Human minds are magnificent in-gurgitators of information – consciously or unconsciously, whether we like it or not. If we don’t like it, perhaps we can escape this condition through the practice of mind-clearing meditations, but the normal human condition is fully immersed in working together in some way with the information that constantly presents itself before us. At times this information is problematic, raising questions or demanding a need to act, and it is in these moments of mental agitation that we can consider ourselves properly conscious of the information we are facing, whereas most of the information confronted by us is received and dealt with unconsciously.

It is the conjunction of this information (at both the conscious and unconscious levels) which constitutes what we consider reality to be. To deepen our lives we have to deepen our reality through a gathering of information – either as information in the pure sense of the term as data, or through the information we can gather by having new or intense experiences that are felt rather than ‘known’. We also synthesize our experiences with other human beings through sharing and receiving narratives and other information with other human beings.

Because there is so much information available to any consciousness, information itself has a seductive nature and it evolves and changes in aesthetic ways to make it more attractive and desirable for absorption. In this way reality becomes an elaborate synthesis of different consciousnesses – and, in fact, reality as a whole is a synthesis of all syntheses of consciousnesses.

To be part of reality, therefore, implies a participation in this synthesis of consciousness.

From this arises a moral standpoint: For life to be meaningful, the contents of the syntheses of consciousnesses should be meaningful as well. And so we come to our contemporary dilemma, for how can meaningfulness be possible in this consumer age in which the synthetic consciousness of reality is driven by robotic cookies pushing us constantly into the field of superficiality that is the essence of consumerism? And the conclusion to this question (that we can’t) then leads us directly into this world of misinformation and fake news, with all of its perverted ideological motives for blatant deception in which black is called white, and evil is passed off as good.

When meaningfulness is lacking, uncertainty abounds, creating a chaos that quickly sinks into totalitarianism. And the only way to resist this push toward an insane reality is to make reality authentically meaningful again: whatever that means and whatever sacrifices have to be made to achieve it. To start with there needs to be an injection for love of truth, of information established by facts. No easy task: technology has allowed statistical information to blossom, and sociology has never had it so good. Nevertheless, we have seen with the growth of statistics that there has also been an equally rapid development of statistical manipulation by certain interested groups capable of fashioning their own fake realities that are dystopian in essence.  So, for meaningfulness to be reinstated, we cannot rely on information alone, we have to be able anchor the information machinery to authentic human needs based on universal moral imperatives that favor Humanity above the interests of Wealth. It is time now to search for what those authentically human, moral imperatives must be.