The Artifice of Ideology

By Greg -
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, for example, has no meaning at the molecular level, and we understand perfectly well what "smooth" means without reference to the underlying physics. We understand consciousness, however, as the agency that performs the underlying functions. In other words, we understand consciousness as both a prerequisite for, and a result of, cognition; and that can't be right. But we've smoothed over the contradiction by calling the prerequisite consciousness "God," and the emergent consciousness "Self." And a universe so divided is the artifice of ideology, and ideology is a precondition of State power.

The trail seems to go a bit further.

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