These are notes I made in preparation for my second collection, Exit From The Matrix:

“Psychology is essentially a reflection of the culture: it focuses on the family unit and what can happen to fracture it. It focuses on society and how an individual can adapt to it. It focuses on re-establishing norms of behavior. It focuses on a person’s past as the key to his problems. It stumbles and stutters and retreats when it comes up against the individual’s creative impulse. This impulse travels far beyond family, society, and the past.”

“Let us consider what are called ‘contents’ of the mind. Many efforts have been made to describe various items: persistent thoughts and images; so-called archetypes; symbols; memories; and so on. These and other items can be viewed as ‘helpers’ in solving problems. They can be viewed as ‘influences’. They can be viewed as irrelevant debris. They can be analyzed from different perspectives. But one thing is clear. For the creative individual, they are all fuel for the fire. They can be reworked, recombined, and, above all, transformed in the invention of some new reality. Therefore, there is nothing final or ultimate about these ‘contents’. Unless a person is merely a passive spectator who has no creative urge at all.”

“When consciousness is directed to find something in particular, it will. This is not a cause for celebration, any more than a dog finding a bone in a garden is shocking. Directed consciousness gives answers that depend on prior assumptions. Consciousness will find the kind of content it is looking for. But these answers ultimate prove unsatisfying. They exist in a bubble that has been laid out beforehand. Imagination, however, is a completely different story.”

“Imagination has the capacity to be spontaneous. Science can’t touch or analyze spontaneity. At bottom, mind control, whether imposed externally or self-induced, exists to prevent spontaneous action.”

“On the surface, it may appear that society does not reward spontaneity because it doesn’t acknowledge it. But every great work contains inexplicable leaps, when the inventor vaults beyond anything that was done and cataloged before. He spontaneously lights on something that never existed. He brings it into being. In retrospect, going back to discover ‘how it happened’ results in plausible but completely false conclusions.”

“People will do everything they possibly can to explain how a spontaneous invention or creation happened. They will say an individual ‘tapped into’ something beyond him. A field, a library, a data mine. This is an attempt to make sense out of what stands on its own: imagination. Imagination invents. It doesn’t need a field or a cosmic library.”

“Just because the overwhelming majority of humans back away from imagination and invention of reality doesn’t mean you have to.”

And here is a backgrounder:

Elon Musk and several other unnamed billionaires believe we all live in a computer generated reality—they’re convinced the universe is a simulation. Therefore, they’re funding research aimed at helping us escape.

The story, as reported in The Independent (10/5), gets even more interesting when we hear from Sam Altman, who owns Y Combinator, a company that helps create tech start-ups:

“Mr Altman…told the New Yorker that he was concerned about the way that the devices that surround us might lead to the extinction of all consciousness in the universe. He spoke about how the best scenario for dealing with that is a ‘merge’ – when our brains and computers become one, perhaps by having our brains uploaded into the cloud…’The full-on-crazy version of the merge is we get our brains uploaded into the cloud. I’d love that. We need to level up humans, because our descendants will either conquer the galaxy or extinguish consciousness in the universe forever. What a time to be alive!’”

If you’re confused and spinning, you should be. How do we get from “we’re all living in a simulation” to “we should get our brains uploaded to the cloud”?

“The devices that surround us might lead to the extinction of all consciousness in the universe,” and therefore we should merge our brains with another such device; the cloud. Our brains and some super-computer should become One, and that will solve the problem.

What??

The machines are taking over. Therefore, let’s all merge with the machines.

If you believe this is logic, I have golf club memberships for sale on Jupiter.

The underlying message here is: say anything that leads to hooking up brains to computers, even if it makes no sense at all. Just do it.

Fast-food burgers are unhealthy. Therefore, let’s all merge our brains with the cloud.

There’s a big hurricane coming. Hook your brain up to a computer.

Perhaps Mr. Altman thinks that a brain-computer interface will preserve consciousness against our own tendency to destroy ourselves. Who knows? If that’s what he thinks, I have news: connecting brains to computers doesn’t produce “more consciousness.” It just brings about a condition of slavery, in which we accept all answers and data generated by a computer.

Which is exactly where technocrats want to go. “You’re not allowed to make mistakes. Computers are flawless. Follow their instructions.”

Technocrats, to the degree their motives can possibly be construed as genuine, are always looking in the wrong places for magic. They think computers embody it. Fill a processing device with enough complexity and it comes alive. Not so. It just becomes a more complicated machine.

There is a premise these geniuses are overlooking: a brain-computer hookup actually works. Who says so? Who says that wiring connections between a brain and a machine is going to produce information, for a human being, that’s more than static and gibberish?

A whole host of assumptions are being made here. On extremely tenuous grounds. It’s slovenly thinking: a brain is like a machine and a computer is like a brain, so the two of them will get along just fine. Really?

The technocrats have seen far too many bad sci-fi movies.

Their basic problem stems from their adoration and worship of machines and systems. This leads to treating human beings as systems and nothing more. If it isn’t a system, they’re afraid of it. They want to predict and control. That’s the world they see.

Systems are, when taken too far, labyrinths. You can enter but you can’t exit. Humans generally don’t know when that line has been crossed. They eat systems. They want to think and behave like systems. This obsession spans the spectrum all the way from schools with zero-tolerance policies to metaphysical maps of the cosmos.

When elites reach the point where the population can’t even imagine what non-system thinking might be, they will have won. They won’t need a supercomputer to instruct brains. They will have created a collective brain.

Many humans just want to know what ‘everyone else’ is thinking…and after they find out, they sign up and join. The joke is, everyone else is thinking they want to be part of the collective, too. That’s the basic and bottom-line thought, and it’s passed around like an empty shell, from person to person. It’s meaningless.

“All right, Mr. Jones, we’re going to link your brain up to our supercomputer. We think this is going to work. Ha-ha, we’ll see. We hope it doesn’t fry any brain synapses. Once we make the connection, you should be receiving a whole new set of information from your brain. We hope it comes through clearly. Your job is to obey what your brain is telling you. When I use the word ‘you’, I’m not sure what I mean. That’s a mystery. There’s a lot of mystery here. We expect you to become a super version of yourself. Super-smart, within the parameters set by the supercomputer. The computer will make sure you’re a good person from now on. Ready? Take a deep breath. Here we go…oh wait a second. I see we need one more signature from you on the informed consent waiver. In case there IS a YOU separate from your brain, that YOU is not permitted to sue us for damages. Just sign on the dotted line…”

(To read about Jon’s mega-collection, Exit From The Matrix, click here.)