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The Mindcore Manifesto

(This will be read on my podcast, without profanity)

I’m always experimenting with seeing the world. I try to find a way to look at things, try it out and then go with it.

I don’t think there is a universal philosophy, I think we all, as individuals have to make our own way in the roads to wisdom. My life has been full of pain, injustice, poverty, failure, and despair. Yet I had to try to find a way to be happy.

Do you know how hard it is to be happy when your life has included you and your severely disabled brother being raised in poverty during a military dictatorship. Those where the first 7 years of my life, in Chile. Then your stepdad beats you and your brother without restraint. Then your Dad comes, rescues you, and brings you to another country where you don’t speak the language. By the time I finally figured out how to live in the US at age 12 I got fucked in the ass by a 30 year old neighbor. Lots of self-mutilation scars and two serious suicide attempts later I’m 19 and I’m just fucking tired of suffering. The stories from this part of my life could more than fill a memoir.

So I follow my best friend into Charismatic christianity.

I finally quit wanting to kill myself, but I was believing in bullshit. God’s hypothetical existence aside, thinking you can hear him in your head when you have had all the psychological trauma that I’ve ha is a recipe for disaster. So what did I find? a sense of purpose in a world of delusion.

God may not be a Delusion as my beloved Richard Dawkins claims, but he was for me.

I was never going to go anywhere because believing God talked to me in my head with my background made me crazy. It made me mentally ill, just in a slightly better way than I was before.

Now I’m 28 and took a slow train to atheism that started when I was in my early 20s and I started experimenting with leftist political philosophies. All the political ideas I liked were hostile to religion, as was immortalized in Carl Marx’s famous statement that, “Religion is the opiate of the masses.”

Eventually I came to find that all my favorite political philosophies which included anarcho-socialism, green socialism, and communism, had dogmas all their own.

I learned about Lysenko’s fake biology under Stalin and about the radical lefts ridiculous opposition to a man I consider such an intellectual giant that I literally believe that he is the wisest man alive, the biologist: Edward Owen Wilson.

I learned all this from Stephen Pinker, in his masterpiece The Blank Slate. Which was the first pop-science book I read, given to me in a drunken haze by another intellectual giant in my eyes: Dr. Ian Norris the social psychologist, who was a grad student then.

Ian came from the Houston punk scene, and to a certain extent, that’s where I came up in Alief: a notoriously bad Houston neighborhood.

He could burn me the coolest MP3s while teaching me how to do electromyographic readings of facial muscle in Social Psychologist Jeff Larsen’s lab.

Ian taught me how to do science.

But…Jeff Larsen taught me how to think like a scientist.

I want everyone to know that after years of hustling my money, snorting drugs, traveling penniless, couch surfing, in addition to christian ministry and evangelism I had developed some finely tuned social intuitions. I had been both a con-man and a social worker, it was all I knew.

Jeff once asked me how I thought a social psychology experiment was going to go, and I made a prediction.

He asked me, “How do you know?”

I said, “that’s just how people are.”

He then explained to me that there was no way that I could rely on that kind of thinking, that I needed to find experimental data to support my claims. That moment Jeff Larsen memetically made me a skeptic.

I learned so many social intuitions are false and have been falsified by psychology experiments that I began to doubt everything. Including for the first time since my conversion: God.

I had great training under Jeff but Ian was going through a phase of looking into evolutionary psychology and neuroscience and I went crazy for it. Meanwhile I was getting recognized at my school as a up and coming science student and began to receive prestigious attention from groups like the Texas Tech Honors College and more importantly HHMI. HHMI funds and trains undergraduates to be scientists, and if you love science HHMI will make you love it even more.

I will never forget drinking by the river for the first time with a group of scientists and really talking about nature’s greatest mysteries. He didn’t know it yet in my imagination, but my God delusion was dealt a mortal wound that night. I would be reading Richard Dawkins and following Edge.org because of my HHMI friends influencing me.

I wanted to study the brain. I tried to broker a deal between Jeff and an animal science researcher to go into a neuroscience study on emotion in animals. He said he was not interested and asked me the second most important question of my life: “Do you want to be dry or wet?” Which in psychology wet means that you work with animals, blood, and brains.

I wanted to be wet, I needed the brain.

So I went to work for the Animal Scientist John McGlone who has been featured as a wild pig expert on National Geographic and has had a cover article in Nature. John McGlone was a powerhouse. I nearly failed his class, but learned more from his class than I did from all my other classes combined. He would recommend literature about my crazy consciousness ideas while doing inventory. I still have some of the papers I found because of him in my permanent files for which I’m trying to amass a real scientific theory of consciousness. He was fearless, he claimed he could take a urine sample from a feral pig, and I believe him. I did surgery for the first time under his graduate students, I learned anatomy from them, and it was there that I beheld and worked for the first time with my beloved brains.

My fiancée moved to Dallas, and there was a school in Dallas that taught neuroscience at a bachelors level. I walked away from the intellectual giant John McGlone for my wife, and began to study neuroscience exclusively at UT Dallas. I learned from other giants like Tres Thompson who taught me scientific reasoning at a level more rooted in physiology than in psychology.

I now work for Christa McIntyre researching memory, and I suspect before she breathes her last the whole world will know her name as she maps the role of emotion in memory consolidation and I have the rare privilege of being under her tutelage and her equally talented graduate student Jayme McReynolds.

So where are we now? I’ve been a committed skeptic for a while now and I’m trying to do my part.

They should call the World Wide Web the Wild Wild West and there are plenty of intellectual gunslingers on this frontier.

Just to name a few DJ Grothe from Point of Inquiry, James Randi, The Skeptics Guide to the Universe, Rebecca Watson, Skepticality, Quackcast, the king of the podcast The Infidel Guy, the Rational Response Squad, Phil Plaitt, PZ Myers, Greydon Square, Bugirl, Skepchick.org, Screw Lose Change, The Brain Science Podcast, This Week in Science Podcast, Neuraldump.com and many others.

I love this podcasting and youtube stuff. Its raw, its direct, and its inspiring.

I really want to do my part to cause people to do more critical thinking. I give money to atheist and skeptic groups, I read all the books, I do community service at my University from time to time, but somehow I feel like I’m selling myself short.

So I decide that someone with my background which in addition to all the science stuff I’ve discussed above includes, singing in metal and punk bands, running a punk club with my best friend, tattooing, publishing my own comics and community organizing. Not to mention all the stuff I did for my church and to try to promote Christianity, which included a radio show and a lot of social work.

So I start a podcast. My vision simple. Could there be an aesthetically post-punk science, skepticism and atheism podcast.

The answer is yes.

I’m doing it.

So I go to all the atheist and skeptic forums I can think of and promote this and ask for feedback.

Most of my feedback amounted to” you suck and stop making your podcast.”

Luckily for me my podcast has a counter that registers listens and I know that there are at least 200 regular listeners. That’s 200 people every week.

I can’t just piss on that because people on forums are crapping all over my efforts. One guy called me a martyr. I’m not a martyr, man, I’m determined. And if you are going to make an ad-hominem attack against me I will stand up for myself and tell you what you’re doing! Sorry!

I am prepared for theists, New Agers, and others to hate my podcast. I am committed to being polite and professional towards these people. I was not prepared for my fellow atheists and skeptics to be such nay-sayers. I wasn’t prepared at all.

Brian Sapient from the Rational Response Squad personally warned me about this.

In all the negative responses there was useful information, and after the initial recoil I heard it. I appreciate those of you who took the time to be cool to me, and really try to be constructive. There was someone on every forum that did this for me. The most constructive forum has been the Richarddawkins.net forum.

A special thanks should go to Rebecca Watson who spelled it out for me.

I was being too contrived. Too forced, the Mindcore character was too much of an act. And People could tell.

In theatre, literature, and film this is called verisimilitude and I was definitely sucking at it. Rebecca said that I could keep the edgy feel without doing this.

I’ve also decided to discontinue all profanity from the podcast in the vain hope that I can get this on a real radio station some day.

So that’s why I’m reading this to you now. This is my real biography, this is who I really am, I’m sorry that I started this with an act. But this is the real me now, and I’m angry, worried, and passionate about the status of critical thinking in the world and the United States.

There are always going to be changes on this podcast, and I’m always going to try to listen to my fellow skeptics, even when they are defecating all over me as some have done. I think part of doing this is having an open mind and trying new things.

So here is the bottom line. I’m Mindcore, a real dude who lives in Texas and studies neuroscience. I’m using a pseudonym because its fun. I consider myself first to be a science popularizer, second a skeptic, and finally an atheist and I consider these three things to be intrinsically linked as it has been proposed in the philosophical work of Paul Kurtz.

I want to bring science to the public and the public to science. I’m not trying to make a show that is universally appealing, I feel that there is a niche that needs fillin and that I’m the one to do it.

I believe the Culture War has many fronts, as does my hero Edward Owen Wilson, who says that it is necessary to have both him reaching out to theists and Richard Dawkins telling them theism should go the way of belief in fairies. I agree.

Many critics have said that I am no Carl Sagan. Indeed, Carl Sagan IS A LEGEND!

I am also no James Randi, no Bill Nye the Science Guy, no Penn and Teller, and so on, and so on.

There is room for a lot of voices in this movement, and I really do believe that critical thinking can become the norm with the work that I’m doing coalesced to the work of so many others.

I salute Greydon Square in particular not only for his service to our country but for being a Physics major from Compton who raps about atheism. He has been more of an inspiration to me than anyone else in my decision to reach out. I am playing only his music on this episode, without permission I’m afraid, I hope he can forgive me in the name of the statement that I’m trying to make.

If you don’t know who Greydon Square is then you are out of touch as both a skeptic and an atheist. He claims to be the black Carl Sagan, and though I think Neil DeGrasse Tyson might disagree, someday he may be right. Do you understand that Greydon is brining science to hip hop?

To hell with you if you don’t even see the beauty of that, and we will simply have to serve on different fronts of the culture war.

I listen to Industrial music and do brain surgery on rats.

My father is a neuroscientist and I am following in his footsteps after a long and difficult reconciliation.

I draw atheist comic books.

I think of the Periodic Table as the flag of my home country. Which is a culture of science that transcends all borders.

I am a real guy, I live in Texas.

I want to interview popular musicians, artists, actors, filmmakers about their thoughts on science and skepticism.

I also want to interview scientists and skeptics.

I want to bring science out of the armchair into the streets.

I will never stop until I’m dead.

I love my life, I think that loving life is what life is all about for an atheist.

And that’s all.

If you like the real me keep listening, I will keep podcasting.

Sorry about the act.

If you don’t like the real me, then bugger off and please, please, please….

Somewhere….

Somehow…

Make yourself useful.

Signing off.