It's both, you mustachioed faggots.

The idea that such a question should be cast upon these waters under the costume of a gay rock-opera band fills me with a strange unease. Cumboy, the Cumlord of Lower Cumthorpe-on-Sea raises the most powerful issues here, and so casually...

Where does perception come from?

How does a brain interpret the world? Is there a form of being which can be interpreted ‘as is’? Or does the act of perceiving change the form of an object from reality to neural representation, a kind of quantum mechanics allegory?

Can experience be represented as a sum of neuronal interactions?

Is the mind-body connection some kind of heady Cartesian masturbation or a question of the utmost importance?

Can the tools we have for revealing the activation patterns of a brain tell us anything at all about its action?

As a young psychologist, these questions were thrown at me like a shower of javelins. The answer eventually provided was, of course, “We don’t really care because we’re scientists... now get back to reading those journals you lazy little shit!”

Thank you so much, academia. You go a long way to fanning the flames of a young man’s flirtations with solipsism.

But the crusty nerd-elite have a point, and a perspective which continually manages to do small things like make diseases go away and build warm stuff to live in – if reality is an all-encompassing illusion, then it does a damn good job of being consistent. So good in fact that predictive laws allow us to understand and manipulate it with a relative degree of safety.

(This raises the question, if we have a ‘reality’ that is artificially constructed from another reality (a meta-reality?) and it is entirely consistent in construction, does it change the definition of the Real? Just... excuse me... sorry. Trying to prise my hand off my penis.)

One of the most interesting parts of the postmodern experiment is the focus on social construction, the idea that ‘truth’ should be understood socially, as a product of socioculturally situated perspective and its rose glass’d view of the Real. Frames and perspectives create different entities of the same object. It’s easy to dismiss as an idea (“We don’t have a social perspective on this test-tube, son! It’s TEH GLASS! NO SOCIALZ HER!! LOL!1!”) and most of my psychological colleagues hate it with a peculiar kind of fervour, thinking the charge of ‘being unscientific’ is the worst possible insult they could level at it.

What putrid shit-encrusted stupidity.

Anyone who has read an utterly convincing statistical analysis, only to read a follow-up article which completely debunks it will be familiar with a small and unassailable feeling that sometimes we have absolutely no idea what the fuck we’re doing. The fact remains that two highly intelligent and educated people, whose arguments are entirely quantitative, can disagree almost entirely on simple matters of easily demonstrable evidence... surely there is space in hard science for a relative understanding of their perspectives.

That is to say, a relative understanding. Not relativism. They are not both right and you can circumcise me with a bone knife, let me wear a burqa and sign me up to the Flat Earth society before you let me believe that particularly feeble hippy inconsistency. If we have moral and ethical constructs, we have greater and lesser good, and if we have a reality that manages to reproduce itself with such charming reliability, then we have a tail to chase. End of story, pomosexuals.

It’s not particularly mature, but this kind of truth-brawling always reminds me of the FarBeyondSane Experiment in Democracy:

• Give a large statistically significant number of very intelligent people, well-meaning and educated people a contentious issue for discussion.
• They will either almost entirely agree on an approach to the issue, in which case intelligence has no place in democracy as is washed out by the will of the stupid, the moralists and the emptiest heads with the loudest voices...
• Or our intellectual elite will remain as sulky, irrational and deeply divided as the population at large, in which case intelligence is irrelevant to democracy as the problem remains insoluble, a balanced switch waiting for a meme to throw it one way or another.

There remains only to tell you relevant things of which I am convinced before I fail to draw any kind of conclusions whatsoever.

* The structure of a brain is complex and ridiculously, even savagely, nonlinear. All such systems have a sensitivity to initial conditions which is so acute, the physical inputs and outputs are theoretically disconnected. The system is best understood as having an output (i.e. behaviour) which acts as if a strange attractor – typified behaviour which follows loose procedures with non-specific boundaries. Its measurement and understanding is tremendously problematic.

* By extension, brains of different structures interpret the same stimulus in ways which cannot approach being the same. The interesting thing about personality traits, political viewpoints, and moralities is that they all have a quasi-reliable pattern of correlates which assemble themselves into archetypes. The annoying thing about the same is that they’re fucking correlates and they don’t DO anything. They allow you to safely conclude 100% of stump-dick-all.

* Morality is a force which completely trumps reason and performs unnatural acts to the bullet wounds in its neck. Broadly, morality posits the idea of Greater Truth. Truth that is so true that it cannot be proven, and doesn’t need to be because it’s just so gosh-darned true. I know I am not the only one who finds this monumentally stupid. That is a great relief, a relief entirely outweighed by the anxiety created by the fact that we are an embattled minority.

* Many scientific types could not give two blowdried shits about the nature of truth. Considering their often cavalier treatment of experimental protocols, and pillaging of statistical procedures, it’s a wonder we feel safe to comb our hair without getting cancer. Like teachers or bankers, many of the truth-chasing fraternity think of their work as ‘just a job’. For shame.

* It is my firm belief that every intelligent person should experiment with drugs. If there is such a thing as a hegemony of perception, then a good dose of psilocybin, or even a greasy joint of White Rhino can give it enough of a shake to create some forward momentum. Not only that, but drugs should be free, legal and widely available to those with tested IQs above 140. Please?

* The Matrix got far too much press for being philosophically astute. Intimations of clever doth not a intellect make, you sandblasted cunts.

Now, I am going down to the yard to lift kegs until my head stops spinning on its axis.