Epstein’s School of Shame – Edge’s HeadCon

Johnny Vedmore investigates the Epstein-funded Edge event in which Establishment scientists discussed how to best control you.

The Edge Foundation was not simply a forum for elite scientists to discuss what interested them most; a clear agenda was at play. The Masterclasses and Seminars tackled three main subjects: how to alter or affect human cells and genes; how to predict the future social order; and how to change people’s decision-making and behaviour. If you were to question any of the Large Language Models about Edge’s major events, they’ll currently tell you that everything was innocent and professional. They are also very quick to belittle and dismiss the uncomfortable fact that much of Edge’s activities were funded by Jeffrey Epstein.

Between 2001 and 2015, John Brockman’s Edge Foundation, Inc, has acknowledged that the organisation received at least $638,000 from Jeffrey Epstein and Epstein-controlled foundations. During the period in question, from 2011 to 2015, Edge received $200,000 alone to fund the study of extremely controversial and questionable subject matter directly related to controlling human behaviour at scale. This period is also extremely notable because it is after Jeffrey Epstein was convicted of child abuse.

In my first articles covering the Edge Foundation’s courses, I examined Elon Musk’s involvement in the Edge Masterclasses in 2008 on Behavioural Economics and, in 2009, the Edge Masterclass on Synthetic Genomics. These two courses focused on behavioural change and genome reprogramming, respectively. Some of these seminars had very questionable sections, including the section in 2008 entitled “The Psychology of Scarcity”, and 2009’s section on “Humans 2.0”, which has since been deleted from the records. Again, well-programmed AI models will present this information in a positive, optimistic manner, regardless of the connotations. The most infamous child-abusing intelligence asset in human history was funding the study of extremely controversial science.

Musk & Epstein: The Third Culture Dossier

The 2008 Masterclass was led by the father of Behavioural Economics, Richard Thaler, while the 2009 Masterclass was led by the fathers of Modern Genomics, George Church and J. Craig Venter. These leaders in their fields analysed the building blocks of their specific scientific areas. They were obsessed with deconstructing our bodies and minds and learning how to rebuild us in their preferred image. You may consider that a dramatic notion, only evoked to sensationalise the intention of these scientists; however, everything I’ve said is true and provable.

Musk and Epstein: SpaceX Offenders

I continued to investigate John Brockman’s Edge Foundation, and in this article, I will analyse the Edge Foundation’s HeadCon ‘14. This seminar brought together leading social scientists at Eastover Farm, where they planned to discuss a range of topics concerning what they describe as the social, moral, or emotional brain.

“To arrive at the edge of the world’s knowledge, seek out the most complex and sophisticated minds, put them in a room together, and have them ask each other the questions they are asking themselves.”

The idea of gathering the best thinkers in their fields to discuss some of the most important issues may be easier for the public to swallow if it hadn’t been funded by Jeffrey Epstein. Instead, HeadCon ‘14 continues to raise eyebrows with some of its key focus. The attendees were truly leaders in their academic fields, with close connections to the Establishment, both academic and political.

The topics under the microscope and the ideas expressed at HeadCon ‘14 are extremely controversial. The scientists who present them do so essentially under the pretence that it’s vital to have these conversations about the potential of future technologies before they exist. This is extremely relevant to understanding Epstein’s wider function. A large part of Epstein’s operations, and those of his close allies and associates such as Nicole Junkermann, Peter Thiel and Ehud Barak, were focused on the notion of Technological Evangelism. The conversations at the Edge Foundation were part of the process of normalising technologies which have massive intelligence and military capabilities.

In this article, I will reveal some of the speakers at HeadCon ‘14 and, in turn, demonstrate that the technological solutions and science that interested Epstein and Brockman were panopticonic in nature. It will also show that some of the punishments these elite scientists designed to manipulate our behaviour have already been enacted successfully. After all, we are now all part of the future society that Epstein and his acolytes were designing in detail. The technologies they were discussing in detail 12 years ago define our current reality.

You should know the names of those creating your cage.

*Ed. The dictionary does not accept “panopticonic” as a word. I disagree, and I am coining this word regardless. I will accept complaints only in video format and published online.

Sarah-Jayne Blakemore – A Study of Feeling Watched

Psychology Professor Sarah-Jayne Blakemore is the author of Inventing Ourselves and a Royal Society University Research Fellow from 2007 to 2013. During the period Blakemore attended the Epstein-funded seminar, she was Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience at the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, University College London.

Blakemore is currently a Professor of Psychology and Cognitive Neuroscience at the University of Cambridge. Like with many of the scientists attending Edge, she has close ties to Government. She was recruited into the political Establishment very early on in her career. In 2000, she applied for a POST Fellowship at the UK Parliament. The Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology (POST) works with both the House of Commons and the House of Lords and produces concise briefings on emerging or complex research.

Sarah-Jayne Blakemore told the UK Parliament’s official website:

“They wanted to know what the developmental neuroscience and psychology evidence said about early years provision and the start of formal education. I travelled around the country with the Committee to visit schools, early years centres and maternity programmes in deprived areas. I sat in on oral evidence sessions in the House of Commons. It was incredibly eye-opening.”

During her time at POST, Blakemore recalls meeting many people in politics and policy, “lunching in the House of Commons” canteen and spending most of her time within the House of Commons Education Committee.

(Listen to Sarah-Jayne Blakemore’s HeadCon ‘14 talk below. I encourage you to download the audio.)

Blakemore also has a famous father, at least in the elite scientific community. Sir Colin Blakemore, who passed away in 2022, was a neurobiologist who was an expert in vision and how the brain develops. Colin’s mother and father worked for the British Army and the RAF, respectively. Colin Blakemore began his formative studies in Stratford-upon-Avon, but was soon sent to Henry VIII School in Coventry, which was established in 1545 under letters patent of the rotund namesake himself. He eventually won a state scholarship to Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, where he studied Medical Sciences.

In 1968, Colin Blakemore went on to gain a PhD in Physiological Optics at the University of California, Berkley with the help of the Harkness Fellowship, which was set up to reciprocate the Rhodes Scholarships for those studying in the United States.

Throughout Colin Blakemore’s career, he would have needed serious high-level clearance from the British and American security services. For instance, he first went to China during the Cultural Revolution under the auspices of scientific collaboration with the Chinese Academy of Sciences. This happened in 1974, only two years after President Nixon’s historic meeting that ushered in a new era of Western-Chinese cooperation. He was also very busy in the media. Notably, Blakemore wrote a 13-part series on Artificial Intelligence called The Mind Machines for the BBC and also published the book Mechanics of the Mind in 1977. Which brings us back to HeadCon ‘14 and Sarah-Jayne Blakemore.

At the Edge Foundation’s HeadCon ‘14, Sarah-Jayne Blakemore’s speech was on “The Teenager’s Sense Of Social Self”, with her conversation now deleted from the Edge website. However, it was saved on the Wayback Machine.

“What happens during the teenage years is that your sense of who you are—your moral beliefs, your political beliefs, what music you’re into, fashion, what social group you’re into—that’s what undergoes profound change.” – Sarah-Jayne Blakemore, Headcon ‘14.

During this Edge event, Blakemore was focused on schizophrenia, which was the subject of her PHD, and the development of the teenage sense of self. This was not Blakemore’s first time at Edge. In 2012, she had presented a conversation entitled: “The Adolescent Brain” alongside Psychologist Simon Baron-Cohen, a relative of Sacha Baron-Cohen of Ali G fame. She had covered many of the same topics in the 2012 conversation; however, one of the most interesting points she made in 2014 is Foucauldian in nature.

“One interesting theory of adolescence, back in the ‘50s, by Peter Elkind, was this idea that teenagers have an imaginary audience. They think they’re being watched and judged by other people much more than they are. That is similar to the state that people with schizophrenia describe how their life feels, that they’re constantly being watched and observed. I’m not saying there is an overlap or there is a similarity, but there is something that is similar, and the question is how do most teenagers not go over the edge into paranoia?”

When one researches the Edge Foundation in any detail, a repeated theme becomes apparent. The top Technocrats, who control the biggest social media networks and companies that process large amounts of data, were being trained in the psychological effects of the digital panopticon they’re creating. Top geneticists and psychologists trained the participants in their respective fields on how to effect behavioural change at every neurodevelopmental stage, both atypical and non-typical. They wanted to know how decision-making worked from cradle to grave.

Sarah-Jayne Blakemore’s involvement adds another layer of potential speculation, which leads to an extremely pertinent question. What does the intragenerational aspect of those involved in building the Technocracy tell us about the Establishment? Sarah-Jayne Blakemore is not the only example I’ve come across of what appear to be elements of hegemony within these circles. Elon Musk’s grandfather was famously the head of Technocrat Inc. in the 1930s, which was designated as a terrorist group in Canada during the war in response to the group’s subversive behaviour. Or Peter Thiel’s father, who I revealed sent Apartheid-era black slaves in South Africa to be eaten to death in the Roessing uranium mine without any protective equipment. Is there a predisposition to using manipulative and cruel social behaviour among those who have been bred to carry forward the mantle of modern-day science?

Schwab and Thiel – Nuclear Apartheid

Even though I will present the most pertinent points made from HeadCon ‘14, it is worth reading each of the presentations and notes yourselves. Follow this link for the transcripts of Sarah-Jayne Blakemore’s conversation from the Edge event itself.

Lawrence Ian Reed – When Facial Recognition Becomes Emotional Recognition

In 2014, many of us were very naive about the technologies being created to make the Digital Panopticon possible. We understood the concept of facial recognition, and we had seen its potential represented in basic ways throughout the media. Movies such as Minority Report gave us a glimpse of a world with little to no escape from the observations of a judgmental authority. However, that was the low-resolution version of facial recognition’s true potential. Those who are building the Digital Panopticon want to know more than just your identity; they want to know what you’re thinking, too.

In 2014, Lawrence Ian Reed had already completed his clinical internship at McLean Hospital/Harvard Medical School four years prior and was listed on the Edge website as the Visiting Assistant Professor in the Psychology Department at Skidmore College, New York.

As a small side note: Even though the most widely used Large Language Models currently claim there are no connections between Jeffrey Epstein and Skidmore College, the Epstein Files released by the Department of Justice show 67 results for Skidmore College. This is mainly related to large payments Epstein made to the Bursar’s Office for the tuition fees of Rene A. de Jongh. The latter is the daughter of the First Lady Cecile de Jongh of the US Virgin Islands, whose business Insider reported: “earned $200,000 a year on Jeffrey Epstein’s payroll.” During the trial of the Government of the United States Virgin Islands v. JPMorgan Chase Bank, JPMorgan Chase claimed that Cecile de Jongh was Epstein’s “primary conduit for spreading money and influence throughout the USVI government”.

Lawrence Ian Reed’s HeadCon ‘14 talk was entitled “The Face of Emotion”, where he said:

“What can we tell from the face? There’s some mixed data, but data out that there’s a pretty strong coherence between what is felt and what’s expressed on the face. Happiness, sadness, disgust, contempt, fear, and anger all have prototypic or characteristic facial expressions. In addition to that, you can tell whether two emotions are blended together. You can tell the difference between surprise and happiness, and surprise and anger, or surprise and sadness. You can also tell the strength of an emotion. There seems to be a relationship between the strength of the emotion and the strength of the contraction of the associated facial muscles.”

(Listen to Lawrence Ian Reed’s HeadCon ‘14 talk below. I encourage you to download the audio.)

Reed’s scientific focus is again what those who are designing the Digital Panopticon crave. They don’t just want to know your identity; they want to get as close to reading your mind as possible, and the study of facial expression is Reed’s chosen gateway. Reed evokes Darwin’s Expression of Emotion in Man and Animals, which stated that facial expressions have a physiological function, and even partially blames Darwin for not pursuing this line of enquiry. At HeadCon ‘14, he says that Darwin allowed the question of communicative function to “lag behind”, stating to the attendees at Edge that it was “because he had the whole evolution by natural selection thing that he wanted to propagate”.

Some of Reed’s claims about the recognition of facial expression appear counterintuitive. This can be noted during the interesting conversation about whether someone who can voluntarily control their expressions would be at a disadvantage to those who authentically express emotion on their face, with David Rand clarifying Reed’s contention, stating:

“Specifically it would be that the person that can fake it would be at an advantage when interacting with strangers, but the person that can’t fake it would be at an advantage when interacting with friends.”

Most people would tend to believe that someone who could voluntarily control their facial expressions would have an overall advantage. And, if this were true, then the next question becomes: why didn’t we evolve to have voluntary control over our facial expressions? In reality, recognising synchronised actions within someone’s wider body language, verbalised language and tone, alongside facial signalling, means that facial recognition can only ever be part of a wider puzzle.

Reed’s talk was mostly centred around these two points: what facial expressions can potentially say about our mood, our frame of mind, and our inner monologue; and whether there is an advantage to be gained from being able to lie convincingly.

Follow the attached link if you want to read through the entirety of Reed’s discussion at the Edge Foundation’s HeadCon ‘14.

Molly Crockett – Shall We Put It In The Water Supply?

Many of the debates and discussions in which the Establishment faithful are actively engaged are controversial at best. However, when these discussions are being funded by an international money man of mystery who was financing such controversial programs on behalf of the CIA and its allies, the same conversations can suddenly be viewed as significantly more sinister.

Molly Crockett’s HeadCon ‘14 entry is a fine example of a conversation which has been a repeated theme of the ruling Establishment for decades. Crockett’s conversation at HeadCon was entitled “The Neuroscience of Moral Decision Making”. At the time, she was an Associate Professor of Experimental Psychology at the University of Oxford; before that, she was a Wellcome Trust Postdoctoral Fellow, studying human decision-making at the University of Zurich and University College London. Molly Crockett’s Doctoral Advisor at Oxford was Trevor Robbins, a highly notable figure in modern cognitive neuroscience research.

She has also received various awards, including the Sir Henry Wellcome Fellowship, which is awarded by the Wellcome Trust; the Gates Cambridge Scholarship, established in 2000 by a $210 million grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation; and the APS Rising Stars award, which is awarded by the Association of Psychological Science.

Side Note: If you’d like to understand more about the Wellcome Trust, you can read my 2022 article: The Wellcome Five – The Proximal Origin of COVID Control.

The Proximal Origin of Covid Control – Redux

“Imagine we could develop a precise drug that amplifies people’s aversion to harming others; on this drug you won’t hurt a fly, everyone taking it becomes like Buddhist monks. Who should take this drug? Only convicted criminals—people who have committed violent crimes? Should we put it in the water supply? These are normative questions. These are questions about what should be done. I feel grossly unprepared to answer these questions with the training that I have, but these are important conversations to have between disciplines. Psychologists and neuroscientists need to be talking to philosophers about this. These are conversations that we need to have because we don’t want to get to the point where we have the technology but haven’t had this conversation, because then terrible things could happen.”

It is true that such conversations should be happening. However, contextually speaking, the conversations should not be funded via the Central Intelligence Agency’s finest child trafficker. Crockett presents the subject matter as though no one has had these conversations before. Even though the Central Intelligence Agency and the United States Government have been asking “maybe we should put it in the water supply?” for many decades.

One of those occasions was via Herman Kahn of the Hudson Institute after being tasked by the State Department in 1967 with various projects. This included The Year 2000, which attempted to predict all the technology which was expected in the foreseeable future. In the video below, Herman Kahn discusses sedating an entire city’s population using such a method.

The normalisation of these conversations, and the potentially controversial solutions which are suggested as simple ways to tackle extremely complex issues, is a key tactic of those who want to coerce the early adoption of such technologies. As well as those who intend to dominate the market by co-opting key technological patents as they are being conceived of and invented.

Molly Crockett is heavily involved with Princeton’s University Center for Human Values, where she was promoted to a full professorship in 2025. At the UCHV, Crockett is the co-organiser of the Future Values Initiative, which promotes its purpose as:

“Leveraging Princeton’s strengths in the sciences and the humanities, the Future Values Initiative supports scholarship that expands traditional approaches to normative inquiry and applied ethics of science and technology, critically examining present injustices by imagining and co-creating radically different futures. We envision new modes of scholarship where scientists are given tools to understand how values shape the production of science and how its benefits and costs are socially distributed, and where humanists are partners in the innovation process rather than critics after the fact. Ultimately, we aim to evolve normative thinking and scientific practice to meet the challenges of the present age.”

Molly Crockett is also part of the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study, which is exploring how AI research shapes understandings of human cognition. She is also jointly affiliated with Princeton’s AI Lab, which is part of the Natural and Artificial Minds initiative. The latter is an initiative launched in 2024 to re-envision “theory-driven cognitive science research in the age of artificial intelligence”.

Jennifer Jacquet and David Rand – You’re A Bad Person For Not Doing What We Want…

Throughout the Edge Masterclasses and seminars, many of the scientists seem to be present simply to sell the idea of using somewhat surreptitious psychological punishments to alter the behaviour of the masses. This may be a key function of the Edge Foundation: to discuss acceptable punishment techniques that can be deployed at scale. It has also been the operational focus of many other military and intelligence programs throughout history.

As I covered in the NEWSPASTE article, Epstein and Musk: The Third Culture Dossier, the 2008 Edge Masterclass on Behavioural Economics had an entire section on the “Psychology of Scarcity”, where Sendhil Mullainathan started the day by stating:

“Let’s put aside poverty alleviation for a second, and let’s ask, “Is there something intrinsic to poverty that has value and that is worth studying in and of itself?” One of the reasons that is the case is that, purely aside from magic bullets, we need to understand are there unifying principles under conditions of scarcity that can help us understand behavior and to craft intervention. If we feel that conditions of scarcity evoke certain psychology, then that, not to mention pure scientific interest, will affect a vast majority of interventions. It’s an important and old question.”

(Listen to Jennifer Jacquet’s HeadCon ‘14 talk below. I encourage you to download the audio.)

At HeadCon’14, Jennifer Jacquet is more interested in how to use shame as a mass punishment to change behaviour at a societal level. The use of shame en masse is essentially one of the main mechanisms behind Richard Thaler’s Nudge Theory. Shaming proved effective when the UK’s Nudge Units put it into practice during the COVID-19 pandemic.

During the HeadCon event, while talking about a previous example of public shaming being utilised successfully, Jacquet stated:

“Shaming, in this case, was a fairly low-cost form of punishment that had high reputational impact on the U.S. government, and led to a change in behavior. It worked at scale—one group of people using it against another group of people at the group level. This is the kind of scale that interests me. And the other thing that it points to, which is interesting, is the question of when shaming works. In part, it’s when there’s an absence of any other option. Shaming is a little bit like antibiotics. We can overuse it and actually dilute its effectiveness, because it’s linked to attention, and attention is finite. With punishment, in general, using it sparingly is best. But in the international arena, and in cases in which there is no other option, there is no formalized institution, or no formal legislation, shaming might be the only tool that we have, and that’s why it interests me.”

David Rand was also essentially speaking about shame from the perspective of public reputational loss as a potential incentive. His talk at HeadCon ‘14 was ominously titled “How Do You Change People’s Minds About What Is Right And Wrong?”

(Listen to David Rand’s HeadCon ‘14 talk below. I encourage you to download the audio.)

Rand’s talk is summed up on the Edge website with the quote:

“There are often future consequences for your current behavior. You can’t just do whatever you want because if you are selfish now, it’ll come back to bite you. In order for any of that to work, though, it relies on people caring about you being cooperative. There has to be a norm of cooperation. The important question then, in terms of trying to understand how we get people to cooperate and how we increase social welfare, is this: Where do these norms come from and how can they be changed? And since I spend all my time thinking about how to maximize social welfare, it also makes me stop and ask, “To what extent is the way that I am acting consistent with trying to maximize social welfare?”

The latter question of “to what extent is the way that I am acting consistent with trying to maximize social welfare” depends on what social norms are in place at the time. If the society has been moulded by Davos or organisations such as Edge, then they decide what maximising “social welfare” actually means. Again, as we experienced during the pandemic, manipulating behaviour through mass shaming created what was then considered the norms surrounding social welfare. In reality, the idea of social welfare can be used as a behavioural change tool, whether or not the perceived social benefits are real or simply another form of Government-led propaganda.

Some people believe that mass shaming was used at an industrial scale during the COVID-19 pandemic, so that Establishment-linked scientists could have an excuse to illegally experiment on the majority of people worldwide. At HeadCon ‘14, five years prior to the start of the pandemic response, this extremely subversive technique was a normal part of the conversation.

I suggest that you read the transcripts of Jennifer Jacquet’s HeadCon ‘14 seminar talk entitled “Shaming at Scale”, and David Rand’s conversation entitled “How Do You Change People’s Minds About What’s Right And Wrong?”. I have combined Jacquet and Rand’s conversations within the same section because they are essentially having the same conversation. They both study the perceived social consequences of your actions and use shame as a form of mass punishment to enact mass behavioural change.

L.A. Paul – The Vegetarian Vampire Skit

“We’re going to pretend that modern-day vampires don’t drink the blood of humans; they’re vegetarian vampires, which means they only drink the blood of humanely-farmed animals. You have a one-time-only chance to become a modern-day vampire. You think, “This is a pretty amazing opportunity, but do I want to gain immortality, amazing speed, strength, and power? Do I want to become undead, become an immortal monster and have to drink blood? It’s a tough call.” Then you go around asking people for their advice and you discover that all of your friends and family members have already become vampires. They tell you, “It is amazing. It is the best thing ever. It’s absolutely fabulous. It’s incredible. You get these new sensory capacities. You should definitely become a vampire.” Then you say, “ Can you tell me a little more about it?” And they say, “You have to become a vampire to know what it’s like. You can’t, as a mere human, understand what it’s like to become a vampire just by hearing me talk about it. Until you’re a vampire, you’re just not going to know what it’s going to be like.”

The speakers at Edge’s HeadCon ‘14 get progressively more controversial. In the Edge Masterclass on Synthetic Genomics held at SpaceX—which was part funded by Elon Musk and part funded by Jeffrey Epstein—there was a section on “Humans 2.0”, which is one of the rare Edge talks which have been deleted from all the records. It discussed a science many of these scientists believe will emerge within the next few decades: the ability to reprogram your genome as though you were a computer.

(Listen to Laurie Ann Paul’s HeadCon ‘14 talk below. I encourage you to download the audio.)

While Molly Crockett was eager to talk about the use of the behavioural-altering drugs of the future, there is little to no debate about whether such interventions should be used; instead, their use is treated as a given. If a significantly advanced technology emerges, will it be used automatically, whether or not it benefits wider society in the short or long term? Is a paradigm-shifting technology’s use initially triggered by the academic scientific community’s want to experiment on the general public?

One of the key issues with modern science is that the professionals involved require human experimentation to prove what they assert. This often starts by presenting the public with a question which allows them to ponder the potential paradigm shift. They are encouraged to consider the potential benefits which will never truly be available to them. In fact, reality will still resemble the two-tier society in which John Brockman, Jeffrey Epstein, and the attendees of their Billionaire’s Dinners were beneficiaries.

Laurie Ann Paul’s talk at HeadCon ‘14 was entitled “The Transformative Experience”, and at the time of HeadCon, Paul was Professor of Philosophy at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, as well as being a Professorial Fellow in the Arché Research Centre at the University of St. Andrews. She studied at Antioch College and Princeton University and, at this time, was the author of Causation: A User’s Guide (with Ned Hall) and the Transformative Experience. She is now Professor of Philosophy and Cognitive Science at Yale University.

Like Molly Crockett and many other speakers at the Edge Foundation, Laurie Ann Paul is now involved in planning for AI. Paul’s CV shows that she is part of the “Yale Taskforce on Artificial Intelligence (YTAI), focused on determining the impact of AI on Yale’s research, scholarship and operations and defining a strategic vision for AI at Yale.” Crockett and Paul are among the key scientists tasked with giving Artificial Intelligence a human face, or synthetic soul, whichever you prefer.

Laurie Ann Paul’s Transformative Experience theory is difficult to explain in shorthand, and you should listen to her presentation. Yet, Paul herself described it as:

“Transformative experiences involve radical personal and epistemic change; an agent’s decision to undergo one “must either be authentic or irrational, but not both”; it walks through the concepts, the problems for rational decision-making, and key examples.”

Some of the critics of Paul’s theory say it deliberately conflicts with the orthodox model of rational choice and the common way of thinking about major life decisions. Paul’s theory challenges the ordinary, intuitive approach the vast majority of people will take to big personal life decisions such as having children or major medical interventions. However, Paul is correct that the standard model of her science is not fit for purpose. The technologies which are being developed today to predict the behaviour of seemingly irrational agents are based on falsification. Which brings us to Michael McCullough.

If you want to read the transcripts of Laurie Ann Paul’s HeadCon ‘14 seminar on “The Transformative Experience” follow the link included.

Michael McCullough – Maybe It’s Philosophical Falsificationism

The last of the publicly listed HeadCon keynote speakers at 2014’s event was Michael McCullough, who gave a talk entitled “Two Cheers For Falsification”. At the time, McCullough was Director of the Evolution and Human Behavior Laboratory, a Professor of Psychology, and Cooper Fellow of the University of Miami. He was also the author of Beyond Revenge. McCullough’s talk at HeadCon is designed to change the speed, focus, impetus, and accuracy of elite scientists’ experiments by replacing Popperian rigidity with a more fluid, flexible model of falsificationism.

Karl Popper’s work shows that modern scientific experimentation can be based on a simple logical fallacy if not countered by falsificationism: If my hypothesis is true, I will observe X. I observe X; ergo, my hypothesis is true. Applying falsificationism to the same logic results in a logically valid argument rather than an invalid one: If my hypothesis is true, I will observe X. I do not observe X; ergo, my hypothesis is false.

(Listen to Michael McCullough’s HeadCon ‘14 talk below. I encourage you to download the audio.)

Essentially, when testing a hypothesis to be valid or invalid, falsification becomes the most logically valid test. In Popperian falsificationism, “A hypothesis is only scientific if it makes predictions that could in principle be shown to be wrong. The mark of good science is not that it has been confirmed but that it has survived serious attempts to falsify it.” At Edge’s HeadCon ‘14, McCullough states:

“Most of you, when you think about falsification, think about Karl Popper, who had this idea that is pretty compelling, which is that we can never have positive evidence for a hypothesis. Hypotheses give us predictions about how the world should be ordered. What we like to do is take the data from the world and then make inferences about whether the hypothesis is true. This is a problematic kind of reasoning. It’s not valid reasoning. As I’m sure many of you know, he suggested that there is a valid reasoning we can use for making inferences about the truth value of hypotheses from observations, but the way to do that is to look for predictions that are falsified in the world.”

Like Laurie Ann Paul, McCullough criticises the rigidity of the related standard model. McCullough and Paul both promote a fluidity in making predictions that projects their own image of where our future society is heading. An ever-changing world with a population forced to be dynamic because of the precarious challenges which will be forced upon them by perpetual technological evangelism.

“What I want to do today is raise one cheer for falsification, maybe two cheers for falsification. Maybe it’s not philosophical falsificationism I’m calling for, but maybe something more like methodological falsificationism. It has an important role to play in theory development that maybe we have turned our backs on in some areas of this racket we’re in, particularly the part of it that I do—Ev Psych—more than we should have.”

Using strong terms such as “this racket we’re in” to describe his scientific field, Michael McCullough calls for a methodological falsificationism rather than Popper’s stricter philosophical version. During the question-and-answer phase of McCullough’s presentation, one of the scientists at HeadCon, Fiery Cushman, makes an important point about the accuracy of the current evolutionary model. Cushman asks, “Whether the effect exists at all?”

McCullough’s theory is designed to be adapted to ever-changing conditions, the type of conditions the Technocracy thrives upon. It is also meant to increase the accuracy and speed of experimentation. In an ever-developing Technocracy, they believe that shortcuts to the truth may be necessary.

The Edge of the Impossible

Every time that I look at an Edge Foundation event, my jaw hits the floor, and HeadCon ‘14 was no different in that regard. After 7 years of writing about the Epstein case and the wider development of the Globalist Technocracy, I feel like a broken record. I seem to constantly be saying “if anything is funded by the most infamous child trafficking spy on the face of the Earth, then it deserves a massive amount of scrutiny”. However, it isn’t impossible to imagine why the Mainstream Media avoids any scrutiny of the Edge Foundation. Many of the scientists at Edge include the experts that CNN, BBC or any other MSM platform presents as the official sources within their specific scientific fields. The vast majority of the scientists who attended or contributed to Edge are household names.

The Edge Foundation was clearly focused on predicting human behaviour, changing behaviour, and affecting decision-making more generally, while also learning how to create and manipulate matter at a cellular level and, in turn, genetically. This is the perfect example of intelligence-linked manipulators learning every effective facet of control. It presents undeniable evidence of Epstein et al.’s intention not only to impact people’s decision-making, but to change the very building blocks of humanity entirely.

In the world of a Futurist Technocrat, the people of the future will be perpetually transformed by currently unknown and ever-developing technologies. Paul’s talk on the Transformative Experience and Michael McCullough’s presentation on falsification were both similar in one way in particular. They focused on dropping standard scientific models when attempting to predict human behaviour, and embracing an ever-fluctuating wave of constantly morphing scientific and technological trends. The elite medical establishment is very similar to Paul’s vampire analogy.

They have already decided to live a Transhuman life and have embraced many of the more positive claims they have made about the future as definite. With their belief in what the potential future holds solidified, they are turning to the outsiders, and they are saying:

“You have to become a Transhuman to know what it’s like. You can’t, as a mere human, understand what it’s like to become a Transhuman just by hearing me talk about it. Until you’re a Transhuman, you’re just not going to know what it’s going to be like.”

Many of us baulk at the visions of the future we’ve seen so far. However, those within the scientific community are desperate to stir the proverbial pot and see what happens. As Tim Hinchliffe and I discussed on a recent NEWSPASTE Podcast episode entitled “Human Hackability,” we are living in an era where the previous machinations of the academic elite are being implemented in reality. Technological evangelism and human greed have sped up the race toward the all-encompassing Technocratic Panopticon, and now the scientific community is eager to try out its newly invented toys.

One of the most surprising points I took from examining HeadCon’14 in detail was the almost unspoken futility among the scientists when it came to predicting human behaviour. Lawrence Ian Reed may be able to tell you’re both surprised and happy simply from examining your facial muscles, or maybe Jennifer Jacquet could map out various ways to micro-punish the majority of the population to keep the population in line. However, Reed and Jacquet’s musings offer limited treatments for predicting parts of complex human behaviour; they cannot tell you the whole picture.

While the best scientists in the world create many clever technological solutions designed to predict our future actions and behaviour, what they cannot fathom or counter is our inner intention. For it is the impulses which come from within, and the true essence of the human soul, which no scientist has ever been able to measure or predict. However hard they try, regardless of who funds them, science can never overcome the indomitable nature of the human soul, and there’s little evidence it ever will.