AWARENESS & AGENCY

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Consciousness and awareness don't need to be fully understood for us to interpret in ways that are beneficial to us.

Which is good, because humanity has very little in terms of scientific proof explaining what the heck is going on here. 

We barely agree on definitions, so let me clarify to start;

Awareness is the ability to understand knowledge and what's currently happening.

Consciousness refers to one's personal awareness of what's happening around and within them on any scale that they understand.

Consciousness doesn't inherently imply free will, which is traditionally understood as the ability to make free choices without being influenced by prior events or external forces.

True free will is a mirage and something we only believe to be evidenced because of control bias and superiority bias, and the sheer terror of western civilization's social contract being entirely invalidated.

Regardless of the inconvenience it causes our rulers, humans instead behave in accordance with mechanisms of conscious choice, which is when our subconscious interprets our previous experiences and current situation and thoughts or decisions emerge for us to allow or deny.

This isn't quite determinism, which suggests that all events in reality are fated to pass a certain way based on the physical laws that underpin reality, nor is it true free will, as we said already.

Instead, this framing of conscious choice is a compatibilism, which is the belief that free will and determinism are compatible.

In fact, I like much of life is capable of conscious choice, and that collectively Life has accomplished a miracle of survival in the chaotic march toward entropy of our universe.

Life resists determinism via conscious choice. But only when it can, which is far more contextual that western society's individualism allows. Individualism is the belief that individuals have sufficient enough internal will to be held fully liable for their Life and their interactions at all times, regardless of the context.

Instead, conscious choice is an emergent property that presents us determined choices based on factors we don't always have present control over. 

However, as we make choices based on the ones offered to us, we can recognize patterns and begin to make the choices that offer us more or better choices. Agency is the freedom we earn as we start to make conscious choice that leads to more conscious choice.

This is complicated within a coerced and deceitful society where people don't have much clue what's going on and we're supposed to pretend we have control over ourselves and know what the fuck is happening. 

Society is so advanced beyond primal instinct that without proper education and social conditioning, people lack the agency to comply with all of society's expectations. 

Even if a person believed in something at a high level and desired to behave a certain way, if their subconscious doesn't present them with the interpretation that the present moment is relevant to a certain belief, the relevant interpretation won't present itself for conscious processing. In it's pure form this is called agency lag.