This week we will discuss public policy tied to the video we shared of drug therapies and nanotechnology as telemedicine driving all this THE BRAIN research having only a goal of brutality and far-right wing corporate fascism-----almost NO social benefit no matter how often they sell propaganda of using it for addictions----to alleviate fear in cancer patients-----
This image is a great POSTER for goals of making PODS of people. CLINTON/BUSH/OBAMA dismantled all our US public health and safety ---corporatized all our strong US medical institutions just so research and human experimentation that would never be allowed in civilized, developed nations could MOVE FORWARD these few decades.
WE KNOW THE GOALS OF ALL THIS RESEARCH TIED TO TELEMEDICINE-----IT HAS BECOME HARDER TO KNOW JUST HOW FAR ALONG GLOBAL BANKING 1% OLD WORLD KINGS AND QUEENS ARE IN THESE TOTALLY INHUMANE MEDICAL GOALS.
The first thing we want to do in educating on these far-right wing global banking 1% OLD WORLD KINGS AND QUEENS' policies is to be clear about how our global banking freemason LITERARY STARS-----as Dean Koontz -----are made best-sellers to create societal FADS and myth-making woven in their stories. We read KOONTZ crime novels----he weaving stories today as JAMES BOND novels did last century not only to entertain but sell the idea that technology and the evil of CLINTON/BUSH/OBAMA has advanced far beyond where it actually is. We know today that most of JAMES BOND secret weapons et al have never been produced. We know CSI---NCI secret weapons and technology has never been produced. We are very sure none of the goals of global banking 1% to create structures of LSD VIRTUAL REALITY HIBERNATION for space travel will ever exist-----but what we do know is far-right corporate fascists will kill hundreds of millions and few billion people trying to get to those medical devices.
WHISPERING ROOM GOOD CRIME NOVEL FILLED WITH CONSPIRACY THEORY MAKING THESE 2% GLOBAL BANKING PLAYERS SOUND MORE POWERFUL THEN THEY ACTUALLY ARE.
The premise of this novel is global banking 1% are now secretly killing off any person that works to reform and STOP MOVING FORWARD. Don't allow these FICTIONS to make our citizens FEARFUL of STOPPING MOVING FORWARD.
Book Review: The Whispering Room
by Dean Koontz
January 10, 2018 Kathy Davie
I received this book for free from the library in exchange for an honest review. This does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review.
The Whispering Room by Dean Koontz
Genres: Psychological Suspense
Published by Bantam on November 21, 2017
Second in the Jane Hawk series and revolving around Jane Hawk, a rogue FBI agent intent on taking down a ruthless cabal.
My Take
Okay, so it’s a common plot: the evil guys want to take over the world and reduce the rest of us to a world of Stepford wives. And Koontz runs with this.
It’s that combination of destroying a person’s free will, the disdain and contempt the bad guys have for anyone not them, and incorporating the technology that already exists, that will scare the bejeebers out of ya! Worse is those few paragraphs that point out the truth of “making the Internet more fair”. Yeah, I’ve had my suspicions.
These smarmy gits are all about “bringing peace to the world” by removing everyone’s ability to choose for themselves. To make them machines. As awful as life can be in this world, without free will, there would be no artists, no writers, no musicians, no beauty. No one to create.
I gotta say that I started reading this before Thanksgiving…and I had to stop for weeks before I took it up again, simply because it was so horrific in its possibilities. All that technology Koontz makes use of is right here, right now. It’s even more horrific, as Koontz uses third-person omniscient point-of-view, so we get to hear everyone’s thoughts. It’ll make you gag.
Jane is an interesting mix of by-the-book FBI and using her knowledge of how the bad guys operate (in general) to evade all the people looking for her. This particular story pulls in Tillman, whose family adds a sense of terror to it all. I’ll be curious to know if Tillman meets up with Jane or if a new family gets pulled in, in The Crooked Staircase in May 2018?
Koontz has a good bit of backstory for Jane which pops out so naturally within the story.
I am confused by Hannafin’s behavior, how badly he misses his wife at the start of his scene, and then what we learn later.
For some reason, Koontz uses present tense at the start of some chapters, and then switches over to past tense. What’s with that??
Maybe Koontz was just tense…god knows I was…tense. My heart raced. I started to peer out the windows…just in case!
The Story
Men and women leading happy, productive lives are committing suicide at tremendous rates. They’re all part of the Hamlet List, a list that indicates this person may push civilization in the wrong direction. The direction the conspiracists don’t want the world to go.
It was her own husband’s suicide that set Jane down this path, for it didn’t make sense. And Jane is determined to know the truth. But these ruthless people bent on hijacking America’s future for their own monstrous ends never banked on a highly trained FBI agent willing to go rogue — and become the nation’s most wanted fugitive — in order to derail their insidious plans to gain absolute power with a terrifying technological breakthrough.
One with which they can get to you anywhere, anytime.
The Characters
Jane Hawk is a rogue FBI agent on the run. Her husband, Nick, killed himself. Jane’s father is a world renowned pianist who murdered her mother. Her son, Travis, is hidden in rural Orange County with friends, Gavin and Jessica Washington, to keep him safe. Bella and Sampson are their mare and stallion. Hannah is an Exmoor pony the Washingtons bought for Travis. Queenie and Duke are the Washingtons’ dogs.
A small town in Minnesota
Sheriff Luther Tillman has been married to Rebecca for twenty-six glorious years. They have two daughters, Jolie is a senior in high school and Twyla is away at college in Boston. Aunt Tandy lives in Madison. Deputies Rob Stassen (his wife is Melanie) and Lonny Burke are puzzled by the FBI’s behavior. Gunnar Torval is the undersheriff. Vance Saunders is with the fire department.
Cora Gundersun is an amazing 6th-grade teacher who cares about her special-needs students and who was named Teacher of the Year a couple years back. Dixie Belle is her dachshund. Hazel Syvertsen was her friend.
FBI
Vikram Rangnekar is a supergeek and a friend of Jane’s. Jane’s mentor and friend had been Nathan Silverman, a section chief.
Booth Hendrickson is from the Department of Justice, and he has a leading role. He’ll become John Congrieve in Iron Furnace. His moles in Minnesota include Huey Darnell, a drunken jerk; Hassan Zaghari who is quite happy to kill anyone; and, Kernan Beedle of the odorous body. Eva Kleitner is the director of a lab in Virginia.
Reseda, California
John and Judy White, a.k.a., Pete and Lois Jones, are Syrian refugees who provide any kind of weapon or alternate ID you could want.
Nogales, Arizona
It’s because of a serial killer, Marcus Paul Headsman, that Jane knows about Enrique de Soto, a black-market car dealer.
Texas
Ancel and Clare Hawk run Hawk Ranch in Texas and are Nick’s parents and very supportive of Jane. Donner is Ancel’s favorite horse. Juan Saba is the ranch manager; Marie is his wife. Chase Longrin had been Nick’s best friend in high school. He married Alexis Aimes. Leland and Nadine Sacket are millionaires who started up a school and orphanage, the Sacket Home and School, with 139 children. They’re also Nick’s godparents. Kelsey Bodine is one of the Sackets’ success stories.
Iron Furnace, Kentucky, is…
…The Town Where It’s Always Christmas on Iron Furnace Lake, a town with a very upscale resort, Iron Furnace Lake Resort, owned by Terra Firma Enterprises which is owned by Apoidea Trust. Derek Lennox-Heywood is a director of the trust. Stacia O’Dell is the concierge and event coordinator at the resort.
There had been eight children under sixteen in the Iron Furnace “sanitarium”: Harley Higgins is fourteen and constantly working on escape; Sally Ingram is seven; Nora Rhinehart is eight; the fragile Jimmy Cole is ten; Tom Proctor; Dulciana Moss prays to God for help because he hasn’t, yet, betrayed her like her parents; Jenny Boone; and, Bobby Acuff. They’re all terrified. Bobby’s sister Rimona died, and wait’ll you read that one! Harley’s uncle and parents aren’t them anymore. Noreen, Walter, Seth Donner, George Woolsey, and Harvey are some of the people who work at the “school”. One for each prisone…, er, stude…, er, patient.
Martin Moses is an event planner with A Private Affair from Atlanta. Freya is a waitress; Lionel is her husband. Ben is the invented hubby. Dr. Wainwright is a veterinarian.
The Seedling Fund, founded and financed by T. Quinn Eubanks, put on a conference at Iron Furnace. Lisa Toska is the current primary officer of the fund.
Arkansas
Otis Faucheur has a booming business, the most stable criminal enterprise in the South, in the Ouachita Mountains. Margot is his third wife. Dozier is the son who had been on death row.
David James Michael inherited billions and keeps on making more; he has a plan for his Arcadia. He’s involved with the Seedling Fund, Aspasia, Volunteers for a Better Tomorrow, and Far Horizons where Sara Laura Sahoen and Henry Waldlock work.
Southern California
Lawrence Hannafin, a journalist, has been a widower for a year since his wife, Sakura, died.
Randall Larkin is a lawyer at [Carter] Woodbine, Kravitz, Larkin, and Benedetto. He has his own escape plans as Ormond Heimdall. He thinks no one knows about it. His second wife is Diamanta. Ellen is his secretary.
Wilson Faucheur is Otis’ son and an architect.
Jason Alan Drucklow is a licensed private detective, but mostly destroys reputations. Cammy Newton is his assistant and girlfriend. He’s currently being paid by Marshall Ackerman of Volunteers for a Better Tomorrow.
Aspasia is…
…a very elite whorehouse which employs girls who have been injected with the nanotech. It ensures they’ll do whatever you want.
Shenneck Technology had been…
…led by Bertold Shenneck who had invented a nanotech control device — from which there’s no coming back; he’s also partnered with D.J. Michael.
There are good Samaritans everywhere, including Foster Oswald with a ring tip and Bernard Riggowitz, a.k.a., Grandpa Bernie, whose wife, Miriam, died a year ago. Shem is Bernie’s brother. Not Lev.
Sandra Termindale is Holly and Lauren’s mother; Pamela is her mother. Roger and Palmer are old friends of Tillman’s who live in Des Moines. Jerry Hare is a greedy bellhop. Rayshaws are killing machines who care nothing about their lives.
__________________________________________________
It is a coincidence that ALICE THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS brings mirror-images to stories and today's neurological goals of mind-control through remote control microchips and nanobots inserted which has been MOVING FORWARD last century we discussed in detail the 1960s having CIA et al using our free love and drug culture to research LSD trips. The progression of these goals has today's SUGAR-CUBE LSD dosing producing paranoia and images in the mind of MIRRORS ------the feeling someone has planted technology in the brain to spy and control that person. This is what THE WHISPERING ROOM sets as a plot-----but it makes one believe those technology goals have gone further than they actually have.
Where use of nanobots tied to telemedicine does have the goals of planting neurological technology that will control behavior-----today's medical science is nowhere near this. Instead, as we saw in the video of Latin American 99% using these drugs----we see random neurological controls with no centralized behavior modification. These PHARMA used by global banking 1% OLD WORLD KINGS AND QUEENS being developed in BARBER SURGEON medical institutions are supposed to be CONTROLLED SUBSTANCES----but we see these video images of citizens taking these PHARMA released on streets in Asia---US ---Latin America, Africa.
THE RELEASE OF THESE EXPERIMENTAL PHARMA ARE NOT ACCIDENTS-----IT IS OPEN EXPERIMENTAL RESEARCH BY SOCIOPATHS MOVING FORWARD SPACE COLONIZATION.
We discussed that much of these few decades called INCREASED INCIDENCES OF SCHIZOPHRENIA were the same experimental MOVING FORWARD of planetary space colonization and mind-control goals of global 1% OLD WORLD KINGS AND QUEENS.
The experimental distribution of LSD-laced sugar cubes to our 99% of US poor citizens tied to corporate NGOs ----is what created much of what society has nicknamed TIN-FOIL HAT citizens.
Mirrors: Schizophrenia or devil's temptation?
Society » Anomalous phenomena
Remember scenes from horror movies where a character looks in the mirror and sees a completely unfamiliar face emerging out of it? Sometimes they see a reflection of a certain entity behind them. Where does this come from? Some explain this phenomenon by an optical illusion, others - deviations in the psyche, while others blame it on supernatural causes.
Italian psychologist Giovanni Caputo describes this phenomenon in detail in an article published in the journal Perception. To see someone else's face in the mirror, you need to stare at your own reflection in a dimly lit room. Optimal conditions for the experiment include a room lit only by a dim lamp (the author suggests a 25W bulb) placed behind your back, while the participant stares into a large mirror placed about 40 cm in front. Within a minute you will discover a "stranger."
Caputo invited 50 volunteers to participate in the experiment. At the end of a 10 minutes session of mirror gazing, the participants were asked to write what they saw in the mirror. 66% of 50 participants saw huge deformations of their own face. 18 % saw a parent's face with traits changed, of whom 8% were still alive and 10% were deceased. 28% saw an unknown person. 18% saw different animal faces such as a cat, pig, or lion, and 48% saw fantastical and monstrous beings.
According to Caputo, such effects may be a combination of visual distortion when the visual system again and again has to recognize the same images, which leads to changes in their interpretation.
The participants' emotional reactions to the changes were even more interesting. Approximately half of them reported that emergence of new faces in the mirror caused sensations that an unknown person was looking at them from within or beyond the mirror. Some participants felt that the "stranger" looked at them with a malign and scary expression; others thought that their stare was enigmatic, while the third group of the participants felt that the "stranger" was encouraging. If deceased family members appeared in the mirror, the participants often felt that they wanted to ask them a question. Monstrous beings produced fear or even horror. Dynamic deformations of new faces (like pulsations or shrinking, smiling or grinding) made the participants feel helpless before these creatures.
There is also an existing practice of telling fortune using mirrors when people try to predict who their soul mate would be. Biologist Mezentsev clearly stated in the "Encyclopedia of Miracles" that "mirror visions" is nothing more than a hallucination.
"What is the process like? he wrote. "Late in the evening, a girl is alone in a dark room lit by a small candle. She sits at a table, and trying not to move, she is staring into the dimly shining mirror surface. Time goes by, and gradually she falls into a drowsy state. Then, fleeting vision-images start popping in her "twilight" consciousness. There is no way to check what images the girl sees. Maybe there was no image, but she feels like there was one. In short, the nature of such illusions, "visions" is easily explained by the properties of our psyche."
Cases where the reflection in the mirror acts as an independent entity are more difficult to explain. For Svetlana N. of St. Petersburg a spiritual session was just a distraction on a boring Saturday night. She invited friends to her apartment. First they called the spirit of Pushkin, then Vysotsky, and a saucer moved in a circle while pointing at the letters of the alphabet, correctly answering their questions. And then Svetlana thought to call for her own spirit. When she uttered a spell she felt instant piercing pain.
The saucer on the table began to move, but the spirit replied in generalities. Soon her friends were bored with it, and the session was over. The guests began leaving and the host was left alone in her apartment. While washing dishes, Svetlana heard footsteps behind her. She looked around and saw a vague silhouette in the hallway. The figure slipped into the bathroom, where the lights came on and water gushed out of the tap. She gained courage to look in the bathroom and discovered that the tap was in off position, but there were water splashes in the sink. She looked in the mirror and was speechless when he saw herself in a dressing gown, while she knew that she had not had time to change after her guests had left. It seemed that the reflection was reaching for her, as if to grasp. Svetlana took a step back, and then some invisible hand started throwing items from the bathroom shelf at her. The woman had never engaged in spiritualism again.
_____________________________________________
What we liked about KOONTZ WHISPERING ROOM plots themes is looking from the helter-skelter of LSD-induced psychosis where neurological control left people completely uncontrolled and unpredictable-----to being the PODS in this novel----the complete opposite of where neurological research tied to LSD-VIRTUAL REALITY HIBERNATION has as a goal.
The medical goals of global banking 1% BARBER SURGEON 5% freemason/Greek pols and players is indeed using nanbots and telemedicine to meet that goal of controlled and predicable human behavior seen in the IRON FURNACE LAKE town in Kentucky.
The PHARMA and technology for any of these goals is nowhere close to achieving THE WHISPERING ROOM town of IRON FURNACE LAKE. What global banking 1% CLINTON/BUSH/OBAMA have released into our US societal structure is MIND-CONTROL practices that have existed all last century ------what was MANCHURIAN spies and espionage tools in hypnosis et al is indeed being unleashed on our general US 99% WE THE PEOPLE black, white, and brown citizen populations.
Don't be confused by the brutal techniques of far-right corporate fascism of last century thinking it is the current goals of LSD-VIRTUAL REALITY HIBERNATION and mind-control.
One of the characters in WHISPERING ROOM killed by those GLOBAL BANKING 2% 'ELITES'-----leaves the clue in her writing as to SPIDERS LAYING EGGS IN HER BRAIN.......ergo, nanobots attaching to her brain neurons.
Moving video shows what life with schizophrenia is ... -
Mirrorwww.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/moving-video-shows...
Moving video shows what life with schizophrenia is like ... with schizophrenia show another side to the image many ... dealing Sunday Mirror figures show ...
No matter how much global banking 1% sell the idea that all this brain neurology and telemedicine tied to remote microchip installation is about HELPING our 99% with disease vectors------WAKE UP! These global banking 5% players are SOCIOPATHS not caring for public health. We can see from all available research database that these goals of THE WHISPERING ROOM novel mind-control making people POD PEOPLE with erased memories is not even close to happening.
Mapping the mind with nanotechnology
The Brain Initiative is combining neuroscience with nanotechnology in the world's biggest project to understand the mind.
By Katharine Sanderson
Wed 29 May 2013 19.01 EDT First published on Wed 29 May 2013 19.01 EDT
An ambitious new science projects aims to unpick exactly what goes on in the brain at the level of individual neurons.
Photograph: Pete Saloutos/Corbis
In April this year President Obama announced a hugely ambitious science project, the "Brain" Initiative (Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies).
Obama was giving his support, and the promise of hard cash – $100m (£65m) in 2014 and up to billions of dollars in total – to a project that will last at least 10 years. The aim is to unpick exactly what goes on in the brain at the level of individual neurons, to see how the human brain deals with emotions, memories, actions, and consciousness.
To understand these complex phenomena, it turns out that nanotechnology is going to be crucial. "The brain has always been nano," says Paul Weiss, a nanoscientist at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), and one of the original instigators of the project. The brain's 100m neurons, and 100tn connections all work over nanometres, so to study the brain on its own scale nano-sized measuring techniques are absolutely necessary. But many of the technologies and tools that will be needed to probe the brain haven't even been dreamed up yet. Nanotechnologists need to get busy.
This unknown element of the Brain project is quite a contrast to other large collaborative science ventures, such as the Human Genome Project for example, which worked out the sequence of all the base pairs in the complete set of human DNA known as the genome. "The Human Genome Project had a fixed endpoint," says Anne Andrews, a nanotechnologist and neuroscientist also at UCLA. That isn't the case with the Brain Initiative: "We don't really know what we're going to find," she says. "We have to trust we'll know it when we see it."
But Andrews has a good idea of where she wants to look. She is investigating serotonin, one of about 100 neurotransmitters – small molecules that carry signals between neurons. Neurotransmitters are released and then need to be recognised by another molecule, a receptor, for their signal to be successfully transmitted. Serotonin is important for feelings of wellbeing, and most antidepressants work by controlling serotonin levels.
Andrews wants to track how concentrations of neurotransmitters change with time. Current technologies to look at these molecules can only give an average of the number of signals taking place at the same time. This is in part because the detectors cover areas of many micrometers rather than the nanometers that neurons transmit their signals. Andrews hopes that her work in collaboration with other nanotechnologists, including Weiss, will lead to sensors that are a few nanometres in size, and that can be used in parallel many at a time.
Andrews is hoping to tinker with the molecules on the surface of thin nanometre-wide silicon wires, or carbon nanotubes. Chemistry becomes important here, because artificial receptor molecules will have to be developed that can not only pick out single molecules of serotonin, but can also attach themselves to the surface of the nanoscale sensor and undergo a change that can be detected with light or electrically. "You can't just take a native receptor for serotonin and put it on a carbon nanotube," she explains. "It's going to be fairly challenging."
Preparing the surface of that nanomaterial to accept an artificial receptor is no mean feat either, says Weiss, but he and Andrews are working on ways to do it, by getting the materials to build themselves in a process called self assembly. Carefully designed molecules can join together and leave specific molecule-sized gaps for those receptors to bind to, he says.
Another member of the initial group who proposed what eventually became the Brain Initiative is Rafael Yuste, a neuroscientist at Columbia University, New York. Yuste is hoping to get a clearer picture of when and how neurons communicate by looking at the electrical signals they send out. There is a big gap between being able to look at a single, isolated neuron and looking at the average behaviour of the whole brain, or region of the brain that might be seen in a functional magnetic resonance image (fMRI), for example. "We need the in-between," Yuste says.
He thinks nanotechnology could begin to fill this gap. Nanoparticles that change somehow in response to voltage could convert the voltage that the neurons fire into an optical signal on the scale of a single neuron. The most sensitive materials to voltage changes are nano-sized diamonds, says Yuste. Perhaps, he suggests, nanodiamonds specially made with defects that make them change colour could be attached to single neurons, or sprayed into the whole brain. Then when a neuron fires its voltage signal, the nanodiamond would change colour and the signal recorded.
Other tiny nanoparticles made from semiconducting materials, called quantum dots, could be harnessed to report on happenings in the brain. These particles with specific luminescent properties could be altered by the voltage signal, if placed correctly in the brain. Of course, getting the signal back outside the brain is another challenge of any of these technologies.
When thinking of brain manipulation, electrodes spring to mind. And the Brain Initiative could also bring advances in this technology. Instead of the arrays of 64 electrodes possible with current technology, nanotech could give arrays of 100,000 or so electrodes, all nanometres across and so perfectly placed to pick up signals from single neurons. Yuste thinks that these materials could also be altered on their surfaces, bringing in the work Andrews is focused on, to pick up chemical changes in the brain as well.
Weiss has another ambition – he wants the project to go beyond reading out what the brain does during certain activities. He wants the project to advance to the point where it's possible to stimulate the brain and then read out the response.
If some of the ideas Weiss, Andrews and Yuste are thinking about sound vague at the moment, that's because they don't exist yet. "In short timescales we'll focus on existing technologies," says Yuste, "but in five to 10 years' time we'll see new types of technologies that we don't know about now."
What's clear is that nanotechnology will be the only way to get a clear picture about how the brain works. With that knowledge, new therapies and drugs will be easier to develop, and the human brain might begin to become less enigmatic.
_________________________________________________
THE WHISPERING ROOM as part of its plot creates a business venue of course where women are made POD PEOPLE having no ability to stop being submissive handing complete control to those 5% global banking players to do as they want with women.
Even the hypnosis that has existed all last century was sketchy as to the ability first to hypnotize----then to control to such an extent people not wanting to be controlled. So, is there sex trade businesses where women have had their minds SCRUBBED to be hopelessly confined as sex slaves? NO-----the old-fashion PIMP practice of getting women addicted to drugs and keeping them in drug-induced submission----YES.
WE WANT TO BE CLEAR THAT MOVING FORWARD DOES INDEED HAVE THESE GOALS OF NANOBOT, REMOTE-CONTROLLED MICROCHIP VIRTUAL REALITY MIND-CONTROL----BUT NONE OF THIS EXISTS AND MAY NEVER BE DEVELOPED.
Talking to people that like to be hypnotised for sex
Here we find out more about trance-sexuality, the practice of being put under a spell in the bedroom
When you think of hypnosis, you may think Covent Garden illusionists, badly made spiral gifs on Tumblr, swinging pocket watches and campy vampire movies. But hypnotism has its place in the bedroom – specifically in a world of extreme fetishism and enhanced submissive/dominant relationships in BDSM environments. People are getting off on being psychologically conditioned to pleasure one or other.
Hypnofetishism is the act of inducing some kind of trance or mindful state that possesses a sexually submissive individual to feel and act a certain way, whether blank and mindless or impersonal and obedient. By using NLP (Neuro Linguistic Programming) to psychologically condition predictions and assumptions into the mind of a submissive, some trained individuals – armed with trigger words and demands – are able to undergo hypnosis in the sheets.
There is a wide variety of things that can be done with hypnosis, both erotically and otherwise. Hypnofetishism is about creating or amplifying sensations and invoking a near-catatonic state before engaging in sexual activity as an entranced individual.
Trance sexuality goes significantly deeper than just an exaggerated sub/dom relationship and raises a myriad of questions: can someone really consent to be in a condition where they cannot consent, and how do these ‘con non-con’ relationships work? It is, in theory, simple. ‘Con non-con’ scenarios involve a universal agreement made beforehand to either ignore or allow the usual rules of consent, perhaps including commands to stop. The act of hypnosis itself is erotic and relationship-affirming for many “power exchange” couples as the subject surrenders control and opens themselves to vulnerability.
To find out more, we speak to three hypnofetishists who use the practice to fulfil their erotic desires in a world where pleasure is obedience and obedience is pleasure.
JASON MITCHELL, MALE (DOMINANT)
I was always fascinated by the concept of hypnosis, even as a kid. I’d see stuff on daytime talk shows and something about it just grabbed me. When I turned eighteen I started exploring some of the online communities. Typically (in sex), hypnosis is performed before any bedroom activities to establish post-hypnotic suggestions and put in place post-hypnotic triggers too. For example, inhibiting or controlling orgasms with a simple word or phrase. Or, maybe you're feeling a bit shy and hypnosis can help you create a persona to play out fantasies and help you relax.
Communication is key. I have two partners that I work with very closely and that I know very well. We have an agreement for non-consensual consent. But this is because we have clearly communicated limits and they trust that I will not cross any lines, nor would I ever think to take advantage of that trust.
“I absolutely love watching someone’s facial muscles relax and smooth out, particularly when eyes begin to roll up. Reaching that depth and intimacy is just wonderful for me”
That being said, one of my favorite quotes from a good friend of mine that I've started using as well is: "Despite that quote that ‘consent is sexy”, consent isn't sexy. It’s mandatory and the mark of a decent human being!”. When we are learning there are little mistakes that may be made. I’ve had people hide psychological conditions from me in the past. Those can cause bad reactions (also referred to as abreactions) while the subject is under hypnosis.
I absolutely love watching someone’s facial muscles relax and smooth out, particularly when eyes begin to roll up. Reaching that depth and intimacy is just wonderful for me. It’s also a huge turn on to use post-hypnotic triggers and suggestions and watch my play partner’s reactions change as they get more and more into the scene.
What’s been absolutely wonderful is how much more accepted hypnosis as a concept and form of entertainment or therapy has become in the last few years. It’s made the idea and concept of it much easier to bring up. Every year there’s more and more videos on YouTube, along with numerous books published.
__________________________________________
This is pure propaganda coming from far-right wing global banking HUFFINGTON POST. Today's brain research is nowhere near this-----it is not even able to finish mapping THE BRAIN----has very little ability to rewire one set of neurological regions with another.
We want to look in detail where global banking 5% BARBER SURGEONS are in MOVING FORWARD these LSD VIRTUAL REALITY HIBERNATION structures they intend to use on space travellers going to distant planets and moons like MARS AND CERES.
THE BRAIN mapping started in REAGAN ERA -----has indeed progressed. The knowledge of how brain receptors work, how the brain circuitry is wired, how to intervene to address one malfunction has MOVED FORWARD. What we do hear from REAL left social progressive PUBLIC INTEREST scientists is THE BRAIN is too complicated for any of this technology to work as global banking 1% OLD WORLD KINGS AND QUEENS have as a goal.
The GOAL of paralyzing people and pushing them into hibernation for space travel to planetary mining slave colonies is REAL ------99% WE THE PEOPLE will be exposed to experimentation towards those goals---we will see people left damaged from that experimentation------it will be that damage from experimentation, not REAL CONTROL OF THE BRAIN which will frighten our US 99% of citizens.
One thing we liked in THE WHISPERING ROOM is the constant reference by leading hero characters of what is called 'elite' and 'INTELLIGENT' as KURZWEIL below are sociopaths trying to make themselves and others believe they are.
'About Ray Kurzweil
kurzweiltech.com/aboutray.html
Ray Kurzweil is one of the world’s leading inventors, thinkers, and futurists, with a thirty-year track record of accurate predictions.Called "the restless genius" by The Wall Street Journal and "the ultimate thinking machine" by Forbes magazine, Kurzweil was selected as one of the top entrepreneurs by Inc. magazine, which described him as ... '
Ray Kurzweil: In The 2030s, Nanobots In Our Brains Will Make Us ‘Godlike’
Once we’re cyborgs, he says, we’ll be funnier, sexier and more loving.
Kathleen Miles HUFFINGTON POST
10/01/2015 08:47 am ET Updated Oct 26, 2017
Futurist and inventor Ray Kurzweil predicts humans are going to develop emotions and characteristics of higher complexity as a result of connecting their brains to computers.
“We’re going to be funnier. We’re going to be sexier. We’re going to be better at expressing loving sentiment,” Kurzweil said at a recent discussion at Singularity University. He is involved in developing artificial intelligence as a director of engineering at Google but was not speaking on behalf of the company.
Kurzweil predicts that in the 2030s, human brains will be able to connect to the cloud, allowing us to send emails and photos directly to the brain and to back up our thoughts and memories. This will be possible, he says, via nanobots — tiny robots from DNA strands — swimming around in the capillaries of our brain. He sees the extension of our brain into predominantly nonbiological thinking as the next step in the evolution of humans — just as learning to use tools was for our ancestors.
And this extension, he says, will enhance not just our logical intelligence but also our emotional intelligence. “We’re going to add more levels to the hierarchy of brain modules and create deeper levels of expression,” he said. To demonstrate, he gave a hypothetical scenario with Google co-founder Larry Page.
“So I’m walking along, and I see Larry Page coming, and I think, ‘I better think of something clever to say.’ But my 300 million modules in my neocortex isn’t going to cut it. I need a billion in two seconds. I’ll be able to access that in the cloud — just like I can multiply intelligence with my smartphone thousands fold today.”
In addition to making us cleverer in hallways, connecting our brains to the Internet will also make each of us more unique, he said.
“Right now, we all have a very similar architecture to our thinking,” Kurzweil said. “When we can expand it without the limitations of a fixed enclosure” — he pointed to his head — “we we can actually become more different.”
“People will be able to very deeply explore some particular type of music in far greater degree than we can today. It’ll lead to far greater individuality, not less.”
This view is in stark contrast to a common perception, often portrayed in science fiction, that cyborg technologies make us more robotic, less emotional and less human. This concern is expressed by Dr. Miguel Nicolelis, head of neuroengineering at Duke University, who fears that if we rely too much on machines, we’ll lose diversity in human behavior because computers operate in black and white — ones and zeros — without diversion.
We’re going to expand the brain’s neocortex and become more godlike.But Kurzweil believes that being connected to computers will make us more human, more unique and even godlike.
“Evolution creates structures and patterns that over time are more complicated, more knowledgable, more creative, more capable of expressing higher sentiments, like being loving,” he said. “It’s moving in the direction of qualities that God is described as having without limit.”
ALL THIS COMING FROM GLOBAL BANKING 1% AND OLD WORLD KINGS AND QUEENS WHO HAVE DNA THAT HAS NOT EVOLVED FROM 3000 BC. THEY ARE IDIOTS.
“So as we evolve, we become closer to God. Evolution is a spiritual process. There is beauty and love and creativity and intelligence in the world — it all comes from the neocortex. So we’re going to expand the brain’s neocortex and become more godlike.”
But will brain nanobots actually move out of science fiction and into reality, or are they doomed to the fate of flying cars? Like Kurzweil, Nicholas Negroponte, founder of the MIT Media Lab, thinks that nanobots in our brains could be the future of learning, allowing us, for example, to load the French language into the bloodstream of our brains. James Friend, a professor of mechanical engineering at UC San Diego focused on medical nanotechnology, thinks that we’re only two to five years away from being able to effectively use brain nanobots, for example to prevent epileptic seizures.
However, getting approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration would likely be very difficult, Friend told The WorldPost. He thinks approval would take “anywhere from only a few years to never happening because of people being concerned about swimming mysterious things into your head and leaving them there,” he said.
Other scientists are skeptical that brain nanobots will be safe and effective anytime soon or at all, largely due to how little we currently understand about how the brain works. One such scientist is David Linden, professor of neuroscience at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, who thinks the timing of Kurzweil’s estimation that nanobots will be in our brains in the 2030s is premature. Linden says there are huge obstacles, such as adding a nanobot power source, evading cells that attack foreign bodies and avoiding harming the proteins and sugars in the tiny spaces between brain cells.
Although the science is far from application in brains, nanotechnology has long been heralded as a potential game changer in medicine, and the research is advancing. Last year, researchers injected into living cockroaches DNA nanobots that were able to follow specific instructions, including dispensing drugs, and this year, nanobots were injected into the stomach lining of mice.
And we are learning how to enhance our brains, albeit not with nanobots. Researchers have already successfully sent a message from one human brain to another, by stimulating the brains from the outside using electromagnetic induction. In another study, similar brain stimulation made people learn math faster. And in a recent U.S. government study, a few dozen people who were given brain implants that delivered targeted shocks to their brain scored better on memory tests.
We’re already implanting thousands of humans with brain chips, such as Parkinson’s patients who have a brain chip that enables better motor control and deaf people who have a cochlear implant, which enables hearing. But when it comes to enhancing brains without disabilities and for nonmedical purposes, ethical and safety concerns arise. And according to a survey last year, 72 percent of Americans are not interested in a brain implant that could improve memory or mental capacity.
Yet, some believe enhancement of healthy brains is inevitable, including Christof Koch, chief scientific officer of the Allen Institute for Brain Science, and Gary Marcus, professor of psychology at New York University. They use the analogy of breast implants — breast surgery was developed for post-mastectomy reconstruction and correcting congenital defects but has since become popular for breast augmentation. Brain implants could follow the same path, they say.
Here are Kurzweil’s answers to a couple of the questions he took at the Singularity University discussion:
You have predicted that in 2029, we will reach the singularity — the point at which artificial intelligence outpaces human intelligence. Your opening remarks suggest that you’re fundamentally positive about AI in the post-2029 world. Other speakers have been a little more ambivalent, certainly regarding the future of employment. Would you elaborate on your overall sentiment on the post-2029 world?
I’ve actually written about the dangers of AI more than most. But I’m also optimistic, having looked at the positive impact that technology has had on human life.
When it comes to the existential threat of AI, the primary strategy comes from governance and social systems. We will have conflict between different groups of humans, each enhanced by AI. We have that today with humans using intelligent weapons. The best tool we have to combat that is to continue to work on our democracy, liberty and respect for each other.
When it comes to potential unemployment caused by AI, it’s always been the case that we can clearly see the jobs that are going away. This started 200 years ago in the textile industry in England. The weavers, who had enjoyed a business model passed down for centuries, were suddenly losing their jobs to machines that could spin thread or weave cloth. You could look at almost every job, and it would not be long before it’d be automated. The reality is that employment went up, and prosperity went up. The common man or woman, rather than just having one shirt, could now have a whole wardrobe. Life became better, and there were actually more jobs.
If I were a futurist in 1900 and said, “OK, about [40 percent] of you work on farms and a third work in factories. I predict, by the year [2012], only about two percent of us will work on farms and [nine percent] in factories,” everyone would go, “Oh my God, we’re going to be out of work!” I’d say, “Don’t worry. You’re going to get new jobs creating apps, web sites, chip designs and data analysis” — nobody would have any idea what I’m talking about.
We’re destroying jobs at the bottom of the skill ladder and creating new jobs at the top. We’ve invested more in education in the U.S. over the last century. We’ve increased per capita investment in K-12 education significantly. We had 50,000 college students in 1870; we have [20 million] today.
It’s a difficult political situation because people can see the jobs that are going away, and that’s painful. You say, “Well but there will be new jobs,” and people say, “What new jobs?” And you say, “Well, I don’t know; they haven’t been invented yet.” It’s kind of a weak argument. But it’s true.
We’re also creating jobs that move up Maslow’s hierarchy so we can spend more time doing things that give us gratification. People a century ago for the most part were happy if they could have a job and provide for their family. Today, to an increasing degree, people get gratification from what they’re doing. They look for a career that meets their passion — lots of people are pursuing entrepreneurial ideas. We have 20 million college students and an equal amount of people who teach them and support that infrastructure, all to think about knowledge and organize knowledge. That’s not something people spent much time doing a century or two ago — we’re going to keep moving in that direction.
In the 2030s, we will be able to send nanobots into living people’s brains and extract memories of people who have passed away.Most things are becoming information technology, including clothing, which will be printed on 3-D printers. We’ll be able to grow food in vertical agriculture and print it on 3-D printers, which are pennies for pounds. In the 2020s, 3-D printing designs will be open source and free so you can live extremely well and print out everything you need, including printing out houses.
People say, “Great, there goes all these industries, like fashion and construction.” But look at industries that have already gone from physical products to digital products, like music, movies and books. There’s an open source market with millions of free products but people still spend money to read Harry Potter, see the latest blockbuster and buy music from their favorite artist. Fueled by the ease of distribution and promotion, you have a coexistence of a free open-source market and a proprietary market. That’s the direction we’re moving in.
I can’t actually describe exactly what the new jobs will be but they will be more gratifying. We are already redefining the nature of work. I don’t feel like I’m working when I go to Google because I’m doing what I’m passionate about. A lot of people today don’t like their jobs. So why are people so upset if these jobs go away? We’ve created a society where you need a job to have a livelihood. But that’s going to be redefined. We’re going to have the means of providing an extremely high standard of living to everyone easily within 15 to 20 years.
In the documentary about yourself, you are preparing yourself to transcend your death. How do you explain your theory of immortality?
In the film “Transcendent Man,” I talk about bringing back my father, Frederick Kurzweil. I’m writing a book now called The Singularity Is Nearer, and I’m talking about this concept of a replicant, where we bring back someone who has passed away. It’ll go through several different stages. First, we’ll create an avatar based on emails, text messages, letters, video, audio and memories of the person. Let’s say in 2025, it’ll be somewhat realistic but not really the same. But some people do actually have an interest in bringing back an unrealistic replicant of someone they loved.
By the 2030s, the AIs will be able to create avatars that will seem very close to a human who actually lived. We can take into consideration their DNA. In the 2030s, we will be able to send nanobots into living people’s brains and extract memories of people who have passed away. Then you can really make them very realistic.
I have collected and keep many boxes of information about my father. I have his letters, music, 8mm movies and my fading memories of him. It will be possible to create a very realistic avatar in a virtual environment or augmented reality. When you actually interact with an avatar physically, it will ultimately pass a Frederick Kurzweil Turing test ― meaning he’ll be indistinguishable from our memories of the actual Frederick Kurzweil.
___________________________________________
None of these predictions on depletion of our MEDICARE TRUST as our SOCIAL SECURITY TRUST are real. These few decades of ROBBER BARON CLINTON/BUSH/OBAMA was nothing but global banking 1% sacking and looting of these public trusts using our US 99% WE THE PEOPLE medical savings accounts and retirement funds to expand medical corporations globally. AFFORDABLE CARE ACT was that dismantling of our strong US first world quality of health care and yes, already tens of millions of US citizens are dying from lack of ordinary health care for everyday disease vectors. These FAKE NEWS predictions on how long these MEDICARE AND SOCIAL SECURITY TRUSTS will last are only propaganda trying to keep our 99% of senior baby boomers thinking they will be able to access what they saved all their lives to cover themselves in old age.
When we understand that CLINTON/BUSH/OBAMA were FAR-RIGHT WING GLOBAL BANKING 1% EXTREME WEALTH EXTREME POVERTY----we understand no policies they promote or install are to HELP PUBLIC HEALTH. That is why we KNOW the public health policies MOVING FORWARD are not MEDICARE FOR ALL-----are not brain medical technologies designed to help people with addictions ---or to turn all of us into INTELLECTUAL GODS. The only goals of TELEMEDICINE, NANOBOT, LSD-VIRTUAL REALITY HIBERNATION is advancing SMART CITIES DEEP, DEEP, REALLY DEEP STATE control of 99% WE THE PEOPLE and to advance space travel planetary mining slave colonies.
HUNDREDS OF BILLIONS OF DOLLARS EACH YEAR FOR THESE FEW DECADES OF MEDICARE AND MEDICAID FRAUD WOULD INDEED EMPTY THESE TRUSTS.
Medicare’s Trust Fund Is Set to Run Out in 8 Years. Social Security, 16.
The Medicare trust fund will be depleted in 2026, the administration said. By contrast, the government said last year that the trust fund would be exhausted in 2029.
CreditDamon Winter/The New York TimesBy Robert Pear
The projections are the first from the administration since President Trump signed a $1.5 trillion tax cut into law in December. They show no sign that a burst of economic growth will significantly improve the finances of the government’s largest entitlement programs.
The Medicare trust fund will be depleted in 2026, the administration said. By contrast, the government said last year that the trust fund would be exhausted in 2029.
In a companion report, federal officials said the Social Security Trust Funds for old-age benefits and disability insurance, taken together, could be depleted in 2034, the same year projected in last year’s report. The fund that helps tens of millions of retirees is expected to be depleted a year earlier than projected last year, while the outlook for the disability trust fund is more favorable.
Still, tax collections would be sufficient to pay about three-fourths of promised Social Security benefits for 75 years.
The report, prepared mostly by nonpolitical actuaries and economists, predicts a 2.4 percent increase in Social Security benefits next year, to keep up with the cost of living. The increase this year was 2 percent.
More than 60 million people are on Social Security, Medicare or both. The two programs account for about 40 percent of all federal spending.
But Mr. Trump has paid relatively little attention to either program, declining to embrace a major restructuring of Social Security or Medicare, as some previous Republican presidents have. Nor has he endorsed higher taxes to finance the programs, as some Democrats have suggested.
Trump administration officials instead are counting on a strong economy to improve the solvency of Social Security and Medicare.
“The administration’s economic agenda — tax cuts, regulatory reform and improved trade agreements — will generate the long-term growth needed to help secure these programs,” Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said Tuesday.
So far that does not appear to have happened, to judge from the annual report of the trustees of Social Security and Medicare, a group that includes three Trump cabinet officers.
The report said the less favorable outlook for Medicare’s hospital trust fund resulted from “adverse changes” in program income and costs. Income to the Medicare fund is expected to be lower than estimated last year because of “lower payroll taxes attributable to lowered wages in 2017 and lower levels of projected gross domestic product,” the Treasury said in a “fact sheet” accompanying the report.
At the same time, it said, outlays from Medicare’s hospital trust fund “are expected to be higher than last year’s estimates due to higher-than-anticipated spending in 2017, legislation that increases hospital spending” and higher payments to private Medicare Advantage plans.
“The current trajectories in health spending are both unsustainable and unmatched by increases in quality,” Alex M. Azar II, the secretary of health and human services and a trustee of Medicare and Social Security, said on Tuesday.
The Congressional Budget Office said in April that federal deficits and debt would soar in the coming decade, following passage of the tax overhaul and legislation to increase military and domestic spending.
Democrats have for months asserted that Republicans would use the deficit — swollen by tax cuts — as “an excuse to cut Social Security and Medicare,” in the words of Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the Democratic leader. Republicans say the programs must be revamped to ensure they will be solvent for baby boomers and their children.
The report said the 2017 tax law would have relatively modest effects on the finances of Medicare and Social Security.
About half of Social Security beneficiaries owe some income tax on their benefits. This revenue will be lower than previously expected while the cuts in individual tax rates are in effect through 2025, the actuaries said. But after that, they said, revenue from the taxation of benefits will be somewhat higher than expected because the tax law alters the way in which income tax brackets will be adjusted for inflation.
In addition, the tax law repealed the penalty for people who go without health insurance. As a result, the report said, Medicare payments to certain hospitals for “uncompensated care” are expected to increase.
Another factor contributing to the increase in Medicare costs is Congress’s decision last year to eliminate the Independent Payment Advisory Board, created by the Affordable Care Act to help slow the growth of Medicare.
The trustees said the outlook for Social Security’s disability trust fund had improved because the number of applications had declined steadily since 2010 and the total number of beneficiaries had been falling since 2014. In addition, they said, average benefit levels for disabled workers “were lower than expected in 2017 and are expected to be lower in the future.”
Medicare now spends an average of about $13,600 a year per beneficiary, and in five years the annual cost is expected to average more than $17,000, the report said.
The standard Medicare premium paid by most beneficiaries is expected to rise next year by just $1.50 a month, to $135.50. But for the most affluent beneficiaries — those with annual incomes exceeding about $160,000 — the premium is expected to be about $460 a month.
Federal officials predict that enrollment in private Medicare Advantage plans will continue growing at a rapid clip, to 29 million in 2027, from 20 million last year.
A major reason for Social Security’s long-term financial problems is a decline in the number of workers for each beneficiary.
In 1960, there were about five workers for every Social Security beneficiary. The ratio of workers to beneficiaries fell to 3.3 in 2005 and then to 2.8 in 2016. It will decline further to about 2.2 by 2035, when most baby boomers will have retired, officials said.
The aging of the population is another factor in the growth of the two entitlement programs. The number of Medicare beneficiaries is expected to surge to 87 million in 2040, from 60 million this year, according to Medicare actuaries. And the number of people on Social Security is expected to climb to 90 million, from 62 million, in the same period.
Speaker Paul D. Ryan has repeatedly tried to overhaul entitlement programs, converting Medicare into a voucherlike program that could shift more retirees to private insurance and turning Medicaid into a block grant to state governments. He has faced bipartisan opposition to that effort, but many Republicans say they hope to continue the push after he retires next year.
For their part, Democrats hope to expand Social Security, to address what they see as a looming crisis in retirement income.
“We will fight every effort to cut, privatize or weaken Social Security, including attempts to raise the retirement age, diminish benefits by cutting cost-of-living adjustments or reducing earned benefits,” the 2016 Democratic platform said. “Democrats will expand Social Security.”
The trustees of the two programs — the secretaries of the Treasury, labor and health and human services and the Social Security commissioner — normally unveil the annual report at a news conference. But none of the four attended the press briefing this year.
________________________________________________
We work hard to expose how what are called today ELITE INTELLECTUALS AND BUSINESS MEN are simply figure heads of global 1% and their 2% using our US Federal employees who are indeed GEEKS AND GENIUS and attributing their research and development to themselves. GATES, ELON MUSK all having bought and privately patenting computer technology developed by US military ----MIT has been partnered with global banking finance and military having been taken control of by foreign sovereignty of MALTA ----
TELEMEDINE, NANOBOT brain technology, the goals of LSD virtual reality hibernation to transport planetary mining slaves is indeed a GLOBAL MILITARY COMPLEX goal.
KURZWEIL is quite the myth-making propagandist-----he is indeed the CARL SAGAN of media creation making everyone think all these objectives are MOVING FORWARD. If anyone is tied to MIT----if we see them on TED TALKS----we know they are FAKE NEWS.
'MIT AGI: Future of Intelligence (Ray Kurzweil)
This is a talk by Ray Kurzweil for course 6.S099: Artificial…
youtube.com'
The article below is long but please glance through to see last century's propagandist for science as Kurzweil is today. These are science HISTORICAL FICTIONISTS. They are paid to be global banking 1% freemason LITERARY STARS creating stories to sell to the US 99% WE THE PEOPLE there are indeed scientific gains being made to justify trillions of dollars in Federal taxes funding these project goals. CARL SAGAN'S science stories were great science fiction-----Kurzweil is telling all kinds of great science fiction as well for the same reason---to create reasons to keep sending trillions of dollars to research for space colonization technology that is highly likely never to be developed.
'But Dr. Sagan wasn’t born a thousand years ago or in a primitive culture. He was born in this century, during the great depression, and he has become perhaps the most popular and the most effective propagandist for science in the twentieth century. His function is, of course, to make myths and tell tall tales, but to do it with such a flourish of scientific legerdemain and eloquence that the credulous are easily and thoroughly convinced of the truth of his scientific sagas'.
This article is of course tied to FREEMASONRY making connections to GOD and BIBLICAL mysticism. Global banking 1% will not reach these goals---but they sure will kill, damage, create societal structures that are brutal for our US 99% WE THE PEOPLE and our new immigrant citizens trying to get there.
This article is long but please glance through to see how global banking 1% freemason STAR LITERARY science fiction is used to paint the idea of what SCIENCE FOR SCIENCE SAKE is MOVING FORWARD may be a reality some day.
The Sagan of Science
John W. Robbins Had Dr. Carl Sagan been born in any other century, he would have been known as a teller of stories, a spinner of yarns, a maker of myths. Some of his listeners would have been skeptical; most would have hung on his every word, believing them all to be true, just as they do today. He is a talented storyteller.
But Dr. Sagan wasn’t born a thousand years ago or in a primitive culture. He was born in this century, during the great depression, and he has become perhaps the most popular and the most effective propagandist for science in the twentieth century. His function is, of course, to make myths and tell tall tales, but to do it with such a flourish of scientific legerdemain and eloquence that the credulous are easily and thoroughly convinced of the truth of his scientific sagas. Of course, he doesn’t start from scratch with his readers. They have been prepared for a hundred years by other storytellers: The Huxleys, Charles Darwin, Ernst Haeckel, Jacob Bronowski, and Isaac Asimov, to mention just a few.
According to the Oxford English Dictionary, a Sagan is a deputy of the Jewish High Priest; he is the second highest functionary of the Temple. In this century, since our religion is science and our temples are laboratories, Dr. Sagan’s name is, appropriately and ironically enough, an accurate description of his function. He is a prominent member of the new scientific priesthood, as anyone can see by looking at his credentials. Dr. Sagan’s name is as fitting for his work as Cardinal Jaime Sin’s name is for his, and Larry Speakes’ name is for his. One can be amused by God’s sense of humor in causing these men to bear the names they do.
Carl Sagan is David Duncan Professor of Astronomy and Space Sciences and director of the Laboratory for Planetary Studies at Cornell University. According to his biography, he has played a leading role in the Mariner, Viking, and Voyager expeditions to the planets, for which he received the NASA medal for exceptional scientific achievement; the International Astronautics Prize, the Prix Galabert; the NASA medal for distinguished public service (twice); and the John F. Kennedy Astronautics Award. Sagan’s Peabody and Emmy Award-winning thirteen-part government television series, Cosmos, has been seen by more than 250 mil lion people in sixty countries. The book that Sagan wrote to accompany the television series is the best selling science book ever published in the English language. Dr. Sagan has won the Pulitzer Prize for another book, The Dragons of Eden; the Joseph Priestly Award “For Distinguished Contributions to the Welfare of Mankind”; and the Leo Szilard Award for Physics in the public interest for his contribution to the discovery of nuclear winter. He is past chairman of the division for Planetary Sciences of the American Astronomical Society, past president of the Planetology Section of the American Geophysical Union, and was editor in chief of Icarus (the leading professional journal devoted to planetary research) for twelve years. Sagan is the author of more than four hundred scientific and popular articles, and the author, editor, and co-author of more than a dozen books: The Cosmic Connection: An Extraterrestrial Perspective; Cosmos; Comet; The Dragons of Eden; Broca’s Brain; Contact; Murmurs of Earth; Intelligent Life in the Universe; UFO’S: A Scientific Debate; Communication with Extraterrestrial Intelligence; The Cold and the Dark: The World After Nuclear War; Other Worlds; and Mars and the Mind of Man.
Isaac Asimov, another writer of science fiction and a popularizer of science (Asimov has written hundreds of books and produces half a dozen or so new books each year), surpasses Sagan in quantity of output; but Sagan, in academic and scientific respectability, surpasses Asimov and all other contenders for the title of Chief Propagandist for Science. Only one other contemporary propagandist for science comes close, Stephen Jay Gould of Harvard, but Dr. Gould has yet to host a government television series and spend millions of dollars in tax revenues spinning scientific sagas for worldwide consumption.
In discussing Sagan’s views, we are not speaking of a man on the fringes of science or academia, but the views of a man who holds a full professorship at one of the nation’s leading universities; who has worked closely with the government scientific establishment, including NASA and the National Science Foundation; and who has won the praise of the scientific establishment and the fervid following of millions of readers and television viewers. Simply because Sagan is so praised and so popular, it is necessary to examine his views. He is, if not the high priest of modern science, then the deputy high priest, just as his name implies.
Dogmatism
Like a priest, Dr. Sagan is given to making dogmatic statements. The first line of his best-selling book Cosmos is an ipsedixitism: “The Cosmos is all that is or ever was or ever will be.” The statement is not argued; no evidence is presented for our consideration; no hint is given that this statement is open to revision of even the mildest sort. The Sagan has spoken; so let it be written; so let it be done. This tone of dogmatic finality appears in all his books, and while it contradicts what he has to say about science, it is fundamental to his duties as a high priest of science.
A few pages later (8), Sagan tells us that “the laws of nature are the same throughout the cosmos.” He repeats the assertion several times throughout his books. He does not tell us how he knows that. It too is an unsupported assertion, and like a mythmaker and priest, Sagan offers no evidence for the assertion. What evidence could he offer? He had already told us (Cosmos, 4) that “the size and age of the cosmos are beyond ordinary human understanding ... [the cosmos] is the greatest of mysteries.” Perhaps the Sagan is claiming greater than ordinary human understanding.
A few more pages into Cosmos we read: “there must be many such worlds [where the matter of the cosmos has become alive and aware] scattered through space” (12). The Sagan does not offer any evidence for this oracular assertion. It is easy to understand why: There isn’t any. But the lack of evidence has never stopped priests, and Sagan continues. He is convinced that evolution occurred not only on Earth, but on billions of other planets as well. “The initial chemical constituents for the origin of life are the most abundant molecules in the universe. Something like the processes that on Earth led to man must have happened billions of other times in the history of our galaxy. There must be other starfolk.... There must be, I think, many places in the galaxy where there are beings far more advanced than we in science and technology, in politics, ethics, poetry, and music” (The Cosmic Connection, 257-258). He asserts that “evolution is a fact, not a theory” (Cosmos, 27). The mechanism of evolution, natural selection, is a “great discovery” made by Charles Darwin and Alfred Russell Wallace. “We are,” he writes, presumably not in tending to speak only of himself and his co-author, “the products of a long series of biological accidents.... We know that the atoms that make us up were synthesized in the interiors of previous generations of dying stars” (The Cosmic Connection, 52). The Earth itself “condensed out of interstellar gas and dust some 4.6 billion years ago” (Cosmos, 30). The early history of Earth is equally open to the penetrating gaze of Sagan: “In the early history of our planet, however, ... enormous amounts of organic molecules were being produced by sunlight in a hydrogen rich atmosphere, ... some similar chemistry must have occurred on a billion other worlds in the Milky Way Galaxy. The molecules of life fill the cosmos” (Cosmos, 40).
Assertions such as these are not true; they are not even good science. They are the stuff that legends and myths are made of, and one cannot understand the importance of Sagan’s work unless one realizes its function as a new scientific mythology.
His dogmatism extends from discourses about what “must” have happened on billions of planets and what “must” have happened on Earth billions of years ago to the details of evolution and the remote future. “We have five fingers,” writes Dr. Sagan, “because we have descended from a Devonian fish that had five phalanges or bones in its fins” (Cosmos, 282). Not only does Dr. Sagan know where fingers came from, he knows toes as well: “They are clearly evolved from fingerlike appendages for grasping and swinging, like those of arboreal apes and monkeys” (The Dragons of Eden, 4). Nothing could be clearer than the origin of fingers and toes, unless, of course, it is the evolution of the neocortex: “Finally, surmounting the rest of the brain, and clearly the most recent evolutionary accretion, is the neocortex” (Dragons, 58). Even the pain of childbirth is transparent to the remarkable intelligence of Dr. Sagan: “So far as I know, childbirth is generally painful in only one of the millions of species on Earth: human beings. This must be a consequence of the recent and continuing increase in cranial volume” (Dragons, 97). Not to let a swelled head get in the way of science (in fact, Sagan would argue that a swelled head is the cause of science), Sagan tells us that “the fear of falling seems clearly connected with our arboreal origins...” (Dragons, 158). “Clearly,” he says.
Dr. Sagan makes science clear for the masses by making false statements about its theories. This can be seen not only in the area of biology, but in physics as well. He declares, for example, that light is a wave (Cosmos, 253). He offers no qualification for the statement, no hint that there is conflicting scientific evidence on the nature of light, no suggestion that scientists have different opinions on the issue, no admission that science is hopelessly contradictory on the definition of light. In many such cases Sagan writes clearly because he writes inaccurately.
Not only is there a paucity of empirical evidence for his dogmatic claims, they are sometimes based upon logical fallacies as well as an overheated imagination. For example, in The Cosmic Connection (3) Sagan writes: “The early atmospheres were composed of the most abundant atoms and were rich in hydrogen. Sunlight, falling on the molecules of the early atmosphere, excited them, induced molecular collisions, and produced larger molecules ... These molecules, remarkably enough, are the ones of which we are made: The building blocks of the nucleic acids, which are our hereditary material, and the building blocks of the proteins, the molecular journeymen that perform the work of the cell, were produced from the atmosphere and oceans of the early Earth. We know this because we can make these molecules today by duplicating primitive conditions.” This argument, that certain organic molecules must have arisen in a certain way billions of years ago because we can make these molecules today by “duplicating” primitive conditions in modern laboratories, is a logical mess. The only thing remarkable about the situation is that a professor at a respected university can make such blunders and retain his chair.
Sagan does not know what primitive conditions obtained; he has chosen the conditions most conducive to the results he wants. He has assumed what he should prove. His argument is: organic molecules must have formed spontaneously under Earth’s primitive conditions; organic molecules today can form only under certain conditions; therefore, those conditions must be Earth’s primitive conditions; there fore, given those conditions, organic molecules could and did form spontaneously.
To argue that x must have happened in the past because x can be made to happen now is an elementary logical blunder. It is like arguing that because we now get to Pikes Peak by cog railway and car, that that is how the pioneers must have done it. Sagan must first demonstrate that there is only one way for organic molecules to be formed. Then he must demonstrate that they formed spontaneously on Earth billions of years ago. He has done neither, he can do neither, and his argument is worthless. It is as much science fiction as H. G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds. It is, how ever, no worse than other scientific arguments which regularly violate the rules of logic.
Sagan’s dogmatism about the past knows no bounds. He asserts, “there is no doubt that our instinctual apparatus has changed little from the hunter-gatherer days of several hundred thousands years ago” (The Cosmic Connection, 7). “No doubt,” Dr. Sagan says. Certainty is quite worthless in the quest for knowledge. Many people are certain that vinegar cures warts, that reincarnation is true, and that science furnishes truth. Dr. Sagan is certain about a large number of things that he cannot demonstrate and of which he cannot possibly know. Far from knowing what the “instinctual apparatus” of the hunter-gatherers was, Sagan does not even know what the instinctual apparatus of the Cornell University faculty is, nor how it differs from that of the hunter-gatherers, whoever they may be.
His dogmatism does not extend only to the remote past and the far reaches of the universe, but to the remote future as well. He believes that the phonograph record which he and one of his wives were responsible for producing for NASA and which was sent into space in two Voyager spacecraft, will “last for a billion years” (Cosmos, 289). So, he says, will the equipment left on the moon by the Apollo astronauts. Fortunately, Carl Sagan’s books will not.
Science
One of the strange things about Sagan’s arrogance is that it is in conflict with his remarks about science. One can conclude from this that either he is confused and does not see the conflict, or that he is well aware that he is not making scientific statements, but is constructing an elaborate scientific mythology for the sophisticates of the twentieth century who could never believe in angels, demons, or God, but who will believe in ET.
”Science,” Sagan writes in Broca’s Brain (15), “is a way of thinking much more than it is a body of knowledge.” Science “has emerged in the popular mind as the primary means of penetrating the secrets of the universe” (Broca’s Brain, 54). “Scientists have been known to change their minds completely and publicly when presented with new evidence and new arguments” (Broca’s Brain, 74). “Science is also self-correcting. The most fundamental axioms and conclusions may be challenged-the history of science is full of cases where previously accepted theories and hypotheses have been entirely overthrown, to be replaced by new ideas that more adequately explain the data” (Broca’s Brain, 96). “Science is a self-correcting enterprise. To be accepted, all new ideas must survive rigorous standards of evidence” (Cosmos, 91).
But where are the rigorous standards of evidence that apply to Sagan’s ipsedixitisms about the evolution of human brains, fingers, and toes? Or to the instincts of ancient men? Or the natural laws that apply a trillion light years from Earth? Dr. Sagan does not meet the standards that he says distinguish science from superstition. Nor does he seem to be willing to subject all his most cherished beliefs-such as evolution-to the scrutiny that science demands.
Still less does Dr. Sagan seem to realize that science is a self-correcting and ever-changing discipline precisely be cause it is never correct. If a scientist ever discovered a truth, it would not and could not change. Two plus two is four is now, has always been, and always will be true be cause it was not discovered by the scientific method. Christian theology has always taught and will always teach the doctrine of the Trinity because the Trinity was not discovered by the scientific method, but revealed by God, who is truth himself. All scientific laws are false. All the laws of physics and astronomy are false. Why just a month ago the astronomers admitted that-oops!-they had made a mistake in calculating the distances between stars, a mistake of only 25 percent. Who knows, perhaps next month they will acknowledge another mistake. Or perhaps it will be the chemists, or the physicists, or the biologists who make the announcement next month. All the physics and biology textbooks written in 1910 are now regarded as completely wrong. Fifty years from now scientists will consider our present texts completely wrong. Scientists never discover the truth because the scientific method, which Dr. Sagan esteems so highly, is a tissue of logical fallacies. Science does not and cannot give us truth. Scientists, to use the phraseology of the King James Bible, are ever learning and never able to come to the knowledge of the truth. Science is a tentative technological enterprise. It is incompetent as a source of knowledge. Dr. Sagan, however, is far from tentative in his oracular pronouncements about man and the universe.
Behaviorism
One of Dr. Sagan’s certainties concerns the nature of thought. He does not believe that he has a mind, and some times this writer is inclined to agree. He maintains that “mind” is the term we use to describe the workings of the brain. He is a behaviorist. To define the term, I quote Ernest Nagel’s Presidential Address to the American Philosophical Association in 1954:
The occurrence of events, qualities, and processes, and the characteristic behavior of various individuals, are contingent on the organization of spatio-temporally located bodies, whose internal and external relations determine and limit the appearance and disappearance of everything that happens. That this is so, is one of the best-tested conclusions of experience.... There is no place for the operation of disembodied forces, no place for an immaterial spirit directing the course of events, no place for the survival of personality after the corruption of the body which exhibits it.
This notion, that mind is merely the behavior of matter, has been advocated by many leading philosophers and scientists, among them John Dewey, John Watson, and B.F. Skinner. Skinner is justly famous for his attack on political freedom and human dignity and his advocacy of a totalitarian society controlled by scientists. Watson was an experimental psychologist of the early twentieth century who exerted enormous influence in both psychology and philosophy. Dewey, of course, is notorious for his influence on American government schools. He is the prime reason why Johnny can’t think, for Dewey did not believe in thinking: according to Dewey, one learns by doing. Dewey wrote: “Habits formed in the process of exercising biological aptitudes are the sole agents of observation, recollection, fore sight and judgment: a mind or consciousness or soul in general which performs these operations is a myth.... Knowledge lives in the muscles, not in consciousness.”
Carl Sagan accepts this behaviorism. In The Dragons of Eden, subtitled Speculations on the Evolution of Human Intelligence, he writes (7): “My fundamental premise about the brain is that its workings-what we sometimes call `mind’-are a consequence of its anatomy and physiology, and nothing more. `Mind’ may be a consequence of the action of the components of the brain severally or collectively.... We are, to a remarkable degree, the results of the interactions of an extremely complex array of molecules.... Because there is not a shred of evidence to support [sic] it, I will not in these pages entertain any hypotheses on what used to be called the mind-body dualism, the idea that inhabiting the matter of the body is something made of quite different stuff, called mind.”
Notice that Sagan presents this behaviorism as a premise, not as a conclusion. He does not argue for it, but assumes it, because, as he says, there is not a shred of evidence for the existence of mind. Obviously, if science can investigate only what can be sensed or quantified, then there is no evidence for mind, which can be neither sensed nor quantified. But this means merely that Sagan is also making assumptions, of which he does not inform us, about the nature of evidence.
Sagan’s phrase about man being an extremely complex array of molecules reminds me of another philosopher, Bertrand Russell, who wrote one of the most powerful passages in English literature defending the same view:
That man is the product of causes that had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and beliefs, are but the out come of accidental collocations of atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling can preserve an individual life beyond the grave, that all the labors of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and the whole temple of man’s achievement inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins-all these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain, that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand. Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul’s habitation henceforth be safely built....
Brief and powerless is man’s life; on him and all his race the slow, sure doom falls pitiless and dark. Blind to good and evil, reckless of destruction, omnipotent matter rolls on its relentless way; for man, condemned today to lose his dearest, tomorrow himself to pass through the gate of dark ness, it remains only to cherish, ere yet the blow falls, the lofty thoughts that ennoble his little day.... Proudly defiant of the irresistible forces that tolerate, for a moment, his knowledge and his condemnation, to sustain alone, a weary but unyielding atlas, the world that his own ideals have fashioned despite the trampling march of unconscious power (Mysticism and Logic, 47-48, 56-57).
Russell’s prose is magnificent-I have come across nothing nearly so good in Sagan-but the “truths” he believes are not true at all.
Neither is Sagan’s behaviorism. For the triune God, Sagan has substituted what he calls “The Triune Brain” consisting of the reptilian complex, the limbic system, and the neocortex. Sagan believes the old mythology of Ernst Haeckel, the popularizer of evolutionary thought in Germany during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and whose books were bestsellers and laid the foundation for Nazism. One of Haeckel’s myths was that ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny. Sagan believes that “in human intrauterine development we run through stages very much like fish, reptiles and nonprimate mammals before we be come recognizably human. The fish stage even has gill slits, which are absolutely useless for the embryo who is nourished via the umbilical cord, but a necessity for human embryology: since gills were vital to our ancestors, we run through a gill stage in becoming human” (The Dragons of Eden, 59-60).
But we are getting somewhat afield from Sagan’s behaviorism. Dr. Sagan believes that “consciousness and intelligence are the result of `mere’ matter sufficiently complexly arranged” (The Dragons of Eden, 221). “Each human being is a superbly constructed, astonishingly compact, self-ambulatory computer” (Broca’s Brain, 281). Speaking of him self, Sagan writes: “I am a collection of water, calcium and organic molecules called Carl Sagan. You are a collection of almost identical molecules with a different collective label. But is that all? Is there nothing in here but molecules? Some people find this idea somewhat demeaning to human dignity, for myself, I find it elevating that our universe permits the evolution of molecular machines as intricate and subtle as we” (Cosmos, 127). “A thought,” Dr. Sagan thinks, “is made of hundreds of electrochemical impulses” (Cosmos, 277).
Upon discovering the brain of Paul Broca, the nineteenth-century French surgeon, in a bottle in the Musee De L’Homme in Paris, Sagan wondered “whether in some sense Broca was still in there-his wit, his skeptical mien, his abrupt gesticulations when he talked, his quiet and sentimental moments. Might there be preserved in the configuration of neurons before me a recollection of the triumphant moment when he argued before the combined medical faculties ... on the origins of aphasia? A dinner with his friend Victor Hugo? A stroll on a moonlit autumn evening? ... Where do we go when we die? Is Paul Broca still there in his formalin-filled bottle?” (Broca’s Brain, 10-11).
These thoughts remind one of the delusions of savages who think that by eating the flesh of their enemies they will become like them. Scientists have performed innumerable experiments testing the cannibalistic theory of learning: since memory inheres in the chemistry of the brain, one can, by ingesting that chemistry, learn what others have known. Scientists use rats and planaria in their experiments; cannibals, of course, use people. Of course, this is not a refutation of behaviorism, merely an illustration of how primitive the modern scientist (or perhaps how advanced the unjustly maligned cannibal) is.
A refutation of behaviorism can be derived from either the Bible or from logic. God, angels, and demons all think. None of them has brains or body. Christ and the thief on the cross went to paradise at death; their brains were lying in the ground in Palestine. Moses, whose brains had been buried somewhere in the Middle East more than a thousand years earlier, held a theological conversation with Christ at the transfiguration. These scriptural references ought to be sufficient to convince Christians that brains are not necessary for thinking. Unfortunately, Dr. Sagan does not believe that the Bible is true, so we will have to offer a more extended argument from logic. If he does not believe that logic is true, then there is no point in arguing with him at all; one ought rather to confine him to a soft room.
Let’s assume that Dr. Sagan’s beliefs about mind and thought are true. Thoughts are, he thinks, “hundreds of electrochemical impulses” in the brain. What follows from this? First, error is impossible. One electrochemical impulse is as good as another. The chemistry in the brain of someone who thinks that behaviorism is false is as perfect as the chemistry in the brain of someone who thinks that behavior ism is true. If thoughts are electrochemical, then one thought, one chemical reaction, is as good as another. Why Sagan insists that his chemical reactions are right and mine are wrong is a complete mystery. “Wrong” has no meaning on behaviorist premises.
It follows from the meaninglessness of error that behaviorists, in this case Dr. Sagan, cannot claim their assertions are true. Behaviorism makes truth equally meaningless. Truth is not a quality of electrochemical impulses. My rejection of behaviorism, that is, in Dr. Sagan’s terms, the electrochemical impulses in my brain, are chemically as good as his. Chemicals never err. Both his reactions and mine are solid chemistry. Both obey the inviolable laws of chemistry, which, Dr. Sagan has told us, are the same every where in the universe. Now if anyone, no matter how highly respected and decorated, proposes a theory that precludes the truth of the theory he proposes, he is involved in a hopeless contradiction and needs no further refutation. If he persists in asserting what cannot be true, he needs close and compassionate attention, rather than disputation.
The situation is, however, somewhat worse than this initial consideration indicates. Not only does behaviorism eliminate truth, it eliminates memory and communication as well. If thoughts are electrochemical impulses, then they are specific datable events in the brain. They cannot be repeated. They occur and then they stop. Memory is impossible. A behaviorist might reply that we can have a similar thought later, that is, a similar electrochemical impulse can occur. But the behaviorist forgets (and hopes that we will forget as well) that according to behaviorism the thought of similarity is still another and still later electrochemical impulse, another dated event separated by time (and perhaps by space) from the first two chemical reactions. How can still a third electrochemical reaction connect the first two, which have already occurred and ended? How can a behaviorist tell whether two ideas are similar, if ideas are electrochemical impulses? Behaviorism makes comparison and memory impossible.
It also makes communication impossible. Carl Sagan’s mind is a bundle of electrochemical impulses and reactions; and so is mine, according to Carl Sagan. Dr. Sagan has a thought, that is, his intracranial chemicals react in a certain way. But his brain’s electrochemical impulses cannot be my brain’s electrochemical impulses, any more than his toothache can be mine or my toothache his. Therefore, I can never know his thought. It is therefore impossible to tell what Dr. Sagan means by any of the thousands of propositions that he has written in his books and articles. And since behaviorism also destroys memory, Dr. Sagan himself has no idea what he wrote either. Perhaps his books mean nothing at all. Perhaps they are simply the debris left by a powerful and sudden electrochemical brainstorm.
Behaviorism has been around for centuries, but the modern revival of some forms of Greek paganism has made it into one of the major superstitions of the twentieth century. Ernest Nagel, in his presidential address that I quoted above, said that it is one of the best-tested conclusions of experience. Gordon Clark has suggested that behaviorism be subjected to the same sort of test that other theories claiming to be scientific undergo. Einstein’s general theory of relativity predicted several events, such as the precession of the perihelion of Mercury and the deflection of starlight in the presence of large masses. Scientists could observe whether those events occurred as implied by Einstein’s theory. Let Dr. Sagan specify which electrochemical impulses in the brain are the thought “the Earth is 4.6 billion years old.” Let him tell us what the specific chemistry of astronomy, as distinguished from astrology, is. Let him specify how the surge of electrochemical impulses meaning “The opening chapters of the book of Genesis are mythological” differs from the spurt of electrochemical impulses meaning “The Bible alone, and the Bible in its entirety, is the word of God written and therefore inerrant in the autographs.” Let us see what empirical basis there is for the claim that thoughts are electrochemical impulses. I certainly hope Dr. Sagan’s brain is up to the task.
Scientific Mythology
Dr. Sagan’s role as deputy high priest of the new religion of science involves creating a new scientific mythology for the twenty-first century. He recognizes both the power and the importance of myth in creating and maintaining a scientific culture. In the introduction to The Dragons of Eden, he quotes Henry David Thoreau’s Journal: “I do not know where to find in any literature, whether ancient or modern, any adequate account of that nature with which I am acquainted. Mythology comes nearest to it of any.” In the same book Sagan offers what he calls scientific myths to the reader: “these conjectures on the origins of the mammals constitute a kind of scientific myth: they may have some germ of truth in them, but they are unlikely to be the whole story. That scientific myths make contact with more ancient myths may or may not be a coincidence” (147). In Cosmos he writes, “As the ancient mythmakers knew, we are the children equally of the sky and the Earth” (318). And in The Cosmic Connection, Sagan spins one of his own myths, which he labels as such by beginning it, “Once upon a time” (249). The fable is the theory of evolution, both cosmic and biological. It is the gist of his book compressed into a few pages. It is a scientific fairy tale.
ET
Now the myth of evolution, both cosmic and biological, is nothing new. Sagan’s contribution to the myth, apart from the fascinating way in which he presents it for the general reader, is an emphasis on extraterrestrial intelligent life. The titles of some of his books betray this interest, this obsession of his: The Cosmic Connection: An Extraterrestrial Perspective; Other Worlds; Intelligent Life in the Universe; Communication with Extraterrestrial Intelligence; and UFO’S: A Scientific Debate.
This obsession has been a lifelong characteristic of Sagan. In Broca’s Brain he tells us that “by the time I was ten I had decided-in almost total ignorance of the difficulty of the problem-that the universe was full up. There were too many places for this to be the only inhabited planet” (162). He has never wavered from that opinion. In The Cosmic Connection he writes: “The initial chemical constituents for the origin of life are the most abundant molecules in the universe. Something like the processes that on the Earth led to man must have happened billions of other times in the history of our galaxy. There must be other starfolk.... There must be, I think, many places in the galaxy where there are beings far more advanced than we in science and technology, in politics, ethics, poetry, and music” (258-259).
When he first learned of pulsars, Sagan thought “that they were perfect interstellar navigation beacons, the sorts of markers that an interstellar spacefaring society would want to place throughout the galaxy for time- and space- fixes for their voyages. There is now little doubt that pulsars are neutron stars. But I would not exclude the possibility that if there are interstellar spacefaring societies, the naturally formed pulsars are used as navigation beacons and for communications purposes” (The Cosmic Connection, 260).
In his most popular book, Cosmos, Sagan argues that “The universe is brimming over with life” (7). He even offers us a calculation of the number of inhabited planets: there are one million advanced technical civilizations in our galaxy alone, and “there appears to be a fair chance that advanced extraterrestrial civilizations are sending radio signals our way ...” (The Cosmic Connection, 211). The notion of extraterrestrial intelligent life is, to quote one of Sagan’s chapter titles in The Cosmic Connection, “An idea whose time has come” (191).
Because he is convinced that ET is out there, Sagan has convinced the government to spend millions of tax dollars on the search for intelligent life in the stars. Over the past twenty-five years, messages from Earth have been placed on spacecraft and sent into space. Radio telescopes have been tuned to distant stars in the hope of picking up messages beamed at us by ET. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration presently operates a program called Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. NASA is now in the middle of a five-year program of research and planning to design the largest and most intensive search for extraterrestrial intelligence ever undertaken. Once started, NASA’s search will last for decades.
Sagan realizes the public’s fascination with the idea of intelligent life in space, and he sees the search for such life as the key to continued public and government financial support for his ideas. A recent public opinion poll, published in The Washington Post on June 2, 1986, indicated that “Seven of 10 participants agreed with the theory that `in the entire universe, it is likely that there are thousands of planets like our own on which life could have developed.’” Sagan believes it is far more than likely, of course. He says it must have happened billions of times. But he does not believe that the Earth has already been visited by such advanced beings. He argues that the Earth has been a technological civilization for too brief a time to have attracted the attention of the intelligences who must be out there, and that the distances to their planets are so vast that sufficient time has not elapsed to allow them to explore all the worlds between here and there, let alone to get here. Perhaps he also realizes that a belief in UFOs at the present time would destroy both his credibility and the reason for government funding for his projects. After all, if ET has already been here, we should be looking for evidence on Earth, not listening to the heavens and sending messages to the stars. Johannes Kepler once commented that the creator has given every animal the means of sustaining its life, and to the astronomer he gave astrology. In the twentieth century, astronomers grow fat by feeding the imaginations of people and bureaucrats who want to believe that ET lives.
The Religion of Science
One cannot help but notice the religious undertone in all of this scientific mythology. Sagan tells us, “Thousands of years ago, the idea that the planets were populated by intelligent beings was uncommon. The idea was that the planets themselves were intelligent beings. Mars was the god of war, Venus was the goddess of beauty, Jupiter was the king of the gods” (The Cosmic Connection, 191). In the eighteenth century the idea that the planets, while not gods, were inhabited by godlike beings, began to grow. Emanuel Swedenborg and Immanuel Kant, two false messiahs of the Enlightenment, claimed that the planets were populated. Sagan believes, “out there in the depths of space, it seems very likely that, sooner or later, we will find other intelligent beings. Some of them will be less advanced than we; some, probably most, will be more.... The beings more advanced than we will have capabilities far beyond our understanding. In some very real sense they will appear to us as godlike” (Broca’s Brain, 368).
If I were a betting man, I might wager that sometime in the not too distant future, these godlike beings will contact Earth. Of course, they will not be what Dr. Sagan apparently believes them to be, the evolutionary products of time, chance, and death; but evil angels who have transformed themselves into messengers of light. It seems to me that the scientific mythology that Sagan develops in his books, together with the influence of movies like ET and Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and the new age movement generally are setting the world up for a massive deception. The contact, when it comes, will permit both secular and religious people to accept the extraterrestrial beings as gods. Scientists, especially behaviorists like Sagan, who do not believe in the God of the Bible or angels or demons, easily believe in some sort of superior intelligence that has evolved by natural processes just as man has. Sagan already believes in such beings, and he is doing his best to convince the world.
The religious nature of Sagan’s scientific mythology may also be seen in his affinity for non-Christian religions, Hinduism in particular. Sagan uses quotes from religious writings generously in the mottoes to his chapters. Cosmos, the best selling science book ever published in the English language, has thirteen chapters, twelve of which are introduced by quotations from non-Christian religions and cultures, including the Aztecs, Incas, Mayans, Eskimos, Assyrians, Indians, Chinese, Egyptians, Sumerians, the Bhagavad Gita, the Zoroastrians, and the Koran. He reproduces in full color a statue of the Hindu god Shiva dancing the dance of creation, and quotes, on the facing page, these lines from The Mahapurana (The Great Legend), a ninth-century Indian document:
Some foolish men declare that a creator made the world. The doctrine that the world was created is ill-advised, and should be rejected. If God created the world, where was he before creation? ...
How could God have made the world without any raw material? If you say he made this first, and then the world, you are faced with an endless regression.... Know that the world is uncreated, as time itself is, without beginning and end. (245).
Obviously, modern science finds much more in common with such doctrines of devils than it does with Christianity. Sagan finds Hinduism particularly attractive, for, “The Hindu religion is the only one of the world’s great faiths dedicated to the idea that the cosmos itself undergoes an immense, indeed an infinite, number of deaths and rebirths. It is the only religion in which the time scales correspond, no doubt by accident, to those of modern scientific cosmology.... There is the deep and appealing notion that the universe is but the dream of the god who, after a hundred brahma years [each 8.6 billion ordinary years long], dissolves himself into a dreamless sleep. The universe dissolves with him-until, after another brahma century, he stirs, recomposes himself and begins again to dream the great cosmic dream. These great ideas are tempered by another, perhaps still greater. It is said that men may not be the dreams of the gods, but rather the gods are the dreams of men” (Cosmos, 258).
Sagan finds Jainism, another religion of India, attractive, because it is one of the few religions of planet Earth that implements a reverence for all life (The Cosmic Connection, 8). The reverence leads Sagan to assert that dolphins and whales may be other forms of intelligent life on Earth, and to ask the profound and moving question, “Why, exactly, all over the civilized world, in virtually every major city, are apes in prison?” (The Dragons of Eden, 127). I thought of describing Sagan’s question as asinine, but then a person who believes in the “connectedness” of all life would miss the meaning of the word and my intention.
Sagan’s philosophy leads him into all the chic and crackpottish causes of the left: ape liberation, the salvation of the whales, fornication as a form of war prevention, the belief in evolution and extraterrestrial intelligences, and a more just redistribution of the world’s wealth. Despite all the clamor he makes about science being self-correcting, it has not kept him from making a fool of himself. But then science never has, and it never will. Only the word of God can stop men from making fools of themselves, and Dr. Sagan refuses to listen. He prefers cunningly devised fables to revealed truth.
The Materialistic Mystic
Does it not seem strange to you that a man who insists upon “rigorous standards of evidence,” and who even rejects the idea of mind because “there is not a shred of evidence to support it,” should endorse the mysticism of eastern religions? Isn’t it odd that Sagan, who does not believe that he himself has a mind, finds “deep and appealing” the mystical Hindu notion of gods dreaming universes without end? How are materialism and mysticism combined in one mind?
In his book The Screwtape Letters, C. S. Lewis has the senior demon, Screwtape, advise the apprentice demon, Wormwood, on how he is to deceive the man over whom he has control:
My dear Wormwood, I wonder you should ask me whether it is essential to keep the patient in ignorance of your own existence. That question, at least for the present phase of the struggle, has been answered for us by the high command. Our policy, for the moment, is to conceal our selves. Of course this has not always been so. We are really faced with a cruel dilemma. When the humans disbelieve in our existence we lose all the pleasing results of direct terrorism, and we make no magicians. On the other hand, when they believe in us, we cannot make them materialists and skeptics. At least, not yet. I have great hopes that we shall learn in due time how to emotionalize and mythologize their science to such an extent that what is, in effect, a belief in us (though not under that name) will creep in while the human mind remains closed to belief in the enemy [God]. The “Life Force,” the worship of sex, and some aspects of psychoanalysis may here prove useful. If once we can produce our perfect work-the materialist magician, the man, not using, but veritably worshipping, what he vaguely calls “forces” while denying the existence of “spirits”-then the end of the war will be in sight (32-33).
Sagan is Lewis’ materialist-magician. He is the believer in scientific mythology. In The Cosmic Connection he writes:
In a very real sense human beings are machines constructed by the nucleic acids to arrange for the efficient replication of more nucleic acids. In a sense our strongest urges, noblest enterprises, most compelling necessities, and apparent free wills are all an expression of the information coded in the genetic material: we are, in a way, temporary ambulatory repositories for our nucleic acids. This does not deny our humanity; it does not prevent us from pursuing the good, the true and the beautiful. But it would be a great mistake to ignore where we have come from in our attempt to determine where we are going.... We are the product of 4.5 billion years of fortuitous, slow, biological evolution. There is no reason to think that the evolutionary process has stopped. Man is a transitional animal; he is not the climax of creation.... The time has come for a respect, a reverence, not just for all human beings, but for all life forms.... It is important that we extend our identification horizons, not just down to the simplest and most humble forms of life on our own planet, but also up to the exotic and advanced forms of life that may inhabit, with us, our vast galaxy of stars (The Cosmic Connection, 4-8).
There you have it, the materialism (man is a machine) and the mysticism (a reverence for all life forms, including the extraterrestrial) in a few paragraphs taken from an essay entitled “A Transitional Animal.” If Lewis is to be believed, Sagan, and the men like him, who seem to number in the millions, are the perfect work of the demons, and the end of the struggle is near. Sagan, by rejecting the doctrines of the Bible, is zealously and eloquently propagating what the Bible calls doctrines of demons.
In another of his books, Perelandra, Lewis has his villain, who is a professor of physics named Weston, explain his philosophy to the hero, Ransom. Any resemblance between Weston’s philosophy and Carl Sagan’s is probably not coincidental:
All my life I had been making a wholly unscientific dichotomy or antithesis between man and nature-[I] had conceived myself fighting for man and against his non- human environment. During my illness I plunged into biology, and particularly into what may be called biological philosophy. Hitherto, as a physicist, I had been content to regard life as a subject outside my scope. The conflicting views of those who drew a sharp line between the organic and the inorganic and those who held that what we call life was inherent in matter from the very beginning had not interested me. Now it did. I saw almost at once that I could admit no break, no discontinuity, in the unfolding of the cosmic process. I became a convinced believer in emergent evolution. All is one. The stuff of mind, the unconsciously purposive dynamism, is present from the very beginning.... The majestic spectacle of this blind, inarticulate purposiveness thrusting its way upward and ever upward ... swept away all my old conception of a duty to man as such. Man in himself is nothing. The forward movement of life ... is everything. (90-91).
It is everything to Dr. Sagan as well. Man is a transitional animal, and out there, in the vast reaches of space, there are beings so advanced that they will appear like gods to us when they finally make contact with us. The materialist- mystic, the perfect work of the devil, is complete. He does not believe in God, but in demons, “though not under that name.”
The coming of the lawless one is according to the working of Satan, with all power, signs, and lying wonders, and with all unrighteous deception among those who perish, because they did not receive the love of the truth, that they might be saved. And for this reason God will send them strong delusion, that they should believe the lie, that they all may be condemned who did not believe the truth but had pleasure in unrighteousness (2 Thessalonians 2:9-12).
This image is a great POSTER for goals of making PODS of people. CLINTON/BUSH/OBAMA dismantled all our US public health and safety ---corporatized all our strong US medical institutions just so research and human experimentation that would never be allowed in civilized, developed nations could MOVE FORWARD these few decades.
WE KNOW THE GOALS OF ALL THIS RESEARCH TIED TO TELEMEDICINE-----IT HAS BECOME HARDER TO KNOW JUST HOW FAR ALONG GLOBAL BANKING 1% OLD WORLD KINGS AND QUEENS ARE IN THESE TOTALLY INHUMANE MEDICAL GOALS.
The first thing we want to do in educating on these far-right wing global banking 1% OLD WORLD KINGS AND QUEENS' policies is to be clear about how our global banking freemason LITERARY STARS-----as Dean Koontz -----are made best-sellers to create societal FADS and myth-making woven in their stories. We read KOONTZ crime novels----he weaving stories today as JAMES BOND novels did last century not only to entertain but sell the idea that technology and the evil of CLINTON/BUSH/OBAMA has advanced far beyond where it actually is. We know today that most of JAMES BOND secret weapons et al have never been produced. We know CSI---NCI secret weapons and technology has never been produced. We are very sure none of the goals of global banking 1% to create structures of LSD VIRTUAL REALITY HIBERNATION for space travel will ever exist-----but what we do know is far-right corporate fascists will kill hundreds of millions and few billion people trying to get to those medical devices.
WHISPERING ROOM GOOD CRIME NOVEL FILLED WITH CONSPIRACY THEORY MAKING THESE 2% GLOBAL BANKING PLAYERS SOUND MORE POWERFUL THEN THEY ACTUALLY ARE.
The premise of this novel is global banking 1% are now secretly killing off any person that works to reform and STOP MOVING FORWARD. Don't allow these FICTIONS to make our citizens FEARFUL of STOPPING MOVING FORWARD.
Book Review: The Whispering Room
by Dean Koontz
January 10, 2018 Kathy Davie
I received this book for free from the library in exchange for an honest review. This does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review.
The Whispering Room by Dean Koontz
Genres: Psychological Suspense
Published by Bantam on November 21, 2017
Second in the Jane Hawk series and revolving around Jane Hawk, a rogue FBI agent intent on taking down a ruthless cabal.
My Take
Okay, so it’s a common plot: the evil guys want to take over the world and reduce the rest of us to a world of Stepford wives. And Koontz runs with this.
It’s that combination of destroying a person’s free will, the disdain and contempt the bad guys have for anyone not them, and incorporating the technology that already exists, that will scare the bejeebers out of ya! Worse is those few paragraphs that point out the truth of “making the Internet more fair”. Yeah, I’ve had my suspicions.
These smarmy gits are all about “bringing peace to the world” by removing everyone’s ability to choose for themselves. To make them machines. As awful as life can be in this world, without free will, there would be no artists, no writers, no musicians, no beauty. No one to create.
I gotta say that I started reading this before Thanksgiving…and I had to stop for weeks before I took it up again, simply because it was so horrific in its possibilities. All that technology Koontz makes use of is right here, right now. It’s even more horrific, as Koontz uses third-person omniscient point-of-view, so we get to hear everyone’s thoughts. It’ll make you gag.
Jane is an interesting mix of by-the-book FBI and using her knowledge of how the bad guys operate (in general) to evade all the people looking for her. This particular story pulls in Tillman, whose family adds a sense of terror to it all. I’ll be curious to know if Tillman meets up with Jane or if a new family gets pulled in, in The Crooked Staircase in May 2018?
Koontz has a good bit of backstory for Jane which pops out so naturally within the story.
I am confused by Hannafin’s behavior, how badly he misses his wife at the start of his scene, and then what we learn later.
For some reason, Koontz uses present tense at the start of some chapters, and then switches over to past tense. What’s with that??
Maybe Koontz was just tense…god knows I was…tense. My heart raced. I started to peer out the windows…just in case!
The Story
Men and women leading happy, productive lives are committing suicide at tremendous rates. They’re all part of the Hamlet List, a list that indicates this person may push civilization in the wrong direction. The direction the conspiracists don’t want the world to go.
It was her own husband’s suicide that set Jane down this path, for it didn’t make sense. And Jane is determined to know the truth. But these ruthless people bent on hijacking America’s future for their own monstrous ends never banked on a highly trained FBI agent willing to go rogue — and become the nation’s most wanted fugitive — in order to derail their insidious plans to gain absolute power with a terrifying technological breakthrough.
One with which they can get to you anywhere, anytime.
The Characters
Jane Hawk is a rogue FBI agent on the run. Her husband, Nick, killed himself. Jane’s father is a world renowned pianist who murdered her mother. Her son, Travis, is hidden in rural Orange County with friends, Gavin and Jessica Washington, to keep him safe. Bella and Sampson are their mare and stallion. Hannah is an Exmoor pony the Washingtons bought for Travis. Queenie and Duke are the Washingtons’ dogs.
A small town in Minnesota
Sheriff Luther Tillman has been married to Rebecca for twenty-six glorious years. They have two daughters, Jolie is a senior in high school and Twyla is away at college in Boston. Aunt Tandy lives in Madison. Deputies Rob Stassen (his wife is Melanie) and Lonny Burke are puzzled by the FBI’s behavior. Gunnar Torval is the undersheriff. Vance Saunders is with the fire department.
Cora Gundersun is an amazing 6th-grade teacher who cares about her special-needs students and who was named Teacher of the Year a couple years back. Dixie Belle is her dachshund. Hazel Syvertsen was her friend.
FBI
Vikram Rangnekar is a supergeek and a friend of Jane’s. Jane’s mentor and friend had been Nathan Silverman, a section chief.
Booth Hendrickson is from the Department of Justice, and he has a leading role. He’ll become John Congrieve in Iron Furnace. His moles in Minnesota include Huey Darnell, a drunken jerk; Hassan Zaghari who is quite happy to kill anyone; and, Kernan Beedle of the odorous body. Eva Kleitner is the director of a lab in Virginia.
Reseda, California
John and Judy White, a.k.a., Pete and Lois Jones, are Syrian refugees who provide any kind of weapon or alternate ID you could want.
Nogales, Arizona
It’s because of a serial killer, Marcus Paul Headsman, that Jane knows about Enrique de Soto, a black-market car dealer.
Texas
Ancel and Clare Hawk run Hawk Ranch in Texas and are Nick’s parents and very supportive of Jane. Donner is Ancel’s favorite horse. Juan Saba is the ranch manager; Marie is his wife. Chase Longrin had been Nick’s best friend in high school. He married Alexis Aimes. Leland and Nadine Sacket are millionaires who started up a school and orphanage, the Sacket Home and School, with 139 children. They’re also Nick’s godparents. Kelsey Bodine is one of the Sackets’ success stories.
Iron Furnace, Kentucky, is…
…The Town Where It’s Always Christmas on Iron Furnace Lake, a town with a very upscale resort, Iron Furnace Lake Resort, owned by Terra Firma Enterprises which is owned by Apoidea Trust. Derek Lennox-Heywood is a director of the trust. Stacia O’Dell is the concierge and event coordinator at the resort.
There had been eight children under sixteen in the Iron Furnace “sanitarium”: Harley Higgins is fourteen and constantly working on escape; Sally Ingram is seven; Nora Rhinehart is eight; the fragile Jimmy Cole is ten; Tom Proctor; Dulciana Moss prays to God for help because he hasn’t, yet, betrayed her like her parents; Jenny Boone; and, Bobby Acuff. They’re all terrified. Bobby’s sister Rimona died, and wait’ll you read that one! Harley’s uncle and parents aren’t them anymore. Noreen, Walter, Seth Donner, George Woolsey, and Harvey are some of the people who work at the “school”. One for each prisone…, er, stude…, er, patient.
Martin Moses is an event planner with A Private Affair from Atlanta. Freya is a waitress; Lionel is her husband. Ben is the invented hubby. Dr. Wainwright is a veterinarian.
The Seedling Fund, founded and financed by T. Quinn Eubanks, put on a conference at Iron Furnace. Lisa Toska is the current primary officer of the fund.
Arkansas
Otis Faucheur has a booming business, the most stable criminal enterprise in the South, in the Ouachita Mountains. Margot is his third wife. Dozier is the son who had been on death row.
David James Michael inherited billions and keeps on making more; he has a plan for his Arcadia. He’s involved with the Seedling Fund, Aspasia, Volunteers for a Better Tomorrow, and Far Horizons where Sara Laura Sahoen and Henry Waldlock work.
Southern California
Lawrence Hannafin, a journalist, has been a widower for a year since his wife, Sakura, died.
Randall Larkin is a lawyer at [Carter] Woodbine, Kravitz, Larkin, and Benedetto. He has his own escape plans as Ormond Heimdall. He thinks no one knows about it. His second wife is Diamanta. Ellen is his secretary.
Wilson Faucheur is Otis’ son and an architect.
Jason Alan Drucklow is a licensed private detective, but mostly destroys reputations. Cammy Newton is his assistant and girlfriend. He’s currently being paid by Marshall Ackerman of Volunteers for a Better Tomorrow.
Aspasia is…
…a very elite whorehouse which employs girls who have been injected with the nanotech. It ensures they’ll do whatever you want.
Shenneck Technology had been…
…led by Bertold Shenneck who had invented a nanotech control device — from which there’s no coming back; he’s also partnered with D.J. Michael.
There are good Samaritans everywhere, including Foster Oswald with a ring tip and Bernard Riggowitz, a.k.a., Grandpa Bernie, whose wife, Miriam, died a year ago. Shem is Bernie’s brother. Not Lev.
Sandra Termindale is Holly and Lauren’s mother; Pamela is her mother. Roger and Palmer are old friends of Tillman’s who live in Des Moines. Jerry Hare is a greedy bellhop. Rayshaws are killing machines who care nothing about their lives.
__________________________________________________
It is a coincidence that ALICE THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS brings mirror-images to stories and today's neurological goals of mind-control through remote control microchips and nanobots inserted which has been MOVING FORWARD last century we discussed in detail the 1960s having CIA et al using our free love and drug culture to research LSD trips. The progression of these goals has today's SUGAR-CUBE LSD dosing producing paranoia and images in the mind of MIRRORS ------the feeling someone has planted technology in the brain to spy and control that person. This is what THE WHISPERING ROOM sets as a plot-----but it makes one believe those technology goals have gone further than they actually have.
Where use of nanobots tied to telemedicine does have the goals of planting neurological technology that will control behavior-----today's medical science is nowhere near this. Instead, as we saw in the video of Latin American 99% using these drugs----we see random neurological controls with no centralized behavior modification. These PHARMA used by global banking 1% OLD WORLD KINGS AND QUEENS being developed in BARBER SURGEON medical institutions are supposed to be CONTROLLED SUBSTANCES----but we see these video images of citizens taking these PHARMA released on streets in Asia---US ---Latin America, Africa.
THE RELEASE OF THESE EXPERIMENTAL PHARMA ARE NOT ACCIDENTS-----IT IS OPEN EXPERIMENTAL RESEARCH BY SOCIOPATHS MOVING FORWARD SPACE COLONIZATION.
We discussed that much of these few decades called INCREASED INCIDENCES OF SCHIZOPHRENIA were the same experimental MOVING FORWARD of planetary space colonization and mind-control goals of global 1% OLD WORLD KINGS AND QUEENS.
The experimental distribution of LSD-laced sugar cubes to our 99% of US poor citizens tied to corporate NGOs ----is what created much of what society has nicknamed TIN-FOIL HAT citizens.
Mirrors: Schizophrenia or devil's temptation?
Society » Anomalous phenomena
Remember scenes from horror movies where a character looks in the mirror and sees a completely unfamiliar face emerging out of it? Sometimes they see a reflection of a certain entity behind them. Where does this come from? Some explain this phenomenon by an optical illusion, others - deviations in the psyche, while others blame it on supernatural causes.
Italian psychologist Giovanni Caputo describes this phenomenon in detail in an article published in the journal Perception. To see someone else's face in the mirror, you need to stare at your own reflection in a dimly lit room. Optimal conditions for the experiment include a room lit only by a dim lamp (the author suggests a 25W bulb) placed behind your back, while the participant stares into a large mirror placed about 40 cm in front. Within a minute you will discover a "stranger."
Caputo invited 50 volunteers to participate in the experiment. At the end of a 10 minutes session of mirror gazing, the participants were asked to write what they saw in the mirror. 66% of 50 participants saw huge deformations of their own face. 18 % saw a parent's face with traits changed, of whom 8% were still alive and 10% were deceased. 28% saw an unknown person. 18% saw different animal faces such as a cat, pig, or lion, and 48% saw fantastical and monstrous beings.
According to Caputo, such effects may be a combination of visual distortion when the visual system again and again has to recognize the same images, which leads to changes in their interpretation.
The participants' emotional reactions to the changes were even more interesting. Approximately half of them reported that emergence of new faces in the mirror caused sensations that an unknown person was looking at them from within or beyond the mirror. Some participants felt that the "stranger" looked at them with a malign and scary expression; others thought that their stare was enigmatic, while the third group of the participants felt that the "stranger" was encouraging. If deceased family members appeared in the mirror, the participants often felt that they wanted to ask them a question. Monstrous beings produced fear or even horror. Dynamic deformations of new faces (like pulsations or shrinking, smiling or grinding) made the participants feel helpless before these creatures.
There is also an existing practice of telling fortune using mirrors when people try to predict who their soul mate would be. Biologist Mezentsev clearly stated in the "Encyclopedia of Miracles" that "mirror visions" is nothing more than a hallucination.
"What is the process like? he wrote. "Late in the evening, a girl is alone in a dark room lit by a small candle. She sits at a table, and trying not to move, she is staring into the dimly shining mirror surface. Time goes by, and gradually she falls into a drowsy state. Then, fleeting vision-images start popping in her "twilight" consciousness. There is no way to check what images the girl sees. Maybe there was no image, but she feels like there was one. In short, the nature of such illusions, "visions" is easily explained by the properties of our psyche."
Cases where the reflection in the mirror acts as an independent entity are more difficult to explain. For Svetlana N. of St. Petersburg a spiritual session was just a distraction on a boring Saturday night. She invited friends to her apartment. First they called the spirit of Pushkin, then Vysotsky, and a saucer moved in a circle while pointing at the letters of the alphabet, correctly answering their questions. And then Svetlana thought to call for her own spirit. When she uttered a spell she felt instant piercing pain.
The saucer on the table began to move, but the spirit replied in generalities. Soon her friends were bored with it, and the session was over. The guests began leaving and the host was left alone in her apartment. While washing dishes, Svetlana heard footsteps behind her. She looked around and saw a vague silhouette in the hallway. The figure slipped into the bathroom, where the lights came on and water gushed out of the tap. She gained courage to look in the bathroom and discovered that the tap was in off position, but there were water splashes in the sink. She looked in the mirror and was speechless when he saw herself in a dressing gown, while she knew that she had not had time to change after her guests had left. It seemed that the reflection was reaching for her, as if to grasp. Svetlana took a step back, and then some invisible hand started throwing items from the bathroom shelf at her. The woman had never engaged in spiritualism again.
_____________________________________________
What we liked about KOONTZ WHISPERING ROOM plots themes is looking from the helter-skelter of LSD-induced psychosis where neurological control left people completely uncontrolled and unpredictable-----to being the PODS in this novel----the complete opposite of where neurological research tied to LSD-VIRTUAL REALITY HIBERNATION has as a goal.
The medical goals of global banking 1% BARBER SURGEON 5% freemason/Greek pols and players is indeed using nanbots and telemedicine to meet that goal of controlled and predicable human behavior seen in the IRON FURNACE LAKE town in Kentucky.
The PHARMA and technology for any of these goals is nowhere close to achieving THE WHISPERING ROOM town of IRON FURNACE LAKE. What global banking 1% CLINTON/BUSH/OBAMA have released into our US societal structure is MIND-CONTROL practices that have existed all last century ------what was MANCHURIAN spies and espionage tools in hypnosis et al is indeed being unleashed on our general US 99% WE THE PEOPLE black, white, and brown citizen populations.
Don't be confused by the brutal techniques of far-right corporate fascism of last century thinking it is the current goals of LSD-VIRTUAL REALITY HIBERNATION and mind-control.
One of the characters in WHISPERING ROOM killed by those GLOBAL BANKING 2% 'ELITES'-----leaves the clue in her writing as to SPIDERS LAYING EGGS IN HER BRAIN.......ergo, nanobots attaching to her brain neurons.
Moving video shows what life with schizophrenia is ... -
Mirrorwww.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/moving-video-shows...
Moving video shows what life with schizophrenia is like ... with schizophrenia show another side to the image many ... dealing Sunday Mirror figures show ...
No matter how much global banking 1% sell the idea that all this brain neurology and telemedicine tied to remote microchip installation is about HELPING our 99% with disease vectors------WAKE UP! These global banking 5% players are SOCIOPATHS not caring for public health. We can see from all available research database that these goals of THE WHISPERING ROOM novel mind-control making people POD PEOPLE with erased memories is not even close to happening.
Mapping the mind with nanotechnology
The Brain Initiative is combining neuroscience with nanotechnology in the world's biggest project to understand the mind.
By Katharine Sanderson
Wed 29 May 2013 19.01 EDT First published on Wed 29 May 2013 19.01 EDT
An ambitious new science projects aims to unpick exactly what goes on in the brain at the level of individual neurons.
Photograph: Pete Saloutos/Corbis
In April this year President Obama announced a hugely ambitious science project, the "Brain" Initiative (Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies).
Obama was giving his support, and the promise of hard cash – $100m (£65m) in 2014 and up to billions of dollars in total – to a project that will last at least 10 years. The aim is to unpick exactly what goes on in the brain at the level of individual neurons, to see how the human brain deals with emotions, memories, actions, and consciousness.
To understand these complex phenomena, it turns out that nanotechnology is going to be crucial. "The brain has always been nano," says Paul Weiss, a nanoscientist at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), and one of the original instigators of the project. The brain's 100m neurons, and 100tn connections all work over nanometres, so to study the brain on its own scale nano-sized measuring techniques are absolutely necessary. But many of the technologies and tools that will be needed to probe the brain haven't even been dreamed up yet. Nanotechnologists need to get busy.
This unknown element of the Brain project is quite a contrast to other large collaborative science ventures, such as the Human Genome Project for example, which worked out the sequence of all the base pairs in the complete set of human DNA known as the genome. "The Human Genome Project had a fixed endpoint," says Anne Andrews, a nanotechnologist and neuroscientist also at UCLA. That isn't the case with the Brain Initiative: "We don't really know what we're going to find," she says. "We have to trust we'll know it when we see it."
But Andrews has a good idea of where she wants to look. She is investigating serotonin, one of about 100 neurotransmitters – small molecules that carry signals between neurons. Neurotransmitters are released and then need to be recognised by another molecule, a receptor, for their signal to be successfully transmitted. Serotonin is important for feelings of wellbeing, and most antidepressants work by controlling serotonin levels.
Andrews wants to track how concentrations of neurotransmitters change with time. Current technologies to look at these molecules can only give an average of the number of signals taking place at the same time. This is in part because the detectors cover areas of many micrometers rather than the nanometers that neurons transmit their signals. Andrews hopes that her work in collaboration with other nanotechnologists, including Weiss, will lead to sensors that are a few nanometres in size, and that can be used in parallel many at a time.
Andrews is hoping to tinker with the molecules on the surface of thin nanometre-wide silicon wires, or carbon nanotubes. Chemistry becomes important here, because artificial receptor molecules will have to be developed that can not only pick out single molecules of serotonin, but can also attach themselves to the surface of the nanoscale sensor and undergo a change that can be detected with light or electrically. "You can't just take a native receptor for serotonin and put it on a carbon nanotube," she explains. "It's going to be fairly challenging."
Preparing the surface of that nanomaterial to accept an artificial receptor is no mean feat either, says Weiss, but he and Andrews are working on ways to do it, by getting the materials to build themselves in a process called self assembly. Carefully designed molecules can join together and leave specific molecule-sized gaps for those receptors to bind to, he says.
Another member of the initial group who proposed what eventually became the Brain Initiative is Rafael Yuste, a neuroscientist at Columbia University, New York. Yuste is hoping to get a clearer picture of when and how neurons communicate by looking at the electrical signals they send out. There is a big gap between being able to look at a single, isolated neuron and looking at the average behaviour of the whole brain, or region of the brain that might be seen in a functional magnetic resonance image (fMRI), for example. "We need the in-between," Yuste says.
He thinks nanotechnology could begin to fill this gap. Nanoparticles that change somehow in response to voltage could convert the voltage that the neurons fire into an optical signal on the scale of a single neuron. The most sensitive materials to voltage changes are nano-sized diamonds, says Yuste. Perhaps, he suggests, nanodiamonds specially made with defects that make them change colour could be attached to single neurons, or sprayed into the whole brain. Then when a neuron fires its voltage signal, the nanodiamond would change colour and the signal recorded.
Other tiny nanoparticles made from semiconducting materials, called quantum dots, could be harnessed to report on happenings in the brain. These particles with specific luminescent properties could be altered by the voltage signal, if placed correctly in the brain. Of course, getting the signal back outside the brain is another challenge of any of these technologies.
When thinking of brain manipulation, electrodes spring to mind. And the Brain Initiative could also bring advances in this technology. Instead of the arrays of 64 electrodes possible with current technology, nanotech could give arrays of 100,000 or so electrodes, all nanometres across and so perfectly placed to pick up signals from single neurons. Yuste thinks that these materials could also be altered on their surfaces, bringing in the work Andrews is focused on, to pick up chemical changes in the brain as well.
Weiss has another ambition – he wants the project to go beyond reading out what the brain does during certain activities. He wants the project to advance to the point where it's possible to stimulate the brain and then read out the response.
If some of the ideas Weiss, Andrews and Yuste are thinking about sound vague at the moment, that's because they don't exist yet. "In short timescales we'll focus on existing technologies," says Yuste, "but in five to 10 years' time we'll see new types of technologies that we don't know about now."
What's clear is that nanotechnology will be the only way to get a clear picture about how the brain works. With that knowledge, new therapies and drugs will be easier to develop, and the human brain might begin to become less enigmatic.
_________________________________________________
THE WHISPERING ROOM as part of its plot creates a business venue of course where women are made POD PEOPLE having no ability to stop being submissive handing complete control to those 5% global banking players to do as they want with women.
Even the hypnosis that has existed all last century was sketchy as to the ability first to hypnotize----then to control to such an extent people not wanting to be controlled. So, is there sex trade businesses where women have had their minds SCRUBBED to be hopelessly confined as sex slaves? NO-----the old-fashion PIMP practice of getting women addicted to drugs and keeping them in drug-induced submission----YES.
WE WANT TO BE CLEAR THAT MOVING FORWARD DOES INDEED HAVE THESE GOALS OF NANOBOT, REMOTE-CONTROLLED MICROCHIP VIRTUAL REALITY MIND-CONTROL----BUT NONE OF THIS EXISTS AND MAY NEVER BE DEVELOPED.
Talking to people that like to be hypnotised for sex
Here we find out more about trance-sexuality, the practice of being put under a spell in the bedroom
When you think of hypnosis, you may think Covent Garden illusionists, badly made spiral gifs on Tumblr, swinging pocket watches and campy vampire movies. But hypnotism has its place in the bedroom – specifically in a world of extreme fetishism and enhanced submissive/dominant relationships in BDSM environments. People are getting off on being psychologically conditioned to pleasure one or other.
Hypnofetishism is the act of inducing some kind of trance or mindful state that possesses a sexually submissive individual to feel and act a certain way, whether blank and mindless or impersonal and obedient. By using NLP (Neuro Linguistic Programming) to psychologically condition predictions and assumptions into the mind of a submissive, some trained individuals – armed with trigger words and demands – are able to undergo hypnosis in the sheets.
There is a wide variety of things that can be done with hypnosis, both erotically and otherwise. Hypnofetishism is about creating or amplifying sensations and invoking a near-catatonic state before engaging in sexual activity as an entranced individual.
Trance sexuality goes significantly deeper than just an exaggerated sub/dom relationship and raises a myriad of questions: can someone really consent to be in a condition where they cannot consent, and how do these ‘con non-con’ relationships work? It is, in theory, simple. ‘Con non-con’ scenarios involve a universal agreement made beforehand to either ignore or allow the usual rules of consent, perhaps including commands to stop. The act of hypnosis itself is erotic and relationship-affirming for many “power exchange” couples as the subject surrenders control and opens themselves to vulnerability.
To find out more, we speak to three hypnofetishists who use the practice to fulfil their erotic desires in a world where pleasure is obedience and obedience is pleasure.
JASON MITCHELL, MALE (DOMINANT)
I was always fascinated by the concept of hypnosis, even as a kid. I’d see stuff on daytime talk shows and something about it just grabbed me. When I turned eighteen I started exploring some of the online communities. Typically (in sex), hypnosis is performed before any bedroom activities to establish post-hypnotic suggestions and put in place post-hypnotic triggers too. For example, inhibiting or controlling orgasms with a simple word or phrase. Or, maybe you're feeling a bit shy and hypnosis can help you create a persona to play out fantasies and help you relax.
Communication is key. I have two partners that I work with very closely and that I know very well. We have an agreement for non-consensual consent. But this is because we have clearly communicated limits and they trust that I will not cross any lines, nor would I ever think to take advantage of that trust.
“I absolutely love watching someone’s facial muscles relax and smooth out, particularly when eyes begin to roll up. Reaching that depth and intimacy is just wonderful for me”
That being said, one of my favorite quotes from a good friend of mine that I've started using as well is: "Despite that quote that ‘consent is sexy”, consent isn't sexy. It’s mandatory and the mark of a decent human being!”. When we are learning there are little mistakes that may be made. I’ve had people hide psychological conditions from me in the past. Those can cause bad reactions (also referred to as abreactions) while the subject is under hypnosis.
I absolutely love watching someone’s facial muscles relax and smooth out, particularly when eyes begin to roll up. Reaching that depth and intimacy is just wonderful for me. It’s also a huge turn on to use post-hypnotic triggers and suggestions and watch my play partner’s reactions change as they get more and more into the scene.
What’s been absolutely wonderful is how much more accepted hypnosis as a concept and form of entertainment or therapy has become in the last few years. It’s made the idea and concept of it much easier to bring up. Every year there’s more and more videos on YouTube, along with numerous books published.
__________________________________________
This is pure propaganda coming from far-right wing global banking HUFFINGTON POST. Today's brain research is nowhere near this-----it is not even able to finish mapping THE BRAIN----has very little ability to rewire one set of neurological regions with another.
We want to look in detail where global banking 5% BARBER SURGEONS are in MOVING FORWARD these LSD VIRTUAL REALITY HIBERNATION structures they intend to use on space travellers going to distant planets and moons like MARS AND CERES.
THE BRAIN mapping started in REAGAN ERA -----has indeed progressed. The knowledge of how brain receptors work, how the brain circuitry is wired, how to intervene to address one malfunction has MOVED FORWARD. What we do hear from REAL left social progressive PUBLIC INTEREST scientists is THE BRAIN is too complicated for any of this technology to work as global banking 1% OLD WORLD KINGS AND QUEENS have as a goal.
The GOAL of paralyzing people and pushing them into hibernation for space travel to planetary mining slave colonies is REAL ------99% WE THE PEOPLE will be exposed to experimentation towards those goals---we will see people left damaged from that experimentation------it will be that damage from experimentation, not REAL CONTROL OF THE BRAIN which will frighten our US 99% of citizens.
One thing we liked in THE WHISPERING ROOM is the constant reference by leading hero characters of what is called 'elite' and 'INTELLIGENT' as KURZWEIL below are sociopaths trying to make themselves and others believe they are.
'About Ray Kurzweil
kurzweiltech.com/aboutray.html
Ray Kurzweil is one of the world’s leading inventors, thinkers, and futurists, with a thirty-year track record of accurate predictions.Called "the restless genius" by The Wall Street Journal and "the ultimate thinking machine" by Forbes magazine, Kurzweil was selected as one of the top entrepreneurs by Inc. magazine, which described him as ... '
Ray Kurzweil: In The 2030s, Nanobots In Our Brains Will Make Us ‘Godlike’
Once we’re cyborgs, he says, we’ll be funnier, sexier and more loving.
Kathleen Miles HUFFINGTON POST
10/01/2015 08:47 am ET Updated Oct 26, 2017
Futurist and inventor Ray Kurzweil predicts humans are going to develop emotions and characteristics of higher complexity as a result of connecting their brains to computers.
“We’re going to be funnier. We’re going to be sexier. We’re going to be better at expressing loving sentiment,” Kurzweil said at a recent discussion at Singularity University. He is involved in developing artificial intelligence as a director of engineering at Google but was not speaking on behalf of the company.
Kurzweil predicts that in the 2030s, human brains will be able to connect to the cloud, allowing us to send emails and photos directly to the brain and to back up our thoughts and memories. This will be possible, he says, via nanobots — tiny robots from DNA strands — swimming around in the capillaries of our brain. He sees the extension of our brain into predominantly nonbiological thinking as the next step in the evolution of humans — just as learning to use tools was for our ancestors.
And this extension, he says, will enhance not just our logical intelligence but also our emotional intelligence. “We’re going to add more levels to the hierarchy of brain modules and create deeper levels of expression,” he said. To demonstrate, he gave a hypothetical scenario with Google co-founder Larry Page.
“So I’m walking along, and I see Larry Page coming, and I think, ‘I better think of something clever to say.’ But my 300 million modules in my neocortex isn’t going to cut it. I need a billion in two seconds. I’ll be able to access that in the cloud — just like I can multiply intelligence with my smartphone thousands fold today.”
In addition to making us cleverer in hallways, connecting our brains to the Internet will also make each of us more unique, he said.
“Right now, we all have a very similar architecture to our thinking,” Kurzweil said. “When we can expand it without the limitations of a fixed enclosure” — he pointed to his head — “we we can actually become more different.”
“People will be able to very deeply explore some particular type of music in far greater degree than we can today. It’ll lead to far greater individuality, not less.”
This view is in stark contrast to a common perception, often portrayed in science fiction, that cyborg technologies make us more robotic, less emotional and less human. This concern is expressed by Dr. Miguel Nicolelis, head of neuroengineering at Duke University, who fears that if we rely too much on machines, we’ll lose diversity in human behavior because computers operate in black and white — ones and zeros — without diversion.
We’re going to expand the brain’s neocortex and become more godlike.But Kurzweil believes that being connected to computers will make us more human, more unique and even godlike.
“Evolution creates structures and patterns that over time are more complicated, more knowledgable, more creative, more capable of expressing higher sentiments, like being loving,” he said. “It’s moving in the direction of qualities that God is described as having without limit.”
ALL THIS COMING FROM GLOBAL BANKING 1% AND OLD WORLD KINGS AND QUEENS WHO HAVE DNA THAT HAS NOT EVOLVED FROM 3000 BC. THEY ARE IDIOTS.
“So as we evolve, we become closer to God. Evolution is a spiritual process. There is beauty and love and creativity and intelligence in the world — it all comes from the neocortex. So we’re going to expand the brain’s neocortex and become more godlike.”
But will brain nanobots actually move out of science fiction and into reality, or are they doomed to the fate of flying cars? Like Kurzweil, Nicholas Negroponte, founder of the MIT Media Lab, thinks that nanobots in our brains could be the future of learning, allowing us, for example, to load the French language into the bloodstream of our brains. James Friend, a professor of mechanical engineering at UC San Diego focused on medical nanotechnology, thinks that we’re only two to five years away from being able to effectively use brain nanobots, for example to prevent epileptic seizures.
However, getting approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration would likely be very difficult, Friend told The WorldPost. He thinks approval would take “anywhere from only a few years to never happening because of people being concerned about swimming mysterious things into your head and leaving them there,” he said.
Other scientists are skeptical that brain nanobots will be safe and effective anytime soon or at all, largely due to how little we currently understand about how the brain works. One such scientist is David Linden, professor of neuroscience at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, who thinks the timing of Kurzweil’s estimation that nanobots will be in our brains in the 2030s is premature. Linden says there are huge obstacles, such as adding a nanobot power source, evading cells that attack foreign bodies and avoiding harming the proteins and sugars in the tiny spaces between brain cells.
Although the science is far from application in brains, nanotechnology has long been heralded as a potential game changer in medicine, and the research is advancing. Last year, researchers injected into living cockroaches DNA nanobots that were able to follow specific instructions, including dispensing drugs, and this year, nanobots were injected into the stomach lining of mice.
And we are learning how to enhance our brains, albeit not with nanobots. Researchers have already successfully sent a message from one human brain to another, by stimulating the brains from the outside using electromagnetic induction. In another study, similar brain stimulation made people learn math faster. And in a recent U.S. government study, a few dozen people who were given brain implants that delivered targeted shocks to their brain scored better on memory tests.
We’re already implanting thousands of humans with brain chips, such as Parkinson’s patients who have a brain chip that enables better motor control and deaf people who have a cochlear implant, which enables hearing. But when it comes to enhancing brains without disabilities and for nonmedical purposes, ethical and safety concerns arise. And according to a survey last year, 72 percent of Americans are not interested in a brain implant that could improve memory or mental capacity.
Yet, some believe enhancement of healthy brains is inevitable, including Christof Koch, chief scientific officer of the Allen Institute for Brain Science, and Gary Marcus, professor of psychology at New York University. They use the analogy of breast implants — breast surgery was developed for post-mastectomy reconstruction and correcting congenital defects but has since become popular for breast augmentation. Brain implants could follow the same path, they say.
Here are Kurzweil’s answers to a couple of the questions he took at the Singularity University discussion:
You have predicted that in 2029, we will reach the singularity — the point at which artificial intelligence outpaces human intelligence. Your opening remarks suggest that you’re fundamentally positive about AI in the post-2029 world. Other speakers have been a little more ambivalent, certainly regarding the future of employment. Would you elaborate on your overall sentiment on the post-2029 world?
I’ve actually written about the dangers of AI more than most. But I’m also optimistic, having looked at the positive impact that technology has had on human life.
When it comes to the existential threat of AI, the primary strategy comes from governance and social systems. We will have conflict between different groups of humans, each enhanced by AI. We have that today with humans using intelligent weapons. The best tool we have to combat that is to continue to work on our democracy, liberty and respect for each other.
When it comes to potential unemployment caused by AI, it’s always been the case that we can clearly see the jobs that are going away. This started 200 years ago in the textile industry in England. The weavers, who had enjoyed a business model passed down for centuries, were suddenly losing their jobs to machines that could spin thread or weave cloth. You could look at almost every job, and it would not be long before it’d be automated. The reality is that employment went up, and prosperity went up. The common man or woman, rather than just having one shirt, could now have a whole wardrobe. Life became better, and there were actually more jobs.
If I were a futurist in 1900 and said, “OK, about [40 percent] of you work on farms and a third work in factories. I predict, by the year [2012], only about two percent of us will work on farms and [nine percent] in factories,” everyone would go, “Oh my God, we’re going to be out of work!” I’d say, “Don’t worry. You’re going to get new jobs creating apps, web sites, chip designs and data analysis” — nobody would have any idea what I’m talking about.
We’re destroying jobs at the bottom of the skill ladder and creating new jobs at the top. We’ve invested more in education in the U.S. over the last century. We’ve increased per capita investment in K-12 education significantly. We had 50,000 college students in 1870; we have [20 million] today.
It’s a difficult political situation because people can see the jobs that are going away, and that’s painful. You say, “Well but there will be new jobs,” and people say, “What new jobs?” And you say, “Well, I don’t know; they haven’t been invented yet.” It’s kind of a weak argument. But it’s true.
We’re also creating jobs that move up Maslow’s hierarchy so we can spend more time doing things that give us gratification. People a century ago for the most part were happy if they could have a job and provide for their family. Today, to an increasing degree, people get gratification from what they’re doing. They look for a career that meets their passion — lots of people are pursuing entrepreneurial ideas. We have 20 million college students and an equal amount of people who teach them and support that infrastructure, all to think about knowledge and organize knowledge. That’s not something people spent much time doing a century or two ago — we’re going to keep moving in that direction.
In the 2030s, we will be able to send nanobots into living people’s brains and extract memories of people who have passed away.Most things are becoming information technology, including clothing, which will be printed on 3-D printers. We’ll be able to grow food in vertical agriculture and print it on 3-D printers, which are pennies for pounds. In the 2020s, 3-D printing designs will be open source and free so you can live extremely well and print out everything you need, including printing out houses.
People say, “Great, there goes all these industries, like fashion and construction.” But look at industries that have already gone from physical products to digital products, like music, movies and books. There’s an open source market with millions of free products but people still spend money to read Harry Potter, see the latest blockbuster and buy music from their favorite artist. Fueled by the ease of distribution and promotion, you have a coexistence of a free open-source market and a proprietary market. That’s the direction we’re moving in.
I can’t actually describe exactly what the new jobs will be but they will be more gratifying. We are already redefining the nature of work. I don’t feel like I’m working when I go to Google because I’m doing what I’m passionate about. A lot of people today don’t like their jobs. So why are people so upset if these jobs go away? We’ve created a society where you need a job to have a livelihood. But that’s going to be redefined. We’re going to have the means of providing an extremely high standard of living to everyone easily within 15 to 20 years.
In the documentary about yourself, you are preparing yourself to transcend your death. How do you explain your theory of immortality?
In the film “Transcendent Man,” I talk about bringing back my father, Frederick Kurzweil. I’m writing a book now called The Singularity Is Nearer, and I’m talking about this concept of a replicant, where we bring back someone who has passed away. It’ll go through several different stages. First, we’ll create an avatar based on emails, text messages, letters, video, audio and memories of the person. Let’s say in 2025, it’ll be somewhat realistic but not really the same. But some people do actually have an interest in bringing back an unrealistic replicant of someone they loved.
By the 2030s, the AIs will be able to create avatars that will seem very close to a human who actually lived. We can take into consideration their DNA. In the 2030s, we will be able to send nanobots into living people’s brains and extract memories of people who have passed away. Then you can really make them very realistic.
I have collected and keep many boxes of information about my father. I have his letters, music, 8mm movies and my fading memories of him. It will be possible to create a very realistic avatar in a virtual environment or augmented reality. When you actually interact with an avatar physically, it will ultimately pass a Frederick Kurzweil Turing test ― meaning he’ll be indistinguishable from our memories of the actual Frederick Kurzweil.
___________________________________________
None of these predictions on depletion of our MEDICARE TRUST as our SOCIAL SECURITY TRUST are real. These few decades of ROBBER BARON CLINTON/BUSH/OBAMA was nothing but global banking 1% sacking and looting of these public trusts using our US 99% WE THE PEOPLE medical savings accounts and retirement funds to expand medical corporations globally. AFFORDABLE CARE ACT was that dismantling of our strong US first world quality of health care and yes, already tens of millions of US citizens are dying from lack of ordinary health care for everyday disease vectors. These FAKE NEWS predictions on how long these MEDICARE AND SOCIAL SECURITY TRUSTS will last are only propaganda trying to keep our 99% of senior baby boomers thinking they will be able to access what they saved all their lives to cover themselves in old age.
When we understand that CLINTON/BUSH/OBAMA were FAR-RIGHT WING GLOBAL BANKING 1% EXTREME WEALTH EXTREME POVERTY----we understand no policies they promote or install are to HELP PUBLIC HEALTH. That is why we KNOW the public health policies MOVING FORWARD are not MEDICARE FOR ALL-----are not brain medical technologies designed to help people with addictions ---or to turn all of us into INTELLECTUAL GODS. The only goals of TELEMEDICINE, NANOBOT, LSD-VIRTUAL REALITY HIBERNATION is advancing SMART CITIES DEEP, DEEP, REALLY DEEP STATE control of 99% WE THE PEOPLE and to advance space travel planetary mining slave colonies.
HUNDREDS OF BILLIONS OF DOLLARS EACH YEAR FOR THESE FEW DECADES OF MEDICARE AND MEDICAID FRAUD WOULD INDEED EMPTY THESE TRUSTS.
Medicare’s Trust Fund Is Set to Run Out in 8 Years. Social Security, 16.
The Medicare trust fund will be depleted in 2026, the administration said. By contrast, the government said last year that the trust fund would be exhausted in 2029.
CreditDamon Winter/The New York TimesBy Robert Pear
- June 5, 2018
The projections are the first from the administration since President Trump signed a $1.5 trillion tax cut into law in December. They show no sign that a burst of economic growth will significantly improve the finances of the government’s largest entitlement programs.
The Medicare trust fund will be depleted in 2026, the administration said. By contrast, the government said last year that the trust fund would be exhausted in 2029.
In a companion report, federal officials said the Social Security Trust Funds for old-age benefits and disability insurance, taken together, could be depleted in 2034, the same year projected in last year’s report. The fund that helps tens of millions of retirees is expected to be depleted a year earlier than projected last year, while the outlook for the disability trust fund is more favorable.
Still, tax collections would be sufficient to pay about three-fourths of promised Social Security benefits for 75 years.
The report, prepared mostly by nonpolitical actuaries and economists, predicts a 2.4 percent increase in Social Security benefits next year, to keep up with the cost of living. The increase this year was 2 percent.
More than 60 million people are on Social Security, Medicare or both. The two programs account for about 40 percent of all federal spending.
But Mr. Trump has paid relatively little attention to either program, declining to embrace a major restructuring of Social Security or Medicare, as some previous Republican presidents have. Nor has he endorsed higher taxes to finance the programs, as some Democrats have suggested.
Trump administration officials instead are counting on a strong economy to improve the solvency of Social Security and Medicare.
“The administration’s economic agenda — tax cuts, regulatory reform and improved trade agreements — will generate the long-term growth needed to help secure these programs,” Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said Tuesday.
So far that does not appear to have happened, to judge from the annual report of the trustees of Social Security and Medicare, a group that includes three Trump cabinet officers.
The report said the less favorable outlook for Medicare’s hospital trust fund resulted from “adverse changes” in program income and costs. Income to the Medicare fund is expected to be lower than estimated last year because of “lower payroll taxes attributable to lowered wages in 2017 and lower levels of projected gross domestic product,” the Treasury said in a “fact sheet” accompanying the report.
At the same time, it said, outlays from Medicare’s hospital trust fund “are expected to be higher than last year’s estimates due to higher-than-anticipated spending in 2017, legislation that increases hospital spending” and higher payments to private Medicare Advantage plans.
“The current trajectories in health spending are both unsustainable and unmatched by increases in quality,” Alex M. Azar II, the secretary of health and human services and a trustee of Medicare and Social Security, said on Tuesday.
The Congressional Budget Office said in April that federal deficits and debt would soar in the coming decade, following passage of the tax overhaul and legislation to increase military and domestic spending.
Democrats have for months asserted that Republicans would use the deficit — swollen by tax cuts — as “an excuse to cut Social Security and Medicare,” in the words of Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the Democratic leader. Republicans say the programs must be revamped to ensure they will be solvent for baby boomers and their children.
The report said the 2017 tax law would have relatively modest effects on the finances of Medicare and Social Security.
About half of Social Security beneficiaries owe some income tax on their benefits. This revenue will be lower than previously expected while the cuts in individual tax rates are in effect through 2025, the actuaries said. But after that, they said, revenue from the taxation of benefits will be somewhat higher than expected because the tax law alters the way in which income tax brackets will be adjusted for inflation.
In addition, the tax law repealed the penalty for people who go without health insurance. As a result, the report said, Medicare payments to certain hospitals for “uncompensated care” are expected to increase.
Another factor contributing to the increase in Medicare costs is Congress’s decision last year to eliminate the Independent Payment Advisory Board, created by the Affordable Care Act to help slow the growth of Medicare.
The trustees said the outlook for Social Security’s disability trust fund had improved because the number of applications had declined steadily since 2010 and the total number of beneficiaries had been falling since 2014. In addition, they said, average benefit levels for disabled workers “were lower than expected in 2017 and are expected to be lower in the future.”
Medicare now spends an average of about $13,600 a year per beneficiary, and in five years the annual cost is expected to average more than $17,000, the report said.
The standard Medicare premium paid by most beneficiaries is expected to rise next year by just $1.50 a month, to $135.50. But for the most affluent beneficiaries — those with annual incomes exceeding about $160,000 — the premium is expected to be about $460 a month.
Federal officials predict that enrollment in private Medicare Advantage plans will continue growing at a rapid clip, to 29 million in 2027, from 20 million last year.
A major reason for Social Security’s long-term financial problems is a decline in the number of workers for each beneficiary.
In 1960, there were about five workers for every Social Security beneficiary. The ratio of workers to beneficiaries fell to 3.3 in 2005 and then to 2.8 in 2016. It will decline further to about 2.2 by 2035, when most baby boomers will have retired, officials said.
The aging of the population is another factor in the growth of the two entitlement programs. The number of Medicare beneficiaries is expected to surge to 87 million in 2040, from 60 million this year, according to Medicare actuaries. And the number of people on Social Security is expected to climb to 90 million, from 62 million, in the same period.
Speaker Paul D. Ryan has repeatedly tried to overhaul entitlement programs, converting Medicare into a voucherlike program that could shift more retirees to private insurance and turning Medicaid into a block grant to state governments. He has faced bipartisan opposition to that effort, but many Republicans say they hope to continue the push after he retires next year.
For their part, Democrats hope to expand Social Security, to address what they see as a looming crisis in retirement income.
“We will fight every effort to cut, privatize or weaken Social Security, including attempts to raise the retirement age, diminish benefits by cutting cost-of-living adjustments or reducing earned benefits,” the 2016 Democratic platform said. “Democrats will expand Social Security.”
The trustees of the two programs — the secretaries of the Treasury, labor and health and human services and the Social Security commissioner — normally unveil the annual report at a news conference. But none of the four attended the press briefing this year.
________________________________________________
We work hard to expose how what are called today ELITE INTELLECTUALS AND BUSINESS MEN are simply figure heads of global 1% and their 2% using our US Federal employees who are indeed GEEKS AND GENIUS and attributing their research and development to themselves. GATES, ELON MUSK all having bought and privately patenting computer technology developed by US military ----MIT has been partnered with global banking finance and military having been taken control of by foreign sovereignty of MALTA ----
TELEMEDINE, NANOBOT brain technology, the goals of LSD virtual reality hibernation to transport planetary mining slaves is indeed a GLOBAL MILITARY COMPLEX goal.
KURZWEIL is quite the myth-making propagandist-----he is indeed the CARL SAGAN of media creation making everyone think all these objectives are MOVING FORWARD. If anyone is tied to MIT----if we see them on TED TALKS----we know they are FAKE NEWS.
'MIT AGI: Future of Intelligence (Ray Kurzweil)
This is a talk by Ray Kurzweil for course 6.S099: Artificial…
youtube.com'
The article below is long but please glance through to see last century's propagandist for science as Kurzweil is today. These are science HISTORICAL FICTIONISTS. They are paid to be global banking 1% freemason LITERARY STARS creating stories to sell to the US 99% WE THE PEOPLE there are indeed scientific gains being made to justify trillions of dollars in Federal taxes funding these project goals. CARL SAGAN'S science stories were great science fiction-----Kurzweil is telling all kinds of great science fiction as well for the same reason---to create reasons to keep sending trillions of dollars to research for space colonization technology that is highly likely never to be developed.
'But Dr. Sagan wasn’t born a thousand years ago or in a primitive culture. He was born in this century, during the great depression, and he has become perhaps the most popular and the most effective propagandist for science in the twentieth century. His function is, of course, to make myths and tell tall tales, but to do it with such a flourish of scientific legerdemain and eloquence that the credulous are easily and thoroughly convinced of the truth of his scientific sagas'.
This article is of course tied to FREEMASONRY making connections to GOD and BIBLICAL mysticism. Global banking 1% will not reach these goals---but they sure will kill, damage, create societal structures that are brutal for our US 99% WE THE PEOPLE and our new immigrant citizens trying to get there.
This article is long but please glance through to see how global banking 1% freemason STAR LITERARY science fiction is used to paint the idea of what SCIENCE FOR SCIENCE SAKE is MOVING FORWARD may be a reality some day.
The Sagan of Science
John W. Robbins Had Dr. Carl Sagan been born in any other century, he would have been known as a teller of stories, a spinner of yarns, a maker of myths. Some of his listeners would have been skeptical; most would have hung on his every word, believing them all to be true, just as they do today. He is a talented storyteller.
But Dr. Sagan wasn’t born a thousand years ago or in a primitive culture. He was born in this century, during the great depression, and he has become perhaps the most popular and the most effective propagandist for science in the twentieth century. His function is, of course, to make myths and tell tall tales, but to do it with such a flourish of scientific legerdemain and eloquence that the credulous are easily and thoroughly convinced of the truth of his scientific sagas. Of course, he doesn’t start from scratch with his readers. They have been prepared for a hundred years by other storytellers: The Huxleys, Charles Darwin, Ernst Haeckel, Jacob Bronowski, and Isaac Asimov, to mention just a few.
According to the Oxford English Dictionary, a Sagan is a deputy of the Jewish High Priest; he is the second highest functionary of the Temple. In this century, since our religion is science and our temples are laboratories, Dr. Sagan’s name is, appropriately and ironically enough, an accurate description of his function. He is a prominent member of the new scientific priesthood, as anyone can see by looking at his credentials. Dr. Sagan’s name is as fitting for his work as Cardinal Jaime Sin’s name is for his, and Larry Speakes’ name is for his. One can be amused by God’s sense of humor in causing these men to bear the names they do.
Carl Sagan is David Duncan Professor of Astronomy and Space Sciences and director of the Laboratory for Planetary Studies at Cornell University. According to his biography, he has played a leading role in the Mariner, Viking, and Voyager expeditions to the planets, for which he received the NASA medal for exceptional scientific achievement; the International Astronautics Prize, the Prix Galabert; the NASA medal for distinguished public service (twice); and the John F. Kennedy Astronautics Award. Sagan’s Peabody and Emmy Award-winning thirteen-part government television series, Cosmos, has been seen by more than 250 mil lion people in sixty countries. The book that Sagan wrote to accompany the television series is the best selling science book ever published in the English language. Dr. Sagan has won the Pulitzer Prize for another book, The Dragons of Eden; the Joseph Priestly Award “For Distinguished Contributions to the Welfare of Mankind”; and the Leo Szilard Award for Physics in the public interest for his contribution to the discovery of nuclear winter. He is past chairman of the division for Planetary Sciences of the American Astronomical Society, past president of the Planetology Section of the American Geophysical Union, and was editor in chief of Icarus (the leading professional journal devoted to planetary research) for twelve years. Sagan is the author of more than four hundred scientific and popular articles, and the author, editor, and co-author of more than a dozen books: The Cosmic Connection: An Extraterrestrial Perspective; Cosmos; Comet; The Dragons of Eden; Broca’s Brain; Contact; Murmurs of Earth; Intelligent Life in the Universe; UFO’S: A Scientific Debate; Communication with Extraterrestrial Intelligence; The Cold and the Dark: The World After Nuclear War; Other Worlds; and Mars and the Mind of Man.
Isaac Asimov, another writer of science fiction and a popularizer of science (Asimov has written hundreds of books and produces half a dozen or so new books each year), surpasses Sagan in quantity of output; but Sagan, in academic and scientific respectability, surpasses Asimov and all other contenders for the title of Chief Propagandist for Science. Only one other contemporary propagandist for science comes close, Stephen Jay Gould of Harvard, but Dr. Gould has yet to host a government television series and spend millions of dollars in tax revenues spinning scientific sagas for worldwide consumption.
In discussing Sagan’s views, we are not speaking of a man on the fringes of science or academia, but the views of a man who holds a full professorship at one of the nation’s leading universities; who has worked closely with the government scientific establishment, including NASA and the National Science Foundation; and who has won the praise of the scientific establishment and the fervid following of millions of readers and television viewers. Simply because Sagan is so praised and so popular, it is necessary to examine his views. He is, if not the high priest of modern science, then the deputy high priest, just as his name implies.
Dogmatism
Like a priest, Dr. Sagan is given to making dogmatic statements. The first line of his best-selling book Cosmos is an ipsedixitism: “The Cosmos is all that is or ever was or ever will be.” The statement is not argued; no evidence is presented for our consideration; no hint is given that this statement is open to revision of even the mildest sort. The Sagan has spoken; so let it be written; so let it be done. This tone of dogmatic finality appears in all his books, and while it contradicts what he has to say about science, it is fundamental to his duties as a high priest of science.
A few pages later (8), Sagan tells us that “the laws of nature are the same throughout the cosmos.” He repeats the assertion several times throughout his books. He does not tell us how he knows that. It too is an unsupported assertion, and like a mythmaker and priest, Sagan offers no evidence for the assertion. What evidence could he offer? He had already told us (Cosmos, 4) that “the size and age of the cosmos are beyond ordinary human understanding ... [the cosmos] is the greatest of mysteries.” Perhaps the Sagan is claiming greater than ordinary human understanding.
A few more pages into Cosmos we read: “there must be many such worlds [where the matter of the cosmos has become alive and aware] scattered through space” (12). The Sagan does not offer any evidence for this oracular assertion. It is easy to understand why: There isn’t any. But the lack of evidence has never stopped priests, and Sagan continues. He is convinced that evolution occurred not only on Earth, but on billions of other planets as well. “The initial chemical constituents for the origin of life are the most abundant molecules in the universe. Something like the processes that on Earth led to man must have happened billions of other times in the history of our galaxy. There must be other starfolk.... There must be, I think, many places in the galaxy where there are beings far more advanced than we in science and technology, in politics, ethics, poetry, and music” (The Cosmic Connection, 257-258). He asserts that “evolution is a fact, not a theory” (Cosmos, 27). The mechanism of evolution, natural selection, is a “great discovery” made by Charles Darwin and Alfred Russell Wallace. “We are,” he writes, presumably not in tending to speak only of himself and his co-author, “the products of a long series of biological accidents.... We know that the atoms that make us up were synthesized in the interiors of previous generations of dying stars” (The Cosmic Connection, 52). The Earth itself “condensed out of interstellar gas and dust some 4.6 billion years ago” (Cosmos, 30). The early history of Earth is equally open to the penetrating gaze of Sagan: “In the early history of our planet, however, ... enormous amounts of organic molecules were being produced by sunlight in a hydrogen rich atmosphere, ... some similar chemistry must have occurred on a billion other worlds in the Milky Way Galaxy. The molecules of life fill the cosmos” (Cosmos, 40).
Assertions such as these are not true; they are not even good science. They are the stuff that legends and myths are made of, and one cannot understand the importance of Sagan’s work unless one realizes its function as a new scientific mythology.
His dogmatism extends from discourses about what “must” have happened on billions of planets and what “must” have happened on Earth billions of years ago to the details of evolution and the remote future. “We have five fingers,” writes Dr. Sagan, “because we have descended from a Devonian fish that had five phalanges or bones in its fins” (Cosmos, 282). Not only does Dr. Sagan know where fingers came from, he knows toes as well: “They are clearly evolved from fingerlike appendages for grasping and swinging, like those of arboreal apes and monkeys” (The Dragons of Eden, 4). Nothing could be clearer than the origin of fingers and toes, unless, of course, it is the evolution of the neocortex: “Finally, surmounting the rest of the brain, and clearly the most recent evolutionary accretion, is the neocortex” (Dragons, 58). Even the pain of childbirth is transparent to the remarkable intelligence of Dr. Sagan: “So far as I know, childbirth is generally painful in only one of the millions of species on Earth: human beings. This must be a consequence of the recent and continuing increase in cranial volume” (Dragons, 97). Not to let a swelled head get in the way of science (in fact, Sagan would argue that a swelled head is the cause of science), Sagan tells us that “the fear of falling seems clearly connected with our arboreal origins...” (Dragons, 158). “Clearly,” he says.
Dr. Sagan makes science clear for the masses by making false statements about its theories. This can be seen not only in the area of biology, but in physics as well. He declares, for example, that light is a wave (Cosmos, 253). He offers no qualification for the statement, no hint that there is conflicting scientific evidence on the nature of light, no suggestion that scientists have different opinions on the issue, no admission that science is hopelessly contradictory on the definition of light. In many such cases Sagan writes clearly because he writes inaccurately.
Not only is there a paucity of empirical evidence for his dogmatic claims, they are sometimes based upon logical fallacies as well as an overheated imagination. For example, in The Cosmic Connection (3) Sagan writes: “The early atmospheres were composed of the most abundant atoms and were rich in hydrogen. Sunlight, falling on the molecules of the early atmosphere, excited them, induced molecular collisions, and produced larger molecules ... These molecules, remarkably enough, are the ones of which we are made: The building blocks of the nucleic acids, which are our hereditary material, and the building blocks of the proteins, the molecular journeymen that perform the work of the cell, were produced from the atmosphere and oceans of the early Earth. We know this because we can make these molecules today by duplicating primitive conditions.” This argument, that certain organic molecules must have arisen in a certain way billions of years ago because we can make these molecules today by “duplicating” primitive conditions in modern laboratories, is a logical mess. The only thing remarkable about the situation is that a professor at a respected university can make such blunders and retain his chair.
Sagan does not know what primitive conditions obtained; he has chosen the conditions most conducive to the results he wants. He has assumed what he should prove. His argument is: organic molecules must have formed spontaneously under Earth’s primitive conditions; organic molecules today can form only under certain conditions; therefore, those conditions must be Earth’s primitive conditions; there fore, given those conditions, organic molecules could and did form spontaneously.
To argue that x must have happened in the past because x can be made to happen now is an elementary logical blunder. It is like arguing that because we now get to Pikes Peak by cog railway and car, that that is how the pioneers must have done it. Sagan must first demonstrate that there is only one way for organic molecules to be formed. Then he must demonstrate that they formed spontaneously on Earth billions of years ago. He has done neither, he can do neither, and his argument is worthless. It is as much science fiction as H. G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds. It is, how ever, no worse than other scientific arguments which regularly violate the rules of logic.
Sagan’s dogmatism about the past knows no bounds. He asserts, “there is no doubt that our instinctual apparatus has changed little from the hunter-gatherer days of several hundred thousands years ago” (The Cosmic Connection, 7). “No doubt,” Dr. Sagan says. Certainty is quite worthless in the quest for knowledge. Many people are certain that vinegar cures warts, that reincarnation is true, and that science furnishes truth. Dr. Sagan is certain about a large number of things that he cannot demonstrate and of which he cannot possibly know. Far from knowing what the “instinctual apparatus” of the hunter-gatherers was, Sagan does not even know what the instinctual apparatus of the Cornell University faculty is, nor how it differs from that of the hunter-gatherers, whoever they may be.
His dogmatism does not extend only to the remote past and the far reaches of the universe, but to the remote future as well. He believes that the phonograph record which he and one of his wives were responsible for producing for NASA and which was sent into space in two Voyager spacecraft, will “last for a billion years” (Cosmos, 289). So, he says, will the equipment left on the moon by the Apollo astronauts. Fortunately, Carl Sagan’s books will not.
Science
One of the strange things about Sagan’s arrogance is that it is in conflict with his remarks about science. One can conclude from this that either he is confused and does not see the conflict, or that he is well aware that he is not making scientific statements, but is constructing an elaborate scientific mythology for the sophisticates of the twentieth century who could never believe in angels, demons, or God, but who will believe in ET.
”Science,” Sagan writes in Broca’s Brain (15), “is a way of thinking much more than it is a body of knowledge.” Science “has emerged in the popular mind as the primary means of penetrating the secrets of the universe” (Broca’s Brain, 54). “Scientists have been known to change their minds completely and publicly when presented with new evidence and new arguments” (Broca’s Brain, 74). “Science is also self-correcting. The most fundamental axioms and conclusions may be challenged-the history of science is full of cases where previously accepted theories and hypotheses have been entirely overthrown, to be replaced by new ideas that more adequately explain the data” (Broca’s Brain, 96). “Science is a self-correcting enterprise. To be accepted, all new ideas must survive rigorous standards of evidence” (Cosmos, 91).
But where are the rigorous standards of evidence that apply to Sagan’s ipsedixitisms about the evolution of human brains, fingers, and toes? Or to the instincts of ancient men? Or the natural laws that apply a trillion light years from Earth? Dr. Sagan does not meet the standards that he says distinguish science from superstition. Nor does he seem to be willing to subject all his most cherished beliefs-such as evolution-to the scrutiny that science demands.
Still less does Dr. Sagan seem to realize that science is a self-correcting and ever-changing discipline precisely be cause it is never correct. If a scientist ever discovered a truth, it would not and could not change. Two plus two is four is now, has always been, and always will be true be cause it was not discovered by the scientific method. Christian theology has always taught and will always teach the doctrine of the Trinity because the Trinity was not discovered by the scientific method, but revealed by God, who is truth himself. All scientific laws are false. All the laws of physics and astronomy are false. Why just a month ago the astronomers admitted that-oops!-they had made a mistake in calculating the distances between stars, a mistake of only 25 percent. Who knows, perhaps next month they will acknowledge another mistake. Or perhaps it will be the chemists, or the physicists, or the biologists who make the announcement next month. All the physics and biology textbooks written in 1910 are now regarded as completely wrong. Fifty years from now scientists will consider our present texts completely wrong. Scientists never discover the truth because the scientific method, which Dr. Sagan esteems so highly, is a tissue of logical fallacies. Science does not and cannot give us truth. Scientists, to use the phraseology of the King James Bible, are ever learning and never able to come to the knowledge of the truth. Science is a tentative technological enterprise. It is incompetent as a source of knowledge. Dr. Sagan, however, is far from tentative in his oracular pronouncements about man and the universe.
Behaviorism
One of Dr. Sagan’s certainties concerns the nature of thought. He does not believe that he has a mind, and some times this writer is inclined to agree. He maintains that “mind” is the term we use to describe the workings of the brain. He is a behaviorist. To define the term, I quote Ernest Nagel’s Presidential Address to the American Philosophical Association in 1954:
The occurrence of events, qualities, and processes, and the characteristic behavior of various individuals, are contingent on the organization of spatio-temporally located bodies, whose internal and external relations determine and limit the appearance and disappearance of everything that happens. That this is so, is one of the best-tested conclusions of experience.... There is no place for the operation of disembodied forces, no place for an immaterial spirit directing the course of events, no place for the survival of personality after the corruption of the body which exhibits it.
This notion, that mind is merely the behavior of matter, has been advocated by many leading philosophers and scientists, among them John Dewey, John Watson, and B.F. Skinner. Skinner is justly famous for his attack on political freedom and human dignity and his advocacy of a totalitarian society controlled by scientists. Watson was an experimental psychologist of the early twentieth century who exerted enormous influence in both psychology and philosophy. Dewey, of course, is notorious for his influence on American government schools. He is the prime reason why Johnny can’t think, for Dewey did not believe in thinking: according to Dewey, one learns by doing. Dewey wrote: “Habits formed in the process of exercising biological aptitudes are the sole agents of observation, recollection, fore sight and judgment: a mind or consciousness or soul in general which performs these operations is a myth.... Knowledge lives in the muscles, not in consciousness.”
Carl Sagan accepts this behaviorism. In The Dragons of Eden, subtitled Speculations on the Evolution of Human Intelligence, he writes (7): “My fundamental premise about the brain is that its workings-what we sometimes call `mind’-are a consequence of its anatomy and physiology, and nothing more. `Mind’ may be a consequence of the action of the components of the brain severally or collectively.... We are, to a remarkable degree, the results of the interactions of an extremely complex array of molecules.... Because there is not a shred of evidence to support [sic] it, I will not in these pages entertain any hypotheses on what used to be called the mind-body dualism, the idea that inhabiting the matter of the body is something made of quite different stuff, called mind.”
Notice that Sagan presents this behaviorism as a premise, not as a conclusion. He does not argue for it, but assumes it, because, as he says, there is not a shred of evidence for the existence of mind. Obviously, if science can investigate only what can be sensed or quantified, then there is no evidence for mind, which can be neither sensed nor quantified. But this means merely that Sagan is also making assumptions, of which he does not inform us, about the nature of evidence.
Sagan’s phrase about man being an extremely complex array of molecules reminds me of another philosopher, Bertrand Russell, who wrote one of the most powerful passages in English literature defending the same view:
That man is the product of causes that had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and beliefs, are but the out come of accidental collocations of atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling can preserve an individual life beyond the grave, that all the labors of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and the whole temple of man’s achievement inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins-all these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain, that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand. Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul’s habitation henceforth be safely built....
Brief and powerless is man’s life; on him and all his race the slow, sure doom falls pitiless and dark. Blind to good and evil, reckless of destruction, omnipotent matter rolls on its relentless way; for man, condemned today to lose his dearest, tomorrow himself to pass through the gate of dark ness, it remains only to cherish, ere yet the blow falls, the lofty thoughts that ennoble his little day.... Proudly defiant of the irresistible forces that tolerate, for a moment, his knowledge and his condemnation, to sustain alone, a weary but unyielding atlas, the world that his own ideals have fashioned despite the trampling march of unconscious power (Mysticism and Logic, 47-48, 56-57).
Russell’s prose is magnificent-I have come across nothing nearly so good in Sagan-but the “truths” he believes are not true at all.
Neither is Sagan’s behaviorism. For the triune God, Sagan has substituted what he calls “The Triune Brain” consisting of the reptilian complex, the limbic system, and the neocortex. Sagan believes the old mythology of Ernst Haeckel, the popularizer of evolutionary thought in Germany during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and whose books were bestsellers and laid the foundation for Nazism. One of Haeckel’s myths was that ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny. Sagan believes that “in human intrauterine development we run through stages very much like fish, reptiles and nonprimate mammals before we be come recognizably human. The fish stage even has gill slits, which are absolutely useless for the embryo who is nourished via the umbilical cord, but a necessity for human embryology: since gills were vital to our ancestors, we run through a gill stage in becoming human” (The Dragons of Eden, 59-60).
But we are getting somewhat afield from Sagan’s behaviorism. Dr. Sagan believes that “consciousness and intelligence are the result of `mere’ matter sufficiently complexly arranged” (The Dragons of Eden, 221). “Each human being is a superbly constructed, astonishingly compact, self-ambulatory computer” (Broca’s Brain, 281). Speaking of him self, Sagan writes: “I am a collection of water, calcium and organic molecules called Carl Sagan. You are a collection of almost identical molecules with a different collective label. But is that all? Is there nothing in here but molecules? Some people find this idea somewhat demeaning to human dignity, for myself, I find it elevating that our universe permits the evolution of molecular machines as intricate and subtle as we” (Cosmos, 127). “A thought,” Dr. Sagan thinks, “is made of hundreds of electrochemical impulses” (Cosmos, 277).
Upon discovering the brain of Paul Broca, the nineteenth-century French surgeon, in a bottle in the Musee De L’Homme in Paris, Sagan wondered “whether in some sense Broca was still in there-his wit, his skeptical mien, his abrupt gesticulations when he talked, his quiet and sentimental moments. Might there be preserved in the configuration of neurons before me a recollection of the triumphant moment when he argued before the combined medical faculties ... on the origins of aphasia? A dinner with his friend Victor Hugo? A stroll on a moonlit autumn evening? ... Where do we go when we die? Is Paul Broca still there in his formalin-filled bottle?” (Broca’s Brain, 10-11).
These thoughts remind one of the delusions of savages who think that by eating the flesh of their enemies they will become like them. Scientists have performed innumerable experiments testing the cannibalistic theory of learning: since memory inheres in the chemistry of the brain, one can, by ingesting that chemistry, learn what others have known. Scientists use rats and planaria in their experiments; cannibals, of course, use people. Of course, this is not a refutation of behaviorism, merely an illustration of how primitive the modern scientist (or perhaps how advanced the unjustly maligned cannibal) is.
A refutation of behaviorism can be derived from either the Bible or from logic. God, angels, and demons all think. None of them has brains or body. Christ and the thief on the cross went to paradise at death; their brains were lying in the ground in Palestine. Moses, whose brains had been buried somewhere in the Middle East more than a thousand years earlier, held a theological conversation with Christ at the transfiguration. These scriptural references ought to be sufficient to convince Christians that brains are not necessary for thinking. Unfortunately, Dr. Sagan does not believe that the Bible is true, so we will have to offer a more extended argument from logic. If he does not believe that logic is true, then there is no point in arguing with him at all; one ought rather to confine him to a soft room.
Let’s assume that Dr. Sagan’s beliefs about mind and thought are true. Thoughts are, he thinks, “hundreds of electrochemical impulses” in the brain. What follows from this? First, error is impossible. One electrochemical impulse is as good as another. The chemistry in the brain of someone who thinks that behaviorism is false is as perfect as the chemistry in the brain of someone who thinks that behavior ism is true. If thoughts are electrochemical, then one thought, one chemical reaction, is as good as another. Why Sagan insists that his chemical reactions are right and mine are wrong is a complete mystery. “Wrong” has no meaning on behaviorist premises.
It follows from the meaninglessness of error that behaviorists, in this case Dr. Sagan, cannot claim their assertions are true. Behaviorism makes truth equally meaningless. Truth is not a quality of electrochemical impulses. My rejection of behaviorism, that is, in Dr. Sagan’s terms, the electrochemical impulses in my brain, are chemically as good as his. Chemicals never err. Both his reactions and mine are solid chemistry. Both obey the inviolable laws of chemistry, which, Dr. Sagan has told us, are the same every where in the universe. Now if anyone, no matter how highly respected and decorated, proposes a theory that precludes the truth of the theory he proposes, he is involved in a hopeless contradiction and needs no further refutation. If he persists in asserting what cannot be true, he needs close and compassionate attention, rather than disputation.
The situation is, however, somewhat worse than this initial consideration indicates. Not only does behaviorism eliminate truth, it eliminates memory and communication as well. If thoughts are electrochemical impulses, then they are specific datable events in the brain. They cannot be repeated. They occur and then they stop. Memory is impossible. A behaviorist might reply that we can have a similar thought later, that is, a similar electrochemical impulse can occur. But the behaviorist forgets (and hopes that we will forget as well) that according to behaviorism the thought of similarity is still another and still later electrochemical impulse, another dated event separated by time (and perhaps by space) from the first two chemical reactions. How can still a third electrochemical reaction connect the first two, which have already occurred and ended? How can a behaviorist tell whether two ideas are similar, if ideas are electrochemical impulses? Behaviorism makes comparison and memory impossible.
It also makes communication impossible. Carl Sagan’s mind is a bundle of electrochemical impulses and reactions; and so is mine, according to Carl Sagan. Dr. Sagan has a thought, that is, his intracranial chemicals react in a certain way. But his brain’s electrochemical impulses cannot be my brain’s electrochemical impulses, any more than his toothache can be mine or my toothache his. Therefore, I can never know his thought. It is therefore impossible to tell what Dr. Sagan means by any of the thousands of propositions that he has written in his books and articles. And since behaviorism also destroys memory, Dr. Sagan himself has no idea what he wrote either. Perhaps his books mean nothing at all. Perhaps they are simply the debris left by a powerful and sudden electrochemical brainstorm.
Behaviorism has been around for centuries, but the modern revival of some forms of Greek paganism has made it into one of the major superstitions of the twentieth century. Ernest Nagel, in his presidential address that I quoted above, said that it is one of the best-tested conclusions of experience. Gordon Clark has suggested that behaviorism be subjected to the same sort of test that other theories claiming to be scientific undergo. Einstein’s general theory of relativity predicted several events, such as the precession of the perihelion of Mercury and the deflection of starlight in the presence of large masses. Scientists could observe whether those events occurred as implied by Einstein’s theory. Let Dr. Sagan specify which electrochemical impulses in the brain are the thought “the Earth is 4.6 billion years old.” Let him tell us what the specific chemistry of astronomy, as distinguished from astrology, is. Let him specify how the surge of electrochemical impulses meaning “The opening chapters of the book of Genesis are mythological” differs from the spurt of electrochemical impulses meaning “The Bible alone, and the Bible in its entirety, is the word of God written and therefore inerrant in the autographs.” Let us see what empirical basis there is for the claim that thoughts are electrochemical impulses. I certainly hope Dr. Sagan’s brain is up to the task.
Scientific Mythology
Dr. Sagan’s role as deputy high priest of the new religion of science involves creating a new scientific mythology for the twenty-first century. He recognizes both the power and the importance of myth in creating and maintaining a scientific culture. In the introduction to The Dragons of Eden, he quotes Henry David Thoreau’s Journal: “I do not know where to find in any literature, whether ancient or modern, any adequate account of that nature with which I am acquainted. Mythology comes nearest to it of any.” In the same book Sagan offers what he calls scientific myths to the reader: “these conjectures on the origins of the mammals constitute a kind of scientific myth: they may have some germ of truth in them, but they are unlikely to be the whole story. That scientific myths make contact with more ancient myths may or may not be a coincidence” (147). In Cosmos he writes, “As the ancient mythmakers knew, we are the children equally of the sky and the Earth” (318). And in The Cosmic Connection, Sagan spins one of his own myths, which he labels as such by beginning it, “Once upon a time” (249). The fable is the theory of evolution, both cosmic and biological. It is the gist of his book compressed into a few pages. It is a scientific fairy tale.
ET
Now the myth of evolution, both cosmic and biological, is nothing new. Sagan’s contribution to the myth, apart from the fascinating way in which he presents it for the general reader, is an emphasis on extraterrestrial intelligent life. The titles of some of his books betray this interest, this obsession of his: The Cosmic Connection: An Extraterrestrial Perspective; Other Worlds; Intelligent Life in the Universe; Communication with Extraterrestrial Intelligence; and UFO’S: A Scientific Debate.
This obsession has been a lifelong characteristic of Sagan. In Broca’s Brain he tells us that “by the time I was ten I had decided-in almost total ignorance of the difficulty of the problem-that the universe was full up. There were too many places for this to be the only inhabited planet” (162). He has never wavered from that opinion. In The Cosmic Connection he writes: “The initial chemical constituents for the origin of life are the most abundant molecules in the universe. Something like the processes that on the Earth led to man must have happened billions of other times in the history of our galaxy. There must be other starfolk.... There must be, I think, many places in the galaxy where there are beings far more advanced than we in science and technology, in politics, ethics, poetry, and music” (258-259).
When he first learned of pulsars, Sagan thought “that they were perfect interstellar navigation beacons, the sorts of markers that an interstellar spacefaring society would want to place throughout the galaxy for time- and space- fixes for their voyages. There is now little doubt that pulsars are neutron stars. But I would not exclude the possibility that if there are interstellar spacefaring societies, the naturally formed pulsars are used as navigation beacons and for communications purposes” (The Cosmic Connection, 260).
In his most popular book, Cosmos, Sagan argues that “The universe is brimming over with life” (7). He even offers us a calculation of the number of inhabited planets: there are one million advanced technical civilizations in our galaxy alone, and “there appears to be a fair chance that advanced extraterrestrial civilizations are sending radio signals our way ...” (The Cosmic Connection, 211). The notion of extraterrestrial intelligent life is, to quote one of Sagan’s chapter titles in The Cosmic Connection, “An idea whose time has come” (191).
Because he is convinced that ET is out there, Sagan has convinced the government to spend millions of tax dollars on the search for intelligent life in the stars. Over the past twenty-five years, messages from Earth have been placed on spacecraft and sent into space. Radio telescopes have been tuned to distant stars in the hope of picking up messages beamed at us by ET. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration presently operates a program called Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. NASA is now in the middle of a five-year program of research and planning to design the largest and most intensive search for extraterrestrial intelligence ever undertaken. Once started, NASA’s search will last for decades.
Sagan realizes the public’s fascination with the idea of intelligent life in space, and he sees the search for such life as the key to continued public and government financial support for his ideas. A recent public opinion poll, published in The Washington Post on June 2, 1986, indicated that “Seven of 10 participants agreed with the theory that `in the entire universe, it is likely that there are thousands of planets like our own on which life could have developed.’” Sagan believes it is far more than likely, of course. He says it must have happened billions of times. But he does not believe that the Earth has already been visited by such advanced beings. He argues that the Earth has been a technological civilization for too brief a time to have attracted the attention of the intelligences who must be out there, and that the distances to their planets are so vast that sufficient time has not elapsed to allow them to explore all the worlds between here and there, let alone to get here. Perhaps he also realizes that a belief in UFOs at the present time would destroy both his credibility and the reason for government funding for his projects. After all, if ET has already been here, we should be looking for evidence on Earth, not listening to the heavens and sending messages to the stars. Johannes Kepler once commented that the creator has given every animal the means of sustaining its life, and to the astronomer he gave astrology. In the twentieth century, astronomers grow fat by feeding the imaginations of people and bureaucrats who want to believe that ET lives.
The Religion of Science
One cannot help but notice the religious undertone in all of this scientific mythology. Sagan tells us, “Thousands of years ago, the idea that the planets were populated by intelligent beings was uncommon. The idea was that the planets themselves were intelligent beings. Mars was the god of war, Venus was the goddess of beauty, Jupiter was the king of the gods” (The Cosmic Connection, 191). In the eighteenth century the idea that the planets, while not gods, were inhabited by godlike beings, began to grow. Emanuel Swedenborg and Immanuel Kant, two false messiahs of the Enlightenment, claimed that the planets were populated. Sagan believes, “out there in the depths of space, it seems very likely that, sooner or later, we will find other intelligent beings. Some of them will be less advanced than we; some, probably most, will be more.... The beings more advanced than we will have capabilities far beyond our understanding. In some very real sense they will appear to us as godlike” (Broca’s Brain, 368).
If I were a betting man, I might wager that sometime in the not too distant future, these godlike beings will contact Earth. Of course, they will not be what Dr. Sagan apparently believes them to be, the evolutionary products of time, chance, and death; but evil angels who have transformed themselves into messengers of light. It seems to me that the scientific mythology that Sagan develops in his books, together with the influence of movies like ET and Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and the new age movement generally are setting the world up for a massive deception. The contact, when it comes, will permit both secular and religious people to accept the extraterrestrial beings as gods. Scientists, especially behaviorists like Sagan, who do not believe in the God of the Bible or angels or demons, easily believe in some sort of superior intelligence that has evolved by natural processes just as man has. Sagan already believes in such beings, and he is doing his best to convince the world.
The religious nature of Sagan’s scientific mythology may also be seen in his affinity for non-Christian religions, Hinduism in particular. Sagan uses quotes from religious writings generously in the mottoes to his chapters. Cosmos, the best selling science book ever published in the English language, has thirteen chapters, twelve of which are introduced by quotations from non-Christian religions and cultures, including the Aztecs, Incas, Mayans, Eskimos, Assyrians, Indians, Chinese, Egyptians, Sumerians, the Bhagavad Gita, the Zoroastrians, and the Koran. He reproduces in full color a statue of the Hindu god Shiva dancing the dance of creation, and quotes, on the facing page, these lines from The Mahapurana (The Great Legend), a ninth-century Indian document:
Some foolish men declare that a creator made the world. The doctrine that the world was created is ill-advised, and should be rejected. If God created the world, where was he before creation? ...
How could God have made the world without any raw material? If you say he made this first, and then the world, you are faced with an endless regression.... Know that the world is uncreated, as time itself is, without beginning and end. (245).
Obviously, modern science finds much more in common with such doctrines of devils than it does with Christianity. Sagan finds Hinduism particularly attractive, for, “The Hindu religion is the only one of the world’s great faiths dedicated to the idea that the cosmos itself undergoes an immense, indeed an infinite, number of deaths and rebirths. It is the only religion in which the time scales correspond, no doubt by accident, to those of modern scientific cosmology.... There is the deep and appealing notion that the universe is but the dream of the god who, after a hundred brahma years [each 8.6 billion ordinary years long], dissolves himself into a dreamless sleep. The universe dissolves with him-until, after another brahma century, he stirs, recomposes himself and begins again to dream the great cosmic dream. These great ideas are tempered by another, perhaps still greater. It is said that men may not be the dreams of the gods, but rather the gods are the dreams of men” (Cosmos, 258).
Sagan finds Jainism, another religion of India, attractive, because it is one of the few religions of planet Earth that implements a reverence for all life (The Cosmic Connection, 8). The reverence leads Sagan to assert that dolphins and whales may be other forms of intelligent life on Earth, and to ask the profound and moving question, “Why, exactly, all over the civilized world, in virtually every major city, are apes in prison?” (The Dragons of Eden, 127). I thought of describing Sagan’s question as asinine, but then a person who believes in the “connectedness” of all life would miss the meaning of the word and my intention.
Sagan’s philosophy leads him into all the chic and crackpottish causes of the left: ape liberation, the salvation of the whales, fornication as a form of war prevention, the belief in evolution and extraterrestrial intelligences, and a more just redistribution of the world’s wealth. Despite all the clamor he makes about science being self-correcting, it has not kept him from making a fool of himself. But then science never has, and it never will. Only the word of God can stop men from making fools of themselves, and Dr. Sagan refuses to listen. He prefers cunningly devised fables to revealed truth.
The Materialistic Mystic
Does it not seem strange to you that a man who insists upon “rigorous standards of evidence,” and who even rejects the idea of mind because “there is not a shred of evidence to support it,” should endorse the mysticism of eastern religions? Isn’t it odd that Sagan, who does not believe that he himself has a mind, finds “deep and appealing” the mystical Hindu notion of gods dreaming universes without end? How are materialism and mysticism combined in one mind?
In his book The Screwtape Letters, C. S. Lewis has the senior demon, Screwtape, advise the apprentice demon, Wormwood, on how he is to deceive the man over whom he has control:
My dear Wormwood, I wonder you should ask me whether it is essential to keep the patient in ignorance of your own existence. That question, at least for the present phase of the struggle, has been answered for us by the high command. Our policy, for the moment, is to conceal our selves. Of course this has not always been so. We are really faced with a cruel dilemma. When the humans disbelieve in our existence we lose all the pleasing results of direct terrorism, and we make no magicians. On the other hand, when they believe in us, we cannot make them materialists and skeptics. At least, not yet. I have great hopes that we shall learn in due time how to emotionalize and mythologize their science to such an extent that what is, in effect, a belief in us (though not under that name) will creep in while the human mind remains closed to belief in the enemy [God]. The “Life Force,” the worship of sex, and some aspects of psychoanalysis may here prove useful. If once we can produce our perfect work-the materialist magician, the man, not using, but veritably worshipping, what he vaguely calls “forces” while denying the existence of “spirits”-then the end of the war will be in sight (32-33).
Sagan is Lewis’ materialist-magician. He is the believer in scientific mythology. In The Cosmic Connection he writes:
In a very real sense human beings are machines constructed by the nucleic acids to arrange for the efficient replication of more nucleic acids. In a sense our strongest urges, noblest enterprises, most compelling necessities, and apparent free wills are all an expression of the information coded in the genetic material: we are, in a way, temporary ambulatory repositories for our nucleic acids. This does not deny our humanity; it does not prevent us from pursuing the good, the true and the beautiful. But it would be a great mistake to ignore where we have come from in our attempt to determine where we are going.... We are the product of 4.5 billion years of fortuitous, slow, biological evolution. There is no reason to think that the evolutionary process has stopped. Man is a transitional animal; he is not the climax of creation.... The time has come for a respect, a reverence, not just for all human beings, but for all life forms.... It is important that we extend our identification horizons, not just down to the simplest and most humble forms of life on our own planet, but also up to the exotic and advanced forms of life that may inhabit, with us, our vast galaxy of stars (The Cosmic Connection, 4-8).
There you have it, the materialism (man is a machine) and the mysticism (a reverence for all life forms, including the extraterrestrial) in a few paragraphs taken from an essay entitled “A Transitional Animal.” If Lewis is to be believed, Sagan, and the men like him, who seem to number in the millions, are the perfect work of the demons, and the end of the struggle is near. Sagan, by rejecting the doctrines of the Bible, is zealously and eloquently propagating what the Bible calls doctrines of demons.
In another of his books, Perelandra, Lewis has his villain, who is a professor of physics named Weston, explain his philosophy to the hero, Ransom. Any resemblance between Weston’s philosophy and Carl Sagan’s is probably not coincidental:
All my life I had been making a wholly unscientific dichotomy or antithesis between man and nature-[I] had conceived myself fighting for man and against his non- human environment. During my illness I plunged into biology, and particularly into what may be called biological philosophy. Hitherto, as a physicist, I had been content to regard life as a subject outside my scope. The conflicting views of those who drew a sharp line between the organic and the inorganic and those who held that what we call life was inherent in matter from the very beginning had not interested me. Now it did. I saw almost at once that I could admit no break, no discontinuity, in the unfolding of the cosmic process. I became a convinced believer in emergent evolution. All is one. The stuff of mind, the unconsciously purposive dynamism, is present from the very beginning.... The majestic spectacle of this blind, inarticulate purposiveness thrusting its way upward and ever upward ... swept away all my old conception of a duty to man as such. Man in himself is nothing. The forward movement of life ... is everything. (90-91).
It is everything to Dr. Sagan as well. Man is a transitional animal, and out there, in the vast reaches of space, there are beings so advanced that they will appear like gods to us when they finally make contact with us. The materialist- mystic, the perfect work of the devil, is complete. He does not believe in God, but in demons, “though not under that name.”
The coming of the lawless one is according to the working of Satan, with all power, signs, and lying wonders, and with all unrighteous deception among those who perish, because they did not receive the love of the truth, that they might be saved. And for this reason God will send them strong delusion, that they should believe the lie, that they all may be condemned who did not believe the truth but had pleasure in unrighteousness (2 Thessalonians 2:9-12).
RSS Feed
