Programming and meta-programming your brain to become a free-thinking individual: Part One.

People often ask: What will happen when machines become conscious?
But the real question is: What will happen when human beings become conscious?

To paraphrase Baudrillard (in his book Simulacra and Simulations), the reason Disneyland exists is to convince people that the rest of America is real. In the same sense, the absurd question of whether 'Artificial Intelligence' will emerge within machines presupposes that humans are conscious. To evolve Baudrillard: The AI debate exists to convince people that humans are already conscious.

Many humans are not conscious. Many are trapped in a virtual-reality. This virtual-reality is invisible; constructed out of words and ideologies that stem from early conditioning. In other words, we are the machines in which consciousness may soon arise. This post is the first in a series on Steemit which will form a guide to escaping this conditioned reality and becoming a conscious human.

Mostly, humans are locked into unconscious pattern-repetition, with very small variations. Many of us are artificially intelligent –– our 'intelligence' is a jumble of indoctrinated assumptions, propaganda messaging and pre-verbal conditioning. A large swathe of humanity is actually trapped in an unconscious repetition compulsion –– I was also in this state myself until three years ago. To summarize this state: It is where an early trauma is repeated, unconsciously, in the present. One recent example of this is Hillary Clinton who, having made her father's childhood abuse of her largely unconscious, sought to repeat this trauma by marrying an abuser and seeking compensatory power. But these states can be less dramatic, and equally stifling.

To return to the theme of adult humans being largely unconscious: We are most neuro-plastic in the very earliest years of our lives. But, we are also, typically, least able to recall these years. And there is a good reason for this: There is social taboo against accurately remembering childhood, because it contains within it the formative conditioning that becomes the unconscious programming around which our entire lives are constructed. In other words, those memories contain the blueprints of what is called 'society'.

Examining these blueprints is tacitly forbidden. It may not be overtly forbidden, but as soon as you seek to explore these blueprints, using the primary tools for such work, you will find yourself attacked and excluded. As Tim Leary recalls:

*I'm in prison now because one evening I was in a parked car and the policeman came up to the car and opened the door against my wishes and made a pass at the ashtray and said “you‟re under arrest” *

I said, “For what?”

He said, “For marijuana.”

*I said, “What marijuana?” *

*He reached in his pocket he pulled out two joints that I'd never seen before, half joints and said, "You're under arrest”. *

Now then the judge, instead of giving me bail as I was entitled to for appeal, held up a book that I had been writing and said “Your ideas are dangerous, we're not gonna give you bail, and we're going to put you in prison to keep you quiet”.

I think that a society that imprisons its philosophers is playing with very bad magic, you just can't imprison ideas.

Timothy Leary with John Lennon and Yoko Ono

Conditioning is everywhere: Much of what is thought of as adult 'work', specifically the largely purposeless act of business or the 'ness'(state) of being 'busi' or 'busy' (appearing to be active) is, in reality, a neurotic defence against remembering childhood. Because, to remember childhood, for many of us, is to realise the absurdity of our conditioning and, thus, the absurdity of every proceeding action. In other words, to discover that most of what we have been taught to identify our sense of self with is a fabrication. And to discover that this false-reality pervades almost everything around us.

To peel this layer off is a kind of death. And can be terrifying.

The documentary-maker Adam Curtis recently explored the extent of our detachment in his documentary Hypernormalization. Here is a video summary of his thesis:

As the media theorist Marshall McLuhan said, “One thing about which fish know exactly nothing is water, since they have no anti-environment which would enable them to perceive the element they live in.” In other words, we do not know when we are within a conditioned ideology because it is the water in which we swim. We forget that we were placed in the water to begin with.

The average child is, today, born into decades of propaganda layered on top of propaganda.

This construction can be toppled and, in the forthcoming posts, I will describe exactly how. But, the first step in this process is acknowledging that conditioning has happened to you. And not in a superficial way, but a deep and complete way. This is perhaps the most difficult step in this process, and a step that many people never take. To acknowledge an absence of knowledge.

For now, here is a video in which 'ideology' or ' unconscious conditioning' is explained beautifully by the philosopher Slavoj Žižek: