Our Brains Will Kill Us.

In the last 5 minutes you may have walked downstairs, made a cup of tea and drunk it. Do you remember the precise actions all this took? Finger in handle of cup/support with lower finger/thumb on top/ bend elbow 30 degrees etc etc? All this goes on with hardly any conscious thought, your only conscious thought is ‘I want to drink the tea.’ Your brain/muscles connection takes care of all the rest. It’s incredible but, well it’s as simple as drinking tea. Our conscious thoughts, our ‘I’, are the tip of an iceberg and it’s well proven they’re up to two seconds out of date. What ‘was’ decided two seconds ago arrives into our consciousness as hot news two seconds later. So where and how was that decision originally made? It’s often likened to a front office manager controlling a large super conscientious back office operation, and, like all such structures, suffers from bad judgement and meddling. Over the millennia the human brain has grown this front office operation tremendously like any corporation. It’s devised technologies, weapons, levels of deviousness, even it’s own electronic equivalent, AI, and created all manner of mental ill health. Yet we lord it as ‘I’ like we might an oligarch and demean what the back office does, until we perhaps acquire a spinal injury. Our world and the world has changed dramatically for the worse as a result, even to the point of some sort of global extinction. This is alarming and usually put down to malignant individuals like Putin, Hitler, politicians and countless profit and power seekers but never down to their brain development and the malignancy of their ‘I’. People have railed over the ‘I’ of wealth and the ‘I’ of power but as societies we have put nothing in place to limit them. The ‘I’ of their conscious thoughts in these cases reigns supreme and is able to indulge itself almost limitlessly. Their back office might put forward post-it notes of empathy, limitation, gratitude and the virtues of fairness but all will be returned unread. Now, like climate change, we have a limited number of years to rectify this. I hope we do otherwise the ‘I’s that we count as ourselves will put paid to the rest of us.