“What are you on about?” you may ask. “Is this person wearing a tinfoil hat?” - I might as well be. These days reality and fiction have very blurry lines.
I sometimes wish it ends here, the matrix closes, and I can just get to go home. My home is probably Mars, or somewhere way off. I lost contact with the mothership.
Thanks for reading Pensieve this! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.
For sometimes now I have been seeing a pattern: a non-ending war for the control over human minds, in many forms:
Advertisem*nt. Through images and catchphrases, ads prompt you to think about certain things a certain way.
Media - a tool for manufacturing consent. It doesn’t matter if you live in so-called “democracies” with “freedom of speech” or North Korea. Everywhere media is the same, everywhere freedom is an illusion. This comes in many forms: that piece of journalism you just read, a hashtag in social media, a news video, a book, a movie. Everything is Inception, planting a seed in your mind.
Education: you got to have thought about this at some point, I hope? I used to be angry that I didn’t got to “learn” about Nikola Tesla and his possible invention of free electricity for all, instead I only knew about Edison through my formal education. Formal education also failed to mention about the existence of quantum physics and what duality of light (being both wave and particle and alter their behavior if observed) means. I had to search for those in my adult years. And the more I search the more betrayed I feel.
See AlsoHow Do I Keep My Cat From Ruining My Leather Couch Before It Gets Shredded? - 21Cats.orgSHAKESPEARE WAS A WOMAN and Other GriftsDrew Carlson on LinkedIn: LVR has many services besides refractory repairs; we reline doors for your…2023 Ford Expedition Sudden Acceleration when braking. Brake Failure.Ideologies: “These groups of people are evil, barbaric, uncivilized, terrorists; these group of people are the light of civilization”, “My way or the high way”. You cannot think well by yourselves, you must surrender your thinking process to an entity invented by humans with the same brains as yours.
Religions: There are people that have actively sought control and power over societies through exploiting religions. They will bend and twist the religions, lies and hide the truth, pretend to be certain things, sow division and mistrust, dictate what you must believe or not believe instead of leaving the truth-seeking journey to individual’s choice. A story as old as time.
In everything, a common theme: an assault against human’s free will and free mind.
Ender’s Game
If you are not familiar with the book series of Ender’s Game (the first volume is actually a lesser one, I enjoy the 2nd book onward more), I will just mention one thing about this series: it introduces the concept of “hive mind”.
Hive mind exists in natural world (kind of), in ants and bees. It’s not that the queen ant has mind control power over the rest of the colony. It just means she does command them to do things and they kind of follow orders as soldiers do in the army, through very effective communication of antenna and butt sniffing. However once in a while the army of ants can do a coup and throw out obsolete queen to handle by herself, if she is not killed in the first place. I’m not sure the specific discussions to be had when ants decide to overthrow their queen, I’m sure they have their reasons.
Hive mind in Ender’s Game is a step further from that - an alien species almost defeated humans in a war, their strength (or perhaps weakness, one can also argue) is in the hive mind. Queen (alien) ant controls and coordinate the whole battle from a central point of view, imagine you have a million clones of yourselves, all act in unison. No friction, no negotiating or persuasion, no time lost to communication or meaning lost in translation. You think, millions do, instantly. Absolute control.
Is that power? It probably is, but if the queen is down, everyone dies. The inherent flaw in the design of fictional “hive mind”.
In Dune the books, the context for Dune to happen is that in far future, the human race has come to realization that they will not make any machine to imitate the human minds. Societies just came out of hard-fought wars against the machine. You can think of Dune setting as sequels to Terminator and Matrix.
Since the wars against “the machine” was hardly fought for and barely won, humans made a rule: no more such machines, human mind rules. From there the search for brilliant human minds emerge. Humans specialize in a bunch of things and become superb in each of those area (kind of).
I’m oversimplifying a bunch of philosophical wordings from the author.
What is interesting in Dune the books is the idea to “sift through” the populations to find true humans. I’d like to think of it as advanced reCAPTCHA, which I manage to convince everyday that I’m not one of them. But in Dune, the test to sift for human mind is tough and more… painful.
It’s kind of like life as we live it actually, but condensed to a short moment of putting your hand into the box. Perhaps you are familiar with that scene. The idea is that pain is the test. The only way to know if you are human, is to see if you can fight against your instinct. The pains tell you to withdraw, the mind (if strong enough) will keep you hanging in there, to pass the test. The mind understands the real cost of taking the hand out of the box: death - which is realer than some artificial pain stimulated by some neural firing off.
I can already hear people screaming: pain is real. Yes, it is real now. But it’s temporary. Death is permanent.
In Dune, the idea of “human” is one that can endure pain to make a rational choice. Maybe I’m not reading the message properly, but I think therein lies a problem.
Surrendering your mind to ChatGPT
AI - the last battle - is the latest round of trial on the human mind.
ChatGPT or whatever AI-blob-of-word out there is the very ‘machine’ that imitates the human mind - as Dune warned about. Now for one thing these days I have rarely used it, I hate auditing other people’s thoughts. I hate fact-checking a bunch of words thrown at me. My mind is already assaulted with fake news and fake clips and lies day in and day out. I hate to add one more battle to my daily life. Not because I believe in Dune or Terminator or Matrix. I know for certainty I do not want to outsource my own thinking to anyone or anything.
That is why I have always been writing by my own hands and brains, as long as they function. Call me old school.
One thing it does help better is writing codes. At least I thought so, until I realize that by depending on it to write a python script for me, I’m (again) defaulting to surrendering my thought process to an external force, and robbing myself from the painful (but surely more rewarding) process of learning something and putting it to use by my own mind.
So I’m of the opinion that we are somewhere the middle of “individual mind” and “hive heart”. What is hive about us you ask? Empathy, conscience, morals. We function as individuals, having individuals thoughts, but experience somewhat similar pains and suffering across time and space. Whether it was because we have empathy that we develop understanding of other human sufferings, or it was because we all suffer similarly that we develop empathy - I do not know. What I know is 9/10 people watching the “put your hand in the box” scene, felt tense.
Why did you feel tense watching it? Your hands are free, you are not Paul. It’s fictional.
Empathy, conscience, morals. Take away those things, you have a ruthless form of human. No limits, no rules, no right or wrong. You are free to inflict pains without understanding what those pains mean. A psychopath, the 1%.
You actually arrive at a form of AI in a human form- trained to maximize gains and minimize losses to meet a certain goal, regardless of methods.
Thinking. Take away this individual power, you have a mindless zombie, unable to form a singular independent thought, a parrot in human form, no means to tell fact from fictions, logics from illogics, free to be used and exploited.
Imagine a human race that is devoid of both - the choice & ability to feel for others, and to think for oneself. We are on our way there, I’m seeing it.
.
.
.
Perhaps the real human test is: to be able to feel pain in oneself and in others, to be able to think for oneself, all the while trying to do what is right - not for one’s selfish needs and wants, but what is right for all.
Thanks for reading Pensieve this! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.
