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Post a Comment On: Bruce Charlton's Notions

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Blogger Seijio Arakawa said...

After re-reading this post I suddenly found myself wondering why ethereal demonic forces want there to be physical means of surveillance. It seems superfluous, on the face of it.

Then it occurred to me that, in tradition, the demons are able to observe everything that happens in the physical world, but they are not able to tell what people are thinking, except by extrapolating from what they do. So that perhaps explains things like Facebook (people blurting out what is on their mind, all the time) and television (cut the gordian knot of surveillance by filling people's minds with predictable content). A combination of these technologies -- to shovel data into people's minds, and then to assess their reactions by the online response they produce -- can start to approach a perfect-feedback mechanism.

29 October 2017 at 21:34

Blogger Bruce Charlton said...

@Seijio - Good point.

My current conceptualization is that they cannot remove agency/ free will because it is a property of the real-self - but they can indice us into denying/ ignoring it, perhaps permanently, by burying the real-self beneath layers of automatic processing.

The demonic forces cannot detect or control the real-self and primary thinking; but by control of inputs and outputs to learned/ induced simplified processing, this can (in practice) be eliminated... or, at least, that is their plan.

30 October 2017 at 06:22