The head of a national medical organization who publicly called for doctors to lose their licenses unless they supported government narratives on COVID-19 treatments and vaccines concealed his relationship with a public relations firm whose client list also included Pfizer, Moderna and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
Dr. Richard Baron, president and CEO of the American Board of Internal Medicine (ABIM) is a client of Weber Shandwick, investigative journalist Paul D. Thacker reported on Wednesday.
This is a perfect example of deadly sleazy use of the term misinformation. Misinformation and disinformation are useful terms if used properly. In this case, calling yourself a ‘misinformation and disinformation expert’ is itself mind-control through disinformation. Nearly all of our once respectable institutions have turned into sleazy lying sacks-of-shit, very sorry to say. ABN
If we consider speech with only one listener and look firstly at the micro level, we find it is fear of wrong word choice, wrong gesture, expression, demeanor, or tone of voice that limits our speech because a misstep with any one of these may transgress interpersonal limits.
At the meso level, it is either fear of offending or embarrassing (our understanding of) the “personality” of our listener or the fear of an actual flareup from our listener.
At the macro level, it is the fear of introducing a largish idea with sociological or career implications that might disturb, embarrass, or anger our one listener.
With two or more listeners, the analysis is much the same though the numbers of people make it more complex, until we get to so many people we are speaking to an audience. Then it becomes simpler in some ways because the micro and meso levels will be less prominent due to distance between speaker and audience and there being no clear single target of our tone of voice or phraseology.
On the other hand, an audience’s response can be more complex and problematic because more than one person can become angry at us.
Human beings thus are stuck in a game that is controlled by how most of us listen most of the time.
Stated differently, human beings have magnificent speech and communicative capabilities, but rarely get to use them to their full, best effect because one or more of the many speech limits outlined above will cause us either to hold our tongues or else risk creating a disruption in the mind(s) of our listeners.
This seems like a Big Problem to me. I do not want to spend my life constrained by those rules. FIMLcan help us overcome this problem but even FIML cannot do it all.
We must also recognize that our very comprehension of meaning itself is grounded in fear.
UPDATE: This is a main area where I have some disagreement with traditional Buddhist practice which tends to put the onus of right speech entirely on the speaker. This makes sense in many contexts but in many other contexts it can cause speakers to withhold or be timid when they should not. Or it can cause listeners to believe that speakers must always keep in mind their weaknesses and that they (listeners) are being entirely proper when they misinterpret or mis-react to someone’s speech. This kind of thinking too often leads to overly emotional responses, a greatly reduced scope of discussable topics, and an overall pettiness that constrains everyone. Placing the onus for right speech always on the speaker and never requiring right mindfulness of the listener leads to a kind of hierarchy of speech or a totalitarian view of what is right and wrong to say. In the world today, we can clearly see how speech is constrained in this way through censorship, shadow-banning, muting, shaming, deplatforming, cancelling and more with almost no good purpose ever being served except elitist control of the masses. At interpersonal levels, our speech is too often limited by the narcissistic sensibilities of listeners or what we fear those sensibilities might be. None of this is optimal good speech. In Buddhism we want to optimize speech, thought, mindfulness, and listening. It is good to be mindful of what we say, when we say it, and to whom. But it is not good to always tread in fear every time you open your mouth. ABN
If you know a system well and change parts of it to make it more efficient, that system will work better.
Evolution works this way “mindlessly” in the sense that we assume today that there is no plan behind evolutionary change. If something works better it tends to replace that which it works better than.
Another “mindless” example is AI systems that invent their own languages:
An artificial intelligence system being developed at Facebook has created its own language. It developed a system of code words to make communication more efficient. The researchers shut the system down as it prompted concerns we could lose control of AI. (Researchers shut down AI that invented its own language)
The linked article mentions other AI system that have similarly invented their own communication systems. These systems work but humans are not able to understand them.
All of this shows that communication systems have their own logic and that they can be made more efficient by pursuing that logic.
This is what FIML does through the use of a few new rules for speaking and listening.
FIML emphasizes and provides techniques for:
analysis of real-time communication
much greater accuracy in real-time communication
much greater mutual understanding, efficiency, and satisfaction
By improving your communication system(s) and removing error from it, FIML greatly enhances psychological well-being.
FIML works with the communication system(s) you already have. FIML does not tell you what to think.
I betray my poor education by admitting that I had never heard of W. V. Quine’s “indeterminacy of translation” until last week. My ignorance is especially egregious as I have worked as a professional translator for many years.
Maybe I had heard about it but had forgotten. I am being self-reflective because FIML practice is deeply, fundamentally concerned with the “indeterminacy” of translating one person’s thoughts into another person’s head.
Quine’s thesis is not just about translating from one language to another, though there is that. It is much more about the fundamental impossibility of determining what anything means well enough to “translate” it into another context, a next sentence, into another person’s mind, or even “translating” your own speech from the past into the context of your mind today.
If I had known about Quine, I probably never would have thought of FIML because his ideas and the slews of papers written on “indeterminacy of translation” surely would have made me believe that the subject had been worked through.
As it was, I have plodded along in a delightful state of ignorance and, due to that, maybe added something practical to the subject.
In the first place, I wholeheartedly believe that speech is filled with indeterminacy, which I have generally called ambiguity or uncertainty. In the second place, I have confined my FIML-related investigations mainly to interpersonal speech between partners who care about each other. I see no solution to the more general problem of indeterminacy within groups, subcultures, or linguistic communities. Until brain scans get much better, large groups will be forced to resort to hierarchical “determinacy” to exist or function at all.
For individuals, though, there is much we can do. FIML practice does not remove all “indeterminacy.” Rather, it removes much more than most people are aware is possible, even remotely aware is possible. My guess is FIML communication provides a level of detail and resolution that is an order of magnitude or two better than non-FIML.
That is a huge improvement. It is life-changing on many levels and extremely satisfying.
FIML does not fix everything—and philosophical or “artistic” differences between partners are still possible—but it does fix a great deal. By clearing up interpersonal micro-indeterminacy again and again, FIML practice frees partners from the inevitable macro-problems that micro-ambiguity inevitably causes.
Moreover, this freedom, in turn, frees partners from a great deal of subconscious adhesion to the hierarchical “determinacy” of whichever culture they are part of. Rather than trapping themselves in a state of helpless acceptance of predefined hierarchical “meaning,” FIML partners have the capacity to sort through existential semiotics and make of them what they will with far less “indeterminacy,” or ambiguity, than had been possible without FIML practice.
Every day you hear at least some utterances you’ve never heard before. That you can understand them is partly due to the fact that they are structured according to grammatical rules. Scientists have found that the human brain may use the relative timing of brainwaves to encode and decode the structures in a sentence.
Grammar is a way of structuring information that makes language an efficient way to communicate. Knowing the grammatical rules of our language allows us to say pretty much anything we want, including things we have never heard before by combining words to (new) sentences. Being able to learn and use grammar is unique to humans. But it also creates a challenge for the science of how the brain processes human language—how do our brains, essentially a bunch of cells in a network, represent something as abstract as grammatical rules?
Scientists at the University of Edinburgh and the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics study this question with the help of computer-based models. They constructed an artificial neural network that simulates key features of the brain, such as densely connected populations of neurons that show neural oscillations. Neural oscillations are wave-like patterns of activity that happen at different frequencies, some very fast and some slow. The relative timing of these neural oscillations can help the brain encode grammatical relationships between words in a sentence, as Andrea Martin and Leonidas Doumas report in a paper in PLOS Biology.
By encoding words in one oscillation, and phrases in another, the brain can keep track of words and phrases at the same time. This demonstrates how something as complex as a sentence can be encoded in the neural currency of oscillations. A key finding of the new study is that these artificial neural networks, when fed example sentences, give off patterns of energy that mimic what the brain does when it processes a sentence. Martin, lead author of the study, says: “This work helps us understand how the brain solves a complex puzzle and why it gives off the activity patterns that it does when processing language.”
In this exciting age of the brain, where we know more about our brains than ever before, being able to link basic experiences like speaking and understanding language directly to brain function is especially important. Linking our brains to our behaviors holds the key to understanding not only what it means to be human, but also to understanding how the (arguably) most complex computing device in the universe, the human brain, gives rise to our daily experiences. Such knowledge may also lead to biologically inspired advances in human-like artificial intelligence and computation.
This article was originally published by Max Planck Neuroscience on March 6, 2017. The relevant study can be retrieved here.
I am posting the entire article because it’s a good summary and I do not want it to be lost. It has been taken down from Max Planck Neuroscience. The study: A mechanism for the cortical computation of hierarchical linguistic structure. This makes good sense and seems to describe something that is really happening in the brain. Being in the zone while performing complex tasks in sports or other endeavors also seems to entail brainwave patterns like these. ABN
A new study on working memory has some intriguing insights into how working memory works and how it doesn’t work.
It’s widely known that when working memory is overtaxed, confusion results, skills decline, while feelings of frustration and anger may arise. The reason for this seems to be:
Feedback (top-down) coupling broke down when the number of objects exceeded cognitive capacity. Thus, impaired behavioral performance coincided with a break-down of Prediction signals. This provides new insights into the neuronal underpinnings of cognitive capacity and how coupling in a distributed working memory network is affected by memory load. (Working Memory Load Modulates Neuronal Coupling)
A well-written article about this study contains the following diagram and explanation:
Miller thinks the brain is juggling the items being held in working memory one at a time, in alternation. “That means all the information has to fit into one brain wave,” he said. “When you exceed the capacity of that one brain wave, you’ve reached the limit on working memory.”
…The prefrontal cortex seems to help construct an internal model of the world, sending so-called “top-down,” or feedback, signals that convey this model to lower-level brain areas. Meanwhile, the superficial frontal eye fields and lateral intraparietal area send raw sensory input to the deeper areas in the prefrontal cortex, in the form of bottom-up or feedforward signals. Differences between the top-down model and the bottom-up sensory information allow the brain to figure out what it’s experiencing, and to tweak its internal models accordingly. (Emphasis added)
Working memory works via connections between three brain regions that together form a coherent brain wave.
Notice that “an internal model of the world,” which is a “top-down signal” within the brain wave feedback loop, predicts or interprets “bottom-up” sensory input as it arrives in the brain.
I believe this “top-down signal” within working memory is the reason FIML practice has such enormous psychological value.
By analyzing minute emotional reactions in real-time during normal conversation, FIML practice disrupts the consolidation, or more often the reconsolidation, of “neurotic” responses. (Disruption of neurotic response in FIML practice)
FIML optimizes human psychology by helping partners intervene directly into their working memories to access real-world top-down signals as they are happening in real-time. Doing this repeatedly reliably alters the brain’s repository of top-down interpretations, making them much more accurate and up-to-date.
The model of working memory proposed in this study also explains why FIML can be a bit difficult to do. Partners must learn to allow a FIML meta-perspective or “super top-down” signal to quickly commandeer their working memories so that analysis of whatever just happened can proceed rationally and objectively. It does take some time to learn this skill, but it is no harder than many other “automated” skills such bicycling, typing, or playing a musical instrument.
The West has failed to analyze and understand metalevels of interpersonal communication. Our philosophies employ metalevel concepts and vocabularies but have never delved into or properly understood metalevels of interpersonal communication.
This failure to properly understand metalevels of interpersonal communication has very large downstream effects. It has retarded our religious understanding and psychologies, our group formation, our understanding of other groups, and our ability to form profound interpersonal relationships.
The basis of this claim is that when interpersonal language is deeply restricted—as ours is by this massive hole in Western philosophy—all other forms of language use are negatively affected. When metalevels of interpersonal communication are limited, so is almost everything else.
I believe our philosophers never went there for the same reason no one elsewhere has either—analysis of interpersonal metacognitive language and thought goes against a primitive human instinct to not question others too closely, especially in real-time and about usage and meaning.
The few areas of Western endeavor that have not been hobbled in this way are science, technology, and to some extent economics and politics. This is because these areas by definition must deal with metalevel concepts and thus are very capable of understanding and manipulating them, but only in their own self-described contexts. They are successful because they are practically engaged with the real-world.
In contrast, Western religions, psychologies, group formations, and intergroup communication are so severely hobbled by limited metacognitive understanding, they are all but forced to use rigid definitions of what their metacognitive levels are. Thus Western psychologies are theoretical, religions are dogmatic, group formations are formal at best or ideologically tribal, indicating the need to enforce metacognitive language and concepts rather than analyze or discuss them.
Wittgenstein came close to understanding the problem but did not provide a solution or seem to see that there is one. I hope readers of this site understand that FIML is both the solution to this problem and the best way to personally experience and come to grips with how very serious it is. ABN
‘My daughter was murdered by a gender ideology,’ she said at the hearing. ‘CPS took my daughter when she was 16 years old. It was helped by her public school counselor and LGBTQ group and another trans-identified girl.
‘My daughter was taken from her loving home because the state of California claims I was abusive for not affirming her trans identity. I lost my daughter over a name and pronouns.’
She went on to say that her daughter had ‘mental health issues’ and was ‘not a boy trapped in a girl’s body.’
‘Why are there so many transgender in foster care? Because this state take them from their families, tell them to run, then steals them. Parents are given one option to treat their distressed child: Affirm drugs and remove their healthy body part or else lose your child,’ she told the Judiciary Senate.
‘The abuse claim against me was finally dropped, but it was too late. The damage was done. By then, my daughter was in horrible mental and physical pain. My daughter knelt down in front of a train. She was murdered by gender ideology.’
I cannot think of any way a Buddhist can countenance what was done to Yaeli by adults. Encouraging and then enforcing a delusional ‘identity’ is the opposite of everything Buddhism stands for. To do that to a child is as bad as it gets. Buddhism is largely a gentle teaching but it is very firm on the ethics of not encouraging delusion in anyone and especially in children. To my knowledge, there is no other religion that is more squarely against what happened to Yaeli than Buddhism. Enticing, encouraging a child in their delusions and then taking her from her home and mother—this is the opposite of all Buddhist teaching. There is no way Buddhists can condone this or not speak against it. This is deeply wrong. I hope more Buddhists will join me in speaking very strongly against these laws and this kind of behavior. It is the adults who are to blame for this. ABN
This short interview gives a quick outline of Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy (REBT): Albert Ellis: A Guide to Rational Living. FIML is not REBT and REBT is not FIML but the two methods are mutually supportive and probably not contradictory in all that many ways.
FIML resembles REBT in that it is a practice that can and will reduce neuroticism and unrealistic thinking. FIML is based on real data agreed upon by both partners and in this sense it is a pragmatic, scientific approach to human psychology and communication as is REBT.
FIML is different from REBT in that it is based on a specific technique that can be taught and then used by partners without the help of a therapist. FIML works primarily with very short segments of communication. It deals with belief, cognition, and emotion, but emphasizes accessing them by being attentive to the moment in a very concrete way.
FIML is not just psychotherapy but also very much a technique for anyone who wants to optimize communication with those who are most important to them. FIML helps partners understand how emotion, semiotics, habit, personal history, word associations, and so on influence how they listen and speak. FIML is largely value-neutral in what it says, though the practice will tend to strengthen awareness, rational thinking, and sound ethical behavior.
Massachusetts middle schoolers tore down Pride decorations and chanted that their pronouns were ‘USA’ in a striking protest after they were asked to wear rainbow colors to school.
Students at Marshall Simonds Middle School in Burlington, Massachusetts, were asked to wear rainbow-colored shirts to celebrate Pride Month on June 2, but a preplanned protest broke out with students tearing up Pride flag stickers and chanting: ‘USA are my pronouns.’
Decked out in red, white and blue, the students destroyed the decorations lining the hallway the student organization Spectrum Group distributed, including a quote from American playwright Tennessee Williams, signage saying the school was a ‘safe space’ and ‘equality for everyone’ decorations.
‘I was shocked and horrified,’ Nila Almstrom, a parent of an LGBT student, said at a town hall meeting about the protest.
Parents have told local news outlets their straight-identifying students said they felt forced to participate and were ‘offended’ by the Tennessee Williams quote that reiterated that the human heart is ‘curved like a road through the mountains’ and only lines and streets can be straight.
‘My daughter just said, “You know, mom, that’s offensive to me, I am straight,”‘ Christine Steiner told WCVB. ‘Some of the kids threw the stickers on the ground. But I can only speak for my daughter, she just didn’t want to wear that to school. It’s not that she wanted to hurt anybody’s feelings.’
As always, the left is doing mind-control by commandeering metacognitive categories and insisting there can be no others. When these categories (required vocabularies, flags, patches, misquotes, etc) are opposed even slightly, those with differing views are deemed ‘intolerant’, ‘phobic’, or ‘hateful’. These nasty words comprise yet another metacognitive level, which the left always commandeers along with the first. Ironically by making such strict distinctions between right and wrong, the ‘tolerant’ left is itself being extremely binary. The way to stop this crazy use of language and the ludicrous policies that flow from it is confront them at the metacognitive level as Christine Steiner’s daughter is doing in the highlight above. ‘Inclusion’ that ostracizes and punishes those with different views is absurd on its face. ABN
In the field of neuropsychology, the term dissociation is used to describe various ways of identifying the neural substrate of specific brain functions.
One way this is done is by studying “lesions,” or damaged areas, in people’s brains and figuring out how that damage affects such functions as perception, speech, memory, vision, and so on.
Neuroimaging is another method for observing particular brain regions and thus “dissociating” them from the larger brain system in order to understand their unique functions.
While FIML practice does not rely on lesions in the brain and has not (yet) been studied in an fMRI machine, it does employ a kind of dissociation.
When a FIML partner stops a conversation and makes a query, the partner being questioned is essentially being asked to dissociate a few moments of communication from the large welter of brain function that had been going on before the query.
By isolating, or dissociating, that small segment of communication, both partners gain insight into how they express themselves and how they interpret what they are hearing or perceiving.
Seeing many dissociated segments of communication teaches partners that their communication is frequently more random, ambiguous, misleading, and just plain wrong than they had realized prior to doing FIML practice.
Dissociation in FIML practice also teaches partners how to sharpen their overall communication by frequently adjusting and fine-tuning small segments of it through FIML queries and follow-up discussions.
I can imagine more advanced neuroimaging devices than we have today showing what part of the brain is being used to do the “macro-perception” required by a FIML query. I hope that a more advanced device will also show how small mistakes in communication can often lead to very large mistakes in mutual understanding.
Ideally, an advanced neuroimaging device would dissociate the initial error in both partners’ brains and show how that error then quickly spreads chemically and neurologically throughout their brains.
For now, all we have is shared self-reporting between FIML partners, but this is still a very large improvement over not doing FIML at all. By clearing up many micro-errors in communication, FIML practice improves macro-functionality in the brain.
FIML is hard to do at first because it violates, or seems to violate, a basic language instinct to not interrupt another speaker or question them too closely.
FIML gets around this instinct by having partners make a prior agreement to interrupt (or break into) a conversation and question each other closely, specifically to ask their partner to divulge the contents of their working memory and then (often) divulge their own.
FIML establishes a new human skill. The ability to do the above quickly and easily, and without undue emotion.
It will feel a bit weird at first to learn and exercise this skill, but after a few dozens iterations it will become fairly easy and eventually become second nature.
I believe FIML has never been discovered and this region of interpersonal language and communication has never been properly explored due to the strong but superficial instinct against it mentioned above. I would also speculate that this instinct is a significant contributing factor to hierarchical social structures and the psychologies that derive from them. In this respect, the psychologies of virtually all people everywhere are deeply steeped in the mores, taboos, and sensibilities that attend to and revolve around the instinct to hold your tongue when you most need to use it.
As post-modern humans on the verge of an earth-shaking AI singularity, it is past time to overcome this part of our primitive nature. ABN
Twitter has mass deleted a video of a migrant knife attack in France that saw five children being stabbed on a playground
A brutal video of a Syrian migrant stabbing children on a playground in Annecy, France, that went viral on Twitter has now been mass deleted, with numerous accounts displaying the message: video deleted.
The attack, which was covered by Remix News, shows a Syrian migrant racing around stabbing children, as a mother attempts to push her child to safety. According to press reports, at least five children were stabbed in the attack, including two adults. Two of the children remain in critical condition.
A full version of the video is available below through Rumble.
I am posting this because it is being censored and also massively downplayed. The linked article contains the video, which is very disturbing. Hate crimes against whites are consistently ignored in MSM across the Western world. This one is an attack on white children but it must not be publicized because people might become prejudiced against the race of the perpetrator. This is mass mind-control and how it works. What we need to do to defend ourselves against this is actively and consciously practice manipulating the words, concepts, thoughts, and emotions that are used in mind-control. Say the words out loud. Contemplate the concepts, move them around in your mind, analyze them. Pay attention to mind-control efforts. They are very common and can be found within seconds almost anywhere in MSM. Ignoring or deleting truths is mind-control by omission. ABN
Covid-19 has been described as a global pandemic but does this title give it a severity and indeed fear factor way beyond its actual impact?
The word pandemic used to have a very specific meaning. It was used to describe a scenario where there was extensive incapacitation of key workers and large numbers of deaths, including young people. A genuine pandemic is not something that would have needed billions of dollars in advertising for people to even notice and fear. Using this long-established definition of the word, we conclude that there was in fact no global pandemic in 2020. The word was deliberately misapplied and weaponised against an unsuspecting public. Let us be clear, this article is not questioning the existence of a virus SARS-CoV-2 or an illness named Covid-19, but even the choice of ‘SARS’ (Severe Acquired Respiratory Syndrome) as the name for this coronavirus was already setting the scene for systematic fear-mongering.
The notion of a ‘pandemic’ was relentlessly promulgated through mainstream media to ramp up fear in the population, to help enforce unprecedented lockdowns and other extremely harmful policies (e.g school closures and universal mask wearing) and to push through Emergency Use Authorisations of novel technology mRNA and viral vector DNA products.
This would not have been possible were it not for three false premises that covid was:
This is a good example of using linguistic and psychological meta-categories (pandemic, fear, urgency, vax…) to commandeer a mindscape, to trick people into believing something that is not true. Lies like this are designed to enthrall entire cultures, to make them cower and obey. To control their minds and thus also their behaviors. I hate to say it but this is practically all the US government does these days. Nothing is true, it’s all designed to control the population and increase government power. Ukraine is another example, as is AGW, as is the planned destruction of our economy and borders. ABN
The left has historically and in the present always fought for control of metacognitive language, concepts, and narratives. It gains control by vehemently asserting the rightness of its definitions while violently attacking any attempt to contradict its irrational assertions. This is where it reveals deep psychopathic tendencies and why it attracts psychopaths and the morally ungrounded. The key to leftist momentum and control is their control of metacognitive thought and language. If you disagree, you are ‘racist’, a ‘running dog’, a ‘reactionary’ and must be destroyed. The secret of all mind-control is control of metacognition such that victims cannot even think another way. ABN
American Buddhist Net 