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| Reality Anchors in Your Mental Universe |
Reality Anchors in Your Mental Universe
The term reality anchor is used here to describe the most basic knowledge that you can use as a foundation for understanding and interpreting all other knowledge. The analogy is with the anchors that can be used to hold a ship in place during a storm. If your reality anchors in your mental universe are well deployed then you can have more confidence in your ability to think clearly and make sound decisions.
Mental anchors are not absolute, but provide the most reasonable and practical foundation for your thought processes. Your mental anchors should never be taken for granted. They should be checked periodically to see if they have served you well.
The term reality anchor is used here to describe the most basic knowledge that you can use as a foundation for understanding and interpreting all other knowledge. The analogy is with the anchors that can be used to hold a ship in place during a storm. If your reality anchors in your mental universe are well deployed then you can have more confidence in your ability to think clearly and make sound decisions.
Mental anchors are not absolute, but provide the most reasonable and practical foundation for your thought processes. Your mental anchors should never be taken for granted. They should be checked periodically to see if they have served you well.
What basic knowledge and concepts can you use as anchors? Which anchors can you count on in tough times and use with confidence to build more elaborate mental concepts? The search for this knowledge and these concepts has been pursued by philosophers for thousands of years. Whole libraries can be filled with detailed religious and philosophical discussions related to mental anchors. There may not be any ultimate or final conclusions to such discussions, but the following paragraphs provide some pragmatic guidelines for establishing your own mental anchors.
Anchor #1: You exist
How do you know that you are not just dreaming? You might be heavily sedated and locked in an insane asylum somewhere. Or you might be a simulated character in some bizarre alien computer game. To philosophers, this is the ‘problem of existence’. Parmenides of Elea (c500 BCE) claimed that simply to think of a concept gave that concept some semblance of existence. René Descartes (1596 – 1650), a French philosopher and mathematician, began his analysis of existence with the phrase, “I think, therefore I am.” Philosophers have not yet devised any absolute solution to the problem of existence, but you can develop a sense of your own basic mental state and use it as a mental anchor. Have confidence that you exist as an individual entity.
Anchor #2: You can think
You have the ability to consider, think, and act as an individual. This is a key idea and the whole focus of this book. For although you possess these abilities, you may not always use them effectively. If ‘You can think’ is to be one of your mental anchors, then you need to spend significant effort to train your brain and utilize your mind in an objective and analytic fashion.
To think clearly you need to be rested and nourished. Your brain needs a good supply of blood and oxygen. You need to ensure that your brain is not suffering from a physical injury or a psychiatric illness, and is free from drugs that might impair your thought processes.
Anchor #3: You can remember
Anchor #1: You exist
How do you know that you are not just dreaming? You might be heavily sedated and locked in an insane asylum somewhere. Or you might be a simulated character in some bizarre alien computer game. To philosophers, this is the ‘problem of existence’. Parmenides of Elea (c500 BCE) claimed that simply to think of a concept gave that concept some semblance of existence. René Descartes (1596 – 1650), a French philosopher and mathematician, began his analysis of existence with the phrase, “I think, therefore I am.” Philosophers have not yet devised any absolute solution to the problem of existence, but you can develop a sense of your own basic mental state and use it as a mental anchor. Have confidence that you exist as an individual entity.
Anchor #2: You can think
You have the ability to consider, think, and act as an individual. This is a key idea and the whole focus of this book. For although you possess these abilities, you may not always use them effectively. If ‘You can think’ is to be one of your mental anchors, then you need to spend significant effort to train your brain and utilize your mind in an objective and analytic fashion.
To think clearly you need to be rested and nourished. Your brain needs a good supply of blood and oxygen. You need to ensure that your brain is not suffering from a physical injury or a psychiatric illness, and is free from drugs that might impair your thought processes.
Anchor #3: You can remember
You can remember past events, and your memories are a guide to understanding present and future events. In your childhood you learned to walk, and talk, and a variety of other useful skills that you still remember. You can recognize people, places, and situations. In fact, you have an amazing ability to remember a tremendous amount of material related to your life’s experiences.
However, as a mental anchor your memories have to be used with some caution. Our memories are not the equivalent of video recordings of events. Instead, memories are your interpretative summaries of the information gathered by your senses. It is possible to train your memory to record more specific information related to events. For example, police officers are trained to observe and elicit specific details of what has happened at a crime scene, doctors are trained to observe specific physical characteristics of their patients, and scientists are trained to make precise observations and record the results.
You can support your mental memories by making external records of information – writing notes, taking photographs, and recording videos. You can run reliability tests on your memory by comparing your recollections with those of others you trust, or by comparing your memories with official records.
Anchor #4: You can test reality
You are always free to take information that you have encountered and compare that information with reality. (See section 2.2 for more on reality anchors.) Reality is not always easy to define, but if someone says, ‘Take two doses of this magic potion and you will be able to fly’, a quick reality check should tell you that something is wrong.
When other people describe events the way you would have described them, then you have reason to believe that your interpretation of the events matches reality. Of course you could all be wrong. Often the challenge is to separate observable reality from belief. Is a typhoid epidemic the result of God’s wrath, or polluted drinking water?
Sometimes the search for reality is deliberately obscured. For example, in a television game show called ‘The Family Feud’, the audience was polled before the on-air show began to determine their views on a variety of topics. Then the challenge of the contestants was not to provide information based on reality, but to determine the audience’s perception of reality. Many people make claims that are difficult to verify or disprove, except by referring to what is practical and reasonable. The more informed you are, the better able you are to make reality checks, and the more valuable this mental anchor becomes.
Anchor #5: You can search for cause-and-effect
Cause-and-effect is a philosophical approach to understanding why things happen the way they do. This approach requires a fundamental assumption that there is a reason, or an explanation, for the occurrence of an event. A cause-and-effect philosophy provides a powerful motive to organize your observations and to search for root causes so that you can begin to control the events that affect your life.
Questions such as: ‘If I do this, what will happen?’, ‘What makes the wind blow?’, and ‘Why is the sky blue?’ reflect the struggle, even at an early age, of virtually everyone to determine why the world works the way it does.
Unfortunately, cause-and-effect is not always easy to determine. There is a continuing debate among economists regarding the economic impact of raising or lowering taxes. The development of quantum mechanics was inspired by the struggle to establish cause-and-effect relationships at the atomic and nuclear levels.
Cause-and-effect can also be difficult to establish in everyday events. Some people seem to be luckier than others. Is there a reason for that luck, or is it just chance? Sports personalities often follow odd routines that supposedly bring them good luck:
they might wear their lucky socks, or pat a doorway five times to increase their chances of winning a competition. If it is possible that mere belief in a cause-andeffect connection can alter an athlete’s attitudes and motivations, then wearing a lucky hat could actually make a win more likely.
Cause-and-effect is particularly difficult to establish when there are a number of cofactors involved. For example, the successful baking of bread depends on the type of flour, the type and quantity of yeast, the amount of liquid, rising times, and baking time – so it can be difficult to determine why your bread does not taste the way it should.
Anchor #6: You can search for truth
Your determination to seek the truth is another valuable mental anchor in your quest for clear thinking. The emphasis here is on evaluating the correctness of communications directed to you by others.
Storytellers and actors earn their livings by convincing an audience that they are portraying an alternate reality. Tone of voice, facial expressions, and physical gestures are used to convey emotions. The literal meaning of words may constitute as little as ten percent of the information received by an audience.
Even the supposed factual content of a communication requires careful evaluation. A communication can be accurate or it can be exaggerated, distorted, erroneous, or completely fabricated. Conveying disinformation is a standard technique of espionage, politics, and marketing. Some people can lie convincingly, complete with appropriate body language and emotional expressions.
Perhaps the most fruitful and dependable approach for detecting truth is to establish an informal tally for the truth-value of communications from a given source. If, over time, the communications from a given source tend to match reality, then you can have higher confidence in the truth of future communications from that same source.
The more you already know about a topic, the harder it is for anyone to mislead or misinform you.
However, as a mental anchor your memories have to be used with some caution. Our memories are not the equivalent of video recordings of events. Instead, memories are your interpretative summaries of the information gathered by your senses. It is possible to train your memory to record more specific information related to events. For example, police officers are trained to observe and elicit specific details of what has happened at a crime scene, doctors are trained to observe specific physical characteristics of their patients, and scientists are trained to make precise observations and record the results.
You can support your mental memories by making external records of information – writing notes, taking photographs, and recording videos. You can run reliability tests on your memory by comparing your recollections with those of others you trust, or by comparing your memories with official records.
Anchor #4: You can test reality
You are always free to take information that you have encountered and compare that information with reality. (See section 2.2 for more on reality anchors.) Reality is not always easy to define, but if someone says, ‘Take two doses of this magic potion and you will be able to fly’, a quick reality check should tell you that something is wrong.
When other people describe events the way you would have described them, then you have reason to believe that your interpretation of the events matches reality. Of course you could all be wrong. Often the challenge is to separate observable reality from belief. Is a typhoid epidemic the result of God’s wrath, or polluted drinking water?
Sometimes the search for reality is deliberately obscured. For example, in a television game show called ‘The Family Feud’, the audience was polled before the on-air show began to determine their views on a variety of topics. Then the challenge of the contestants was not to provide information based on reality, but to determine the audience’s perception of reality. Many people make claims that are difficult to verify or disprove, except by referring to what is practical and reasonable. The more informed you are, the better able you are to make reality checks, and the more valuable this mental anchor becomes.
Anchor #5: You can search for cause-and-effect
Cause-and-effect is a philosophical approach to understanding why things happen the way they do. This approach requires a fundamental assumption that there is a reason, or an explanation, for the occurrence of an event. A cause-and-effect philosophy provides a powerful motive to organize your observations and to search for root causes so that you can begin to control the events that affect your life.
Questions such as: ‘If I do this, what will happen?’, ‘What makes the wind blow?’, and ‘Why is the sky blue?’ reflect the struggle, even at an early age, of virtually everyone to determine why the world works the way it does.
Unfortunately, cause-and-effect is not always easy to determine. There is a continuing debate among economists regarding the economic impact of raising or lowering taxes. The development of quantum mechanics was inspired by the struggle to establish cause-and-effect relationships at the atomic and nuclear levels.
Cause-and-effect can also be difficult to establish in everyday events. Some people seem to be luckier than others. Is there a reason for that luck, or is it just chance? Sports personalities often follow odd routines that supposedly bring them good luck:
they might wear their lucky socks, or pat a doorway five times to increase their chances of winning a competition. If it is possible that mere belief in a cause-andeffect connection can alter an athlete’s attitudes and motivations, then wearing a lucky hat could actually make a win more likely.
Cause-and-effect is particularly difficult to establish when there are a number of cofactors involved. For example, the successful baking of bread depends on the type of flour, the type and quantity of yeast, the amount of liquid, rising times, and baking time – so it can be difficult to determine why your bread does not taste the way it should.
Anchor #6: You can search for truth
Your determination to seek the truth is another valuable mental anchor in your quest for clear thinking. The emphasis here is on evaluating the correctness of communications directed to you by others.
Storytellers and actors earn their livings by convincing an audience that they are portraying an alternate reality. Tone of voice, facial expressions, and physical gestures are used to convey emotions. The literal meaning of words may constitute as little as ten percent of the information received by an audience.
Even the supposed factual content of a communication requires careful evaluation. A communication can be accurate or it can be exaggerated, distorted, erroneous, or completely fabricated. Conveying disinformation is a standard technique of espionage, politics, and marketing. Some people can lie convincingly, complete with appropriate body language and emotional expressions.
Perhaps the most fruitful and dependable approach for detecting truth is to establish an informal tally for the truth-value of communications from a given source. If, over time, the communications from a given source tend to match reality, then you can have higher confidence in the truth of future communications from that same source.
The more you already know about a topic, the harder it is for anyone to mislead or misinform you.
