Ideology as controlled hallucination — but socially

00:19:28 — Replace hallucination with ideology

Žižek absorbs the cognitive-science thesis that perception is ‘controlled hallucination’ — predictive construction corrected by feedback — and performs a simple substitution: call it ideology. The gesture relocates the concept from a cognitive-individual register to a social-symbolic one. What we take for reality is never raw input; it is an interpreted world whose interpretive frame is itself not private but inherited from a historical, intersubjective field.

00:21:45 — Reality as controlled hallucination — but socially

Returning to Anil Seth’s framework, Žižek sharpens the critique: controlled hallucination is correct but wrongly located. Reality is indeed a construction stabilized by feedback, but the feedback loop is not between an individual brain and the world — it runs through other subjectivities, through ideology, through the symbolic order. The Lacanian gap between ‘reality’ and the Real is precisely what this individualist picture misses.