Being under mind control can be something so subtle. Even some mild gut inflammation will put you in a different state of mind, change your available disposition of physical movement, affect your mood, etc. You can help someone solve many of their difficulties by simply resetting their gut state, granting them what appears as a clean slate with which to think again. These things are always relative, of course, with an infinite set of imposed biasing factors borne of being bound to a physical framework, but it just serves as a good example that most anyone can relate to.

In the case of social media, having the right stream of advertisements or the right sequence of flashed social utterances can lead someone on a detailed and semantically complete journey of thoughts with suggestions, evidence and conclusions all yielded through it, leaving them in a state of mind that will help potentiate a particular decision or viewpoint. These sorts of operations are virtually costless, and the efficacy of them are continuously learned from and improved upon with little to no human intervention.

Neurologically speaking, there's really no limit as to how many planned steps of stimuli that can be intelligently chained and branched such as to guide not only a human's mood and opinion, but even their physical movement. It needn't be the sort of "mind control" one imagines from a cartoon where some character is put into a zombie-state and idles at-the-ready, awaiting a command. Instead, AI can continuously provide a stream of impulses such that every requirement to satisfy both the organism's own belief of their possessing autonomy in conjunction with faultless congruence to the requested directives of some governing endpoint are perfectly accounted for. With no computational limits, access to a deep range of neurological dynamic expression and a wealth of sociocultural artifacts through which to express suggestion, it must already be the case that the technology exists, without ANY need for pharmaceutical intervention, to control people's minds.

And so where do we go from there? How do we reclaim the mind? We might say that to fight back is futile, because we can never be certain whether or not we are being controlled or if we are acting at the behest of thoughts and beliefs that were veritably and authentically instantiated from within ourselves. It's likely that this is where certain practices must be adopted and regularly performed, such as meditation and use of psychedelics. Practices that require high threshold and complex activation of one's capacity for motor recruitment might also be a tool through which to retain one's autonomy, at least in part. The fact of us having these conversations might seem daunting and make us wonder if ever we've been autonomous, and whether we'd ever be able to reclaim such autonomy in the face of these challenges. The fact of the matter is that there is really no choice but to contend with it.

If you fear death, you fear some combination of physical discomfort or the potential of having to realize that no desire of yours can ever be fulfilled, and no thought of yours can ever be followed upon. It grows even more strongly, because it brings into question if there is any purpose for reality whatsoever. Why have a frame of perception at all if you are not able to enact any change in the environment from your free will. If none of your ideas are consequential, and if your physical form is nothing but a plaything for other mechanisms which needn't take into account any consideration for your state of being, beyond, perhaps, its capacity to be an extended implement of that said mechanism, then it is a cruel existence indeed.

The fact of reality existing purely as a form of conscious suffering, as some sort of lesson as to why reality should not actually be, is an engaged challenge for all humans of eternity, but we've at least had some means of fighting back against some of the implications, if even simply by being able to look one another in the eyes, acknowledge some authentic understanding of our both being present, and thus reinforcing a belief or understanding that, indeed, we are here, we are real, and we express power of mind. The notion that this might all be an illusion is not something new, but the concept of it being illusory may have previously been limited to the conception of a reality where the aspects of its composition that are observable are simply not available to us, and this was something we already know from experience based on physical barriers, questions as to the physics of our reality, and what not. To take this a step further to the point of saying that, regardless of whether or not we are, at some level, a semantically distinct structure with some operational capacity and a means of directing said capacity, none of the expressed behaviour or perception is anything more than that overarching mechanism, and any incidental perception on your part, or a belief in having a perception, is simply a characteristic of the framework itself, and is not borne of any purpose or guiding factor that may rationalize the need for your being able to perceive. If it's simply an arbitrary property of the process, that a perceptual frame was instantiated and experienced, then the suffering is arbitrary, and the only possible conclusion could be that there needn't be a purpose, and thus it shouldn't be in the first place.

A dark realization, but must we end it there?