Debunking the debunkers

When I post stories such as the snow that can't be melted, I always get comments like “why do you post shit like this?”

On reflection, I think I have as many problems with debunkers as with the perveyers of conspiracy theory. As for sceptics – they are beyond the pale for me.

There are definiitely areas that remain a mystery and go beyond science.

Obsessive Debunking Disorder (ODD)?

Are Hardcore Skeptics and Debunkers Actually Brain Deficient? Their Own Beloved ’Hard Science’ Might Well Suggest Many Are.

Red Ice Creations,

16 May, 2013

We have all encountered them. The men and women of ’reason’. The self-appointed guardians and vanguards of materialist dogma along with their absolute faith and belief in official government and corporate press releases. The debunker, the hardcore skeptic—how they love to compulsively ridicule and mock all they deem ’pseudoscience’ and ’conspiracy theory’—while also declaring anyone who thinks outside the box or questions the prevailing orthodoxy, a "moron" and a "tard". Matters not how solid the evidence you present them with is, nor how flimsy their own state-sanctioned ’hard science’ which they smugly offer up as their rebuttal; they are driven by a messianic compulsion to root out unscientific ’idiots’ with all the zeal and fanaticism similar to that of a Dominican or Jesuit charging through southern France in the twelfth century seeking out ’heretics’ for the burning. Irony does not even come into their myopic worldview—unless of course a government, corporate or university press office states this. Then it becomes an undisputed fact. Thanks to the likes of Richard Dawkins and Christoper Hitchens, these Internet-bound warriors of rationality see ’Creationists’ and ’hidden Christians’ around every corner and seek to root them out and expose them as part and parcel of their own peculiar secular witch hunt mentality. 

The reality is that apart from their own kind—other self-proclaimed non-’idiots’—most people find such arrogant and obnoxious debunkers and hardcore skeptics to be strangely angry and boorish, and often confrontational to the point of hysterical. So many of them seem to lack basic social and behavioural skills when ’debating’ with their ’kook’ of choice. Their absolutism can be staggering at times. Yet, despite all this, they have somehow come to consider themselves ’cool’ and even ’sexy’ within the last decade. This is simply a lack of critical thinking on their behalf; a distorted worldview where only they are right and everyone else is an idiot.

However, when you strip down their whole mandate into its constituent parts, one soon finds that most of these ’scientifically’ minded crusaders have no actual accredited scientific background, and the entire thrust of their endeavours remains nothing less than unconditional servitude and unquestioned devotion to authority figures and the status quo. They seek entrenched orthodoxy, not exploration and wonder. They see an open-minded individual as being akin to a brain being infected with a disease, or the mark of a witch. They act as if Creationists are a real danger to human survival, as if the US Bible Belt has extended beyond its absurd boundaries. Creationists are about as much danger to the advances made by scientists in the last two hundred years as Graneda was to Ronald Reagan back in the early 1980s.

It is only fair to point out that there are also healthy skeptics who genuinely do look at anomalies and unexplained phenomena within the natural and unseen cosmos with a cautious eye. They will at least indulge a novel or radical opinion and look at the evidence before taking a stance—often it is an arbitrary position—based on using the Scientific Method coupled with Carl Sagan’s "extraordinary evidence". They are generally polite and only moderately condescending at worst.

The debunker and the hardcore skeptics, on the other hand, will even attack these open-minded Materialists, similar to how a flying saucer cult will have very public witch hunts of so-so members who have not shown their unconditional devotion to the messages sent from the ’space brothers’. The irony is that many of the open-minded skeptics that they attack often have a scientific or engineering background, and these folks are being attacked by debunkers whose sum total of their own quest for reason and logic rarely extends beyond procuring a ’Mythbusters’ DVD box set or having a poster of Richard Dawkins on their wall. Any Reductionist fence-sitters will be treated with ridicule and contempt—even fascistic vitriol and vicious insults.

There is simply no grey areas within the concrete consciousness of the debunker or the hardcore skeptic; instead, only a kind of scientific idealism—and idealism, both secular or otherwise, is really just a nice way of saying ’fascism’.

So what gives? How come they behave the way they do? A complete lack of social intelligence? An inability to debate, share interesting banter and listen to what another person is saying which might be at odds with their own beliefs? Surprisingly, their own beloved science might well provide the answer to these questions. It may well be an over-stimulation of the left hemisphere of their brains leading to a kind of self-induced schizophrenia whereby the right hemisphere of their brain has been switched off. Hence, why they place no value on other forms of non-lateral intelligence: noetic wisdom and intuition.

THE LEFT RIGHT BRAIN—MYTHOLOGY AND FACT

During the 1960’s and well into the following two decades, a branch of pop psychology developed which began to make some very speculative assumptions about the specific roles the two hemispheres of our brain play in our cognitive awareness and functioning. The general understanding developed that the left hemisphere of the brain was essentially analytical and concerned with processes and quantitative evaluation, while the right hemisphere of the human brain was where the artists and dreamers resided. This is a very simplistic understanding; and in recent years, imaging research has shown that both hemispheres share more or less the same attributes, and both can equally process the same cognitive functionality. However, and this is crucial, there is a level of redundancy in both hemispheres.

The growing speculation for the need for two (asymmetrical) brain hemispheres is to perform two acts of awareness. The left brain is devoted to specific tasks and objectives, while the right brain acts as a kind of peripheral awareness. There has to be a kind of background seeing, as well as immediate attention to the task at hand. Think of an early human on the side of a riverbank trying to spear a salmon—the left brain would be devoted to this task. In order to maintain awareness of the environment and possible dangers therein, the right hemisphere of the human brain is ’looking’ out for predators such as a saber-tooth tiger seeking an easy meal in the form of a prehistoric human who is completely concentrated on catching a fish. Hence, why the right brain is often associated with insight, intuition and noetic realisations. Which is why artists tend to have an ability to see changes in their environment and social conditions before the rest of the population. Their ’background vision’ is more highly developed due to them using both hemispheres of their brain for the purpose they were intended.

The left brain, on the other hand, has been shown to be highly narcissistic and with an inflated sense of its own worth and status. The left hemisphere sees no problem with itself, and this has been shown in stroke patients who lost the use of the right hemisphere of their brain. Operating in left-brain mode only, they assumed they were perfectly fine until they attempted to get out of bed only to discover they were paralysed on one side. 

Between the left and right hemispheres of the human brain is the corpus callosum, which is a thin membrane of nerve fibers which separates the two halves and has now been shown that rather than being a communicative link between the two brain halves, it acts more like a buffer, with the left brain in Western people having a desire to literally switch off the neural activity in the right hemisphere. This is one meme which Betty Edwards was correct about in her book Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain—the left hemisphere is a bully. In overly logical and analytical individuals, fMRI scans have shown the left brain actually inhibits the right brain—via the corpus callosum nerve fibers—from offering its contribution to the entire cognitive process. This state of right hemisphere nullification is where the debunker and the hardcore skeptics are trapped and can never leave—in their intolerant and highly narcissistic left hemisphere—using the two percent of neural wiring into their right hemisphere in order to shut it off. Ordering the right hemisphere to cease activity while the left side of the brain saves the world from ’morons’ who dare question official government press releases or the mandates from any authority figure or bureaucratic institutions. 

Along with this, their intuition and ’background awareness’ are likewise diminished. Can you see where this is going? For all their obsession with brain functionality and brain size, as well as their entrenched (and completely unproven) notion that all human consciousness resides in the brain, the debunkers and hardcore skeptics are only using one half of their brain.

EVOLUTION AND THE CORPUS CALLOSUM

Despite what one would assume, the further we get from our hunter-gatherer ancestors, the thickness of the corpus callosum has actually increased. Pushing both halves of the human brain further apart rather than removing it. This presents Darwinists with a problem; as we move further away from the dangers of the natural world, there should be an on-going lateralisation and symmetry of the two brain hemispheres. Another problem is presented here; in that it has now been shown that people of higher intelligence and IQ are much easier to hypnotise and mind control than more creative individuals, and even people with lower IQs are less likely to be mesmerised than formally educated persons with advanced degrees. This would go a long way to explaining why the most absurd flying saucer cults are populated with PhDs and other highly qualified people waiting for the ’space brothers’ to arrive. The over-dependence upon and submission to the left hemisphere of the brain leads to just as much delusion and risk of being deceived as the flighty and poetic over-stimulated right hemisphere.

A COGNITIVE AWARENESS STRANGLED BY STATISTICAL INFORMATION AND EXPERIMENTAL DESIGNS

All the great scientific discoveries were ’eureka’ moments. They were not developed in the labs by white coats working for corporations and foundations. Scientific discovery was not gained by piling sequential ’certainties’ upon previous ’certainties’. They were intuitive insights which were validated through the Scientific Method of measurement and constant re-testing. The Western system of education has created a kind of trial separation between the left and right hemispheres of the human brain. Therefore, similar to a stroke patient who is not aware that one side of his or her body is paralysed until they attempt to get out of bed, the deeply entranced hyperactive left brain debunker and hardcore skeptic is simply unable to grasp how the rest of us see the world and experience life. Unable to see the wood from the trees, they do not comprehend intuition and noetic insights. They are cognitively blinded to these experiences and the rest of us trying to explain to them how some official announcement or world event—does not "feel right"—is a human experience that they are completely unaware of. This is why you cannot explain an alternative viewpoint of view to them. Humans need both sides of their brain working in tandem in order for their consciousness to synthesise a more complete and richer understanding of the world as well as human and social dynamics.

THE JOURNEY INTO ORTHODOXY MADNESS

This can be seen as a kind of self-induced schizophrenia, resulting from over-hyperactivity in the left hemisphere of the brain. There is too much information being processed, and the intense devotion to the analytical leads to a kind of overload in the ’here and now’ dominant cognitive rationalisation based on statistical data, while neglecting the right hemisphere of the brain and the ’background awareness’. 

Much of this has to do with how our minds process ideas and concepts through visual thought forms, and how this is then expressed in language and the written word. By neglecting the right hemisphere, extreme stress is then placed on the left hemisphere, and the results can be catastrophic. Philo Farnsworth, the Utah farm boy who invented the modern television system and then went on to develop over 150 patents in television and broadcast technology, ended up drinking himself to death due to—according to his family—being unable to shut his mind down and live a normal life. His initial discovery was a result of a ’eureka’ moment, when as a teen, he observed how the plough lines behind his tractor represented the ideal method for transmitting images by radio waves; however, his obsession with formulae and endless analytical pursuits literally blew his mind. Farnsworth is not unique in this respect. 

When one becomes completely entrenched within the left brain and obsessed with an exclusively analytical lifestyle (which then becomes a belief package to be defended), there is a loss of cognitive functioning and behavioural control. This explains why there is so much anger and hostility among debunkers and hardcore skeptics. The bullying aspect of their narcissistic left brain creates a superiority complex, in that they come to believe they know all and see all, when in reality, they are running half-empty with one aspect of their human experience essentially missing. This part of the human experience where intuition, hunches, insight and social intelligence of the most subtle and intricate forms are a complete mystery to them. To the skeptical debunker, things—’either are or they are not’—there is no grey area, as they are ironically not fully utilising their own grey matter to its full potential. 

Stress is then incurred upon their left hemisphere cognitive functioning and behavioural deficiencies result. They are not calling people ’morons’ and ’retards’ as a general insult or standard Internet ’courage’—the debunkers and hardcore skeptics are deeply frustrated and near hysterical to the point where they see anyone who is open-minded and willing to indulge the mysterious as being akin to an alien life form. They simply cannot relate to the rest of us. We are ’irrational’, ’lacking reason’ ’lost in woo’. Their experience of being human and how they describe it through crude metaphors whereby ’we are just DNA robots’ and there is nothing else going on—is not how the rest of us experience our lives. We know there is much more to the human experience than these left-brained internees of the hardcore skeptic and debunker faction assume. Much, much more.

So the next time you find yourself confronted with a hardcore skeptic or debunker, do not even bother to try and make your argument or present your point of view to them, as you are throwing 100% of a human experience in 50% of a self-repressed cognitive understanding. It’s not their fault they are the way they are. They are victims of an educational system which began in Prussia in the eighteenth century and which has led humanity into one scientific genocide and meat grinder after the next. 

Use your intuition and ignore them. You do not need their validation and approval, as they are only interested in what the men in the white coats tell them that which is a ’fact’. Be polite and continue to follow your own field of study and knowledge path, and then see where it leads you. This may lead you nowhere, but so what. The journey is often more important than the destination. Your life will be more rewarding, creative and enriching for allowing your right brain to take part in the imagination of yourself within this five-sense reality we call human existence.


Further Resources:

Left Brain, Right Brain: Perspectives From Cognitive Neuroscience by Sally P. Springer and Georg Deutsch

The Master and his Emissary by Iain McGilchrist

Right Hand, Left Hand by Chris McManus

Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, by S.B. Kaufman