Introduction

Everything you do is philosophical.

You wake in the morning, groan, stretch and open your eyes. What is happening? Everything that is happening is philosophical.

How do you know you are awake? How do you know it is morning? How do you know your eyes are open? How do you know your dreaming has ended and your day has begun?

How do you know your memories of yesterday – or ten years ago – are valid? How do you even know you are the same person as the one who got into bed last night?

It gets even crazier, when you really think about it.

How do you know that your “experience” is not in fact some elaborate simulation? Do you know for certain that you are not a brain in a tank, wired up to some Matrix-style virtual reality?

Look at your hand right now. You see a hand, sure, but how do you know that the hand truly exists outside of your mind? Sure, you see your hand, but the image only shows up in your mind. It’s the same with your sensations of your hand – they also only show up in your mind. Where is the hand itself?

Last night, in your dreams, you also had hands – or claws, or tentacles, or heaven knows what – that did not exist or move in what you call the “real world.” In your dreams, you visited a floating island full of dragons that does not exist outside your dreamscape – or does it? Perhaps your dreams are the real world, and your “waking” life is the dream. How can you know for certain?

Perhaps the people you live with are mere avatars – artificial intelligence simulations of human beings. Perhaps they were all real people at some point, but have been replaced by space aliens with perfect biological robots. When you went to a movie last night, perhaps the entire cinema complex was a form of elaborate theatre – perhaps you were in a movie, watching a movie.

What if you are created anew every day from scratch, but with a steady if inconsistent series of progressive memories layered into your newly hatched brain?

What about your memory?

Is it real? Recalled events are gone, lost in time; your memory only exists in your mind. What if you or something else is altering it over time?

Think of your very first memory – is it real? Think of other early memories – could they have been created in your mind by stories you heard as a child?

Try this on for size: go and visit your childhood neighbourhood. I guarantee you that it will neither look nor feel exactly as you remember it – and sometimes not even approximately, even if little has changed.

Look at a picture of yourself as a child – where has that child gone? When you build a foundation for a house, the finished house still has that foundation. But what still remains of your childhood body and mind? You are not like some Russian doll with smaller versions of yourself remaining inside. The human body is replaced over time – every seven years, with little to nothing left from your past physical self. Where are your memories? Are your memories like the childhood game of Broken Telephone, irretrievably lost in endless translation?

Invite childhood friends and siblings over for dinner and discuss shared past events – what perceptions do you all have in common? I guarantee you that others will have very strong memories that significantly differ from yours – sometimes even opposing them completely. What does this mean? You were all in the same place, experiencing the same things – but you have very different memories. Nothing remains of the events except the memories, the interpretations, and everyone’s story about the events – so tell me, what is real? If everyone has a different idea of what happened, what actually happened? Can anyone tell?

If you have home movies of your childhood, sit down with your family and review them – what are the various interpretations of what is “objectively” happening on the screen? When your sister made fun of you, was it playful ribbing, as she remembers, or was it painful teasing, as you remember? Even recorded “objectivity” rarely leads to objectivity.

Even if you remember the same events as your siblings, you can each end up with entirely opposing interpretations. A father hits his children – one child remembers violent abuse, the other remembers stern but loving discipline. A sister believes it made her a better person, a brother believes it harmed him deeply.

A mother has an affair – her daughter sympathizes with her loneliness; her son condemns her as selfish.

You grew up poor – you resent it, your brother thinks it built character.

One of your toddlers loves the noisy vacuum cleaner – the other screams and flees in terror. Is either interpretation the true nature of the vacuum cleaner? Is it a fun noisemaker, or a terrifying monster?

One mother loves cooking for her family; another resents it as a repetitive chore. Let us go deeper – as we can always go deeper.

Here is another challenge: you claim that you have an identity and that you are your own person, of course – but what does that really mean? Let us say that you are a Christian, and you consider your religion a feature of your own personal identity. If at birth you had been adopted by a Zoroastrian family, you would surely have been brought up in that family’s religion, and you would now consider being a Zoroastrian part of your own personal identity. If you were brought up in a house of Democrats, or liberals, or leftists, you would likely be more willing to inherit that political perspective.

How much of you is distinct from what you have inherited? If you merely inherited a trait, is it really you?

How much of your personality is largely inherited, genetic, and beyond your capacity to change significantly? How much of yourself do you think you have chosen, earned, built with your own mental bare hands? How often do you condemn other people’s personalities, as if other people somehow magically just chose who they are?

What if your judgmental nature is not completely your choice, but partly genetic?

You say that you are tall or short – but height is also a function of your genetics, not your own personal, earned identity. You can take pride in parts of your personality and achievements – you may be hard-working or very honest – but significant aspects of your personality and achievements are genetic. Your intelligence is largely genetic, your conscientiousness, your level of social comfort, your charisma – these largely arise from unchosen biological influences, though we often take personal pride in that which we have biologically inherited.

Do you consider yourself a conservative, liberal, or something else? If you are a male conservative, did you know that trait is 64.5% heritable? For women, it is 44.7%.

To describe yourself, you need language, of course. If English is your native tongue, you possess a unique set of words by which you may describe yourself – some of which do not even exist in other languages.

Think of how much of your personal identity, that which you call a “self,” has been influenced by the work of others – writers and moviemakers and actors and singers and teachers and so on.

Your language, your culture, your family, your schooling, some of your accidental exposures to the thoughts and feelings of others – all of these influences have shaped you, but they did not originate within you.

Even if you could accurately say, “I was influenced by Bob,” you have merely moved the chain of causality one step away. Who was Bob influenced by? How many of his capacities and perspectives were chosen? Were you influenced by Bob’s thoughts or Bob’s genetics? How can the things that influenced you – or Bob – be accurately separated?

Perhaps we are all just predetermined dominoes falling on each other under the pretense of choice.

So what does it mean to have an identity, to be yourself, when so little of who you are was completely self-generated?

Do you see what I mean?

Everything we do is philosophical.

When most people think of the word “faith,” they generally refer to a belief in God – but it is much more accurate to say that we have “faith” in reality. We have faith in ourselves, our existence, memories or history, our relationships, the evidence of our senses, the virtue of our choices – we have few if any real philosophical certainties in these areas. We accept what we have to in order to survive, to get through the day, to find shelter and food – and love, hopefully.

Your young son steals a candy bar from a store – you rebuke him, march him back into the store, perhaps punish him – but why? What objective, universal moral principles did your son violate? How do you know that they are true or good? Where do they exist in reality? Do you punish your son because you fear the disapproval of others? Are you afraid that people will think you are a bad parent because you raised a thief? Do you punish your son because there is a subjective social convention against stealing? Is that how you describe it to him? No, surely, you will tell him that it is wrong to steal, that he is bad for stealing, that it is immoral and so on. But – how do you know? If you are Christian, you have a pretty good idea – one of the Ten Commandments is Thou shalt not steal. But that exists in the realm of theology, not philosophy.

If you are atheist or agnostic – how do you know that stealing is wrong? Because it makes people unhappy? That argument is scarcely philosophical – a lot of things make people unhappy, without being immoral. A negative movie review makes the filmmakers unhappy – and can cost them millions of dollars – but it is neither illegal nor immoral to write a negative movie review, if you write it honestly. Also, your son can argue that getting the candy bar without paying makes him happy, so it totally evens out.

Perhaps you invoke the golden rule – do unto others as you would have them do unto you – and ask your son if he would like it if others stole from him. However, he may just reply that he does not care, and then what could you say? Maybe he is the biggest kid around, and no one would dare! Relying on his empathy for his future self and for the feelings of others only works if he already has empathy.

Most morality is like a diet book for slim people. If you are morally sensitive, then you will generally accept moral arguments, but then you tend to be the kind of person least in need of moral arguments. Morality needs to be powerful enough to overcome the indifference of truly selfish people. Morality that requires the leverage of self-criticism has virtually no power over narcissists, sociopaths or psychopaths, who have little to no capacity for self-criticism. If you care about others, you will most likely be good, with or without moral arguments – if you do not care, moral arguments will have no real sway over you.

When you start to explore definitions, the question of theft becomes even more complicated. If “theft” means taking property without permission, or using force, against the will of its legitimate owner, then what is taxation? If you try to legitimize taxation by appealing to the democratic will of the majority, aren’t you just encouraging your son to get a few friends to go with him to the convenience store, where they will then outvote the owner on who gets the candy bars? Can immorality be legitimized by the majority? If two men vote to rape one woman, surely that does not make rape any less immoral? Surely our highest aspirations as moral instructors cannot be to teach our children to submit to or join the majority mob.

Perhaps we teach our children that self-sacrifice is the highest universal moral ideal – that they should give up their own preferences and aspirations in order to serve the needs of others. But if self-sacrifice is a universal moral ideal, then it cannot possibly be applied universally. If Bob sacrifices for Doug, then Doug cannot simultaneously sacrifice for Bob. There are those who sacrifice, and those who collect that sacrifice – those who pay, and those who receive. If self- sacrifice is a universal moral ideal, then those who collect that sacrifice, rather than provide it, must be immoral, since they are profiting from other people’s self-sacrifice, rather than sacrificing themselves. But if the highest moral ideal requires other people to be immoral, how can it be universally good?

Perhaps we teach our children that they should obey authority figures – listen to your teacher, obey your father, etc. However, they then learn from history that horrifying atrocities were often committed by those obeying authority figures. Sometimes, perhaps it is good to obey authority figures – other times, it is a great evil to obey authority figures – how can we teach them the difference? Is there a moral authority higher than secular authority? How are morals justified? How do we know?

The Tortures of Philosophy

We currently have a tortured relationship with philosophy. We need it to get out of bed in the morning and get anything done with our lives. But we cannot examine it too closely, for fear of mental or moral disintegration. It is like the Aristotelian mean – too little philosophy makes us animalistic, too much tempts impotent madness. We desperately need rules in society, but we recoil from examining our rules too closely for fear of unearthing something unholy in the empty heart of our coerced coexistence.

Many who are drawn to philosophy become toxic to the majority. They drink deep the dizzying wine of scepticism, question the basic empiricism necessary for life, and end up absorbing and transmitting radical relativism and subjectivism. They cry out that there is no such thing as truth, thereby proclaiming that there is no such thing as philosophy – all spoken under the guise of philosophy.

Most of us have every rational reason to avoid, fear and deny the pursuit of truth, since it so often leads us with great momentum to the crumbling edge of a foggy cliff.

There is great danger in the study of philosophy.

It can feel like summoning a demon you can barely hope to control.

A shallow study of philosophy is like a child’s first brush with science. As a child, when I first learned that the sun would eventually burn itself out, and that I was living on the side of a giant spinning ball on the edge of an unremarkable galaxy, I felt depressed and disoriented. In the childhood of our species, when man believed he was the centre of the universe, it gave him comfort.

As a toddler, my daughter confidently told me that the lead hero in a movie could not die, because he was the centre of the story. Moving mankind from the centre of the universe to the inconsequential periphery can be extraordinarily disorienting. But it does give us the capacity to navigate the globe, predict the path of the planets, fly between continents and get to the moon and back.

It seems like a reasonable trade-off.

When I was younger, I had a lengthy recurring dream. The dreamscape would span the entire length of a semester – or even a whole school year – at university. Here’s how it went.

At the beginning of a semester, I sign up for an obscure class in an out-of-the-way building.

Then – I simply don’t go to class. I have strong intentions of going, so I don’t drop the course – but I just never seem to get around to showing up.

I forget the time and place of the course. I know I have it written down somewhere – and know I should dig up the information, attend the class, and get caught up on the course material. However, as the semester wears on, the growing backlog of work and the effort it would take to get caught up swells to the point where I avoid even looking up the class location, preferring to attend more enjoyable classes, play Frisbee in the quad, go on a romantic date, or – well, do anything but confront how far into the hole I have actually sunk.

Over the course of the dream, I feel a growing sense of unease, knowing I am being irresponsible by avoiding something essential. I continually kick myself, when my anxiety spikes, for not dropping the course when I had the chance, before it became too late, because now the bad mark will show up on my transcript no matter what.

This avoidance grows to the point where I have trouble enjoying anything, and I feel at war with myself.

Later in the semester, I become petty and easily annoyed. I view the anxiety that is trying to help me as an enemy. Oh come on, I tell it, there’s nothing to be done now! Why are you interfering with my enjoyment?

We all have this temptation, right? We all know we need to examine truth, morality, virtue, good and evil – and compare our examinations to our existing life, the lives of those around us, and our societies as a whole. But so often we prefer to coast, to avoid, to resent the nagging feeling that we are drifting further and further away from where we ought to be – as people, as families, as communities, as nations, as a species.

Instead, we think, Let me enjoy myself now, and the future will sort itself out somehow…

We believe anxiety is a form of instability. And we want to stay stable, no matter the cost to our personal and collective futures. We busy ourselves with alcohol, drugs, video games, exercise, vanity, spending. We deploy every form of stimulant to distract ourselves from difficult but necessary wisdom.

This book will bring you that wisdom. It will not make you crazy – I guarantee you that.

If you listen, this book will make you painfully sane. We have drifted so far from sanity that reality now scalds us – but we have no other choice, other than non-existence.

We have become so lost that we fear maps, but maps are all that can save us. It is not too late as yet – but almost, almost.

Let us begin.

What Is Philosophy?

Philosophy is the study of truth, which is a definition that raises almost as many questions as it answers.

What is truth? How is truth differentiated from falsehood? Why is truth even preferable to falsehood?

Truth is the accurate identification of facts and principles in objective reality.

Our senses are our mind’s only windows to objective reality. Our brain, our consciousness, is encased in a bony skull prison. It cannot send out tentacles or mind rays to map whatever exists outside the inside of our heads. It must rely on information received and transmitted by the five senses.

As we grow, we create mental maps, based upon on our reception of sense data. When we feel the wind on our face, the treetops also move. When it rains, it is typically cloudy. When it is sunny, we feel warmer. We cannot breathe underwater, nor generally jump higher than half our height. When we run, we get short of breath, it hurts when we do belly flops, and mosquitoes are not our friends. Ladybugs are cute, but bees can be dangerous. An excess of courage often leads to injury, while an excess of cowardice leads to mockery and self-contempt.

In childhood, we build maps not just of empirical reality, but of social reality as well. People of different personality types constantly goad or encourage us to become more like them, or they prod others to satisfy their emotional requirements. The shy kids want us to restrain ourselves, while the outgoing kids mock our restraint. The fearful kids mock our courage, while the overconfident kids both help and endanger us by egging us on. The moral kids condemn our rule-breaking – the nihilistic kids mock rules. The nerds mock the jocks – the jocks roll their eyes at the nerds. The pretty kids don’t eat, the fat kids learn the arcane rules of even more arcane games – the homely kids learn how to make jokes. The kids who don’t take drugs scorn those who do, the kids who don’t have sex scorn those who do, and vice versa, of course.

Perceptive children quickly understand that society is an ecosystem of warring personalities and mental structures – not just horizontally, but vertically as well. The teachers, the curriculum, the entire educational structure attempts to impose a certain mindset upon the children. Many succumb without question, while others push back as much as they dare, often hopelessly and helplessly – or they withdraw completely, ghosting through the painted brick hallways.

The children are constantly commanded to be moral, but morality is never defined in a way that captures immorality on the part of their elders. Ethics become like an inverted fishing net that only catches the minnows, while letting the sharks swim free. We can further imagine a legal system that punishes a sailor taking a photograph in a submarine, while excusing a powerful woman who bypasses required security by setting up a home-brewed server in a barn.

When children blurt out an uncomfortable truth, they are told that “keeping quiet” is moral. When adults want information from kids, “speaking up” becomes moral.

Children are told not to use force to get their way, but they are typically spanked at home and punished in school. Children are told to respect the property of others, by teachers who use the power of the state to compel parents to pay their salaries through property taxes. Children are told to save their money, to avoid frivolous debt, and to be responsible – only to be justly shocked when they learn about the trillions of dollars in national debts that governments take out in their names. Children are told they have free will and that they are responsible for their choices, but they are generally compelled to go to school and to obey the commandments of their teachers.

Children are constantly told they owe society allegiance, because society really cares about the well-being of children. They’re told that all the harshness heaped upon them arises out of that concern for their young and tender well-being. As they age, however, the children find out they will be taxed for decades to pay for old-age pensions that they themselves have no chance of receiving. Their elders voted for government benefits, but not for the tax increases necessary to pay for those benefits, resulting in catastrophic debt and unfunded liabilities.

Children are told not to harm others, while many boys have a third of the skin of their penises sliced off shortly after birth, without anesthetic, for no medical necessity.

Among the more intelligent children, a suspicion begins to arise that moral rules are a form of psychological control, rather than universal absolutes that everyone must follow. When children begin to read the news and discover that those in power regularly get away with atrocities a thousand times worse than anything any child could imagine, this suspicion expands exponentially.

The pursuit of truth and the advocacy of truly universal moral rules quickly become a dangerous occupation when pseudo-philosophy is used as a weapon to subjugate society to the whims of the powerful. If your response to the question, “What is truth?” is not, “What your elders tell you,” then you may soon find your elders can rapidly turn on you.

When societies are growing and expanding, at least it’s a highly profitable subjugation to submit to the dictates of one’s elders. Obey social norms, get a good job, raise a family, save for your retirement, live well. However, when societies begin to contract and fail, elders rapidly lose the power of economic bribery necessary to control the youth.

The young graduate under a mountain of student debt and face dim or non-existent job prospects. They realize that criminal bankers get debt forgiveness, but young people cannot discharge their student debt even through bankruptcy. Then the young can no longer be bribed and social norms begin to fall apart. Seldom do a criminal enterprise or a pirate captain face mutiny when the gold is flowing in. Cold fingers close on hilts when victim ships are scarce.

To wipe away all these complications, all these confusions, all these manipulations from our mental maps of the world and its inhabitants requires an act of philosophy. It requires that we truly start from a blank page, with the innocence and ignorance of an infant, assuming that nothing is true, but that truth is possible. We must wilfully forget all we have learned – and especially all we have been taught – and view our existing histories, cultures, societies and beliefs as mere tangled rubble and undergrowth that need to be cleared away completely before we can start digging the foundations of a true and permanent home.

When you are walking and someone gives you bad directions, sending you in the wrong direction for hours, you get angry when you realize you’ve been misled. You did not start lost – you were made lost.

So it is with truth.

Bad ideas often lead to bad actions – and bad actions create the need for compounding lies to cover them up. Without philosophy, power and the resulting entropy reign supreme in the human mind and heart, and cultures continually fall away from reason, virtue and happiness.

Philosophy and Conformity

When we are children, rules continually come flying at us like a swarm of locusts, seemingly without end. We do not need philosophy in order to conform to the expectations of others – particularly if they hold power over us; that comes naturally. If virtue is obedience, our path to goodness is simple – find the authority figure with the most power to harm or reward us, and then merely conform to whatever that authority figure desires.

However, this choice rarely manifests so starkly. Authority figures do not like to present themselves as mere agents of physical strength, for the simple reason that they inevitably weaken with age.

A parent has an advantage of near-infinite size and power over the child – but as the child grows, the parent weakens. If physical size and strength alone determine who wins, the parent who dominates his child later ends up dominated by his adult child.

Concepts of “gods” and “virtues” were originally summoned to infuse authority figures with credibility over and above mere physical presence. A king is merely a man who can be easily slaughtered in his sleep, as Macbeth showed. However, if the king is infused with the divine right of monarchy, and is placed by an all-loving and all-powerful God to rule over a sinful mankind, then opposition to the king is opposition to God. You may kill the king, who can then no longer do you any more harm – but God will get the king’s revenge by robbing you of sleep and sending you to hell forever. Moral concepts were generally invented – or they evolved – to hide the aging mortality of merely empirical power relationships. “You are not obeying me,” says the king. “You are obeying God, who placed me to rule over you.”

You must obey the king, because he represents God. But the king himself does not have to obey God, because the king prays for instructions from God. And whatever the king does is informed by that mysterious and unverifiable interaction.

The chieftain represents the elders, or the world spirits, or the ghosts of champions. Such representation infuses him with an authority that transcends his mere mortal and physical presence. Totalitarianism is a dungeon patrolled by ghosts, however; banish those ghosts, and the dungeon breaks wide open.

It is impossible to avoid philosophy, even if one only wishes to pursue conformity to authority. What constitutes authority? Why and when is authority valid? How should we respond to an authority that contradicts itself, or acts against the moral values it imposes on its subjects?

We can say that no irrational abstractions can legitimize authority – that authority is merely the power to punish and reward, usually through force. We can say to ourselves that we have no respect for our teachers, for example, but we recognize their ability to pass or fail us. We can say to ourselves that we have no respect for tyrannical laws, but we recognize the judge’s ability to punish us. This perspective may trigger conformity to rules, but we will not internalize those rules as ideal standards. Ruling us profitably will be impossible, since we refuse to rule ourselves, and we are eager to break whatever fake rules we safely can.

There is an old saying that morality is whatever we do when no one is watching. This is not a philosophical argument, but it is an interesting observation. Do you respect property rights because it is moral, or do you avoid stealing another’s property because you fear jail? In a situation of societal breakdown, such as after a natural disaster, would you loot because you no longer feared jail? When rules are not idealized and internalized, the cost of enforcing them becomes increasingly high – often to the point of unsustainability. If you wish to destroy a society, teach its citizens that rules are mere exercises of power.

A thief who approaches a house and hears a large dog barking inside will probably choose another house – not because he has a sudden attack of conscience, but because he fears a sudden attack of dog.

The fear of consequences – of punishment – is like a stream pouring down the side of a mountain. If the stream hits a big rock, it will part and the water will find another way down. If the stream hits a lake, or a dam, or a reservoir, its progress will stop. This is how the mind of an amoral man in pursuit of a goal works. If he runs into a guard dog, or a policeman, or an alarm system, then he will change his course – but he won’t give up his goal.

Traditional philosophy empowers to evil those who most need its guidance toward the good, while it appeals most to those who need the least guidance. If you care about being good, you will listen to morality, but you also already possess the essential virtue of empathy, so you will most likely be good anyway. If you don’t possess empathy, you can easily use traditional philosophy to manipulate those who do into serving your needs.

Conformity to authority cannot be universalized, however, and universality is the very essence of philosophy. If I conform to an authority, who does the authority conform to? Of course, some would say the authority conforms to God, or to the wishes of the ancestors, or to the world spirit, or to the will of the people. But even these cannot be universalized and are scarcely objectively measurable. Also, if one man can conform to God, and I am a man, then why can I not just conform to that God? Why do I need a secular authority to order me around? If every man needs another man to obey, then who does the ultimate authority figure obey?

This is the problem of infinite regression. We can abstract the concept of obedience to say that a citizen obeys something called “the law,” but the law either represents abstract moral virtues, or it is the mere will of the legislature. If the law represents abstract moral virtues, then I am not obeying the law. I am merely conforming to those virtues – which are superior to the law, and which render the law invalid if it deviates from the virtues.

Saying that the law is a mere shadow cast by the perfect statue of virtue severely curtails the will of the ruler, as King George found out during the American Revolution. If the moral law is Thou Shall Not Steal, then a government that steals – or legalizes its own act of theft – is acting against morality. And moral people would have no innate reason to obey it. In fact, their respect for property rights would instruct them to challenge the law, or perhaps even disobey it.

If the law represents the mere will of the legislature, then it has no foundational moral content to speak of. It is merely the compulsion used in the pursuit of power. This approach expands the will of the ruler – either in a democracy, or in a more authoritarian system – but contradicts his moral legitimacy. It exposes a coercive oligarchical hierarchy as a mere exercise of power – do it because I have more guns than you – which turns the enforcement of legality into a dangerous game of whack-a-mole, since citizens feel no universal moral obligation to obey the law. Thus they get away with whatever they can. This in turn triggers the rulers to raise the penalties for disobedience, which increases the costs of enforcement and inflames the cynicism of the population, leading to economic and social collapse.

Thus rulers need morality, but fear morality as well. It is like desperately needing a bodyguard, but being terrified that he will stab you in your sleep. If rulers can cloak their exercise of power in morality, then people will be more likely to obey them – but the innate universality of morality limits the power of the ruler. This tension will exist as long as governments exist, with the same inevitable outcome every time.

Philosophy and Reality

“Truth” describes verifiable and objective principles and experiences.

If I say that I had a headache last summer while camping alone, there is no way to verify my statement. But if I say that the sun is 8.3 light minutes away from the earth, there are ways to verify my statement.

Subjective experiences do not fall in the realm of philosophy, any more than nightly dreams fall in the realm of physics. Saying that something “feels true” makes about as much sense as saying that “imagination proves scientific hypotheses.”

The conflation of subjective experience with objective truth is one of the great curses of human history.

If I speak a truth that others find inconvenient or offensive, they imagine that their emotions somehow rebut the facts. The idea that being upset trumps examining objective facts is an example of just how far we have drifted from the tough-minded and empirical philosophy that founded our civilization.

In order to value truth, we must first establish the existence of an objective reality.

Its existence is easily testable. For instance, I have two realms of experience – one in which impossible things happen, and another in which impossible things do not happen. The first realm is my dreams – or perhaps a very vivid video game. The second is reality. I once had a startling dream wherein an alligator propelled itself backwards a distance of fifty or sixty feet, landing near me. This cannot happen in reality, absent the invention of reptilian jetpacks.

Impossibility is a hallmark of subjectivity. Fantasy novels contain magic, and magic is defined as mental effects on nature that cannot be explained or achieved in reality. I can buy a Taser, if I want, but I cannot shoot lightning bolts from my fingertips, Dungeons & Dragons style. I cannot cast a sleep spell, but I can shoot a tranquilizer dart.

I cannot move forward by pushing a W key, which is one reason I know that my computer monitor is different from my eyeballs.

Impossibility is at least partly defined as “objects or processes with self-contradictory definitions” – a square circle, for instance. It is impossible for matter to both attract and repel other matter simultaneously, for a gas to both expand and contract when heated, for the world to be both flat and spherical, or for objects to be moving closer together and further apart at the same time.

Thus, there are two realms of experience – the realm of impossibility and self-contradiction or the realm of possibility. In one realm – the dream realm – there are no consistent laws of physics or identity. Objects and entities have a variety of properties that change all the time, but we usually wake up in the same bed we fell asleep in. If I am curious, I can hook up a video camera to record myself sleeping, and then compare my subjective experience of dreaming to my objective experience of lying in a bed. I may dream that I am flying, but when I observe myself, I see I am only twitching under the covers.

There is also an intermediate realm – which can be confusing for some, but which is easy to explain philosophically – and that is the realm of manipulation.

Let’s say your friend Bob is lying on the couch, and he really wants a peach from a tree in the garden. Bob can ask you to go pick one for him, and perhaps you will. Or Bob can beg, wheedle, bribe, cajole, bully or manipulate you into getting him a peach, and perhaps you will. But he only tries because you’re human. There is no other living entity in the universe that we know of that Bob can manipulate into getting him a peach. He can manipulate other human beings; he cannot manipulate peach trees or physics or gravity.

If I have to jump from a high wall, I can beg you to catch me. I cannot rationally beg gravity to suspend itself, even for an instant. If I’m lying in a sunny hammock, I can ask you to get me sunscreen. I cannot ask the sun to refrain from burning me – or, if I do, the sun will not obey.

If you have a job or hobby that involves manipulating and controlling people, then you spend a lot of time in a fairly subjective frame of mind. Please understand, I am not saying that manipulating and controlling people is innately bad. It can have very positive outcomes, such as your doctor scaring you into losing weight and exercising, or a salesman helping you overcome your fearful resistance to a beneficial purchase.

If you are in sales, politics, the media, or academia, then your primary focus is not on objective reality, but on other people’s minds – their perceptions and thoughts and feelings. If you wheedle, cajole, bully, manipulate, encourage and inspire, then you are like a farmer whose primary crop is future human actions. Of course, the hope is that you bring objective principles to people’s subjective experience, with the goal of helping them make rational decisions – but often, of course, this is scarcely the case. If you are in academia, you might bring to people’s pre- existing prejudices the facts that deny the sexism of the supposed male/female “wage gap.” Or you might stoke those prejudices and provoke the plethora of resentments, alienations, and frustrations that lead people to bitter, barren lives.

Those who spend significant amounts of time attempting to influence other people’s thoughts and actions are often in grave danger of falling prey to the “subjective universe” hypothesis – which is one reason it spreads so rapidly. Since most of their mental energies are spent trying to change other people’s minds, the objectivity of the universe easily becomes obscured.

When I was a kid, spoon bending, telekinesis and all other sorts of mental gibberish were enormously popular. And I remember, open-minded young tyke that I was, experimenting with controlling objects through my mind. My very first music LP was “The Things We Do for Love,” by 10cc. Back in the day, you had to put a needle on the record to play it, and when the song was over, the needle would just keep clicking against the label. I clearly remember, at about the age of eleven, lying on my bed, listening to the music playing in another room, and working my mind feverishly to lift the needle and put it back in its holder.

I tried a number of other approaches to this hypothesis that telekinesis could work, all of which failed completely.

Another time, my mother took me to a spoon-bending class, where I was supposed to be taught how to bend spoons with my mind. This turned out to be mere mental manipulation combined with continually rubbing the metal of the spoon to make it softer. You then imagined yourself easily twisting the spoon. By the time you actually twisted it, the metal was softer, and you were mentally psyched up to more easily do it.

I also got interested in mind reading, UFOs, pyramid power, and all other sorts of mental detritus that clogged up the brainpower of the late 1970s – but none of it ever panned out.

In hindsight, I’m sort of glad that this nonsense was everywhere – and I’m very glad that I gave it all an honest try. Because it taught me two important things: first of all, empirical verification is the key to truth. And second, society seems more than willing to regularly swan-dive into sophisticated vats of utter mental garbage.

Moving objects with your mind violates basic laws of physics. It is an effect without a cause – in other words, movement without prior movement. And it also denies basic evolution – in that if we could move things with our minds, we would scarcely have developed arms and hands. It’s the same with telepathy. Any human group with the capacity to transmit thoughts would have had such an enormous evolutionary advantage that such a skill would have spread like wildfire among the population. (Imagine the advantage in war and hunting alone.)

Similarly, our emotions are good at helping us read people, but not as good at helping us understand objective reality. Throughout history, human predators were our greatest danger. And they live among us in the greatest disguise of all, since they often look just like us or people we love. Those who developed strong and accurate “gut instincts” about dangerous people avoided – or at least minimized – such predations.

As we became more civilized and lived in towns and cities, non-human predation fell away. And so people tended to focus their fight-and-flight mechanisms on dangerous people, rather than on predatory animals. These dangerous people, in turn, developed language skills designed to blunt people’s capacity to sniff out human danger.

Lions creep in the tall grass, and human predators hide in baffling and manipulative syllables. Rational philosophers bring truth and pain now, but freedom later. Sophists bring ease and relief now, but tyranny later. The human herd vacillates from greed to necessity and back again, like a weak man torn between a good wife and a dangerous mistress.

These days, we live in such a social world that we tend to confuse our instincts about people with facts about reality.