awareness

this is an incomplete draft. When the essay is complete this statement will be removed.

By Mark Moore

Siem Reap, Cambodia, 2015

Contents

Introduction

1. Unintended Consequences

2. Uncertainty

3. Artificial or Natural

4. Field of Opposites

Results

Introduction:

Awareness - Reality or Illusion?

I became expert at giving the appearance of normalcy in job interviews, and I obtained lucrative jobs which I could not sustain, because normalcy is not an appearance. Normalcy is consistency, conformity, and a special adaptivity: a tolerance for unpleasantness combined with an ability to act and react within culturally acceptable boundaries. If I go so far as to label this a form of confinement, then I place myself outside these boundaries. Normalcy also includes having goals which are similar to one's peers, and feeling satisfied upon achieving those goals. It includes an effort to coexist harmoniously and to cooperate within one's social milieu, and an important component of this cooperation is a positive responsiveness to the feedback which one receives within one's social group. I have become expert at defining normalcy because normalcy is a strange water that I cannot swim in, or a very abundant food that I am allergic to. Normalcy is a highly common species of insect and I am the reclusive entomologist who studies it with the eerie feeling of discovering something strange.

But I am struggling to swim in that water, and my head is just above the surface. I must eat that food, and endure the allergic reactions that follow. And those very common insects are crawling all over me. And this is my description of normalcy: it is something I cannot achieve, and I feel like it is killing me gradually.

That is my point of view today; it might be counted as an item in an inventory of self-awareness. But I was not aware of it even a year ago in the same way that I am now. And what about the Human Resources agent who interviewed me for the job? What was her point of view, or what was her awareness of me? Whatever it was, we now know that it was wrong. She was effectively deceived, or self-deceived if you like. She hired me and then she fired me, or I disappeared without notice. but wait, I haven't told that story yet, or have I? Now it may seem to you that I have not introduced that story yet but after you have read this essay the order in which the material was presented may appear in your memory confusing. And this leads me to one of the major points of this essay. Awareness in general, and self-awareness, are both extremely overvalued or over appraised by people. After many years of study on this subject, I have reached the tentative conclusion that people have comparatively very little awareness at all.

A broader definition of adaptivity might include the ability to give the appearance of normalcy for the purpose of getting a job, whether or not the required job performance can be sustained. By this definition I am a moth whose wings look like the bark of a tree upon which I rest. But this is a survival tactic; it does not lead to cooperation or harmonious coexistence, but instead to trouble. The realization that I regularly engaged in this tactic was one of many important clues which led me to an awareness of my chronic depression. but I have already trashed "awareness," or at least stated that it is overvalued, therefore how can I claim to have achieved awareness of anything?

in practical terms, to assert that I have depression instead of normalcy I must first believe that there is an internal self and an external world, or in other words there is a part of the world that is internal to myself and something that is outside of myself. This may work for the purposes of a psychoanalyst, or Human Resources Agent, but it breaks down when we look more deeply into the subject. I am a part of the world or a subset of it. Anything that is internal to me is also internal to the rest of the world. And so technically there is no external world. This means that what an analyst might call "my depression" is not a problem that is internal to myself but that it is a problem of the world at large, since I am a part of the world. the obvious proof of this idea is in the fact that the Human Resources agent who hired me and her company experienced at least as much trouble as I did as a result of her mistake in hiring me. And so the concept of "Internal and external" as opposites begins to dissolve in careful observation of reality.

As an anecdote to the above generalization, I obtained what nearly every human on earth would consider an excellent job at Xerox in San Diego California. I listened to congratulations and exclamations from friends, family, and even from colleagues within the company. I was astonished, because I had already pummeled to a pulp many similar jobs, and knew before I started my first day at work that I would already be planning my escape.

conversely what I view as an exciting escape, an adventure, an exciting new experience, often is greeted by family, friends, and colleagues at a job from which I intend to escape, by the reverse exclamation, "wow that sounds crazy! I would not do that if I were you." One such escape was a month long bimooke ride up the coast of California. I camped at state parks, I foraged for wild edible food as a hobby, i pedaled north along the cliffs of highway 1 against the northern wind, because I did not know about that wind, and it was difficult. But it was not as difficult as going to work at the Xerox office every day and listening to my boss lament about his inability to change the font on the legend of a pie chart.

So apparently in depression as in everything else that follows the laws of physics I follow the course of least resistance. but it is far from obvious where that course leads. Especially when we are young.

A clue or a piece of a puzzle may go unrecognized as a part of the big picture of one's life. A complementary clue or a piece of my puzzle which fitted neatly together with the piece about my scuttled job at Xerox came in the form of the same friends and family shouting at me when I quit the job that I must be crazy. but I did not yet see the pattern or the big picture, and these survival tactics became habitual.

friendships and romantic relationships became burned bridges in a similarly explosive manner. As the years passed, the connection was increasingly apparent. There was something wrong with me. But what could it be? I had always looked for the problems outside. Now I was forced to look for the problem's origin inside myself. I had little success finding reasonable consistent sources for my problems externally, but when I began to look for my problems internally, they are they were! I had all the pieces of the jigsaw puzzle of my strange and twisted life in a jumbled pile inside me, and all I had to do was assemble them into a meaningful picture which would explain the source of my strange and twisted behavior.

but I have already sought to demonstrate that there is no internal self that is separate from the external world, and so why have I now attempted to describe my problems as problems all internal to myself? Again the concept internal and external they have practical use for example it is easy to point your finger at a person and say you ran that red light and therefore this traffic accident is your fault. In doing so you externalise the blame or the problem and relieve yourself of the blame simultaneously. However as the section on unintended consequences will demonstrate we are not in control of these accidents and in fact no one is to blame for the accident. part of my purpose here is to demonstrate that we have taken some practical ideas such as the opposites of internal and external and applied them to such an extent that they do not serve us well. this subject will be dealt with in the section on the field of opposites. taken together living in a world of unintended consequences, where opposites do not exist but dissolve, gives rise to a sense of uncertainty in all things under the Sun.

perhaps surprisingly this concept of uncertainty arises from the science of quantum mechanics. science is supposed to explain things not make them uncertain. In the field the physics, it has been demonstrated quite clearly that causality is not a reality. on a practical level in everyday life we have the experience of competition in almost every aspect of daily life. But beneath the surface there is a smaller or perhaps quantum reality which is best described as probability and uncertainty. politicians and judges must administer populations of people and make decisions about right and wrong, which are perhaps almost absurd on the field offices. But fortunately I am not burdened with such decisions, and I have the liberty to explore the world on a deeper level.

My purpose here is to use my apparently increasing awareness of my depression to illustrate the possibility that our awareness of ourselves, and awareness of things in general, it is very small, and in fact plays a very very small role in the outcomes which we observe in our lives. another way of saying this is that the myriad factors that we are not aware of play a much larger role in determining the outcome than the factors that we are aware of. This is not a new idea for many people, and has long been known as the "theory of unintended consequences." but it is new to me, especially where I simultaneously consider the implications of the theory and my own attempt to increase my self awareness.

The summary given thus far is deceptively brief. The unfolding of these events was a long and tedious process. I would pick up a piece of the puzzle. I would turn it upside down and inside out and try to understand how it fit with the other pieces.

A very bright psychiatrist said something to me like a diamond among a pile of rubble that, as we observe the processes and problems of our lives we believe that the underlying reasons for the events in each situation are distinct and unique. But after enough of these problems occur we start to see a pattern emerge: no matter how different the reasons may appear, the outcome is always the same. that diamond in the rubble has in the light of quantum uncertainty and the dissolution of the field of opposites and knowledge of the theory of unintended consequences and many anecdotes which support it, that diamond has become a little piece of charcoal it crumbles under the slightest pressure.

I found this diamond among the rubble very valuable or perhaps useful, but very vexing. As I had always done in the past, I began to believe my own story. As ever, this new story or explanation appeared to be more persuasive than the stories and explanations which preceded it. Is this a newly discovered reality, or is this just another illusion? And what is the value of a narrative that is predicated upon uncertainty? People often express frustration with the dogma of religion, with the confinement of their jobs, or with the tedious repetitiveness of social traditions. But it seems to me that they would rather endure these frustrations than risk the alternative of uncertainty, unanswered questions, and perpetual second guessing.

it is especially vexing now that I am past middle age, and it has dawned upon me that a Rubicon may be crossed, or in other words a point may arrive when a thing is broken and cannot be fixed. It is easy to imagine an alternate course of life in my youth wherein I came to this awareness at a much earlier time, at a time when it was possible to salvage something of value, and to begin afresh, to start a new life with this awareness in hand or in mind or at heart. It is easy to imagine that my life might have evolved in a much happier direction.

ok

But I am afraid it is too late for that now. perhaps all I can do now is leave this scrap as a warning to those who might dare to enter here. But I am NOT optimistic that it will be useful to those who need it most. And that is the end of the introduction; the remainder of this book has the purpose of attempting to answer some of the questions posed in the introduction.

1. Unintended Consequences:

The theory of unintended consequences is worth a lifetime of study, if only for the purpose of avoiding a life of wasted effort and self deception.

In the realm of science and technology, the theory implies that the solution to any problem contains a new problem which is worse than the original problem, and that this new problem may or may not be known, but is inevitable. This may be a function of entropy at work in daily life, but I would prefer to keep this discussion non technical. there are abundant nortorious examples of this theory in action.

one website called an inventor Thomas Midgkey jr the king of unintended consequences. she was the chemist who introduced CFCs as refrigerant in the air conditioners.

the goal itself cannot even be said to be your own, for it is the result of millions of influences upon you, some large and some small, none of which you are aware of, none of which were part of your intentional design or plan, but all the switch in some way affected the outcome.and the outcome but you observe is not the outcome. What you observe is only a small part of the outcome

2. Uncertainty

The End of Cause and Effect

collective knowledge and collective awareness. Enormous libraries full of books that no one can read. And internet with hundreds of millions of websites.

3. Artificial or Natural

4. Field of Opposites

throughout most of my adult life I was astonished by the juxtaposition of these two apparently contradictory ideas: first of all cooperation among people is required in order to have peaceful coexistence. Secondly people are constantly in competition with each other, and this competition more often than not develops into arguments at least and sometimes fighting and even war. how can this apparent contradiction be resolved? One simple answer is that the first idea, the idea of cooperation, must be replaced by deception. In other words cooperation is only an appearance such as the appearance of normalcy that I gave during job interviews. After I became aware that I was doing this intentionally as a tactic for short term gain, I could not escape the awareness that my tactic was not cooperative but instead competitive.

the work of Joseph Campbell, author and professor of mythology, made a very influential impression in my life when I was about 27 years old. In a series of interviews Campbell explained his concept of the "field of opposites." He explained that opposites do not really exist. They are simply a matter of practical usefulness in ordinary daily communication, but upon careful study they dissolve, exactly as the contradiction explained in the previous paragraph dissolves when we replace the word cooperation with deception. Now this is a very practical example, but much more carefully formulated statements of this concept can be produced. my purpose is to make these ideas accessible, and to bring them all together into one paper.

black and white in no way oppose each other. They are not in competition with each other, and there is no opposition between them.so why do we say that black is the opposite of white? It is simply a matter of habitual communications an ordinary daily life. But I believe that it does not serve us well. I believe that it does not increase comprehension of the natural world, but instead create illusions of oppositions which do not exist. It is most important because there are oppositions, competition, and of course conflict of all kinds. But these R creations of people. Sir, are we aware or is this just another another illusion?

Results

while this essay is in progress and under construction it may appear strange that I have written the results in advance, or that the conclusion was reached before the substance of the paper. In reality it only means that the entire paper was written in my head before I started writing on the computer. That is a preface to the results, and this paragraph will be deleted when the essay is finished. Unless I get hit by a bus that is.

my conclusion is that words like "awareness" "meaningfulness" have clear practical application in daily life, but when we explore them deeply, like everything else such as quantum mechanics and structure of space itself we find that these practical definitions breakdown and do not have very fundamental usefulness. I have always been somewhat annoyed that human beings create their own definition of success and then pat themselves on the back for achieving that success. This includes the idea of self awareness, because in practical conversation people generally use self awareness to distinguish human beings from the other animals, and the prejudicial way which implies that people are superior to other animals.

choose any two each of the different species, and compare them. Remarkable differences can be observed. But similarities are more abundant than differences. And so this idea of awareness starts to break down.take the immune system for example. We have no awareness that a virus has invaded our bodies, until our immune system creates symptoms in response two actions it has already taken sometimes days or even weeks in advance without our knowledge or awareness and the reality is that if we had to consciously manage our immune system we would be dead in two weeks. That kind of conscious awareness simply does not exist. The immune system is a fundamental part of each individual and yet the individual has no awareness of that system whatsoever and it might as well be autonomous.

(interim - needs editing)

The statement that life is hollow and meaningless arises as an impression felt during a few hours of depression or hopelessness. without a context a statement like that is little more than an exclamation of despair. So let me put it into a context.

I know a little girl who died of cancer when she was 7 years old, and she spent the last two years of her life in the hospital. at least one of her parents was always there with her, and friends and family brought food to the hospital to be supportive of them. The little girl was too young to know about the experiences of life that she might miss, and her parents were in a nearly constant state of despair. They had a concept of what she would miss and of their loss and how much emptiness they would feel long before she was gone. and then she was gone.

"meaning" or purpose are words that have different meanings to different people. the little girl did not have time to worry about formulating a concept of meaning or purpose for her life; it was over too fast. she did not into your years of contemplation as some of us do where and we struggle to find meaning and purpose and balance in this world of madness. But people who survive loved ones and family members who died of cancer often spend months or years studying the mechanisms of cancer which we call oncology to try to understand why this is a problem that cannot be fixed. And those people who study cancer and understand it well, often begin to look at all living creatures as biological machines.

the mutations which arise that cause cancer are homologous to the mutations which give rise to the evolution of species. if people read that deeply into the subject, they often emerge with a very different kind of perception of the world than they had before someone special to them died of cancer. One friend of mine Brian Swift a physical chemist whose wife died of what they used to call cup cancer because they could not identify which cell type mutated to become the cancer, Brian has become a garage oncologist. Nearly a year after his wife died he and two other people are working on alternative cancer therapies. like most true scientist he is agnostic. In this situation, he cannot let go. It is a challenge which has become an obsession. challenge has given him purpose but not meaningfulness. That is the rub.

cancer is a special kind of vacuum that draws some people into a new a challenging necessity to form a meaningful concept of life and purpose. For those who never experience this challenge, and Here I am using a simplification, because of course there are many other types of problems such as autoimmune diseases, and my sister has two of those, for those who never are challenged to reach into the minutiae of biological reality, it is possible to go through life and a blithe way. if my father has ever spent an hour reading about the mechanics of auto immune dysfunction, it would surprise me, and it is much easier to imagine him throwing his hands up and lump in all of this disease and despair into a big box and labeling it or attributing it to "something that only God understands." He is satisfied with that, and carries on with his daily life of playing golf eating at fine restaurants.

so if we compare Brian's response to his wife's cancer with my father's response to my sisters autoimmune disease, it is easy to see that two different people can have very different responses in spite of the fact that they are both absolutely human, and genetically 99.99% the same.

the purpose of this example is to show that human beings created the concept of meaning. if meaningfulness were inherent in life it would not be so easy for Brian and my father to take such different approaches to it. for the purpose of comparison consider how people respond to drowning. There is a survival reflex which occurs. Usually there is struggling followed by gasping. In this situation you might say that "suicide is not an option" as you said or wrote in your previous email. "all is lost" is a fairly recent movie which made a big impression on me, because I have been in similar situations and many many times. By which I mean that I was in a near death situations as a result of going out on and adventure or excursion which went awry. At the end of that moviethe only actor in the movie accidentally sets his life raft on fire in an attempt to signal a passing boat where he is lost at sea, jumping from the life raft seeing it on fire, thinking rather than swimming he decides to let go and he decides that he will not fight again. And then in the last instant we a hand reached down and grasp his reaching hand. when we come to our end, we do not know if there will be a hand reaching for us or not, and we do not know if that outstretched hand will even be able to save us.

the little girl who died, her parents were there everyday with outstretched hands, and they would have done anything to save her. But they could not. Did she want to live or die? She had no time to think about the question. All we know is that those outstretched hands could not help her. And then she was gone. So who decides what the meaning of life is, or if there is any meaning at all?

from my limited and prejudiced point of view, in other words from the point of view of a person with a chronic depression disorder, and with my experience of life,the biggest assumption is that there is meaningfulness in life. Because there certainly is no evidence of this meaningfulness, and there is no more evidence of meaningfulness than there is of the correctness of any of the hundreds of different religions and their doctrines and dogma. for practical purposes it is worthwhile to say that for example if any of the mainstream versions of Christianity are correct in their doctrine then all of the other religions are incorrect in their doctrine. And all the war and madness that has come about in the name of these various doctrines, is an absurdity which points to the possibility that there really is no meaning. It points to entropy.

you asked about the ups of my life looking back. The most recent one was the volunteer project in my village. That went on and was driven by hope and the possibility that I could make a meaningful or purposeful change for the better development of the children in the village. And that project was destroyed by people bent on greed and corruption, and in a very large numbers, and I was simply overwhelmed by the proportion of corruption here. So this is probably not a very useful example to bring about hope for the future, because it came with the same result that the parents got with their little girl. Some people have 2 kids for 20 years, and I had 20 kids for 2 years. They might as well have been my own children. Their parents were completely irresponsible, I suppose poverty misery desperation and a desire for free handouts will do that to people. But I would teach for 2 hours outdoors, while the fathers of my students Sat 10 yards away from us drinking cheap rice wine out of bags and getting drunk. When the army of corruption came to destroy the project., those parents did not come to my aid because I was not bringing money into the village. And the army of corruption new that if I succeeded with my project those kids would not be poor anymore and they would cease to be bait for the easy tourist handouts. it was like living in an episode of 60 minutes the TV show I grew up watching every Sunday evening, but it was like living in that show for two years every day.

it is silly to look at a picture and say that's depressing or that makes me feel sad when I am a person who has chronic depression and I was already sad before I looked at that picture. But awareness of this fact does not seem to help the situation. Why does awareness not help the situation? It is because awareness is something manufactured in the brains of people it has some practical applications but when we call upon awareness other situations it may fail completely to be useful

some interesting links to websites related to the subject in this essay:

http://www.quora.com/What-are-the-best-examples-of-the-law-of-unintended-consequences-in-action