‘Awareism‘

Blazing a Trail to Reality

Like a forest choked by underbrush, our ideas on ‘reality’ are overgrown with a six-thousand-year growth of dogma, deadwood, and contradiction. Time for a (conceptual) fire

Things exist. How could they not? The world around us, mountains, people, chairs: they’re real, they exist. Any idea of how ‘things’ might not exist is, ‘yeah right,’ scoffed at.

Helen Keller lost both her sight and her hearing at age 19 months. She was nearly 8-years-old before the concept of ‘words’ entered her head.

“…and somehow the mystery of language was revealed to me. I knew then that w-a-t-e-r [being signed into her hand by her new teacher] meant the wonderful cool something that was flowing over my hand” — Helen Keller (1880–1968), The Story of My Life

If ‘water,’ the word, the conception, didn’t exist for young Helen Keller, what did?

What was it, for example, that she took her bath in? What existed for seven-year-old Helen Keller before she learned that word, ‘water’?

A feeling, that’s what existed. But what is that? What is feeling, at all?

‘Feeling’ doesn’t even warrant an entry in either the Stanford or Internet, online philosophy encyclopedias. In fairness to the halls of academia, there is a term, ‘qualia,’ of no generally agreed-upon definition, which seems to take its place.

“The quale [singular of ‘qualia’] is directly intuited, given, and is not the subject of any possible error because it is purely subjective,” so wrote Clarence Irving Lewis early in the last century.¹

That’s a description, not a definition, but scratch out ‘the quale’ in the above and replace it with ‘feeling,’ and there’s really no difference. A quale by any other name would still be a feeling.

So let’s start by simplifying things. Let’s define feeling (for now) as detected interactions.

Allow me to explain.

Like a bat hitting (interacting with) a ball, an interaction is a term physicists like to use for force. Air pressure waves interacting in ears (sound), light waves interacting in eyes (sight), chemicals interacting in mouth and nose (taste and smell), hormonal reactions, electromagnetic interactions of nerve endings (touch), even neurons firing in our brain (thought): these are all applications of force involving a transfer of energy, and all can be thought of in terms of detected interactions, transfers of energy that are detected by our senses.

Looked at this way there is nothing ineffable about feeling. We detect interactions of thought, light, air pressure variations. We detect chemicals in nose and on the tongue, touch, pain. Feeling comes from interactions we ‘detect.’

So, as an example, something, somewhere, changes (the sun rises). That change is reflected in an application of force (light waves flood our world). That force is detected by our senses (photons interacting with eyes), manifesting as a feeling (black turning to dull orange through closed eyelids). Wake up!

At this point, if we listen closely, we might detect a chorus of semi-righteous ‘harrumphs’ echoing down academia’s long and hallowed halls, because how does ‘detection’ become ‘feeling’?

How do detected light waves, for example, become the feeling, ‘red’ or ‘warmth’?

It’s an honest question. But looking at feeling simply as detected interactions allows us, for now, to conceptually strip away not only the baggage of any process for ‘generating’ feeling, but the language of feeling as well, the feeling of…whatever…that tends to steer our thoughts onto narrow pathways bounded by language itself.

So, baggage begone!

Detected interaction: interactions detected; that’s all we’re going to deal with here.

At first.

Some ground rules:

• An interaction is a transfer of energy, not the energy itself. Detected interactions have no inherent information on ‘what’ is interacting.

• Individual detected interactions are instantaneous and detected NOW — ‘in the moment.’ Like money changing hands, while we may be able to assign a time to the moment of transfer, the transfer itself, in effect, takes ‘no time.’

• In physics, force is a vector quantity meaning a ‘direction’ is associated with it. So in a general sense, we can say that detected interactions come from somewhere (rather than from everywhere at once).

The other side of is

Conventional wisdom has it that substantive ‘things’ exist on their own, independent of any awareness of them. It’s called ‘objective reality,’ and it’s not just things, but the things things are made of as well; molecules made of atoms, atoms made of subatomic particles, all exist independent of ‘mind’ or any ‘detection’ of them. That’s how we see it.

To detect these things, however, does seem to need a medium. It gets the lodgers of the hallowed halls muttering about ‘agency’ because feeling, awareness, consciousness, even detection, all seem to require an agent, an entity of some nature or another equipped with the sensory tools, the processing equipment, a means for doing the detecting, for generating feeling.

Feelings can be fleeting. If an energy transfer isn’t continuing, the detection ceases. Gone. But substantive things, as we tend to think of them, are still there even if we aren’t. That’s the ‘objective’ part.

And yet, consider these very words you read. Whatever the medium you use to read or hear them, when that medium is not in your direct presence, if you cannot hear, see, touch, smell or taste these words, then in what manner do they exist…to you?

Answer: they ‘exist’ in the form of the thought (detected interactions) that they exist apart from that same thought.

The irony of thinking of substantive ‘things’ as existing independently of mind or ‘agent’ is that we need mind or agent to conceive of things existing independently of mind or agent.

Unless…

Deconstructing descriptions

It’s not merely that substantive things exist ‘on their ‘own’; it’s that in our minds they interact on their own as well.

Our very language is wedded to the notion of things interacting. It’s implied in nearly every sentence we might compose. A horn beeped. The tires skidded. A fender crumpled. Implied interactions, all.

And therein lies the tangled underbrush of existential reality because subatomic particles, the ‘building blocks’ of our world, do not recognize — they do not interact with — ‘tires’ or ‘fenders’ or ‘gnashed teeth.’ They interact with other subatomic particles.

Grouping untold trillions of individual interactions into a single unit and calling it a ‘tire’ or a ‘car’ is a sensible ploy for describing our world. But descriptions don’t interact with other descriptions. Do they?

It might seem, sure, descriptions don’t interact, but the objects they describe do interact. But if a toy car careens across a room and slams headlong into a wall, would we say that the object — itself — ‘detected’ the wall?

It’s not an exercise in semantics. Physics has a more rigorously defined version of what amounts to the same issue called the ‘measurement problem’ (ever heard of Schrödinger’s cat?).

What is it that qualifies any interaction to be (or not to be) a ‘detected’ interaction? What even is a ‘detection’?

If we don’t know, can we say who or what ‘detects’ anything? It’s like looking for water when you don’t know what water is. You might find yourself drowning in the very thing you can’t find. (Maybe that’s the case with ‘detection’?)

The ocean we are

Time to get back to basics: “I knew then that w-a-t-e-r meant the wonderful cool something that was flowing over my hand.” Helen Keller again.

Those words, wonderful, cool, flowing, was she describing ‘water,’ or a feeling?

Or…both?

Both. Right? There was a single ‘set,’ we can call it, of detected interactions. Those detected interactions felt a particular way to her. And that feeling, in that context, became for her the feeling of water.

Could she, or anyone for that matter, experience water in any manner other than by detecting an energy transfer? And not just water either, but anything?

Thoughts, memories, emotions, pain, touch, sight, and so on are all energy transfers. They are all detected interactions that we feel.

It’s all feeling.

If we don’t feel it — if we don’t hear it, taste it, think it up for ourselves, or hear of it from another — if there isn’t an energy transfer regarding it, does it exist? Without a detected interaction, can it exist…for us?

Is there any other way anything could be felt, and thus known, by us, other than by detected interaction? Because if there isn’t, then all interactions are detected interactions. All of them. Because if it’s not detected, it doesn’t exist. Not for us, it doesn’t.

Perhaps by now a bit of the warm rays of a rising sun have begun working their way through your foggy eyelids. The question is, since only ‘detected’ interactions exist, is that all that now exists for you? Foggy eyelids? Because that’s the only thing you’ve detected…so…?

As Albert Einstein reportedly asked, “Does that mean the moon is not there when I am not looking at it?”

If we ask his question from a different perspective, we get, ‘Am I the only qualified detector of interactions?’

Awareness of creation of awareness

So, to paraphrase from above, if we don’t feel it, it doesn’t exist, and if we don’t detect it, we can’t feel it. This leaves us (because if we don’t feel it, it’s not there) being ‘made of’ (existing as) detected interactions manifesting as feeling.

Feeling.

And if that’s the case, then isn’t it high time to stand the feeling of our world right up next to the substance of our world as equal partners?

Like the panel of wood upon which the Mona Lisa is painted, structure, substance, becomes not the entirety of what we are, but rather the medium upon which we paint the feeling of our lives.

Instead of studying the process by which our brain ‘outputs’ feeling from a detected interaction ‘input,’ let’s take a different approach and grant to feeling the same objective reality status that we might grant to any ol’ brick, as a thing that exists on its own.

If we do that, we find, no surprise, that a brick is ‘made’ from subatomic particles, and feeling is ‘made’ from detected interactions between subatomic particles.

Duality, the uncertainty principle, entanglement: the conundrums of quantum mechanics confound our delicate, ‘objective reality’ sensibilities. Are we missing something, some piece of the puzzle? Is that why it all seems so strange?

Is it too far a leap to suppose that electron-to-electron energy transfer, for example, is detection?²

Is it out-of-bounds to suggest that the very ‘act’ of transferring energy, one electron to another, implies or includes a detection component? A little ‘beep,’ or tickle, a dot, a flash…a teeny tiny beacon of awareness:

‘Yo!’

That’s all it ‘says.’

‘Happening!’

That’s all it means.

We’re creating another wrinkle to the universe here, the awareness wrinkle, an acknowledgment that the awareness of change in ‘that which is changing’ — be it a substance, a creation, a what have you — that that change is what ‘exists’ objectively, ‘on its own.’

Once we wrap our head around that idea, then, ‘the moon is there, Professor!’ Interactions objectively exist as awareness of change. There is objective reality.

But importantly — very importantly — ‘objective’ reality exists hand in glove with the awareness of reality. We objectively exist, then, as the awareness of our reality.

Awareness builds. A myriad of ‘Yo!’ organized and processed by evolution (or what have you) builds into a feeling of morning mist rising from a forest meadow, a free concert in the park, screaming kids in the other room; awareness builds to life.²

If we can do that, if we can stand ‘awareness of change’ right up next to the substance that is undergoing change (via transfer of energy), then substance and the feeling we glean from it become one.

Mind and body merge.

Our universe, so grand, now becomes no longer remote. As we gaze at the stars above, whatever feeling we may have becomes part of who we are, just as surely as the feeling we have when gazing upon a sleeping child is part of who we are.

The stars come home to live with us.

footnotes

1: New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons. p.121 Mind and the World Order (1929)

2: ‘Consciousness’ and/or the feeling of ‘existing’ is a complex and created form of awareness, not a given of awareness. Our awareness of existing is our creation, it’s who we are. Existence as…something, does not necessarily translate outside our own experience; a ‘tree’ does not necessarily feel ‘I exist.’