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George Orwell’s 1984 through a neuroscience lens

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Re: George Orwell’s 1984 through a neuroscience lens

#41

Post by ukj »

feralimal wrote: post #19
ukj wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If Big Brother hadn't published 1984 would you even know how they really operate? (this comment is a tribute to https://xkcd.com/966/ )

I'm not clear what your position is, but what does it say about one, in one can only see the tyranny in a book but not be able to see it in real life?

I am able to see both Orwell’s tyranny AND Huxley’s tyranny.

If I frame all dysfunctional human interactions through the lens of “tyranny” then I see “tyranny” everywhere.

That is how all confirmation biases works. That is why they are all uninteresting.

Falsifying one’s own biases is much more fun...

The world today is less tyrannical (as per Orwell’s concept) than it was when he was alive. Only when you ignore all moral progress do you get to paint contemporary society with Orwell’s brush.

Re: George Orwell’s 1984 through a neuroscience lens

#42

Post by pjc50 »

feralimal wrote: post #16
Hoasi wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It is a great book, and Orwell was spot on with so much of what he wrote. How did he do it? Not to diminish Orwell's prescience in any way, but Yevgeny Zamyatin's novel We precedes Orwell's work by almost 30 years. It contains all the same themes, and without a shadow of a doubt, had a massive influence on Orwell's work.

I would suspect that Yevgeny Zamyatin would also have been privy to the plan. Aldous Huxley too.

Ah yes, a dissident who couldn't get published in his own country was obviously included.

Re: George Orwell’s 1984 through a neuroscience lens

#43

Post by mistermann »

ukj wrote: post #41
feralimal wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not clear what your position is, but what does it say about one, in one can only see the tyranny in a book but not be able to see it in real life?

I am able to see both Orwell’s tyranny AND Huxley’s tyranny. If I frame all dysfunctional human interactions through the lens of “tyranny” then I see “tyranny” everywhere. That is how all confirmation biases works. That is why they are all uninteresting. Falsifying one’s own biases is much more fun... The world today is less tyrannical (as per Orwell’s concept) than it was when he was alive. Only when you ignore all…

Might there be some confirmation bias at work here?

Re: George Orwell’s 1984 through a neuroscience lens

#44

Post by feralimal »

gameswithgo wrote: post #23
feralimal wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Honestly i say this not to be mean but to try and help, it sounds like you are not mentally well. There are many real threats to the well being of the masses enacted by various powerful people and groups but masks and vaccines are not one. they are just the best way we know how to deal with a virus that is killing thousands of people a day.

My ability to comment has been restricted apparently - "I'm commenting too fast." My last post was 3hrs ago.

I have expressed an opinion that Covid is a mass hoax being perpetrated on humanity to weaken the general population and entrench those who govern us still further - that we have been living in 1984 since at least 1948. Apparently this is not an opinion that can be allowed on HN - it needs to be quashed.

(If anyone is inclined to read more, this is a good article: https://www.lewrockwell.com/2020/12/gary-d-barnett/the-state...)

Back to the comment.

Yeah, thanks for your 'concern', but as you feel empowered to cast aspersions on my mental health, can I ask you to please take a look in the mirror? Do you do that to people a lot, when people disagree with you? At the least, it is a pretty juvenile tactic. And you think I have a mental health issue? Ok. But then, you probably believe that people who argue against what the government and media say are mentally unwell, because? ... the government and media say so. If you think for a second, you will see how circular that reasoning is, and should even be a little embarrassed that you uncritically accept what you are told.

As I see it, you seem to have bought the idea a re-branded flu is going to kill us all. Have you seen or have any reason to believe that the virus is a real thing in your life? Have you seen people dying? Is there anything to indicate to you that this is real except for what you have seen on TV? Did you believe that Independence Day was real too?

Appealing to your reason now, do you think that wearing a mask will help you breathe better and enable you to avoid illness? That staying away from loved ones, is the way to show you care? That staying at home is the way to optimal mental and physical health? That putting something direct into you bloodstream, bypassing all your body's defences, where you have no idea of the ingredients, is a good idea? If so, why? Is it because you have been taught by Big Brother (government, military, corporations) that this is 'good'? Do you trust Big Brother over yourself and your own reasoning?

Re: George Orwell’s 1984 through a neuroscience lens

#45

Post by ukj »

mistermann wrote: post #43
ukj wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am able to see both Orwell’s tyranny AND Huxley’s tyranny. If I frame all dysfunctional human interactions through the lens of “tyranny” then I see “tyranny” everywhere. That is how all confirmation biases works. That is why they are all uninteresting. Falsifying one’s own biases is much more fun... The world today is less tyrannical (as per Orwell’s concept) than it was when he was alive. Only when you ignore all…

Might there be some confirmation bias at work here?

Might you be responding to half of my post?

Re: George Orwell’s 1984 through a neuroscience lens

#46

Post by jasomill »

082349872349872 wrote: post #37
samizdis wrote: post #7

Nineteen Eighty-Four, and most of Orwell's other works (including his essays) are freely available at: https://orwell.ru/ Edited to add direct link to the appendix to Nineteen Eighty-Four, as referenced at the end of the article: https://orwell.ru/library/novels/1984/english/en_app

Newspeak didn't occur in a vacuum. I find it more likely Orwell was spoofing Wells and Basic English and all of the post-1918 utopian attempts at "simplifying language" or auxlangs, than that he would be pretending to any originality. It's not newspeak that causes crimestop. It's that "quiet desperation is the english way", it's the middle class attitudes of the title of "Keep the Aspidistra Flying", etc. that cause…

What Orwell was doing with Newspeak was, I believe, less a direct spoof of existing schemes than an illustration of how common habits of language might be consciously harnessed and directed by a totalitarian regime to further its own intellectual and political designs. In his own words[1],

When you think of a concrete object, you think wordlessly, and then, if you want to describe the thing you have been visualising you probably hunt about until you find the exact words that seem to fit it. When you think of something abstract you are more inclined to use words from the start, and unless you make a conscious effort to prevent it, the existing dialect will come rushing in and do the job for you, at the expense of blurring or even changing your meaning.

Along these lines, the basic idea behind Newspeak was to create a language where "the existing dialect" would "do the job for" the Party, by making the expression of desirable thoughts not merely the natural result of lazily-chosen expression, but the automatic result of any admissible expression, by simplifying, not only the language itself, but the underlying body of ideas it was capable of expressing.

[1] https://orwell.ru/library/essays/politics/english/e_polit

Re: George Orwell’s 1984 through a neuroscience lens

#47

Post by gumby »

Orwell became an engaged socialist as a young man based on his experience as being sent out as a colonial officer to Burma, and then as a consequence his exploration of the lives of the lower classes in the “developed” regions of Europe (primarily UK, France and Spain).* he wrote extensively of the inequities of capitalism and specifically of British social system.

By the end of the war his opinions had expanded as he understood the common thread of manipulation that ran through the governing systems of capitalism, fascism and communism. His subsequent, and final book, Animal Farm was about how communist systems, due to human nature, can tend to to end up just as bad as the others. It’s unclear to me if he ever gave up on his hopes for socialism (and if he had, if he despaired of any alternative) but it’s his weakest book in an extraordinary corpus.

1984 is often taken as a denouncement of socialism, but it’s more broad than that.

* Blair’s journey to socialism parallels the earlier journey that made socialism an acceptable doctrine in the UK at all, the trenches of WWI. That was the first time many of the upper class (all officers of course) had ever interacted closely with members of the lower classes and really developed even an inkling of what their lives were back home.

Re: George Orwell’s 1984 through a neuroscience lens

#48

Post by pjc50 »

082349872349872 wrote: post #37
samizdis wrote: post #7

Nineteen Eighty-Four, and most of Orwell's other works (including his essays) are freely available at: https://orwell.ru/ Edited to add direct link to the appendix to Nineteen Eighty-Four, as referenced at the end of the article: https://orwell.ru/library/novels/1984/english/en_app

Newspeak didn't occur in a vacuum. I find it more likely Orwell was spoofing Wells and Basic English and all of the post-1918 utopian attempts at "simplifying language" or auxlangs, than that he would be pretending to any originality. It's not newspeak that causes crimestop. It's that "quiet desperation is the english way", it's the middle class attitudes of the title of "Keep the Aspidistra Flying", etc. that cause…

He wrote an entire essay on politics and the English language: https://www.orwell.ru/library/essays/politics/english/e_poli... which he complains about incoherent metaphors as cover for bad politics. Newspeak is a language in which metaphor is banned, and therefore politics and opposing the state is impossible.

Re: George Orwell’s 1984 through a neuroscience lens

#49

Post by pjc50 »

gumby wrote: post #47

Orwell became an engaged socialist as a young man based on his experience as being sent out as a colonial officer to Burma, and then as a consequence his exploration of the lives of the lower classes in the “developed” regions of Europe (primarily UK, France and Spain).* he wrote extensively of the inequities of capitalism and specifically of British social system. By the end of the war his opinions had expanded as h…

> 1984 is often taken as a denouncement of socialism

It's specifically a denouncement of Stalinism and the paths that led there. The tendency of people to conflate everything from Blairism through Fabianism to Stalinism into the same "socialism" makes it hard for them to see that it's not a denouncement of all of those things at once.

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