Why We Want You to Be Rich - Wikipedia
Donald Trump's direct involvement in blame-the-victim 'MLM' cultic rackets, and his associations with 'Prosperity Gospel/self-betterment' gurus, never gets mentioned, let alone explained, in media interviews with Steve Hassan. Furthermore, the concept which Steve Hassan describes as 'Mind Hacking,' is not original. Let's face it, one doesn't need a degree in psychology, to recognize the pernicious fairy story that controls the thinking, and resulting behaviour, of Trump's deluded followers.
David Brear (copyright 2024)
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Following on from work he began in 1941, in 1950, Dr. Alan Turing published a paper, 'Computing Machinery and Intelligence,' in which he discussed the existing philosophical question of whether machines can think. He then proposed a test, in the form of a blind question and answer game, where computers would be used to try to convince humans that they were not engaging with machines, but with other humans. Thus, despite its appearance, the 'Turing Test' is not a high-brow parlour-game or even a scientific experiment to determine whether machines can think, but a rudimentary, logical test of whether an artificial mind can be made to appear to have the same cognitive capacity as the human mind.
In recent years, various people have suggested ways in which the 'Turing Test' can be reversed, but, as far as I am aware, no one has yet suggested that Dr. Turing's celebrated thoughts on artificial intelligence, can also be applied to the study of the cult/totalitarian phenomenon; for, due to their incapacity to engage with external reality, the inflexible core-adherents of totalistic cults have often been compared to robots. However, the way that exploitative, self-perpetuating non-rational ritual belief systems bait, trap and enslave their prey, by reflecting common human instinctual desires as being obtainable in exchange for absolute subservience, can also be compared to a phenomenon which Dr. Turing did not live to witness - computer viruses. Had Dr. Turing been able to continue his work, he might have eventually felt the need to propose a rudimentary, logical test of whether an artificial mind can be made to appear to have the same ego-related capacity to become delusional as the human mind; for although cult adherents insist that no one is controlling them and that they are excercizing free-will, nonetheless, illogically, and without exception, they all see the world in mechanical two-dimensional terms ('negative vs positive', 'us vs them' , 'good vs evil' , 'winners vs losers', etc. ), communicate in code-like thought-stopping language and obey their de facto programmers without question (no matter what suffering this entails).
Given a detailed knowledge of any Utopian fiction modifying the personalities and behaviour of the core-adherents of a particular cultic group, it would, therefore, be a relatively simple matter to program a machine to duplicate the adherents' systematic responses (or indignant refusal to respond), to a series of blind questions concerning the contents of the group's controlling narrative. In other words, the predictable answers given by deluded core-cult adherents, and those given by machines programmed to duplicate human minds dissociated from external reality, would be indistinguishable.
David Brear (copyright 2015)
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