What happens and why?

While cruising the social networks this morning it was glaringly obvious that politicians and media people were obfuscating the contemporary hot topics.

My attention centre reverberated with the idea that ‘stuff happens as a result of agents acting on intentions’. ‘I’ was motivated to unpack those ideas as they feature idiosyncratically in my mindbrain and systematically in academic disciplines.

• An intention is a mental state that represents a commitment to carrying out an action or actions in the future. Intention involves mental activities such as planning and forethought.
• Obfuscation is to make something obscure or unclear, especially by making it unnecessarily complicated.
• Agency refers to the capacity of individuals to act independently and to make their own free choices
• Agents (agentic entities) can be human or non-human
• Non human agentic entities are not aware of intentions - things happen by serendipity or chance, eg droughts, floods, famines, plagues, attack by predators. These happenings can be viewed as Acts of a God who is an omniscient, supernatural being working in mysterious ways and with divinely inspired intentions. But that story line leads to old time religion so we will pass over it here.
• Human agents are culturally conditioned individual persons, groups, corporations, or states (governments)
• Cultural conditioning is an ongoing process. It involves changing minds in advance of changing intentions and thus actions.
• Persons, groups, corporations, and states can have opposing intentions. But only states can legally force their intentions on others. The enforcement process can be more or less elegant.

SO - What happens and why?

The external world constantly changes and human culture patterns evolve to keep up. Adapt or die! There are several types of human agents of change giving rise to intentional variations which are subject to selection and to survival of the fittest.

There is a continuum of ways of changing minds ranging from training (vocational), through education (enculturation) and on to enlightenment (liberation).

Training and education involve rearranging the seats on the Titanic. Those who are enlightened feel no need to cross the Atlantic. They are liberated from their natal cultural conditioning. They witness their thought processes and know that ‘reality’ is mind made – mostly in the unconscious. By sitting quietly they come to know things as they really are, and the peace that passes understanding.

What happens? – I change my own mind and encourage others to change theirs. Why? To cut through the obfuscation and make the world a better place.