The danger in playing at being a machine is of course that we will lose sight of the fact that we are only playing. Machines don’t have a concept of play, after all. A machine is quintessentially ‘black and white’ in its outlook – either a particular statement is true or it is false and there’s nothing in between. It’s as stark as that – the suggestion that there might be something in-between simply doesn’t make sense to a machine. Machines operate on the Principle of the Excluded Middle.
‘What else could there be apart from ‘true versus untrue’? What exactly would neither YES nor NO look like?’ we might ask dubiously, seeing the machine’s point of view. The mechanical/logical point of view is absolutely clear on this point – there’s no other category apart from YES and NO and no way to imagine how there possibly could be. This is inherent in the very structure and nature of logic. It’s perfectly possible to live our whole lives without seeing how there could be something other than ‘true versus false’, how there could be any type of life other than the mechanical or rule-based one. This lack of vision is the reason that the mechanical life – the life that lurches from one defined value to the next – is ‘the default’.
It’s all just a trick, however – no matter how convincing we might find it, it’s all nonsense. The term <TRUE> doesn’t actually have any meaning of its own – it only means something in relation to some statement, some definite assertion that has already been made. Then – and only then – does the notion of TRUE (or the notion of FALSE) actually mean something. If there weren’t any definite statements floating around the place then neither true nor false would be ‘a thing’, clearly. That’s the first point we can make, and the second – closely connected – point is to say that there are no ‘definite statements of fact’ floating around – positive assertions of fact are not a feature of the natural universe. When we come across them it’s because we ourselves put them there (and then sneakily say that we didn’t).
So, I can have my own free will and make some definite statement or other (the exact nature of which doesn’t matter) and then I can indeed say that <true versus false> is ‘a thing’. But supposing I don’t, suppose I don’t pull any fine-looking definite statements out of the proverbial hat? To paraphrase James Carse, ‘There’s no instruction telling us that an instruction has to be issued’ and that means I don’t have to say anything either one way or the other. This then raises the question: what remains when we just let things ‘be what they are’? This question is not one that can ever be answered however because we’re going beyond categories here (and if there are no categories then there can be no TRUE versus FALSE) but one thing we can say for sure is that our fundamental inability to know what’s there, when we don’t say that things are either right or wrong, doesn’t in any way affect the way these things actually are – the universe doesn’t care in the least about what we think we know or don’t know. That’s our own private fantasy and the universe doesn’t care about our own private fantasy (the ‘is’ is divinely indifferent. as Richard Bach says).
The logical continuum of ‘true versus false’ can only come into being when we do pull a positive statement out of the hat to relate it to; <YES versus NO> is a second order phenomenon – it is secondary to us making some kind of ‘arbitrary assumption about reality’ (the kind of arbitrary assumption that we will never be able to prove since we have no basis to do so). <True versus false> only has the meaning that it does have in relation to a statement which is ‘only on the table because we ourselves put it there’; it only has meaning within the context of the game that we are playing but don’t know we’re playing, in other words. When the logical mind comes into town (driving a sports car and wearing a super-expensive tailor-made suit) it makes a big deal about how there are only these two all-important terms – [+] and [-] – and it convinces us that there can’t be anything else, any trace or essence that exists outside of their jealous remit, outside of their range of applicability, then this is the purest, most ridiculous garbage, therefore. A child could see that this is not so. A small child – because they have yet to be contaminated by the humourless virus of logic – knows very well (without having to know that they know) that there’s no such thing as ‘right and wrong’. That’s why children are genuinely playful and spontaneous and that’s why we adults are not.
To say that the (conditioned) reality which is permitted us (or ‘gifted’ us!) by the parsimonious thinking mind is the only reality there is, and that this digitalized domain is all we need to be concerning ourselves with, is a barefaced lie. This is an outrageous bluff – the only thing being that it’s a bluff that we ourselves are continually falling for. We’re bluffing ourselves with a dead straight face and it’s a bluff that we’re stuck to like glue, a block that has become a permanent fixture in our lives, a bluff that has become our life. Thought always points us in the wrong direct – every direction that thought points to is ‘the wrong direction’…
A machine cannot see beyond the limits that have been designed into it and for it to do ‘what it is made to do’ is therefore the ideal. Nothing could be better than this – by definition nothing could be better than this! For a machine there are only the two possibilities – either it gets to perform the function that it is designed for it is or it doesn’t. The one possibility is all-good (‘off-the-chart’ good) whilst the second is all-bad (‘off-the-chart’ bad) and so what this means is that for us (when we’re in Machine Mode) our existence has been tremendously (and ridiculously) simplified – it’s been simplified down to the level of a stupid joke. The life of the machine has been reduced or degraded to a perpetual petty-minded matter of <right versus wrong> and there is nothing more absurdly undignified than this – to take this nonsense seriously is to miss life entirely. In this modality of being our lives are lived in the state of ‘unreflective slavery to our design’, a state of ‘unconscious slavery to the banal purposes that have been programmed into us’ and it just doesn’t get any more dismal than this. This then is the lot of the conditioned human being.
We can’t see beyond our conditioning and our conditioning is at all times guaranteed to be completely meaningless (or ‘completely arbitrary’) – it’s a bad joke, in other words, just as we have said. The reason the rules we obey are meaningless is precisely because we can’t see beyond them and if we can’t see beyond the limiting ‘conditions’ of our lives then we are defined by them. To not be able to question a rule is to be trapped by it; to be unable to see that the conditions by which we live are 100% arbitrary is to be imprisoned by them. There’s no space for questioning, only obeying in the conditioned world; we either perform, or fail to perform, the task which has been given to us and our success or failure in it is the only thing that matters – there is ‘succeeding’ and there is ‘failing’ and that’s all there is… The successful enactment of our mechanical function is the Ideal, there’s nothing better than this, but at the same time putting all our efforts and time into ‘successfully approximating the mechanical ideal’ is the most profoundly, atrociously meaningless thing there is – it doesn’t get any atrociously meaningless than this! This is ‘the Life of the Machine, so what else would we expect?
When fall under the spell of the machine then we are in the situation where we lead a meaningless (or hollow) life without knowing it – it’s meaningless or hollow because we pay no attention to anything other than what the machine is telling us to do, what the machine is telling us to be, and the machine itself is something that we ourselves have invented without paying any attention to that fact. The machine has created a reality which is entirely made up of either ‘achieving the goal or not achieving it’, even though the goal in question doesn’t really matter a damn in the bigger picture of things. We’re just ‘keeping ourselves busy’ and by doing this we pay the price of turn having to become machines; we’re ‘machines who think they aren’t machines’, just as Gurdjieff says. To ‘be a machine without knowing it’ is to lead a meaningless life without knowing it – our ‘meaning’ comes from the task, the goal, the ideal we are supposed to realize, and that supposedly ‘super-important’ task or goal or ideal is just a red herring, just a distraction…
Were we to start to notice this ‘distraction-business’ going on (this business where we are constantly running up dead-ends under the impression that there’s something good there) then this would of course be a profoundly disturbing sort of thing for us to be aware of – there couldn’t actually be anything more disturbing (and therefore unwelcome) to us and for this reason we are maximally motivated try to avoid it by whatever means we can. We do this by demonizing consciousness. We live in a culture that demonizes consciousness (as Joe Campbell points out), a culture that ‘celebrates the ideal of the mechanical/rational life. If we successfully complete the mechanical task that is being pushed up on us by the system then everyone smiles on us (we can do no wrong) and if we’re not able to complete it the world we say that there something wrong, something ‘defective’ or ‘maladjusted’ about us. If we are deliberately going against the system’s agenda (if we are a ‘traitor to the cause’, in other words) then that means we’re a bad person, a ne’re-do-well (or ‘wrong-headed’) person who has to be reined in. Ironically, the one situation that could be helpful to us (in terms of being woken up out of our dream of being a machine) is taken against in a big way by society (and therefore implacably resisted by the world of psychiatry). Painful and challenging awarenesses are most definitely not valued by our society and the bearer of such will be treated accordingly. In a culture that demonizes consciousness our approach to mental health gets skewed by 180 degrees – we are made to feel shame about going through this universally unwanted experience (the universally unwanted experience of being uncompromisingly aware of a painful and widely-unaccepted truth) and the healing process itself is taken to be ‘a problem’, is taken to be a symptom of mental ill-health.
If adherence to the prescribed pattern is the ideal, the gold standard, the ‘only thing that matters in life’, then of course consciousness is going to be demonised. ‘Consciousness’, as Gurdjieff says, ‘comes about because of conflict’ – without conflict there is only the smooth uninterrupted working of the machine which spells perpetual unconsciousness, unconsciousness without end (and unconsciousness means misery). Deviations from the standard are corrected for and then forgotten about, discounted, dismissed… Where it gets interesting therefore is when the errors can’t be corrected, can’t be discounted and then forgotten about. Just so long as we continue to believe that ‘we really are the machine that we are pretending to be’ then this is going to be a situation that we don’t ever want to have anything to do with, a situation that we are dead set against encountering. To come across this awareness is a pure horror, there’s nothing pleasant about it at all and for this reason if we’re given any choice at all we will gravitate to unconsciousness, we will gravitate towards amnesia…
For the machine there are only two possibilities. There might be some sort of grey zone in there but it’s only ‘temporarily grey’ – it’s grey only until we get the necessary information to make the call and say whether it’s RIGHT or WRONG. It will then be identified either as ‘signal’ or ‘noise’ and if it is identified as ‘noise’ then we will dismiss it out of hand and then forget that we ever did so. A machine has a very particular type of existence therefore – it exists only in terms of its own crude and clunky projections, projections (or as we could also say, ‘assumptions’) which have no relevance to the ‘Bigger Picture’ whatsoever…
Image credit – ‘Fábulas de robots de Stanislaw Lem’, culturamas.es
