I do not suggest that the brain originates anything. I do not know that the brain ‘causes’ consciousness: it might or might not. For example, it might transduce, or otherwise mediate, consciousness. I have my own view on that, which I will come to in a later chapter. But it is a matter of likelihoods: I know of no way of proving the point one way or the other, since the observable facts would look the same whether it gave rise to, or simply mediated, consciousness: just as an alien could not tell merely by looking in the back of the TV set whether it gave rise to, or transmitted, the material it shows.
[I]f you ask me why I robbed an old lady, I could reply: ‘I needed the money’, ‘I had just watched a violent video’, ‘I inherited my dad’s psychopathic tendencies’, ‘I was high on crystal meth’, ‘I heard a voice tell me to do it’, ‘I was brought up in a subculture where it was considered normal to steal’, ‘the government cut my welfare payments’, ‘my serotonin levels were depleted’, and so on. What counts as a possible cause depends on the context of the question.
Sadly, this patent reality [of climate change, environmental degradation, & the limits to industrial civilization] continues to be mostly denied in societies made up largely of the passively uninformed and the passionately misinformed.
Unfortunately, rational behavior is not characteristic of addicts and ignoramuses, so the warning signs of overshoot are denied or rationalized away by a divided, distracted, and deluded populace, and this would not change even if 100 percent of the world’s scientists were to issue a warning to humanity. So far from trying to solve our problems, we persist in the behavior that makes them worse.
But we're not at 100% of qualified experts agreeing on the reality of climate change. According to climate change expert Professor Jerry Schnoor of the University of Iowa, we're only at 99.9%. (#sarcasm)
Once our hope is focused on a story about the future that’s anchored in clear-eyed realism, we need to perform a bit of magic— to turn our hope “water” into hope “wine,” so to speak.
Intense uncertainty, the kind that makes the usual sense of the term status quo virtually irrelevant, became a source of fear. No one quite knew whether the era’s constellation of crises indicated “a state of greater or lesser permanence, as in a longer or shorter transition towards something better or worse or towards something altogether different.”
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