The Philosophy of Everything 2e — Part II, Ch 5: The Nature of Reality

You have never seen the world, only a screen behind your eyes. Underneath it is a room that hands back everything you put into it, in its own time, with no one adding mercy.

In brief: This is where the book turns from how we know to what is actually there. In this chapter I pull apart three layers that blur together every day. There is the private screen behind your own eyes, the shared operating system your culture installed in you, and the reality underneath both, which cares about neither. I also say plainly what reality is like. It is not on your side, and it is not against you. Most needless suffering, I think, comes from mixing up the three.

What I had been calling reality, for most of my life, was the small lit screen reality arrived on. The screen sat behind my eyes. The screen was where the world came to me. I thought the screen was the world. It was not the world. It was the world after the world had passed through the machinery I described in an earlier chapter. It had come through the senses, through the brain's editing, and through the mind's old habit of taking what it was handed and not bothering to look.

What I started to see, slowly, was that there were three things to keep separate, even though they blurred together every day. There was what only one person could see: the screen-on-the-inside that nobody else has ever looked at. There was the larger picture that several of us could check together, when many of us compared notes. And underneath both, indifferent to either, there was what was actually there. Three layers. Each laid over the one beneath. Each easy to mistake for the others. The next thing I had to figure out was how to tell them apart.

Before I describe the three layers, one thing about reality itself, said straight, because everything that follows depends on it.

Reality is not a friend. Reality is also not an enemy. It is not on your side, and it is not against you. It is more like an empty room through which everything that happens has to pass. It is a medium without qualities of its own, something that things pass through the way sound passes through air. It does not care whether the news arriving is good or bad. It does not pause when you cry. It does not hurry when you are in a rush. It is neither judgemental nor kind. It just runs the consequences. Think of what you put into the room: your thoughts, your words, your actions. The old word for all of these is karma. It all comes back to you in its own time, with no editor in between adding mercy. The room does not love you. The room does not hate you. The room is a room. Your job is to be careful about what you put into it.

And the room is the same room for stones and starlings as it is for human beings. Reality does not switch off between worlds. The same arrangement underwrites a galaxy and a grasshopper and the conversation you had with someone last night. It holds up all three from underneath. Most of what I want to say in the rest of this book is built on that one stubborn point.

This was a hard thing for me to absorb. I had spent a long time assuming the room was somehow on my side. Letting that assumption go was not pleasant. The relief that came afterwards was not the kind of relief I had expected. It was the small sober relief of a person who had stopped waiting for someone else to do the work, and had started doing it himself.

And one observation about how the room operates, which the rest of this book will keep returning to. In the natural world, the arrangements that hold up over time are the ones where two parties are both getting something out of being together. A bee carries pollen and gets food in exchange. The tree is fed and its young get carried somewhere new. The two arrangements feed each other. They keep going. Then there is the other kind of arrangement, where one party is taking what the other party needs without giving anything back. It eventually collapses. The taker runs out of takers. The host dies. Both sides lose.

People who behave as parasites towards the rest of the world, on the long view, are not getting away with anything. They are just slower to notice the bill. The old word for the two-sided arrangement is mutualism, and I will come back to it in later chapters. The shape of every arrangement that survives, in the end, is mutualism. The shape of every arrangement that does not survive is something else. This is not a moral claim. It is a description of what the room turns out to allow.

So, with that said, I have two things in hand. There is reality as a neutral medium that runs the consequences for everything inside it. And there is the long arc bending towards arrangements where both sides win. Now let me walk through the three layers.

The first layer is the one only you can see. The screen on the inside.

The cleanest way I have found to think about it is to think of the device almost everyone has in their pocket. A smartphone. The phone is a piece of hardware. The same model leaves the factory in the millions, each unit identical at the moment it is boxed. But the moment you turn yours on, your phone starts to drift away from every other phone of its model. You sign in. You install your apps. You pick your wallpaper. You silence some notifications and allow others. Five years later, no other phone in the world has the same screen as yours. The hardware is the same. The display is yours.

This is a useful picture for the inside of a head. There is the hardware (the brain, the senses, the body), which is roughly the same in every member of our species. There is the screen on top of it, which is what each of us actually looks at when we look out at the world. The screen is built by three things, stacked on each other. Together they account for almost every difference between two human beings looking at the same situation.

The first thing on the screen is what came with the device. The default themes. The factory settings. Every human being is born with a set of innate tendencies. These are the urges that came pre-installed by the species, mostly aimed at keeping the body alive long enough to make another body. The urge to eat. The urge to mate. The urge to protect what is yours. The urge to fight off what is threatening. The urge, dressed up in many languages, to look out for number one before looking out for anyone else (and number one is always yourself). These are the defaults. You did not pick them at the store. The species picked them, over millions of years, because brains with these settings made it through and brains without them did not.

The settings are useful. The settings are also narrow. They produce a view of the world in which the self is the centre of the universe and everyone else is, at best, a resource. We are all born with this view, and in early life it looks the same in everyone. The view is the species' opening offer. The work of becoming a person, in part, is to grow out of it.

I lived inside the default settings for a long time without knowing I was inside them. I thought my preference for myself, and for the people who looked roughly like me, over strangers, was a taste I had developed thoughtfully. It was not. It was the species' opening offer, running quietly in the background of every decision, while I called it my own. Most adults are walking around inside the same situation and never notice. You have to look closely at your own reflexes: what you reach for first, who you flinch from (pull back from without thinking), what you would do if no one were watching. Only then can you begin to see which of them are yours and which are the manufacturer's.

The second thing on the screen is what was customised, over time, by everyone who got near you while the customising was still possible. Acquired conditioning. Acquired means picked up after you were born. Conditioning means the habits of seeing and feeling that other people train into you. The themes you grew up around, in your house, in your school, in your village or your city or the corner of the internet where you spent your afternoons. Some of this conditioning is positive. It is the teacher who told you that you could do hard things. It is the grandmother who showed you what patience looked like. It is the friend who pointed out a kindness you had not noticed in yourself.

Some of it is negative. You may have grown up around adults who continuously said poisonous things about a community across the river, or across the ocean, or across the road. As a child you had no way to push back. The poison settled into you without your knowing. By the time you were old enough to question, the poison felt like part of your own thinking. Even now, as an adult, you may have to catch yourself flinching at people you have never met. It happens because of stories you absorbed before you were old enough to refuse them. None of this was your fault. All of it is now yours to fix.

Some of what I once mistook for my own taste turned out, on inspection, to be the taste of whoever had got to me first. The work of getting rid of acquired conditioning has to be done on purpose, slowly, over years. It is some of the most important work a person can do in a life.

The third thing on the screen is the consequence of what you have already done. Past karma. The phone has a global setting, such as dark mode (the setting that turns a bright screen dark). Once it is turned on, it recolours every app on the system. The icons change. The notifications change. The reading experience changes in every direction. Your past actions are this kind of setting in a life.

A loan you took five years ago shapes every decision you make today, whether you remember the loan or not. A friendship you broke shapes how you treat the next person who reaches for you. A cruelty you offered, once, sits inside you, and tilts the next encounter without your permission. Past karma is the dark mode of a human life. It colours every app you are running. Most of the people who feel stuck in a life they did not choose are people whose past karma is doing more of the directing than they realise. They have not yet sat down to look at the settings menu.

The bad karmas do not have to be permanent. They can be revised, or at least repaid. Sometimes the world does the revising for you. It might be the loud collision with a wall that forces you to question what you had been doing. It might be the prison stay, or the marriage that fell apart. It might be the night you walked home alone and could not pretend any longer that what you had been doing was working. The shock makes the dark mode visible. You see, for the first time, what had been colouring everything. Then the choice is yours. You can revise the settings. You can install the patch, the small repair a phone downloads to fix what has gone wrong. Or you can refuse, walk back into the same dark mode, and run the same life again, until the next collision, and the next. Most of the suffering I have watched in my own life and around me is the suffering of people who keep refusing the patch.

Take these three together: the defaults you were born with, the conditioning that was poured into you by everyone who got to you first, and the consequences of what you have already done. They are what each of us is actually walking around looking at, instead of the world. The three do not stay in their separate boxes. They mix. The mixing produces much more than three subjectivities, three private ways of seeing. It produces a whole spectrum of them. No two people stand at the same point on the spectrum. A piece of acquired conditioning gets rebranded as an innate tendency: "I am just that kind of person." A piece of past karma is mistaken for a default of the species: "anyone would do what I did, in my situation." Most of the work of being a careful person is the patient sorting of which is which, and the willingness to update the device when the sort comes out wrong.

If the screen on the inside lines up with what is actually there, the days work. If it does not, the days do not work, and the unhappiness can last to the end of a life. The original word for that condition was destitution, and the word is not too strong. Destitution means being left with nothing. The screen is yours. The world is not the screen. Anyone who tells you the screen is the world is asking you to live inside something very small.

The second layer was harder for me to see, because everyone around me was using the same screen, and the agreement looked, from inside, like reality itself.

If your screen is the apps, your customisations, your dark mode, the operating system is what runs underneath all that. It is the system you share with everyone using the same kind of phone you are. People who grew up Christian look at the world through one operating system. People who grew up Hindu look through another. People who grew up Muslim through a third. People who grew up with no religion at all are still running on an operating system. It is just one assembled from the secular (non-religious) and commercial pieces of the time and place they were born into. Same hardware underneath. Different system installed on top. The system is what decides which apps come pre-loaded, which ones look familiar, which ones the device will let you uninstall.

What goes in the operating system is what philosophers sometimes call objective truth, but in a much wider sense. It holds the customs, the languages, the foods, the music, the holidays, the moral assumptions, and the stories about where the world came from and where it is going. Most of this you absorbed before you could speak. You did not pick the language you dream in. You did not pick the gods of your household. You did not pick the songs you find comforting. They came installed. Other people running the same system find the same things obvious. People running a different system find them strange.

This is fine, as far as it goes. There is nothing wrong with operating systems. We need them. We could not live next to each other without them. The trouble is what happens to the operating system over time. A good system gets updated. New information comes in. The world changes. The system patches itself to stay useful. The bad systems refuse the update. They run on, year after year, century after century, on assumptions that have stopped being true.

This is, more than anything else, what is wrong with most organised religion. The books in these systems were written down in a particular century, and after that nobody was allowed to edit them. Their followers were told that the books were the work of an all-knowing being and could not be improved on, ever. So the books stayed exactly as they had been, while the world they were meant to describe kept moving. The rivers kept flowing. The species kept evolving. The diseases once thought of as punishments turned out to be bacteria. The thunder turned out to be electricity. The stars stopped being divine messengers and turned into nuclear furnaces. The old explanations got steadily disproved. The books, still nailed to the year they were written, stayed exactly where they had been. A whole-software-update worth of new knowledge sat outside the door, and the followers were told not to let it in.

I want to put one question to anyone who still defends this arrangement. If God meant for human beings to have a book that never changes, He could have made a world that never changes. He did not. He made (if there is a He at all) a world in which the rivers flow, the birds fly, the sun sets every evening, and every person born on the planet ages and dies. Everything in the universe comes into existence, grows, decays, and is recycled into something else. Nothing stands still. So why is the book the one thing that should? God alone knows the logic behind keeping a book unchanged while keeping the world changing.

The pattern is not only religious. We have a smaller version of it in our food. For most of human history, food was scarce and the next meal was not guaranteed. The species developed, sensibly, a strong urge to overeat whenever overeating was possible. The urge is hardwired. The hardware was good for a world in which the next meal might be a week away. Today, in most of the cities of the world, the next meal is twenty feet away, twenty-four hours a day. The hardware has not noticed. We are an overweight species inside an environment of plenty, and the operating system has not been updated. The result is most of the chronic illness of the modern world. Doctors would put this a little differently, I know. They count overeating as one big cause among several, with poor-quality food, smoking, drink, too little movement and polluted air all doing their share.

The fix is not very mysterious. It is updating the system: eating like a person who has access to the next meal, not like a person who might not. But the system resists. Old patterns prefer their old groove. We have to override the default on purpose, with conscious work, every day, for the rest of our lives. Most people do not bother. The illness then arrives on schedule.

The same is true of every social pattern that has not been examined in too long. The hatreds across borders. The hierarchies inside families. The treatment of one kind of person as worth more than another. All of these were operating-system assumptions, installed somewhere in the past for reasons that may once have made some sense, and never updated. We carry them around because nobody told us we were allowed to update them, and because updating them is uncomfortable. The discomfort is the price. Without paying it, the system runs out of date forever.

The honest signal of a working philosophical system, by the way, is that it never claims to be finished. The people who put it together are still working on it. They expect that what they have written will be improved on by people who come after them. They do not promise final answers. They promise a procedure that will keep producing answers as long as there are people willing to do the procedure. Anyone who promises you a never-changing answer, in a never-changing book, in a world that is changing every second of every day, is asking you to live in a museum.

The work, then, is to refuse to let your operating system go stale. To keep the patches coming. To accept that some of the apps you grew up with were good for their time and have to be retired now. To install new ones when the world hands you better information. None of this is disloyalty. It is the only honest way to be a person who has actually decided to live in this century instead of in a previous one. Anyone who keeps refusing the update is digging a grave inside a moving world, while the world moves on.

The third layer was the one I had the hardest time even thinking about, because it sits underneath everything the other two are doing.

Whatever your phone shows you, the hardware itself is the same. The battery, the processor, the memory, the way the circuit board is laid out: these are what they are, regardless of what is happening on the screen on top. If every phone in the world were smashed tonight, the underlying laws of physics that made a phone possible in the first place would still be true tomorrow. The hardware belongs to whoever has the phone. The laws underneath the hardware belong to nobody. Nobody owns them, nobody invented them, nobody can patch them.

Absolute reality is what is there underneath all of that. The thing that goes on whether or not anyone is watching. The thing that does not care which operating system you are running, what you have customised, or which dark mode you have switched on. The sun does not pause when you close your eyes. The galaxies do not freeze when human beings have a bad century. The atoms keep moving. The laws keep holding. This is the layer the rest of this book has to be honest about. Nothing in the other two layers really makes sense until you know what they are sitting on.

The trouble is that absolute reality is not something you can just walk up to and look at. Every time you try to look at it, you are looking through your own screen and through your own operating system. Every report you write about the world is a report from inside a particular head, with a particular history, running a particular system. Different observers will give different reports of the same thing, and they are not all lying. They are honestly reporting what their machinery shows them.

The work of getting closer to absolute reality is the slow work of comparing many honest reports. You look for what they have in common, and you treat that common ground as the most likely description of what is actually there. We will never get a final answer. We can get a better one than yesterday's. That is the most reality lets us have, and it is enough.

There is a way of approaching the thing that I had to learn, and it took me a while to get used to it. Most of us notice the look of a thing first. Then we ask what it is for. Then, much later if at all, we ask what makes this particular one of its kind not interchangeable with any other, so that nothing else could take its place. We notice the body first, the function second, the specific personality of the thing third. I described this order, in passing, when I was looking earlier at how the mind builds up ideas. That is the order in which the eye finds things. It is not the order in which things come into existence. Things come into existence in the reverse order. A cause produces an effect. The effect, under particular conditions, takes a particular form. The form is the last to arrive, not the first.

Take an ancient bird, two million years ago, on an island where the food has shifted. Seeds are now the main thing to eat. The bird that can crack seeds survives. The bird that cannot, does not. Generation by generation, the descendants of the survivors carry heavier, shorter beaks built for cracking. The beak did not come first. The behaviour did. The bird had to function differently to survive, and the body slowly arranged itself around the function over long stretches of time. The form (the beak) is what we see. The cause and the function are what produced it.

This is true of beaks. It is also true of bodies, including human bodies. The athlete's frame did not appear because the athlete decided to look like an athlete. The frame appeared because the person started behaving like an athlete and the body slowly arranged itself around the behaviour. The same is true of the body of someone who has spent twenty years eating without moving. The form is the consequence of the function, which is itself the consequence of the cause. Cause, effect, form. That is the order things actually run in.

This matters for absolute reality because it tells us where to look. If we want to understand what is underneath the visible world, we cannot start with the visible world. We have to start with what is causing it. And what is causing it turns out to be two things, not one. There is something unchanging that gives the rules. And there is something changing that follows the rules. The unchanging thing acts on the changing thing. The changing thing produces, under the actions of the unchanging, all the various forms we see around us. Two halves. Both ancient. The simplest names for them are the permanent and the altering: the part of reality that does not move and the part of reality that does.

Indian philosophy has names for this pair, going back thousands of years. Īśvara and Naśvara. Puruṣa and Prakṛti. Śiva and Śakti. In plain words, Īśvara is the one that rules and Naśvara is what perishes. Puruṣa is the still witness and Prakṛti is nature, always on the move. Śiva is the silent one and Śakti is power in motion. They are three different ways of pointing at the same observation. There is something that does not change, and something that does. The changing thing is what produces all the forms we are familiar with, under the laws of the unchanging thing. The pairings are old. The observation is older.

The picture I have come to find useful for holding all of this in one head is a football match. There is the playground: the space where everything happens, wide, neutral, neither favouring nor punishing either side. There are the rules of the game: fixed, unchanging, the same in every match ever played. And there are the two teams: potential and kinetic, the stored energy and the moving energy. They are the two ways the universe's one stuff arranges itself. The players run on the field, following the rules. They reach each other through what physicists call fields, which are particular parts of space where each kind of energy is at work on the other. Out of the interactions of the players, the whole match unfolds. The match is the universe. The galaxies, the trees, the people, this sentence: every one of these is a particular moment in the game.

Space is the playground. It is everywhere. It is not caused by anything. It is not changed by anything. It is the room in which everything else happens. It is large enough that energy can bend and curve inside it, and nothing can contain it, because containment is not its nature. I know most physicists today would put this differently. Since Einstein, they have treated space and time as one fabric that mass and energy can bend, and one that has been stretching ever since the Big Bang.

The eternal laws are the rules. They are the same in every part of the cosmos. They were not voted on by anyone. They cannot be amended. They are deeper and subtler than what we can see, known only by inference, which means by reasoning from what we can see. It is the way you know there are rules in a football game even if no one tells you, because the players keep behaving in patterns that have to be explained. They are like the code underneath every app the screen is showing you. They are invisible most of the time and perceivable only on careful inspection, but they are running every shape that appears on the surface. The energies (potential and kinetic) are the teams. The interactions of the energies, under the laws, in the space, produce all the forms we see. Form is what is on the field, the running and the colliding and the moving forward. The rules and the playground are what make the game possible. The teams are what give the game motion.

So absolute reality has these two halves. The unchanging: the laws, the rules. The changing: the energies, what they do. Together they produce everything else. We do not see the rules directly. We see them in their consequences. We do not see the energies directly either. We see them in their forms: in matter, in light, in motion, in life, in the person reading this page. Everything we touch, every body any of us has ever lived in, every word any of us has ever spoken, has been a particular arrangement of the two halves. It has been played out on the field of space, according to laws older than every story human beings have ever told about them.

One last thing before I go on, because this chapter has been about layers and it is easy to get lost between them.

The smartphone has hardware, has an operating system, has a customised screen. A human life has the absolute reality underneath, the objective reality of the systems we share, and the subjective reality on the inside of one head. The work, mostly, is knowing which of the three you are looking at in any given moment. When you are arguing with someone you love about whether last night's conversation went well, you are arguing about screens. When you are arguing with someone from a different country about what counts as a good society, you are arguing about operating systems. When you are watching a leaf fall from a tree and not thinking about anything in particular, you are sitting briefly next to the hardware. Most of the unnecessary suffering in human life comes from confusing the three. The remedy is to keep them separate inside your head. It is also to live in such a way that what you put into the room is what you would have wanted to come back to you.

Eight rules, as it turned out, doing all the work underneath the playground. And the energies those rules act on. Both came next.

Words to Keep

• metaphysics: the patient work of asking what is really there, which parts can be checked and which cannot, and how to live honestly with the rest.

• the room: reality pictured as an empty, neutral medium that everything passes through. It takes no side and simply runs the consequences.

• karma: your thoughts, your words and your actions, which come back to you in their own time, with no editor adding mercy.

• mutualism: an arrangement in which both sides gain from being together. In the long run, it is the only shape that survives.

• subjective reality: the first layer, the screen on the inside of one head, built from innate tendencies, acquired conditioning and past karma.

• innate tendencies: the factory settings of the species, the urges we are born with, mostly aimed at keeping the body alive and making another.

• acquired conditioning: the habits of seeing and feeling, good and bad, poured into you by everyone who reached you before you could question.

• past karma: the consequences of what you have already done, which colour every part of your life the way dark mode colours a phone.

• objective reality: the second layer, the operating system a group shares, with its customs, languages, foods, moral assumptions and stories.

• absolute reality: the third layer, what is actually there whether or not anyone is watching. We get closer to it only by comparing honest reports.

• cause, effect, form: the order in which things actually come into being. The form the eye notices first is the last to arrive.

• the permanent and the altering: the two halves of absolute reality, the unchanging laws that give the rules and the changing energies that follow them.

Sources and Further Reading

Most of this chapter comes from my own looking and thinking, not from any one book. These are the works and traditions it names or leans on.

• Aristotle, Metaphysics. The work that gave this branch of philosophy its name, though the title was given to it by later editors.

• Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species (1859). Natural selection, which sits behind the island bird whose beak follows its food, and behind the factory settings of the species.

• Īśvarakṛṣṇa, Sāṃkhyakārikā. The classic text of the Sāṃkhya school, where Puruṣa, the unchanging witness, and Prakṛti, ever-changing nature, are set side by side.

• The Śaiva and Śākta traditions of India, which pair Śiva, the still one, with Śakti, power in motion.

• The Indian teaching of karma: every thought, word and action comes back, in its own time, to the one who set it going.

• Ecology and the study of symbiosis, where mutualism names partnerships like the one between the bee and the tree.

• Albert Einstein, Relativity: The Special and the General Theory. His own plain account of the picture of space that most physicists hold today, mentioned in my note on space.