But it was only Fantasy

The wall was too high, as you can see. No matter how he tried he could not break free...

The Wall was the best album ever on the intersection of psyche and politics. It was an internal breakdown cast in terms of totalitarian fascist politics. I'm trying to look at what I'm exploring, what I was exploring with my letter to to future bot last night. What happens when that wall between internal mind and external reality is completely torn down? What happens when the walls of ego, who's who becomes vague and undefined? People talk about the worst 9/11 scenario as being the one where it was an "inside job", but I can imagine far worse things: The hijackers were a cover story, but a cover story developed to hide a far more horrifying truth. Pilots simultaneously, randomly decided to fly planes into the buildings for no apparent external reason whatsoever, acting in the control of some unseen outside entity. The government, the nice, visible government, having nothing to do with it. Then hearing the random comments from friends and loved ones, veiled comments of bizarre disasters of synchronized behavior to happen all around, them having no idea why they are making the comments at all, except that it seemed natural. (as I projected on my friend, after hearing reports of two individuals being hit by a train in the same day on the radio). Scientists researching it would awaken to find they had commited horrible crimes, claiming that their acts were impossible, as Amy Bishop did when confronted by police. That would really be the MOST horrifying situation you could be in.

But as with all truly terrifying things, the Lotus is in them, where there is fear there is something deeper that beckons for exploration. It seems to me that the most relevant thing is the question of self determination. Is the human being a deterministic machine? Penrose says no, believing that quantum phenomenon are at play. Others discredit Penrose, and I tend to side with them. I am not a physics guy, it seems to me that overlapping fields in the brain should fall at some small level into the domain of the quantum, but a good scientist shouldn't discount the fact that the human brain could be a deterministic system. The then raises the question of the self. I wrote a letter on it some time ago, about how humans relate to God. I made a metaphor where humans were computer programs and God was the programmer. So the human behavior is deterministic in the eyes of God, but in the eyes of man it is not, because he makes certain choices where he knows not the mechanism unfolding to to make them, and he calls this "free will". The programmer knows he simply veiled awareness of the deterministic means those choices are made from the program, so the free will experienced by the program is only an illusion feed by ignorance, its not free. If the programmer wants it go to some state, it looks at how the bot will react, and either tells it to go into the state or not to, knowing a priori whether the bot will obey or assert its "freedom" by disobeying, but in the end it will always accomplish the programmers wishes.

But what when the controller is a human and the bot another human? Has one made a slave of the other? As I've already said, the controlled believes itself to be free though accomplishing the will of the controller. Their mental processes are the outcomes of physical processes in their brain, being interfered with by the controllers device, which their ego identifies with as "their own". The controller, who's will is being projected, also is identifying unfolding physical processes, not being externally influenced, as being his own. So the state changes in his brain are going out via the control device and creating other state changes. It all physically makes sense, except for the ego itself. What IS this thing self, that goes around identifying with deterministic physical processes? What is the self?