The Brain's Unlearning Flaw and State Indoctrination

[Brainzing]

Have you ever noticed that learning something new with a clean slate is much easier than learning something new which contradicts previous learning?   My first recollection of this was during an electronics class back in high school, where a previously learned oversimplification made learning a new fact more difficult, much more difficult than it should have been.

 

In a recent TV show called The Brain, the host shows a rotating white face mask lit from the side.  The convex side is correctly interpreted by the brain as curved outward, and when the concave side starts to enter the field of view, the brain correctly interprets it as concave (curved inward), realizing it is looking at a thin shell mask.  But then as the concave side starts to rotate to a more face on direction, the brain overrides it's previous correct analysis and switches the perception to convex.  Despite all the visual evidence it had just seen previously indicating the mask is now rotating around to the side where it should be concave, the brain overrides all that previously self consistent information in the scene and chooses to side with previous "all convex faces" evidence.  This demonstrates the brain's inability to unlearn its previous internal model of "all things perceived as faces must be convex".   Can this incorrect convex perception be unlearned?  Perhaps touching the mask repeatedly will rewire the visual neural networks sufficiently

 

Instead of visual networks, suppose emotional networks are involved in previous learning.  Supposed the brain is perceiving new evidence contradictory with this previous learning (for instance, a reasoned Stephen Molyneux talk contrary to previous State indoctrination).  The brain is biased towards previous learning and against current new evidence, as the rotating mask example illustrates.  With emotional circuits involved, an emotional feeling amplifies the brain's inclination to hold its previously learned neural network.

 

Later in The Brain, the host shares video of an experiment where an elementary school teacher tells a class of elementary students that blue eyed people are better than brown eyed people.  The students are then separated into two groups to reinforce this idea through group belonging.  The video shows some of the blue eyed students turning on previous student friends. .  Next day, the teacher turns the tables, and now states that brown eyed people are better than blue eyed people, and now the previously superior feel inferior.   At the end of the experiment, the teacher tells them that the neither blue or brown eyed people are superior to each other and asks how they felt being part of the inferior group and whether it was right to separate students according to eye color.   Nationalism, based on "dirt proximity" (as Stephen Molyneux phrased it in a recent netcast) is a similar bogus dichotomy used to justify State instigated mass slaughter and destruction called Wars.

 

As long as mass State school indoctrination exists, with its associated Nationalism, and as long as the human brain has difficulty unlearning previous neural encoding (perhaps involving emotions) is not this completely overwhelming, on average, the efforts of Stephen Molyneux spreading the virtue of evidence based reason?  

 

Is humanity doomed to live under the mass theft of coercive States forever?  To be ruled by State induced fear and deception in perpetuity?  Will the current spiderweb of States encasing the globe continue to strangle humanity for eternity?

 

Have you asked the question at some point in the past, "What is the nature of government?", and through evidence-based reason, came to learn the mafia nature of the State?  Perhaps your childhood State indoctrination was light, making the path less cluttered with uneasy feelings that resist unlearning State childhood indoctrination.

 

Perhaps you came across the writings of FEE.org, FFF.org, the netcasts of Stephen Molyneux, or other pearls of clearly expressed evidenced-based reason, and felt, after a long journey of uneasy unlearning, you arrived at a point where hearing the truth made you happy.  Happy to be amongst the reasoned, when you were for so long, misled or beaten down by the collective insanity of the State indoctrinated.

 

 

 

 

[Mister Mister]

Well you're hitting upon the fundamental challenge of the show, which I think is what made it different right from the start.  There are many great resources out there, educating people towards libertarianism, atheism, rational/critical thinking, and so on, which is great, but propaganda seems so much more effective. From the very early shows, Stef and others at FDR started looking at the real psychological barriers to people processing the arguments and information, and what makes those of us different who had enough curiosity and integrity to follow the reason and evidence to startling, heretical conclusions.  The Death of Reason, Bomb in the Brain, and early call-in shows are all recommended for exploring this topic more.

 

  I would just caution you against a kind of determinist, hysterical catastrophic approach, when you say things like "Is humanity doomed to live under the mass theft of coercive States forever?".  No one knows what the future holds.  And we are not just spectators, we are participants in this great global human drama.

But I really appreciate you bringing up the topic, and I sympathize with your anxiety.  Probably I'll have more to say later, but I wanted to start with this

[Brainzing]

What prompted this post was the juxtaposition of watching The Brain and listening to a Stephen podcast in which, after the Paris attacks, he calls for sanity in response to the insanity response in the "news". 

 

As far as anxiety, I think anyone who had a good dose of State indoctrination nonstop in the first 30 years of their life (typical these days in the US) has residual shell shock no matter how well developed the rational part of the brain.