Your Mind is Not a Computer

Researchers, pundits, and academics look for metaphors to describe the mind. For at least 50 years, the favorite analogy has been the computer.

“Well, both the mind and a computer employ logic. They store data. They use strategies to solve problems.”

Is that it? The mind is merely a problem-solving machine? Of course not.

That’s where the metaphor breaks down.

By the way, a metaphor is way of describing one thing in terms of another. It’s not literal. People used to learn that in school.

Two days ago, I wrote and posted an article headlined: “150 million Americans go to Mexico, swim back, become instant millionaires.” Some people apparently thought I was reporting a fact. Or misreporting it.

It’s called satire. That’s when you take a metaphor and stretch it beyond the breaking point of exaggeration. In that case, I was commenting on current immigration/welfare policy.

Metaphor isn’t fact.

The metaphor of “mind as computer” isn’t a fact, no matter how hard technocrats wish it were true.

Behind the moronic and childish presumptions of technocracy, there are indeed people who want to treat the mind as a computer for a very simple reason: they want to control it.

Looking at the mind as an input-output machine suggests tactics for modifying, controlling, and weakening it.

That’s what Pavlov was after. Applying a stimulus and getting a predictable and unvarying response. That was his holy grail.

There are projects underway to build a simulated model of the human brain. This takes us one step further away from the truth, because the brain is not the mind.

The mind (consciousness) isn’t a physical object. It isn’t a container. It isn’t a machine. It isn’t a thing.

The CIA’s infamous MKULTRA mind-control program is widely misunderstood. Its original experiments were much more about controlling behavior through coercion. High-dose panic-inducing LSD, threats, intimidation, hypnosis applied in a climate of fear.

Of course that can work on many people, but it’s not sophisticated or mysterious. You can pound somebody with a hammer and make him obey orders if you keep it up long enough.

Waterboarding can control behavior. So can long periods of isolation.

And when it comes to electromagnetic stimuli or creating “voices in the head,” the elements of fear and disorientation play a central role.

On the other hand, take a capable hypnotist and give him 30 people. Stage an experiment in a friendly non-threatening atmosphere. A certain number of very suggestible people will respond. Others won’t. They’ll just sit there and listen to the hypnotist and refuse to go under.

Psychiatric electroshock, which is a form of naked torture, “works” on some people because they experience very heavy trauma and come out of it with a more accepting (submissive) attitude. They now fit in. They now accept the status quo. They understand the primitive terms of the setup: obey or experience more pain.

Yes, conditioned reflex can be induced. It’s done by attacking one small corner of consciousness.

Through threats, pain, disorienting practices (flashing lights, putting people on spinning tables, etc.) MKULTRA fascists could drive people into surrendering states in which “programming” could then be accomplished.

That’s not a difficult feat. It just takes a killer to do it.

What happens in a kidnapping? The criminals achieve “mind control” by telling the family they have to pay or their loved one will die.

Whole populations can be “mind-controlled” by domestic armies under the rule of a dictator.

Does that mean the mind is a computer?

The mind is a potentially unlimited faculty. It has no boundaries. The only walls on it are those which people build to hem themselves in.

It’s time we understood that.

There is a certain amount of propaganda aimed at calling that fact “reaching too far.” “The mind is an unlimited capacity? Oh, if you accept that, then you’re saying humans aren’t humans anymore.”

Baloney. Humans aren’t humans anymore when they put so many limitations on themselves that they live like somber machines. Take a good look at how large bureaucracies function. Every worker in his own cubbyhole exists and munches like a little parasite.

You want a real education? Watch a TV soap opera for a few months. The characters all live in a rank puddle of overlapping goo. Every time a character threatens to make a decision that might conceivably offend others, they descend on him like angry flies.

They live to meddle. It’s a collective. It’s mutually upheld limitation executed by interference.

“You agreed to be limited. We all have. You just stepped outside the circle. Now we’re going to punish you and make you feel guilty.”

In case you hadn’t noticed, many families operate this way.

If the the mind (consciousness) is going to open up new space, its owner has to be an independent individual. That’s the first requirement. Without that, nothing happens.

Again, we have propaganda aimed at defeating that proposition. “Oh, if you try to elevate people to the level of independent individual, there won’t be any social or political movements to liberate the oppressed. You’ll just have selfish greedheads.”

Baloney. That’s so wrong its absurd. First of all, the whole purpose of social and political movements is to achieve freedom for every INDIVIDUAL. It isn’t to “form a better group.”

Second, you’d damn well better have some independent individuals inside a valuable social and political movement, or the whole thing will collapse. A hundred thousand robots of one mind aren’t going anywhere.

The mind is not a thing. It is CREATIVE POTENTIAL. That’s what it is. Problem-solving is just one capacity of that potential.

A potential doesn’t come alive unless somebody (the you, the spirit at the center of it all) gives it the green light with energy and purpose and desire.

Put together that creative potential, pushed to the foreground, plus memory (which doesn’t and can’t exist in the brain), and you really have something. You have power, joy, and the ability to reinvigorate love.

What I’m talking about here is non-material. It doesn’t exist as atoms or waves or quarks. It isn’t subject to some provincial laws of physics. It most certainly has nothing to do with computers.

The mind as computer is a fantasy and a metaphor and a sold-out dream, driven by people who are still wondering what happened to their own creative force.

Behind the silly metaphor of mind as computer is a dead-end philosophy of materialism: everything everywhere is just an effect of some prior physical cause. Utter insupportable nonsense.

Philosophic materialism means freedom doesn’t exist. It means there is no such thing as choice. It means nothing is alive.

It means any experimentation on humans, no matter how heinous, is permissible, because what difference does it make? You and I are just collections of whirling particles, and an experiment simply rearranges those particles.

This is the real underpinning of totalitarianism. It’s the input-output machine-view of society.

I’ve been after these people for a long time, since I put a lid on my study of the history of Western philosophy, in 1958. What I saw then and see now is an attempt to obscure the fatal flaws in materialism.

Starting at the end of the 19^th century, materialists claimed they were applying the scientific method to the world, civilization, and the human being, and through their “lens of understanding,” they could definitively say: there were no leaks; all life at every level was made of physical matter.

The mumbo-jumbo intentionally distorted and reduced Asian philosophy that was imported into America in the 1960s did nothing to slow down these materialists. They went to work on the brain—and they are just getting started.

They aim for control. They love the idea. They want to put the brain through paces, ruling it from their elite perches, and they use “the mind is a computer” as their cover.

They promote that lie over and over. They use collectivism as the social justification for their “research.”

That’s what they’re talking about when they say “we’re all in this together.” On the far shore of their ambition, they see brains linked as computers would be linked.

When the subject of true individual and human potential arises, they try to discredit it by calling it some kind of heresy against The Group.

They preach a numbing “equality” as the final solution. And it is. For them.

Here’s another metaphor: “There is a very large room. And it’s filled and crowded with an astonishing number of objects. They’re piled up on the floor, on shelves, hung from the walls, suspended from the ceiling. They interact with one another in wondrous but very specific ways. It’s a fascinating mystery. We’re just beginning to understand the processes involved. We haven’t even cataloged all the things in the room yet. But we’re making progress. Soon we’ll have a handle on the basic algorithms of the operation. Then, we’ll make miracles occur…”

That’s how brain researchers and psychiatrists and technocrats see the mind. That’s their picture. It’s about as accurate as a map of Europe drawn by a microbe that lives a hundred miles under the surface of Jupiter.

When they stall, when they suffer a setback and can’t successfully float lies about “breakthroughs,” they fall back on: “Everything is connected to everything, we just don’t know quite how yet.”

No, Virginia, everything isn’t connected to everything. The principal thing that isn’t connected is the unlimited creative potential of the individual.

And neither is freedom connected to everything. Freedom is the power of choice. It isn’t in the causal chain. It’s free.

That absolutely upsets the apple carts of physicists and brain researchers. They want to draw all of reality into their net. But it doesn’t work.

If it did work, and if your mind were nothing but your brain, and if your brain were nothing more than atoms in motion, atoms like all other atoms floating around the universe, you wouldn’t be able to read anything on this page. You wouldn’t be able to understand meaning at all. Atoms don’t possess understanding. In fact, there wouldn’t be a you or a me.

But there is you. There is me.

We’re here. We aren’t just atoms.

We’re not made out of matter.

That’s what happens when you strip away the lies of materialism.

The danger, to the status quo, is human beings becoming what they are actually are.

You can pretend you’re a bunch of atoms for only so long, and then it becomes tiring. Foolish. Self-defeating. Stunningly crazy.

“The cooking vessel of the soul takes in everything, everything can become soul; and by taking into its imagination any and all events, psychic space grows.”

James Hillman, co-author, “We’ve Had a Hundred Years of Therapy—and the World’s Getting Worse”

The author of two explosive collections, THE MATRIX REVEALED and EXIT FROM THE MATRIX, Jon Rappoport was a candidate for a US Congressional seat in the 29^th District of California. Nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, he has worked as an investigative reporter for 30 years, writing articles on politics, medicine, and health for CBS Healthwatch, LA Weekly, Spin Magazine, Stern, and other newspapers and magazines in the US and Europe. Jon has delivered lectures and seminars on global politics, health, logic, and creative power to audiences around the world. You can sign up for his free emails at www.nomorefakenews.com