Pixelated Semantics

A schizotypical inventory

History's actors and reality-based free will

Wired talks of redefining "free will and personal responsibility": "neuroscientific discoveries will change the law because they will change our moral intuitions about free will and responsibility". A perspective that could either be used to liberate or deeply enslave: "for moral judgment, [...] the most interesting trends in neuroscience are the ways in which judgments vary as a function of how emotionally salient the situation is" - but ultimately to the interviewee "all behavior is mechanical". Strikes one as also being a theory that dovetails very well with the current authoritarian direction of societies in the west - nor should one forget that aspects of modern "neuroscience" arose (and still rise) from CIA-funded behaviour-modification experimentation, including tests on unwitting patients.

But the media has always had strangely symmetrical ways of mirroring realities: compare the New York Times interview in October with a "libertarian Republican":

"This is why George W. Bush is so clear-eyed about Al Qaeda and the Islamic fundamentalist enemy. He believes you have to kill them all. They can't be persuaded, that they're extremists, driven by a dark vision. He understands them, because he's just like them..."

with the ABC's 7.30 Report November interview with a former cellmate of al-Zarqawi:

"YOUSEF RABAB'AH: Zarqawi divides people into infidels or believers, with me or against me.

And this is the saying that came out of George W Bush after September 11 that the world has become divided into two parts - those who are with me and those who aren't with me are against me.

And I said this logic is the common denominator between al-Zarqawi and Bush.

Both of them express extremism."

Though "reality" itself is a commodity of a "faith-based" empire, according to aides to the American President: "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality... We're history's actors" (and leading that writer to ponder "who besides guys like me are part of the reality-based community?").

Item posted by AutoEditor at 9:31 am ::