If you want to see philosophy in action, pay a visit to a robo-rat laboratory. A robo-rat is a run-ofthe-mill rat with a twist: scientists have implanted electrodes into the sensory and reward areas in the rat’s brain. This enables the scientists to manoeuvre the rat by remote control. After short training sessions, researchers have managed not only to make the rats turn left or right, but also to climb ladders, sniff around garbage piles, and do things that rats normally dislike, such as jumping from great heights. Armies and corporations show keen interest in the robo-rats, hoping they could prove useful in many tasks and situations. For example, robo-rats could help detect survivors trapped under collapsed buildings, locate bombs and booby traps, and map underground tunnels and caves. Animal-welfare activists have voiced concern about the suffering such experiments inflict on the rats. Professor Sanjiv Talwar of the State University of New York, one of the leading robo-rat researchers, has dismissed these concerns, arguing that the rats actually enjoy the experiments. After all, explains Talwar, the rats ‘work for pleasure’ and when the electrodes stimulate the reward centre in their brain, ‘the rat feels Nirvana’.To the best of our understanding, the rat doesn’t feel that somebody else controls her, and she doesn’t feel that she is being coerced to do something against her will. When Professor Talwar presses the remote control, the rat wants to move to the left, which is why she moves to the left. When the professor presses another switch, the rat wants to climb a ladder, which is why she climbs the ladder. After all, the rat’s desires are nothing but a pattern of firing neurons. What does it matter whether the neurons are firing because they are stimulated by other neurons, or because they are stimulated by transplanted electrodes connected to Professor Talwar’s remote control? If you asked the rat about it, she might well have told you, ‘Sure I have free will! Look, I want to turn left – and I turn left. I want to climb a ladder – and I climb a ladder. Doesn’t that prove that I have free will?
We have a predator that came from the depths of the cosmos and took over the rule of our lives. Human beings are its prisoners. The Predator is our lord and master. It has rendered us docile, helpless. If we want to protest, it suppresses our protest. If we want to act independently, it demands that we don't do so... I have been beating around the bush all this time, insinuating to you that something is holding us prisoner. Indeed we are held prisoner! "This was an energetic fact for the sorcerers of ancient Mexico ... They took us over because we are food for them, and they squeeze us mercilessly because we are their sustenance. just as we rear chickens in chicken coops, the predators rear us in human coops, humaneros. Therefore, their food is always available to them." "No, no, no, no," [Carlos replies] "This is absurd don Juan. What you're saying is something monstrous. It simply can't be true, for sorcerers or for average men, or for anyone." "Why not?" don Juan asked calmly. "Why not? Because it infuriates you? ... You haven't heard all the claims yet. I want to appeal to your analytical mind. Think for a moment, and tell me how you would explain the contradictions between the intelligence of man the engineer and the stupidity of his systems of beliefs, or the stupidity of his contradictory behaviour. Sorcerers believe that the predators have given us our systems of belief, our ideas of good and evil, our social mores. They are the ones who set up our hopes and expectations and dreams of success or failure. They have given us covetousness, greed, and cowardice. It is the predators who make us complacent, routinary, and egomaniacal." "'But how can they do this, don Juan? [Carlos] asked, somehow angered further by what [don Juan] was saying. "'Do they whisper all that in our ears while we are asleep?" "'No, they don't do it that way. That's idiotic!" don Juan said, smiling. "They are infinitely more efficient and organized than that. In order to keep us obedient and meek and weak, the predators engaged themselves in a stupendous manoeuvre stupendous, of course, from the point of view of a fighting strategist. A horrendous manoeuvre from the point of view of those who suffer it. They gave us their mind! Do you hear me? The predators give us their mind, which becomes our mind. The predators' mind is baroque, contradictory, morose, filled with the fear of being discovered any minute now." "I know that even though you have never suffered hunger... you have food anxiety, which is none other than the anxiety of the predator who fears that any moment now its manoeuvre is going to be uncovered and food is going to be denied. Through the mind, which, after all, is their mind, the predators inject into the lives of human beings whatever is convenient for them. And they ensure, in this manner, a degree of security to act as a buffer against their fear." "The sorcerers of ancient Mexico were quite ill at ease with the idea of when [the predator] made its appearance on Earth. They reasoned that man must have been a complete being at one point, with stupendous insights, feats of awareness that are mythological legends nowadays. And then, everything seems to disappear, and we have now a sedated man. What I'm saying is that what we have against us is not a simple predator. It is very smart, and organized. It follows a methodical system to render us useless. Man, the magical being that he is destined to be, is no longer magical. He's an average piece of meat." "There are no more dreams for man but the dreams of an animal who is being raised to become a piece of meat: trite, conventional, imbecilic.
She loved him. But he didn’t know how to love.He could talk about love. He could see love and feel love. But he couldn’t give love.He could make love. But he couldn’t make promises.She had desperately wanted his promises.She wanted his heart, knew she couldn’t have it so she took what she could get.Temporary bliss. Passionate highs and lows. Withdrawal and manipulation.He only stayed long enough to take what he needed and keep moving.If he stopped moving, he would self-destruct.If he stopped wandering, he would have to face himself.He chose to stay in the dark where he couldn’t see.If he exposed himself and the sun came out, he’d see his shadow.He was deathly afraid of his shadow.She saw his shadow, loved it, understood it. Saw potential in it.She thought her love would change him.He pushed and he pulled, tested boundaries, thinking she would never leave.He knew he was hurting her, but didn’t know how to share anything but pain.He was only comfortable in chaos. Claiming souls before they could claim him.Her love, her body, she had given to him and he’d taken with such feigned sincerity, absorbing every drop of her.His dark heart concealed.She’d let him enter her spirit and stroke her soul where everything is love and sensation and surrender.Wide open, exposed to deception.It had never occurred to her that this desire was not love.It was blinding the way she wanted him.She couldn’t see what was really happening, only what she wanted to happen.She suspected that he would always seek to minimize the risk of being split open, his secrets revealed.He valued his soul’s privacy far more than he valued the intimacy of sincere connection so he kept his distance at any and all costs.Intimacy would lead to his undoing—in his mind, an irrational and indulgent mistake.When she discovered his indiscretions, she threw love in his face and beat him with it.Somewhere deep down, in her labyrinth, her intricacy, the darkest part of her soul, she relished the mayhem.She felt a sense of privilege for having such passion in her life.He stirred her core.The place she dared not enter.The place she could not stir for herself.But something wasn’t right.His eyes were cold and dark.His energy, unaffected.He laughed at her and her antics, told her she was a mess.Frantic, she looked for love hiding in his eyes, in his face, in his stance, and she found nothing but disdain.And her heart stopped.