Interview with my wonderfully eccentric friend, Rick Rosner, parts 2 and 3

In-Sight has published parts two and three of a massive six-part interview with Rick Rosner, my high school friend who went to high school for a decade, sued Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, was the subject of an Errol Morris documentary, and became a writer for Jimmy Kimmel.

But the better question is, “Can we be in charge of our thinking?” That is, can we think without bias? Consciousness is always playing tricks on us, because consciousness is a product of evolution, not a pure product of a desire to give us the most complete and accurate view of the world. (But we don’t need to be products of evolution for our brains and biology and consciousness to have hidden agendas. The biases are there, regardless of what put them there. Just ask any grad student in psychology about what must be thousands of experiments which show that consciousness gives us a highly filtered and biased and monkeyed-with view of the world. Each of us is our own Fox News.)

There are a bunch of parasites that transact business by messing with the brains of their victims – parasites that make mice attracted to cats (toxoplasmosis) or bugs attracted to light – so they get eaten and pass on the parasite to the next host in their life cycle. The hosts’ brains have been hijacked. To some extent, everyone’s brain is hijacked by what our genes want us to do.