The End of Illusion

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One of my goals in my pursuits of thought, and indeed one of the goals of philosophy itself, is to pierce through all the misconceptions and arbitrary knowledge we have built up through experience and culture and find a place of raw truth, the sandbox within which all knowledge is constructed.

Now, after building up a toolbelt of knowledge and contemplating the nature of reality, the Bayesian network model of knowledge, the is-ought gap between fact and morality, the concept of narratives, and the effects of language, I believe I have finally found a place free of all illusions. It is this: what happens happens, and all else is interpretation.

It is very hard to talk about this idea using language. After all, by describing it, I am, well, describing it. That in itself adds a layer of interpretation to something which is supposed to be beneath interpretations. Yet, as we discussed last week, it is possible to use words to describe things beyond words, so I will attempt to do so.

Consider how the squirrel sees the world. The squirrel has no language, knows no words. Yet still it perceives the world. Though it has no word for “cloud,” it notices differences in patches of the sky. Though it has no word for “tree,” it knows there are cylindrical surfaces with lots of footholds to grab onto.

There was a time before language, when all things saw the world as the squirrel does. There was a time before perception, and a time before life. Yet the universe existed back then, just as much as it exists now. And it behaved according to its inherent nature, just as it does now.

This is reality beyond illusion. That which is, independent of perception or belief. It does what it does, and all concepts, narratives, and models, from philosophy to religion to science, are merely interpretations.

Symbolic Cognition

For years, I’ve been grappling with a question: Why do we expect life to make sense like a story? Why do we try to piece together the events of history and our lives in ways that make narrative sense, rather than logical sense?

I have a hypothesis about this, which I call symbolic cognition. When we see something or think of a concept, we don’t just see it as it is, but also with layers of symbolism. Today, we are going to discuss symbolic cognition through four types of associations: aesthetics and metaphors, memorization, objects with morality, and facts with meaning.

Before we move on, I want to take a moment to talk about the term, symbolic cognition. While contemplating the ways we construct our views of the world through symbols, I searched for an official field of science devoted to it. The closest I could find is a sociological theory called “symbolic interactionism.” However, as far as I could tell, symbolic interactionism is specifically focused on how we view our identities through our relationships with others, whereas symbolic cognition is a framework by which to analyze one of the ways we construct our knowledge and worldviews. If there is an official term for symbolic cognition, or if symbolic interactionism does indeed cover it, I apologize.

Aesthetics and Metaphors

What is it like to hear the murmuring of a crowd? Is it soothing like a babbling brook? Eerie like a flock of squawking crows? Perhaps it’s full of energy, all the people as busy as bees. But a crowd is not bees or crows or a brook, it’s people. The comparisons come to mind because they stimulate our aesthetic senses in similar ways.

When we bite into a strawberry, we sometimes describe it as an explosion of flavor. Why an explosion? It’s because the flavor of a good strawberry can be as intense to our sense of taste as an explosion is to our senses of sight, sound, and touch. Few people are confused when we describe it this way.

When we think and experience concepts and sensations, the information gets all mixed up in our brains. As a result, our entire conceptualization of the world is a web of connections, many of which are not logical, but a this-is-like-that relationship. This is why abstract art and music without lyrics can be so powerful to us. The associations between the colors and the strokes of the brush evoke within us the same emotions as a sunset or a beautiful day in the city. Our unconscious minds make the connections, even if our conscious minds don’t understand it.

Associative Memorization

Our ability to associate logically disconnected concepts gives us an ability for memorization so incredible it might as well be a superpower. Let’s consider the strawberry we mentioned in the previous section. When we bite into the strawberry and experience its explosion of flavor, we see a firetruck drive by, its sirens blaring. This reminds us of a time we were walking by the river and a firetruck drove by, rudely interrupting our peaceful contemplation. Looking at the ripples on the river, we think of mountains being formed and crumbling from the long-term forces of plate tectonics in the Earth’s crust. With this sequence of associations, we can remember the list, “strawberry,” “fire truck,” “river,” “Earth’s crust,” despite the fact that these items have no logical connection with each other.

With practice and creativity, we can remember lists of hundreds or even thousands of items for long periods of time. A great technique for this is to use a memory palace, a place or object we are familiar with enough that we can see it vividly in our mind’s eye. This could be our house or a walk around our neighborhood, or even something like a statue we can hold in our hands. When we want to memorize something, we walk through this palace, associating every item with something we see.

For instance, the hallway leading out of my apartment has five doors. I could mentally walk past each of the doors, assigning something I want to memorize with each of them. Then, when I want to recall that list, I could mentally walk through again, picking up each item from its assigned door. If I want to memorize more than five things, I could open the doors and assign items to the features inside. For another example, my stove has four dials, each with twelve settings: OFF, LO, 1-9, and HI. With these four dials alone, I could memorize 48 things by assigning them to the positions of the dials and associating them with the items on either side.

Associations can also be made by a process called operant conditioning. When we are presented two things together enough times, we tend to associate them with one another. This is most often discussed in the context of creating a physiological reaction by an association, such as a dog salivating to the sound of a bell after being presented with food accompanied by a bell ringing enough times.

Advertisers take advantage of operant conditioning in us. For example, they condition us to see cars as sexy by repeatedly showing us car ads with attractive women in them, and they condition us to see beer as manly by repeatedly showing us ads of beer being enjoyed by strong, bearded men.

Perceiving Objects as Symbols of Morality

Picture the Holy Grail, the Cup of Christ, be it a jeweled golden chalice in your minds eye or a wooden carpenter’s mug. Now push that image aside and imagine you pick up a piece of furniture to find mold growing in a big stain where the carpet meets the wall. Most likely you saw the cup as good and the mold as bad. Not only do we associate concepts with one another, we also associate concepts with value. We feel like objects can be good or bad.

Moral symbolism can be beneficial when it helps us make healthy choices, but it can be bad when we make moral associations with types of people, forming stereotypes. For example, if you perceive smoking as bad, and you see a lot of tattooed people smoking, you might come to see tattooed people as bad by association. You then might go on to see someone with a tattoo as bad, even if you know that this person does not smoke. Moral stereotyping is, unfortunately, something we humans do very naturally, and we must work hard to train ourselves out of it.

Religions utilize moral symbolism with concepts of the sacred and the profane, worthiness and unworthiness. In the best cases, this can lead us toward fulfilling, positive lives, but it can also be used by religious authorities as a means of control.

Perceiving Facts as Symbols of Meaning

How many constellations are there? What message does a rainbow send? What is the meaning of the existence of natural evil? These questions do not have real answers. Constellations are made up. A rainbow is what happens when water droplets refract sunlight like a prism. And natural evil is just things happening naturally that result in people being harmed. There is no meaning inherent in these things, at least not when there isn’t someone causing them on purpose. But out minds imbue them with meaning by treating them as symbols.

There are a few ways in which facts mean something. If someone organizes things, such as words in a book, with the intention of conveying a message, then the objects used for communication carry the meaning of the communication. Also, we can find logical meaning in an object or place by observing and investigating it, which can tell us about what happened there in the past. However, we have a tendency to see symbolic meaning in things when it isn’t there.

For example, the idea that Earth is the center of the universe feels right, and the idea that there is no center of the universe can make us feel sad. The idea that our ancestors were crafted by the loving hands of God can make us feel much happier than the idea that we evolved from common ancestors with monkeys and apes. Yet we have no reason to feel this way. We are what we are regardless of how our ancestors came to be, and the Earth is our home whether it’s at the center of the universe or somewhere else.

This tendency to see facts as symbols with meaning has an upside: it can make stories more compelling. An author, songwriter, or poet can put objects and imagery into their stories with the intent that they be interpreted to have meaning, and that meaning contribute to the themes and aesthetics of the story.

The dark side of this is, unfortunately, very dark. When bad things happen to us, or we are confronted with the human condition, we tend to assume there must be some meaning in our suffering. We convince ourselves that without this suffering, something essential to the enjoyment of life will be lost.

If there truly is nothing we can do about it, this can be comforting and help us cope with our circumstances. However, if things change and it becomes possible to work toward changing our circumstances and getting rid of our suffering, then the story we tell ourselves of the meaning in that suffering can hold us back. We might remain chained to our suffering, even when the opportunity to get rid of it presents itself. Even worse, we might fight against those who try to move forward and make things better.

Final Thoughts

It is likely that we are not blank slates, that we are born with predispositions for certain associations given to us by evolutionary psychology. Things such as character archetypes, hero stories, and dragons, which have been found all over the world in completely disconnected cultures. On top of these templates, we build our models of the world, both symbolic and logical. Being common to all of humanity does not make them objective to the fabric of reality, but they do give us something by which we can all relate to one another.

Symbolic cognition can make it hard to learn true things, because in each instance there may be something we must first unlearn. On the other hand, symbolic cognition gives us the ability to appreciate a rich banquet of stories, arts, music, and philosophy. The symbolic meanings we see in nature may not be real, but properly cultivated, symbolic cognition itself can be a source for the meaning we seek.

Broadening our Perspectives with Game Theory

Toolbelt of Knowledge: Theories
Darwinian Evolution
Game Theory

It’s been awhile since we’ve added to the Toolbelt of Knowledge, perhaps because there is so much we can explore in the space of ideas with what we’ve already covered. Today, I’ve decided to add to the longtime-lonely Theories category with another theory that can show us a new perspective on behavior, actions, and ethics: Game Theory.

What is Game Theory?

By its name, we might think Game Theory is a theory of games. It’s not, though. Most commonly, Game Theory is described as a theory of goals, outcomes, and strategies, though it can also be thought of as a theory of acting in accordance with our values. Game Theory is a theory of choices and consequences, actions and effects. The reason it is called “Game Theory” instead of “Strategy Theory” or “Choice Theory” is that games are structured with rules and goals for the players, and so it is easy to apply Game Theory to games. In this blog post, any time we mention “games,” we mean game theoretic systems, unless it is obvious by the context that we are talking about games in the fun-and-games sense.

There are three elements to a game theoretic system: Agents, the people, animals, AI programs, etc. who make decisions; the choices available to them; and the predicted outcomes of each combination of choices. The outcomes are usually written as a list of numbers, such as (3, 10, -1, …). Each number represents how satisfied each person is with the results.

You might see a problem here: in a game, this can represent the number of points each player ends up with, but how does it apply to the rest of life, where outcomes are not so easily quantified?

The answer, in my view, is that Game Theory should not be considered a theory of winning, but a theory of actions and consequences. Instead of numbers, we might put emojis representing how each person feels about the results. Or, we might directly represent the outcomes, rather than trying to quantify them. This can make it more difficult to compare the outcomes, but there are still times when we can comfortably say A is better than B, such as if A includes intense happiness and B includes despair.

Let’s look at some of the concepts of Game Theory, and some of the systems we can apply it to.

Positive-Sum, Negative-Sum, and Zero-Sum

There are three possible ways the total amount of “points” at the end can compare to the total amount at the beginning. If there is more at the end, it is a positive-sum resource; if there is less at the end, it is a negative-sum resource; and if the amount at the end is the same as the beginning, it is a zero-sum resource.

A note on terminology: you have probably heard the terms “positive- etc. sum game” instead of “positive- etc. sum resource.” A _____-sum game is more tied to the way the agents look at the game. For instance, if we say someone is “playing a zero-sum game,” it means they are trying to gain more by taking from others, rather than trying to increase the pot for all.

To illustrate each of these resource types, let’s look at the economy of a hypothetical island nation. This nation is self-reliant, it doesn’t trade or interact with anyone else.

The people of this island want to make it thrive. So they work the farms, build houses, mine for minerals, chop down and plant trees, educate their children, and all the other things a society needs in order to thrive. At the end of the year, they have more seeds, more knowledgeable people, more metal and wood and other resources than when they started with, and they are ready to start the next year and continue to reap increasing returns. This is a positive-sum game.

The land on the island is a zero-sum resource. There is a fixed amount, so if every acre is owned by someone, the only way for a person to acquire more is to get it from someone else.

And finally, the island’s coal supply from the coal mine is a negative-sum resource. The best use for coal is to burn it for electricity, but the more the nation uses, the less there is left to use. In order to continue to thrive in the long term, they must get off the negative sum game of coal power and find a positive sum game with renewable energy sources.

Short, Long, and Infinite Games

There are essentially three ways to strategize about a game-theoretic scenario. Short games are where we try to score as many points (metaphorically or literally) as possible as quickly as possible. A 100-meter dash is a short game; the goal is to get to the finish line before as many of your competitors as possible.

In a long game, the idea is to bide your time, waiting for the right moment to make the pivotal move. In a long game, we make short-term sacrifices for long-term payoffs. Chess is the archetypal example of a long game, as the ultimate goal is to trap the king, and it is common practice to sacrifice one’s own pieces in order to trap the other player in a snare.

An individual person’s life is a long game. The ideal life, according to present-day America and some other places, is to work hard at education, take out some loans for college, get a job, take out some loans for a car and a house, and slowly work off our debts until we break net positive and start accumulating wealth later in life.

An infinite game, on the other hand, is one that doesn’t end. The goal of an infinite game is to stay in the game as long as possible. Those who score points in infinite games are not people, as people have finite lifespans, but longer-lived things like countries, religions, and social causes.

Wars may end. Civil rights may be won. Oppressive regimes may be toppled. But their ripple effects continue, and in order to understand the way things are in the present and move toward a better future, we must study the past. Though the threads of history change, none of them end. History is a collection of infinite games.

Dominant Strategies

Sometimes, a single action can lead to positive results for all possible outcomes. These are called dominant strategies. Let’s look at a few examples.

Suppose we have a scenario where there is one choice: to light a candle or not to light it, and one risk: the candle might fall over. There are four possible scenarios.

1. We do not light the candle, and it does not fall over.
2. We do not light the candle, and it falls over.
3. We light the candle, and it does not fall over.
4. We light the candle, and it falls over.

If the fourth outcome happens, the house catches on fire, but in the other three outcomes it does not. We notice that if we do not light the candle, there is no outcome that results in a house fire. So if our goal is to not have a house fire, the dominant strategy is to not light the candle.

Another example can be found in cooking. If we are cooking a pan full of food, such as stir fried vegetables, we want to cook every piece equally on all sides. The surefire way to do this is to flip each piece individually. But if we do that, it takes too long, and by the time we’re done with the last piece, the first one is burnt. A better way to get it all cooked evenly is to stir the whole pan, making all of the pieces tumble around. Instead of having to plan each time exactly how to deal with each piece of food, stirring the pot or pan works every time. It is a dominant strategy.

Of course, in real-life situations it is often hard to find dominant strategies, since there are usually a very high number of factors and choices. Still, we can use this concept to look for strategies that have high probabilities of leading to good outcomes for a wide variety of ways a scenario might go.

Instrumental Goals and Ultimate Goals

There are two types of goals we might have in game-theoretic scenarios. An ultimate goal is what we are after, the outcome that would give us the most satisfaction from the game. Along the way, we pick up instrumental goals, things that help us achieve our ultimate goals.

Suppose my ultimate goal for today is to finish writing a blog post. In order to do that, I pick up a number of instrumental goals. I make coffee, because caffeine helps me think faster and more clearly. I eat food for similar reasons. I cross the street carefully, because it would be very difficult to finish my post if I am in the hospital or dead.

Of course, there are other reasons to do these things; other games being played. I’m playing the long game of life, in which writing is my major marketable skill, and finishing blog posts is an instrumental goal in service of the goal of making a living as a freelance writer, which is an instrumental goal in service of the goal of pursuing my passion as a science fiction author, which is . . . You get the picture. It’s not always clear what one’s ultimate goals are, or if their web of instrumental goals loops back on itself, or goes on forever.

The distinction between instrumental goals and ultimate goals comes from artificial intelligence research, not Game Theory. But they are useful in the same way as the rest of the ideas we’re looking at today, so I thought it made sense to add them to the Game Theory bundle.

Prisoner’s Dilemmas

Most of us are taught that being selfish is bad, and that we should share and be kind to others. Game Theory has several mathematical models supporting these ideas, the most well-known among them the prisoner’s dilemma. Abstractly speaking, a prisoner’s dilemma is any situation in which people acting in their best interests at the expense of others makes things worse off for everybody.

I won’t use the famous prison example today; you can find a million explanations of it with a quick google search. Instead, let’s look at another example: water rationing. Suppose there is a drought, and a town that usually has plenty of water for everyone starts to run low. The water supplier puts out a public notice, telling everyone that if they don’t limit their water consumption, the supplier will have to start temporarily shutting off the water for several hours at a time.

Each person is faced with the following conundrum:
1. Limit water and there is no shutdown.
2. Limit water and there is a shutdown.
3. Do not limit water, and there is no shutdown.
4. Do not limit water, and there is a shutdown.

In either case, whether or not there is a shutdown, an individual gets to use more water if they don’t limit their own consumption. Therefore, the dominant strategy is to ignore the public advice and use as much water as they want.

However, if too many people make this choice, the water will be rationed by the supplier, making things worse for everyone than if they had all limited their own water consumption. Hence the dilemma: the best possible outcome requires everyone to make the choice that is not the best for themselves.

The way to deal with prisoner’s dilemmas is through trust and self-sacrifice. We have to make the decision that is bad for ourselves, trusting the others to do the same. This is one of the reasons why it is important to treat others well and build relationships, even for people who only care about themselves. If everyone makes the hard choice to do the right thing, everyone ends up better off than if someone makes the selfish choice.


When considering things like political issues, our plans for our own lives, how we treat others, and stuff like that, it can be helpful to consider the questions from a game theoretic perspective. I may feel like this choice is right, but will its consequences actually line up with my values? Am I treating this situation like a zero-sum game, when it could be taken as a positive-sum game? Could a little sacrifice and trust on my part lead to a better outcome for everybody? These questions put things in a new perspective, and can lead to wiser choices and better outcomes.

The Best Argument Against the Quantum Multiverse

Recommended Pre-Reading:
The Quantum Multiverse

Some time ago, I argued in favor of the Many-Worlds interpretation of quantum physics, explaining how I had misunderstood it before, and why I changed my mind. I recommend reading that post for the full story, but the short version is, the Many-Worlds interpretation (or more accurately, the Universal Wave Function interpretation) is the straightforward interpretation of quantum physics, explaining the weird paradoxes without adding any extra assumptions to the theory. All other interpretations require adding something; either a collapse condition, where a measurement causes the wave function to immediately change shape all at once, ignoring the speed of light, or some kind of hidden variables we can’t measure. The Many-Worlds interpretation says the wave function described by the Schrodinger equation is correct, and that is all. Everything else, the multiple universes and such, are deduced from that single statement.

However, there is one thing that bugs me, one loose end Many-Worlds doesn’t explain. That is why today, I am going to continue the Best Arguments Against series, and put forth my best argument against the quantum multiverse.

Most people who argue against Many-Worlds don’t understand it. Some dismiss it out of hand as too weird. Others get Occam’s Razor backward and think Many-Worlds has branching universes as a postulate, rather than a deduction. These are not good arguments.

The best argument has to do with probabilities. If we look only at the math, it makes sense that the wave function can split into two worlds, one with an amplitude three times stronger than the other. Think of a pile of sand. Someone splits it into two, one of which is three times bigger than the other. Where there was one pile, there are now two of differing heights. That’s an apt analogy for the splitting of universes, and it’s quite easy to visualize. Nothing confusing or difficult to believe there.

However, when we do an experiment, the outcome with the higher amplitude has a 90% chance of happening, and the outcome with the lower amplitude has a 10% chance of happening. If the universe splits into two equally real branches, as Many-Worlds claims, where does this probability come from? Many-Worlds says there will be two universes, each of which will have an equally real version of us. Thus, before the experiment, it would be natural to think there would be a 50% chance of finding ourselves in each universe after the measurement. But it’s not; it’s 90-10. This is a contradiction, and a currently unresolved paradox in the Many-Worlds theory.

This is important, because we rely on quantum probabilities all the time. The nuclear fusion that powers the sun and gives the Earth energy uses quantum probability. The half-lives of unstable elements, used in various technologies and geological dating methods, rely on quantum probability. And most conspicuous of all, quantum computers work by minimizing the quantum probabilities of the wrong answers and maximizing the quantum probability of the right answer. If there were simply one universe for each possible outcome, our intuition says none of these should work!

There is one way to resolve this conceptually. Suppose instead of two worlds, there are a large number of them, and 90% of them go in the direction of higher amplitude, and 10% of them go in the direction of lower amplitude. Those 90% are completely identical to each other, as are the 10%. This would square off the probabilities. Instead of there being two of you, one in the low amplitude world and one in the high amplitude world, there would be many of you, split between the worlds 90-10.

However, this takes away the straightforward purity of Many-Worlds. The math does not say there will be lots of identical universes, it says there will only be one for each possibility. Resolving this conflict by proposing large numbers of identical universes adds extra fluff to the theory, taking away its advantage over the other interpretations!

This could mean Many-Worlds is the wrong interpretation of quantum physics. Or it could be that we just don’t understand quantum probability yet, and we will find a satisfactory resolution to the paradox. Many-Worlds is still the tidiest interpretation so far, since it explains all the other phenomena of quantum physics, like entanglement and the measurement problem, so neatly. For now, I still rank it as the most plausible, leaving the door open for something else to come in and explain it all.

I don’t like the quantum multiverse. I want there to be only one course of history. It feels cheap if everything that is physically possible happens in one timeline or another. But, as mentioned at the beginning of the post, the fact that it is weird is not valid evidence. I hope Many-Worlds is wrong, but as a truth seeker, I cannot let that hope influence what I believe. The truth is the truth, whatever it turns out to be. Maybe there are a near-infinite number of universes splitting off from one another every moment, or maybe there is just this one. All we can do is follow the logic and evidence where it leads us.

How did Life Begin?

The philosopher Immanuel Kant once said, “It is absurd to hope that another Newton will arise in the future who will make comprehensible to us the production of a blade of grass according to natural laws.” Soon after Kant died, Charles Darwin was born. And after Darwin came molecular biology.

Despite Kant’s pessimism, we have come a long way toward understanding life in terms of physics and chemistry. Darwin’s theory of evolution by variation and natural selection has been substantiated and improved upon by the discovery of DNA and genetics. We now have a robust theoretical picture of how, over billions of years, life can evolve from single-celled organisms to the variety and complexity we see today.

Yet still, one piece of the puzzle eludes us. How did the first spark come to be, when life formed from non-life? We have not seen this happen anywhere, not in nature, nor the controlled conditions of the laboratory. So far, Kant's prediction has held.

But Kant's claim is a lot stronger than perhaps even he would have meant. It is far easier to show something is possible than to prove it impossible. For instance, it was once said that there are no black swans. Nobody in Western culture had ever seen one, and it was taken for granted as common knowledge. But when explorers set out to map the coast of Australia, there they were, black swans, swimming around like nothing was out of the ordinary. The claim that we will never find a naturalistic explanation for the origin of life is the same as saying there are no black swans. To disprove it, all we have to do is find one.

How do we go about looking for a theory of the origin of life? We need to look for what all life absolutely requires, its reductionist building blocks. First is water. We know of nothing living or semi-living that does not incorporate liquid water as an essential part of its makeup. The next is organic molecules. All of the complex molecules making up life forms are constructed from small organic molecules. Finally, life needs an energy gradient. This is a technical term for “food source,” although it sometimes literally means energy is being transferred through the environment, like in photosynthesis. In the realms of physics and chemistry, energy gradients are the drivers of reactions and increasing complexity, making it look on a small scale like the second law of thermodynamics is being violated.

All three of these are common in the universe, water especially. But there is another element we haven’t talked about yet: the information the organism is made of. This consists of DNA and RNA, long chains of molecules that act like source code. DNA and RNA are only known to exist on Earth, within living or quasi-living organisms, and in laboratories. When we look for it in nature, in places we guess life might have emerged from, we don’t find it. Is this evidence Kant was right? No, because of one important factor: life already exists in all those places. Anywhere the ingredients for life could be found are swarming with bacteria gobbling it up. Once life exists in a place, we can safely bet it won’t get started there a second time.

So what do we do now? The next obvious course to investigate is the simplest life we can find. So far, the simplest natural living organism we know of is a bacterium called mycoplasma genitalium. This little bugger has less than 600,000 base pairs in its DNA. Contrast that with humans, who have billions. Still, 600,000 base pairs is far from simple, and it has a cell wall to boot. M. genitalium does not look like a good analog for the bridge between non-life and life.

If existing life is not the answer, we can perform experiments to try to make something simpler. Nine years ago, Craig Venter took the DNA from M. genitalium, deleted as much as he could, and put the results into an inert cell, creating the worlds simplest and first synthetic life form, mycoplasma laboratorium. The number of nucleotides it had was . . . still over 500,000. It was an improvement, and a major breakthrough for science, but did not get us much closer to the origin of life. At least, not yet.

However, we have not yet talked about quasi-living organisms. These are organisms that are kind of alive, but don’t replicate themselves, instead relying on the reproductive machinery of other living things. There are two kinds of quasi-living organisms: viruses and viroids. Viruses have their own DNA and cell walls, but viroids are just small closed loops of RNA. How small? Between 200 and 500 nucleotides. Not genes, nucleotides. And they don’t have a cell wall, or organelles, or supporting macromolecules.

Model of the potato spindle tuber viroid.

Now we might be getting somewhere! Of course, viroids could not be the original life forms, because they require other life in order to reproduce. Still, it is now within the realm of possibility that the first quasi-living organisms were similar to viroids. We know that small amounts of DNA and RNA can perform various types of mechanical tasks, as shown by the field of DNA nanotechnology, so we seem to be on the threshold of a solid theory of the origin of life.

You may sometimes hear people talk about the probability that life will arise on its own. But no number you hear is valid. Whenever I’ve dug into these calculations, I’ve found the math formulae that are used treat the molecules as if they are drawn out of a hat. That is not how chemistry works. To do the calculation properly, we would have to know the physics of the environment, the chemistry of every step along the way, how common such environments are in the universe, and how big the universe is. We don’t know any of that stuff, so we can’t say anything at all about the probability.

Some people don’t want to believe it’s possible that life arose naturally in the universe. Some of them just aren’t interested in the science, and don’t have the time to learn the mental skills and do the research to get up to speed. That’s understandable. Others are averse because they are loyal to a religious narrative, like I once was. Still others may be uncomfortable at the thought that human life had such a humble beginning, believing it takes away from our innate worth. This is a fallacy. Human beings are priceless and have innate dignity because of what we are. How we came to be this way has no effect on what we deserve or how we should treat one another.

Based on what we've talked about, we can construct a crude hypothesis, a guiding tool, a proof of concept. This may or may not be close to how life began, but it will stand as evidence that there is an answer, and we can find it. Here it is:

Suppose, deep in the ocean, where vents spewed heat from the Earth’s mantle, there was a soup of organic molecules. These molecules bumped into each other, reacting millions or billions of times every second, to make more complex molecules. Some of these complex molecules would fold and unfold, or spin parts of themselves around, or be attracted to certain parts of other molecules. Some of these molecules could break other molecules apart and reconstruct them. This process was random, and mostly resulted in junk. But a few made copies of themselves, which in turn made more copies. There, Darwinian evolution took root, with variations in each generation, and natural selection favoring those that reproduced better. With further generations, the molecules bonded with other, non-reproducing complex molecules, forming a symbiosis which allowed them to do more tasks. Eventually, one of these constructed a shell of molecules around itself, and the first cellular organism was born.

This process, and others like it, can be tested in the lab. One of the most interesting mysteries of all time, it's a popular subject of research. So far, there has not been a Newton for the blade of grass. But it is no longer absurd to think one will arise one day soon.

How We Choose what to Believe – Narratives and Rationality

Every moment we find ourselves alive, two questions drive us: What should we do, and what should we believe? When looking for answers, we find narratives, stories about existence and right and wrong. Many narratives gel with one another, and many contradict. Our natural method for evaluating narratives is by our narrative senses, coherence and fidelity.

If that sounded like Greek, let me explain with a type of narrative that is easy to understand: fiction. Despite fictional stories being made-up, there are things about them that “ring true,” specifically the parts that are coherent and fidelitous. Coherence is how well the elements of the story fit together and remain true to themselves, like the believability of the characters and the consistency of the science and magic. The fidelity of the story is how well it resonates with our values, like when the characters act heroically, or when its exploration of the themes includes views we sympathize with.

That’s fine for stories, but what about real life? We might naively believe we see the world in terms of facts. On the contrary, our view of the world is colored by layer upon layer of narrative, with facts getting only the smallest amount of our attention. It is our first instinct to apply our narrative senses to everything we hear, from religion to politics to science. We think we’re good at determining what is true, that we and those who believe as we do have a knack for common sense.

But this “common sense” is really just our narrative senses telling us what feels true. If we want to know what is true, we need to change the way we evaluate narratives. A method that keeps us focused on our goals and the relevant facts. We need rationality.

Rationality is the practice of forming beliefs through observation and logic. By anchoring ourselves to evidence and mathematical thinking, we can overcome the pull of narratives, and follow truth wherever it leads. Rational thinkers recognize that almost everything is more complicated than they know. They arrive at their beliefs by knowing their values, and assessing facts and possibilities to best act in accordance with those values. They keep their minds open to be changed by good counter-arguments, recognizing the difference between having a solid foundation for their beliefs and being stubborn.

I’m sure this came as no surprise. Of course we should be rational, not chase after what feels true. But knowing this in our heads and putting it into practice are very different things. It is human nature to believe ourselves much more rational than we really are. Rationality is a skill, requiring constant exercise. Our natural method of determining truth is our narrative senses, and unless we admit this about ourselves, it is likely we are not very rational at all.

I grew up believing the Earth was created six thousand years ago. I also believed myself to be rational. My mind changed a few years after I started college, and I became obsessed with the question, “Why do people believe things when there is clear and easily accessible evidence to the contrary?” You could say it has been one of the overarching themes of this blog. And now, I’ve found a narrative that just might be the answer: Rationality is not natural. The only reason anyone is rational is because they stumbled upon the rationality narrative, and it appealed to their narrative senses.

If you truly understand this, if comprehension sinks into your bones, then you see how profound the implications of this statement are. Narratives are everywhere, and their persuasive power does not necessarily have anything to do with how truthful or rational they are. Our views of the world are shaped by narratives about morality, human nature, religion, science, the nature of reality, the structure of society, justice, honor, history, and the list goes on and on. Many of these narratives use dirty tactics to appeal to our narrative senses and shield us from the rationality that would show us how hollow they are. Here are some to watch out for.

1. Trying to take control of the space of ideas allowed by language. Narratives do this by changing the meanings of words, making words taboo, or introducing new ideas in such a way as to feed the narrative. For instance, they might fiddle around with the definitions of “truth” and “rationality” to confuse people into believing the narrative is rational when it is not.

2. Pointing to individuals or groups as scapegoats. This is an effective tactic to redirect doubt and discomfort from the narrative. After all, if you’re convinced the immigrants, or the homosexuals, or the straight white men are the ones causing you problems, then you feel less need to question the narrative.

3. Treating faith in and loyalty to the narrative as virtues. If something doesn’t make sense, this kind of narrative would say, don’t worry, it’s still true; it’s just beyond your comprehension right now. This makes people feel small and insignificant, and it can be especially depressing when one believes everyone around them understands, and they are the only one who does not.

4. Using guilt and shame. Making people feel they are bad or worthless unless they espouse the views of the narrative and act in accordance with its rules. Double points if the rules are vague and contradictory.

5. Viewing interactions with people who disagree with the narrative as fights. This attitude stimulates our deep-seated light versus dark mentality, where the light is the Truth (i.e. the narrative) and the darkness is doubt, questioning, and the hearts of those who would lead you astray. Less dramatically, it manifests in the idea of using arguments to “defend your beliefs.” Discussions about beliefs should be had with an open mind and a desire to learn, not to further cement yourself into what you already believe.

6. Presenting themselves as the only alternative to another narrative which is clearly bogus. If you see the world as us versus them, and realize the “us” part has problems, the “them” starts to look pretty good. It’s the false dichotomy fallacy. If you look, you will find plenty of other narratives to choose from, and perhaps even forge your own.

Some people craft and perpetuate narratives like this for the sake of power. Others spread these narratives because they honestly believe them to be true. We find ourselves in a world full of narratives that have almost taken on a life of their own, competing with each other for dominance. Being pulled to and fro from every direction, it is so easy to get lost in the currents of narrative, forgetting our skepticism and rationality. Nevertheless, it is worth it to remain steadfast to yourself, even when the path of reason seems to disappear.

If you find your own way, forming your own narrative, observing the world around you and taking the rational and good parts from other narratives, then you will find a kind of confidence that cannot be found any other way. It won’t be a straight shot to the truth. In fact, you will constantly be making adjustments as new information comes in or you see connections or contradictions you missed before. But the goal is not to have the “right” view of things, it is to get ever closer to truth and wisdom. And having a solid structure you built yourself, which you keep crafting and tweaking and making more beautiful, is so much more satisfying than merely trusting in the stories you have been told.

Keeping Science Accountable – The Sokal Affair

In 1996, a physicist named Alan Sokal submitted a paper to a non-physics academic journal. The paper argued that the idea of an objective physical reality was a social construct to keep scientific power in the hands of the elites. The paper was accepted and published. Three weeks later, Sokal publicly announced that the paper had been a joke, its logic and technical language either made up or used nonsensically, and the reason he submitted it was to test the integrity of the journal. This became known as the Sokal Affair.

Sokal exposed a fact that can sometimes make scientists uncomfortable: science is not inherently superior to all other collaborative methods of determining truth. It has to earn that status by being intellectually rigorous, which means defining terms clearly, making hypotheses that are falsifiable, accounting for all variables, taking unbiased data, and analyzing the data with the best, most applicable statistical methods available. If a journal allows papers that do not live up to these standards, that journal is no longer a vehicle of science, but of dogma.

After Sokal revealed the paper to be a hoax, there were cries of foul play. He had, after all, intentionally published a paper with false data and results. Fabrication is considered profane among scientists, and can result in the author being ostracized from the scientific community. However, the reason for this is because it spreads false information. Sokal’s purpose was not to spread false information, but exactly the opposite: to expose and prevent the spreading of false information by the journal.

Within the past few years, a team of academics followed in Sokal’s footsteps by submitting several bogus papers to a few different journals. Many of these papers, including a passage from Mein Kampf with key words swapped out, were accepted. Luckily, the Mein Kampf plagiarism wasn’t actually published. This became known as Sokal Squared, and also received blowback. It should be noted that Sokal Squared was not meant to discredit the fields being studied, but to expose the fact that it was being done wrong in these particular journals.

I believe the authors in the Sokal and Sokal Squared affairs did absolutely nothing wrong. In fact, what they did is perfectly in line with the scientific process, which is to continually test ideas from every different angle to see whether they can stand up to it. I think that every academic journal, from the natural sciences to the humanities, from the most prestigious to the peripheral, should be regularly put to a Sokal Test. By this, I mean that people from different fields of study, or who are not professional academics, should write nonsense papers using the journals’ jargon, and see if they get accepted. Anyone writing a hoax paper should be required to reveal the hoax within a reasonable amount of time. Journals that fail the Sokal Test will lose reputation points, and those that pass will gain prestige.

Science is an amazing vehicle for understanding the universe and what happens within it. It is naturally competitive, its scholars each putting forth their own theories and doing their best to prove everybody else wrong. To do this, they use every legitimate trick in the book: making sure all significant variables are accounted for, checking the data collection methods for bias, and many others. But these feedback processes are largely self-contained within each discipline, which means they can become corrupted and watered down. Instituting a Sokal Test would be an effective and equitable way to keep journals accountable to scientists in other disciplines, and to everyone who is interested in true scientific knowledge.

What can We Know about Reality?

The Nature of Reality:
Quasi-Realism
Representational Realism
Existence and Natures
Knowledge of Reality
The Language of Reality

We have spent the Nature of Reality series developing the idea that we do not see reality as it is, but as our brains create from the information we receive through our senses. In fact, it is impossible for us to perceive reality as it really is, because the very act of perception is at least one step removed from reality. This leads to mistakes. We perceive things that are not there, and we are blind to things that are. Furthermore, the only way we have to determine whether something is real is to compare it with the rest of reality as we know it, all of which is contained within our heads. Just like every word in a dictionary is defined by other words in the dictionary, so we judge the reality of every concept and perception in our brain by other concepts and perceptions in our brain. So the question arises: are we stuck? Is there any way we can know anything about true Reality, or are we forever doomed to subjectivity and relativism?

There is one thing we can know about true reality. That is because perception itself is a part of reality. You can know with absolute certainty that you are conscious, and that your consciousness has a variety of qualia. You are looking at light gray lines on a dark gray background. As you read these words, you are sounding them out in your head, in a way that is kind of like hearing them, but not quite. It may be impossible to directly know the true nature of the computer screen, or even if the computer screen exists, but you do know with absolute certainty that you are experiencing perceptions as if there is a computer screen in front of you.

Abstract Painting 599 by Gerhard Richter. You may not know what it is supposed to represent, but you know that you are perceiving colors and textures.

But our direct perceptions are only an infinitesimally small part of reality. In order to know anything about the rest of it, we need to be content with the representations of it we create in our minds. The question then becomes, what makes some representations of reality better than others? What does it mean for a representation to be true?

The place to start is the fact that Reality obeys the law of non-contradiction. Something that is real cannot be both true and false at the same time. See the previous entry in the series, Existence and Natures. Now you may wonder if that is true. After all, if we both look at a ball, and it looks blue to me, but it looks green to you, isn't that a contradiction? No, because my perception takes place in my brain, and your perception takes place in your brain. Neither of our perceptions is the ball. The ball is itself. The ball reflects the wavelengths of light that it does, which just happens to look different to you than it does to me because our cognitions work a little differently.

Because Reality obeys the law of non-contradiction, we can apply logic to the information brought to us by our senses. It is true that the models of reality we create are not themselves reality, they are only models. But if a model accounts for the information we get from our senses, and it does not contradict itself in any way, that is enough to say the model is true. And if the model makes predictions for new information you would get through your senses in the right circumstances, and you create an experiment to test those predictions, that increases the certainty that the model is true. You may find this familiar; after all, it is the scientific method as it is taught in grade school.

Today we learned that even though it is impossible to know reality directly except for the small fraction of reality that is your own perception, that doesn't mean reality is forever out of our reach. Reality is governed by logic, and we can know logic. So if we have models of reality in our minds, and the logic that describes the models is the same logic that describes reality, then we say that we know that part of reality. If a concept or belief has the same logical structure as the real thing it describes, that is what it means to be true.

What is Knowledge?

What does it mean to know something? We have this thing in our head called knowledge, which is a collection of notions about the world and how it works, and which helps us to act in ways that make sense. But we know that it is possible to be wrong, and wrong knowledge is not knowledge at all, but false belief. At this point in history, when we are waking up from our intellectual bubbles and seeing all the different views people have, many of which seem to go against common sense, it seems like a good idea to take a look at knowledge and find out what it is and how it works.

When we are children, knowledge is simple. Our parents and other people we trust tell us things, and we believe them. For the purpose of this discussion, I will call this method radical credulity. Of course, now that we are older, we understand that this way of thinking lets incorrect ideas in just as easily as correct ones. This is one reason we keep our kids in safe environments with trustworthy people.

A simple method to filter out ideas that are probably incorrect from ideas that are probably correct is to believe things that are reliably useful. This is called pragmatism. How do we know the Earth is more sphere-like than flat? Because treating the Earth as a sphere gets our airplanes to their destinations, while treating it as flat does not. The pragmatist view is that we believe things that let us reliably predict the consequences of our actions, so that we can effectively do what we are trying to do. It’s as the old defense of the scientific method says: we believe it because it works.

But pragmatism has its shortcomings. For example, most of the time, we live as if the Earth is flat, so there is not usually any problem with believing it to be so. However, there are circumstances where this belief could be catastrophic. Of course the pragmatist will say that we should treat the Earth as flat or round depending on the situation, and the real truth of its shape doesn’t matter. However, for many of us, it isn’t good enough to believe things because they are useful; we want to believe things because they are justifiably true, and pragmatism does not do this for us.

In the middle of the last century, psychologist Jean Piaget came up with a theory of knowledge called constructivism, which says we don’t simply acquire knowledge, we create it as a logical network. When we hear a new claim, we evaluate it by how well it fits with what we already know, and if we find no contradictions, we add it to the network. If we do find a contradiction, we either toss it out or reevaluate the belief that it conflicts with. Right away, we see something in constructivism that was missing from radical credulity and pragmatism: logic. The beliefs we hold are connected to each other by threads of non-contradiction.

However, as we all know, it is possible to have beliefs that are false. Adding a new belief that doesn’t conflict with a false belief doesn’t help us come to the truth. One way to attempt to rectify this is to take the beliefs that we are most confident and passionate about as an immutable foundation, and build our knowledge of the world around them. In philosophy lingo, these beliefs are called basic beliefs.

Of course, if people just take whatever they please as basic beliefs, we will find people with all kinds of beliefs that contradict each other’s, and they’ll stubbornly yell at each other until they’re blue in the face. Faced with this problem philosophers sought what could be called properly basic beliefs, truths which are so obvious and undeniable that it is impossible for them to be false. DesCartes famously took his own existence to be properly basic, and the philosophy of empiricism holds the validity of logic, mathematics, and observation as such.

Unfortunately, we run into another problem: we cannot agree on what beliefs should count as properly basic! Take any belief that is proposed as properly basic, and you will be able to find people who doubt it. Mathematics? Can be doubted. Objective reality? Can be doubted. “I think, therefore I am”? Can be doubted! What’s more, since properly basic beliefs are supposed to be the foundation upon which all other knowledge is constructed, the only argument that can be made for a belief to be properly basic is, “can’t you see it’s obvious?” Not exactly up to academic standards!

In the absence of anything that could justifiably be called properly basic, we might, with heavy heart, be tempted to conclude that knowledge is, in fact, impossible, and that everything is just mights and maybes. This is a pessimistic outlook, and not one most of us are comfortable with. In order to avoid it, we might choose a basic belief on radical credulity, usually called “faith” in this context. Or we might revert to pragmatism, and choose a belief that has proved reliable time and again as our basic belief.

I, however, subscribe to a third option, and that is to view knowledge in terms of probabilities instead of just yes or no. Although it may be impossible to know anything with a justified certainty of 100% with an infinite number of decimal places, we can be justifiably 90% certain, or 99.999% certain. We may not be able to calculate the numbers, but with practice we can guess the ballpark.

How is the level of certainty of a belief determined? By how well it connects into the knowledge network. Reality itself is one giant network where everything connects to everything else, so the larger a person’s knowledge network and the more interconnected it is, the more likely the beliefs in the network are to be true. To understand why, the jigsaw puzzle analogy is apt. When building a puzzle, there is a small chance that two pieces will fit, even though they don’t actually go together. But the chance that the same piece will fit incorrectly on two sides is much smaller. So to be sure you have the right piece, you want to try to connect it to the picture by more than one side. The chance of it being the right piece is even higher if there is a fourth piece connecting the two connecting pieces together, so that you have a square of four pieces. And the more pieces that can be added on to the connecting pieces, the higher the chance of each of them being the right piece.

Knowledge is like that, except there are plenty of extra pieces that don’t go to the puzzle, the chance of an incorrect connection is much higher, and the pieces can hook on to an arbitrarily large number of other pieces, which don’t have to be right next to each other. The knowledge puzzle also gets scaled up to more complex levels. With knowledge, you can have two packages of tightly-knit beliefs, but these packages only have a few connections between them. Imagine two balls of string connected to each other by three threads. Each ball is tightly connected, so they each individually have a high chance of being true, but their connection to each other is tenuous. If you discover that the two packages of beliefs contradict each other, either by learning something new or by thinking about them both in new ways, then you might have to make the tough decision to let one of them go.

When a contradiction is found between two sets of beliefs that one has, it is called cognitive dissonance, and depending on the complexity of the beliefs in question, as well as how attached we are to them, it can manifest as a physical headache. We instinctively want to get rid of the cognitive dissonance as quickly as possible. There are two ways to do this. The first, is to commit to whichever beliefs are most important to you, taking them, at least temporarily, as basic beliefs. The second takes longer, but it leaves you in a more stable place, and that is to take apart each package of beliefs and reevaluate them in the broader context of your total knowledge network, and by learning about the relevant topics from a variety of external sources.

A mind well-practiced in the art of knowledge construction will take time every so often to reevaluate the pieces of their knowledge network, to make sure it all fits together properly. There are many techniques to this, which we explore on this blog in the “Toolbelt of Knowledge” series.

There is still one teeny tiny issue with constructivism without basic beliefs, which you may have picked up on. Constructivism itself is a model, a sub-network of nodes within the larger network of a person’s knowledge. In particular, the belief that “the more solidly integrated a belief is within the network, the more likely it is to be true,” is itself a node in the network. This means that it must be subject to the same reevaluation process as everything else, or be taken as properly basic on faith.

But we don’t do that kind of faith here at SciFic. As you know if you’ve read “The Limit of Philosophy,” we prefer to race headlong into the trippy world of metalogic. So what happens when we allow ourselves to doubt the very method we use to determine what is true? Well, we just do the same thing we do with everything else: evaluate it. If it does not measure up to its own standards, then we get rid of it. If it is self-consistent, and we don’t have any alternative methods that are more self-consistent than this one, then we might as well use it. But one last question: why should we use self-consistency as a measure for whether a method of determining truth is valid? Because, as human beings, we are psychologically driven toward consistency. Of course, that’s not a logical reason, but remember, the most fundamental question is not “what is true?” but “what should we do?” and our action is driven by our unconscious psychology rather than logic.

As children, we are told all kinds of claims, which we accept on radical credulity. Then, we evaluate new things by a combination of how useful they are and how well they integrate into our networks of knowledge. A mature, practiced thinker will not take any claim as foundational, but evaluate and reevaluate every part of their network by how well it connects with the rest. That is knowledge.

The Stigma Against Being Wrong

When it comes to knowing things, we like to be right. We give praise to people who have lots of knowledge, and ridicule those who hold false beliefs. We feel it is our duty to correct them, because we feel it is wrong for people to believe false things. In fact, we use the same word, “wrong,” that we use to describe evil actions.

Why do we do this? Why do we feel so strongly that everyone should believe the truth, or at least as much of the truth as we feel should be obvious? Perhaps we believe that they must have based their beliefs on faulty reasoning, and by using that same reasoning they’ll fall prey to con artists and propaganda. Perhaps it is because we fear their false beliefs will cause them to hurt people. Perhaps it is because we care about them and don’t want them living in delusion. Part of it is certainly because we are afraid that our own beliefs might not be as well-grounded as we think, and the more people who agree with us, the more comfortable we can be with those beliefs.

Regardless, we treat having false beliefs as an abnormal condition that must be corrected. However, this stigma does more harm than good. Other people are as certain in their beliefs as we are in ours, and instead of seeing the truth in our words, they think we are the ones who need correcting. This leads to closed minds and hostility, and leaves us worse off than when we started.

To avoid this, to have good relationships and work productively together, we need to recognize that if someone believes something that is not true, it does not make them a bad person. If someone has the wrong idea of God or insists that the Earth is flat, it’s not that big a deal. Let them believe what they believe. The world is big enough for the both of you. No one believes only true things. We are all full of bias and assumptions. We are human, and what we really need is to be respected, not pressured to conform our beliefs to someone else’s expectations.

There is a time and place for everything.The time to debate facts with reason and evidence is when both parties come to the table with open minds, ready to think about things in new ways. This means you have to be willing to listen to them too, and change your mind if they present a good enough argument.

There are also times when a person’s convictions must be challenged, like when they believe God told them to kill someone. The line between false beliefs that are tolerable and those that are not is when they cause the person holding them to neglect their responsibilities. What exactly counts as a responsibility is debatable, but many of the things we argue about, like the compatibility of science and religion, are not even close.

This message is as much for me as for anyone. When I hear someone say biological evolution doesn’t happen, or universal basic income is socialism, or global warming is a hoax, I get mad. A few weeks ago, after I started writing this, I made a fiery reply to someone’s facebook post about multiverses. Reflecting on it afterward, I wondered if I was qualified to speak about being tolerant of others’ beliefs. However, I’ve realized that respectfully allowing others to be wrong is important enough that it’s worth saying, even if I’m not a shining exemplar of it.

Resolutions of Truth

In his Ted Talk, cognitive scientist Donald Hoffman talks about how he and his associates did many simulation experiments where they created a variety of virtual worlds and creatures to inhabit them, and ran them forward using Evolutionary algorithms. They found that, with natural selection, the trait of seeing the world as it was went extinct, and fitness won out every time. Hoffman suggests that we see our world like a computer desktop, an interface full of icons that help us interact with the world, but are completely different from the objective parts of reality they represent.

Life evolves to see the world in ways that are useful, not in ways that are true.

We already know that the Universe is different from how we see it. The Earth looks flat, but it is really more like a sphere. Solid objects seem like continuous matter, but really they are made of atoms, which are mostly empty space. Planets seem to follow Newton’s idea of gravity as a force, but as Einstein discovered, objects in space really take as close to a straight path as possible in curved space-time. Hoffman’s idea, however, is more like what I discussed in Representational Realism, where reality-in-itself is fundamentally different from anything we can imagine, because the act of constructing a picture in our minds is automatically at least one step removed from reality itself.

In their public conversation, Michael Shermer of the Skeptics Society and professor of psychology Jordan Peterson discussed Hoffman’s interpretation of an icon-based perception of the world. They disagreed slightly with his interpretation, because our perceptions and mental pictures inform us to some degree of what will happen when we interact with them. Thus, it is not correct to say that the icons we see are nothing like reality, but they are versions of the truth at a low-resolution.

This fits with my own experience, and I presume the experiences of most people as they progress through life. In our quest for nobler purpose and deeper truth, we keep finding that the truth as we see it is not entirely correct, and that some nuance at the edges of it speak of something more complex. We continually find ourselves looking closer at things we thought we understood, only to find new insights about them that cause them to make even more sense and explain things more thoroughly.

As reality pertains to the human experience, the lowest resolution is one of stories. We see how the patterns in the world and our lives line up with the archetypes buried in our unconscious minds—or how they deviate in tragic or amusing ways. At a slightly higher resolution, the world is made of agents of choice,* people with free will who craft the future through effort and action. At a higher resolution, we find deterministic biology and physics, with organs, neurons, and fluid systems performing their tasks like clockwork. And at the highest resolution known to humankind, we find probabilistic quantum physics, where two systems that start out exactly the same can end up differently, but with well-defined probabilities for each. That might be the highest resolution, or there might be more layers hidden beneath it. No one knows.

You might wonder, as we come to understand higher and higher resolutions of truth, if there is any reason to look at the world in the lower resolution pictures. Shouldn’t we just go with the clearest, most in-depth understanding of reality, and throw out the naive views we had before? I’ll answer that question with another question: is it better to look at a map of the world, to walk along a beach, or to examine a handful of sand? All of the layers are important, because every time we peer closer, we lose a little of the big picture. What I’m saying is that reality comes in layers. At one level, physics is probabilistic, but at a large enough scale, it behaves deterministically. At one level, human beings have free will and the power to make the future, and at another level we act out our archetypal instincts like actors on a stage. All of these pictures are true, and we find the richest, fullest understanding and engagement with the human experience by taking all of them seriously.

*I am actually not sure what order free will and archetypes come in. It may be that free will is sandwiched between telling stories at a lower resolution, and acting out archetypal instincts at a higher resolution. I left the main text as it is, though, because its lower-resolution explanation gets my point across nicely, while this higher-resolution explanation in the footnote would bog it down.