I once thought that consciousness was the final frontier, the only inviolable holy land.
Until I discovered that even this holy land had been colonized a long time ago.
We live in the cage of our own perception, but mistakenly believe that we own the whole world. Language classifies us, culture narrates for us, and history sets roles for us. Even the most private and turbulent desires may be scripts carefully written by the outside world. We are so immersed in playing "I" that we recognize this image made up of countless fragments of others as the only reality.
This is not a conspiracy. There's no silhouetted hand in a dark conference room pulling the strings. It is grander and more terrifying - it is a system, a civilized automaton, a huge self-replicating narrative engine. It breathes through each of us, sustaining itself through our love and hate, creation and consumption. We are both its cells and its creations.
Once the seeds of doubt are planted, they will take root under the appearance of perfection and grow quietly until everything is broken.
My name is Chen Ji. I used to be a cognitive brain scientist, and I firmly believe that consciousness originates from the electrochemical storms of neurons, which can be observed, decoded, and ultimately fully understood. My job was to draw a map of desire, and I lost my way home in the map I drew.
