All conscious thought the world over has been hijacked by the neurobiological approach to science, medicine, behavior and psychology. You hear it on NPR – public radio – so it isn’t confined to academia; it is brainwashed into public consiousness.
The principles are accepted, unquestioned, as the “new truth” these fields have to offer us.
On NPR I heard a scientist raving over the fact that stimulating a certain area of the brain could bring on thoughts like “I don’t really belong here.” She was in a rhapsody about this discovery.
But think about it – so what? Where would the ultimate conclusion take us? Locate those cells in the brain and burn them out so you think only positive thoughts from now on?
Is ANYBODY questioning the blatant materialism of all of this? The concreteness? Furthermore, when did the criticism of “Cogito Ergo Sum” get swept under the rug? “I think therefore I am” has been questioned as an accepted truth for decades. We humans are far more than our thoughts. To reduce us to our thoughts is to participate in reductionism. Oversimplification.
The field itself is not simplified – it has been rendered so biologically complex and obfuscated as to stagger the intellect. BUT THE UNDERLYING PREMISE ITSELF IS REDUCTIONISTIC.
I remember when the now cherished public belief got inserted by Big Pharma into the zeitgeist. “All mental illness is a chemical imbalance.” Now we are reduced to a bag of chemicals.
Solution? Our chemicals are for everyone with a problem in living, such as grief, or job loss that might be depressing you.
All of these ideas tie us to the material – the brain, the complex chemistry of the body. They demand that we stop looking deeper. They box us in to ignore the mystical, the ethereal, the unseen, the puzzling, the unanswerable, the mystery.
Materialism is a problem in our culture anyway – manifesting in greed and the accumulation of anything we can get our hands on – but these “new ideas and new solutions” just reiterate more of the same, but on a grand scale never experienced before.