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It's an interesting trail to follow, the idea that consciousness and the bicameral mind were invented by the State as means of social control. But if consciousness is a precondition to its invention, the question, "Who's doing the inventing?" would seem to lead to a dead end. The question, in fact, discounts all natural explanations for cultural-cognitive evolution, and so we fall back on divine purpose and inevitability. A machine may improve itself through random trials, errors, and the establishment of precedence over coincidence. We understand intelligence as memory and computation, sentience as active programming and reactivity, and consciousness as some miraculous synergy of a sufficiently complex intelligence and a sufficiently expansive sentience. If, however, we assume that consciousness is an emergent property of memory, computation, passive perception and active programming, it must stand apart from the prerequisite conditions. The property of smooth...

Being where you ought to be, with no doubt that you are doing exactly what you ought to do, might be in the clutches of a lion, or at a desk in a sterile office building. Happiness is rarely found, and then only briefly, in a lounge chair surrounded by slaves attending to your whimsy. Happiness is the impossibility of anything else taking the place of the moment we currently occupy. In a life or death struggle, no thought interferes with the necessity of doing what we're doing right now. Are we happiest when our options collapse to one, necessary choice, regardless of the circumstances that focused our attention on the preeminent "now?" I think so. The present always satisfies, whether it's painful or joyful, whether it's filled with exigencies or void of responsibility. The pursuit of happiness, then, would seem to be an oxymoron. The mythology of our time is the idea of God, become Man, finding His way home. Civilization persists and is driven forward by...

Measurements suffice in lieu of a definition, and there are many measurements of wealth to satisfy us that we're happy, but neither word stands for a well understood concept. Wealth comes from the same root as power , and the wealthiest persons were simply those who controlled the natural and human resources of their realm. If the measure of wealth is the power of the State, then we, its subjects, are wealthy only in so far as our service and dedication deserves its recognition. Happiness , on the other hand, has never been a measurable quality; and, in modern times at least, happiness can't be earned, stolen, or even pursued. Happiness, like any happening, happenstance, or mishap, is a matter of luck. It is, like all good things, bestowed only by fortune. The Indo-European root word for happiness conveyed "fitness", a different attitude toward the joy and comfort that we now regard as a self-indulgent luxury or guilty pleasure. Happiness was the condition of bein...

Consciousness in many ways made us less intelligent, and may have been invented as a means of social control. We know it's possible to have language and culture without consciousness, but it may be impossible to conceive of the State without it. Consciousness made us vulnerable to illusions, and the State was the dream weaver. We know that consciousness is taught, that it didn't emerge as a high-level property of neurological processes. Language gave us imagination and populated the world with spirits. But consciousness gave us ideology, quieted the spirits, and gave us God. The State had its origins in the bicameral kingdoms, and its kings, no doubt, had a degree of consciousness that grew more refined as their kingdoms grew. Consciousness spread, I think, not in the nurturing of a child by its mother (as was certainly the case with language) but as indoctrination. Far from being recognized as a precious cultural artifact, consciousness was the end result of a ruthless off...

The State preceded consciousness, and the evidence for the bicameral mind is in the iconography of power. Language is only a tool, and the Mind it creates is infinitely varied. Because it's the power-obsessed narcissists who leave legacies in stone and precious metals, it's from their fealty that we write history. The co-evolution of language and consciousness wanders and branches as much as biological evolution, and no one has come up with a principle or law for its trajectory. We all seem to believe, however implicitly, that evolution is directed, and that some law, some divine purpose, some invisible hand, has charted its trajectory and, if left unmolested, will follow its true path to paradise. But we only believe in Paradise because our lives have been made miserable by domestication. Those who successfully avoided the spell of the State were free to invent a more limber and accommodating kind of consciousness, one that didn't set itself apart from the natural world. ...

Truth is abstraction and reality is metaphor. Both occupy consciousness and define the split between heaven and earth, the sciences and the humanities, the holy and the profane, and, to some, nonsense and sense. There are sanctioned abstractions, and there are abstract concepts which rely on abstract experience for their meaning. Mathematics is a tool for manufacturing the abstract causes and effects which align with the abstract concept. Truth is always internally consistent, and because consciousness contains the whole universe, external contradictions can be discarded as false. We all know this, but we choose to believe in truth because it's easier than doubt, skepticism, curiosity, and the shame that comes with being a social irritant. Science, say its true believers, is self-correcting. But if we take the long view, so is every religion. Despite the claims of fundamentalists, every religion adapts to its time and evolves along with the environment which it domesticates to ...