In response to: http://www.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/o21ld/does_the_thought_of_millions_of_republicans/c3dtfa0?context=3
Thread link: http://www.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/o21ld/does_the_thought_of_millions_of_republicans/
This is very true, but if you live in a world of complete honesty, where we talk about all our problems, instead of worrying about them, the people who choose to live there will solve more problems. Then it won't matter who chooses not to learn. We'll revert back to the natural way of creating order out of chaos by spreading good ideas, and not bad ones.
People who recognize good ideas will build on them, and tell other people. It will snowball until so many people have these good ideas who are living extremely successful lives that the people who chose to believe their misinformation will have to adapt to survive in the new world.
If you choose to continue living in our current world with all its problems, and we don't act as we'd like other people to act, no one else will learn. Our brains learn through pattern recognition, which essentially means we learn by example. If you keep leading by example, people's brains will slowly wire themselves up to recognize your example wherever they go. They won't consciously know they've learned your example till they meet someone who's different.
You don't have to believe in it, because whether you do or you don't, the world will work itself out. As long as I keep spreading good ideas, people will put those ideas in their own set of tools, so they can handle the world just a little bit better. It all builds and builds on the little things. If a system is made up of very tiny things, and every time you see a very tiny thing you say it's negligible, you will eventually have called the entire system negligible. So solve what you can solve. The rest will work itself out.
Have a read: https://gist.github.com/1559175
Brains adapt to their current conditions so that they can survive for one more day, so that they can adapt, so they can survive one more day. If a voter has been voting one way his entire life, and no one has ever told him he should stop, he never had to reevaluate why he votes one way. He never had to keep on asking "why?" until he understood everything he could about the world. That's how we'll fix everything.
We need to realize that the universe is run on cause and effect, and we are made up of universe stuff. There is a chemical or electrical cause for everything we do. Our brain is simply a set of neurons, which, when put together, form a neural network. Hebbian theory has one of the simplest explanations of learning in a neural network: neurons that fire together, wire together. Our entire consciousness is these electrical signals that represent information as they flow through neurons.
Your standard neuron is quite simple. It's a ball with an antenna on the top, and a bunch of floppy roots sagging down at the bottom. If you run electricity through the antenna (known as the axon), it shoots the signal out through all the floppy roots (known as dendrites). There are these things in your brain called Schwann cells. Their purpose is pretty simple: they attach to a neuron, and whenever a signal runs through the floppy roots/dendrites, it wraps electrical tape around them.
This electrical tape makes the roots/dendrites less floppy and more rigid. Every time two neurons fire close together, the electricity draws them a little bit closer, then the Schwann cells wrap some more electrical tape (known as myelin) around the dendrites. This electrical tape/myelin also insulates the signal, so instead of flying out every part of the dendrite, it starts to send its signal out only to the end of the dendrites.
When there is less loss of signal between neurons, there is a stronger connection. There is less luck involved with having the signal transfer from one neuron to the other. It'll begin to happen more and more as you run electricity through. That's what we know as learning. It's the same concept across all brains.
Our brain is different because we have developed things like Schwann cells which attach to neurons and affect how they fire, and thus how they develop. But we don't think in terms on neurons, we think in terms of ideas, so let me start building up the system by explaining more simple parts.
There is a pleasure center of the brain. When the neurons fire here, we feel happy. That is an assumption I am making, because I haven't met a neuroscientist who will talk to me, yet. In any case, we're all born with certain connections in our brain. I don't know exactly these connections, but I can give an example to explain the concept.
All our senses are just things we've developed through random mutations which eventually connect to neurons and turn those senses into electrical signals. When you hear a certain pitch from your ear, certain neurons are firing. When we're born, the higher-pitched sounds are connected with the pleasure center. Because we make baby noises when we play with babies, which are always higher-pitched, because women have higher pitch voices, which is useful for babies to recognize, because presumably the woman around the baby is its mother, who will care for it.
When the higher pitch neurons fire, the happiness center fires. That connection is with us from birth. Then we branch out from there. The eyes are also simple: certain colours fire certain neurons. When we're born, all we see is colours. It's as if someone put a picture right in front of your face. You can't discern objects in it; it's just blobs of colour.
When you hear a higher pitch sound, those auditory neurons fire, causing the pleasure center to fire. And if you see a certain colour blob when the pleasure center is firing, those neurons associated with that colour blob get connected to happiness. Then, whenever you're happy, those colour blob neurons will fire. You keep recognizing colour blobs until you recognize faces. Then you start recognizing other objects.
Every time your happiness center fires, all the other neurons connected to it fire. Which means that if you're happy every time you learn, all your neurons (and thus ideas) will get connected to happiness. Then whenever you have a problem to solve, you just make yourself happy, and all the ideas hooked up to happiness will come up. And any little differences in your current situation narrow down which path from happiness the signal should travel down.
This all happens on its own. It's all made up of simple parts that work together, that were added one by one until it became a complex system. And its just like your ideas. They start very simple and build from there, until they start to recognize e=mc^2.
We are made up of universe gunk. And we have developed information processing skills. We are the universe understanding itself.
I hope you learned a little bit more about your own brain, so you can stick it in your set of tools for later on. If it helps you, that's wonderful; if not, I'll keep on figuring out this brain stuff till it does, and I can help you further.