Booman wants war with Iran.

(10 am. – promoted by ek hornbeck)

 

Eh, ragazzo, I didn’t want to go this way, but we are at war.  Stupid fucking Hobbit.  Stupid fucking man.  

BooMan is pushing the long-ago debunked IAEA report and wishes that the international community squeezes Iran like a balloon to enact regime change.  

And he thinks I’m the moron.  Needless to say, I think such manifest nonsense is crazier than a shithouse rat dining on Dick Cheney’s rotting corpse.  Are you listening, driftglass?  We haven’t even finished our latest war crimes that broke us to pieces.  Suffice it to say, if we attack Iran, I rely upon the noble Persians to shove the Fifth Fleet up our collective ass, for the sake of justice.

Ideological insanity.

I want to touch on the problem of ideological insanity.  It strikes me as a Necker cube problem, wherein people lose their ability to “flip” between ambiguous interpretations of reality.

Allow a brief digression.

Jeff Hawkins, who invented the palm pilot, has an interesting theory of cortical function, as good as any, better even.  Based on the virtual uniformity of structure of the large dinner napkin we call neocortex, as originally noted by Mountcastle, he suggests that the invariable function of the six-layered neocortex is to correlate data, the higher the layer, the higher the level of correlation; such that low-level properties (lines, angles, colors) are correlated in the lowest parts of the hierarchy, whereas high-level concepts (war, peace) are correlated in the highest levels of the large dinner napkin.  To quote Hebb, neurons that fire together wire together, and the cerebral cortex is nothing but a massive hierarchical multivariate analysis.

Yes? So good, so far.

The brain’s three parts (I hold with the “four-parts” people, spare parts excluded) can be sub-divided as far as you want to go, but at Swanson’s considerable eyeblink, it goes “cortex, cerebral nuclei, brainstem,” which suffices for our discussion.  

Within the brainstem are two major parts: the incoming and outgoing processes: sensory inflow (thalamus) and motor outflow (hypothalamus), what you see, what you do; low-level stuff, but stuff that should not be dismissed.

The high-level “CEO” (how I hate that acronym) in the cortex relies on incoming data.  He is only as good as his data.  But what happens over time, learning, development, is that the high-level correlations, i.e., belief-systems, come to dominate sensory input; that is, expectations come to rule, even above incoming facts. The large dinner napkin begins to instruct and bias sensory input.  Quite literally, cortical output dominates sensory input, over time.  To put it simply, religion dominates facts, the ‘cerebral cortex coerces sensory input, in the same way Dick Cheney coerced prisoners at black sites (albeit via the triple-descending outflow of cortex).

Now that is fucked up, but that is the way that it is because it is that way.