of the times.
Fast forward 3 decades into the 1960s and we find a growing Mechanistic World View, a form of scientism where Science is God. The Universe, society and humans operate like machines and everything is governed by natural laws and deterministic processes. All phenomena are reduced to their component parts (Reductionism) and the Universe operates like a clockwork mechanism. At first, mechanistic thinking involved the experimental application of chemical and physical manipulation to affect behavior, it was soon followed by a focus on how the brain works. Neuroscience was officially born in 1962 when Otto Schmidt founded the Neurosciences Research Program (NRP) at MIT. An interdisciplinary framework united biology, chemistry, physics and mathematics to study the human brain and nervous system. The race for understanding and controlling the brain was on. 1990 began the Decade of the Brain, a brain mapping initiative that achieved 3d modeling of human, rat and monkey brains in healthy and diseased conditions. In 2002 Rocco and Bainbridge founded Nano-Bio-Info-Cogno (NBIC) and framed Convergence Science as laid out in their book Converging Technologies for Improving Human Performance. Their work emphasized societal transformation into human like artificial people in a hive mind. Understanding not just the brain, but the mind also and with that knowledge, a transformation of the fabric of society and mankind would be attainable. In 2013, President Obama announced the Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies (BRAIN) Initiative and committed hundreds of millions of dollars to fund it. The project was to perform genome like mapping that drilled down into every working part of the human brain to map how it works. It became a Global movement and spawned the Transhuman dream. However, this was not only dependent on knowing how the mind works, another unanticipated factor was encountered. Consciousness was identified as a key component of brain function. Does the brain create consciousness or is consciousness driving brain function?
An Organismic Perspective became obvious while mapping the brain, where an interconnectedness and dynamic nature of living systems drives development and change that equals more than the sum of the parts.
Enter from back stage, the Military and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) which is the dark projects section of the Pentagon. They have been clandestinely developing a Brain Computer Interface (BCI), since the 1970s, in the creation of super soldiers. How much of the Obama BRAIN initiative funding has been diverted to this secret program is unknown. A public –private capital investment group (NGO) has been incorporated in the furtherance of AI and Transhumanism. It is named In-Q-Tel and functions under the guidance of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).
Note: In depth coverage of these topics by journalist Patrick Wood and others, can be found at technocracy.news/the-brain If while encountering these reports you experience the Fight or Flight (fear) response, catch and release the emotion, take back your power and know this: ‘If we can face it, God can fix it’.
We will dive deeper into use and misuse that foreshadows the Transhuman agenda, in next weeks’ article.
