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Before I left, I could not see the point of continually towing a log

also pulled out the large scale charts. Wisdom, real wisdom, would be to throw them all overboard, to avoid the temptation of closing with the coast to give word via a ship or a fisherman in the dangerous Bass Strait between Australia and Tasmania.

There were no compasses on the Gulf of Siam junks, and I did not want it used during my sailing school cruises in the Mediterranean. Instead of bearing 110° from France to Corsica my crew had to steer with the mistral swell very slightly off the port quarter. At night, it was the Pole Star one small hand abaft the port beam. And if there was neither distinct swell nor star, we made do with whatever we had. I wanted it that way, because concentrating on a magnetized needle prevents one from participating in the real universe, seen and unseen, where a sailboat moves.

land is so far away compared to the questions the stars are asking me. I can only give them my first log, with birds, sea, daily sights and little everyday problems. My real log is written in the sea and sky; it can’t be photographed and given to others. It has gradually come to life out of all that has surrounded us for months: the sounds of water on the hull, the sounds of wind gliding on the sails, the silences full of secret things between my boat and me, like the times I spent as a child listening to the forest talk.

When I step into the cockpit to fill my lungs and talk with the sea, I leave the harness in the pocket, because I keep hold of the cabin hatch cover then, eyes and ears everywhere at once for erratic breaking seas, ready to open the hatch and jump inside to safety. A second and a half is all I need to open the cover, step through the hatch, quickly flop down on the inside steering seat and slam the hatch over my head, pulling down hard so that the neoprene seal fits tight all around. With the harness I would feel less mobile. And there is something else . . . the intimate participation with things around me. The harness would only link me to some steel cleat, not to the rest.

A bad blow, if the camera had let me down. It has become a real friend. I believe it helped me to see things that I may not have seen as clearly on my own, during the voyage.

I feel a dangerous urge to go out on the bowsprit pulpit . . . I don’t dare go beyond the staysail: it marks the farthest limit of good sense. In surfing, water is no longer water, but rock.

I ate nothing this morning, nothing at noon. Not from laziness or nerves; I just didn’t feel like it. Penguins and seals go for long periods without food in the mating season, other animals do the same in the great migrations. And deep within himself man may carry the same instinct to leave food aside, as animals do in the solemn moments of their lives.

There is no standard of greater or lesser satisfaction other than individual judgments of value, different for various people and for the same people at various times. What makes a man feel uneasy and less uneasy is established by him from the standard of his own will and judgment, from his personal and subjective valuation. Nobody is in a position to decree what should make a fellow man happier.

There are for man only two principles available for a mental grasp of reality, namely, those of teleology and causality. What cannot be brought under either of these categories is absolutely hidden to the human mind.

The aspect from which history arranges and assorts the infinite multiplicity of events is their meaning. The only principle which it applies for the systemization of its objects—men, ideas, institutions, social entities, and artifacts—is meaning affinity

The state of absolute perfection must be conceived as complete, final, and not exposed to any change. Change could only impair its perfection and transform it into a less perfect state; the mere possibility that a change can occur is incompatible with the concept of absolute perfection. But the absence of change—i.e., perfect immutability, rigidity and immobility—is tantamount to the absence of life. Life and perfection are incompatible, but so are death and perfection.

It is nonsensical to fight the racial hypothesis by negating obvious facts. It is vain to denv that up to now certain races have contributed nothing or very little to the development of civilization and can, in this sense, be called inferior.

Acting man chooses between various opportunities offered for choice. He prefers one alternative to others. It is customary to say that acting man has a scale of wants or values in his mind when he arranges his actions. On the basis of such a scale he satisfies what is of higher value, i.e., his more urgent wants, and leaves unsatisfied what is of lower value, i.e., what is a less urgent want. There is no objection to such a presentation of the state of affairs. However, one must not forget that the scale of values or wants manifests itself only in the reality of action. These scales have no independent existence apart from the actual behavior of individuals. The only source from which our knowledge concerning these scales is derived is the observation of a man's actions. Every action is always in perfect agreement with the scale of values or wants because these scales are nothing but an instrument for the interpretation of a man's acting.

Any examination of ultimate ends turns out to be purely subjective and therefore arbitrary.

Neither is value in words and in doctrines. It is reflected in human conduct. It is not what a man or groups of men say about value that counts, but how they act.

A judgment of value does not measure, it arranges in a scale of degrees, it grades. It is expressive of an order of preference and sequence, but not expressive of measure and weight. Only the ordinal numbers can be applied to it, but not the cardinal numbers.

A statement is probable if our knowledge concerning its content is deficient. We do not know everything which would be required for a definite decision between true and not true. But, on the other hand, we do know something about it; we are in a position to say more than simply non liquet or ignoramus.

Class probability means: We know or assume to know, with regard to the problem concerned, everything about the behavior of a whole class of events or phenomena; but about the actual singular events or phenomena we know nothing but that they are elements of this class.

It is, furthermore, impossible to substitute other people's work for that of the creators. If Dante and Beethoven had not existed, one would not have been in a position to produce the Divina Commedia or the Ninth Symphony by assigning other men to these tasks. Neither society nor single individuals can substantially further the genius and his work. The highest intensity of the “demand” and the most peremptory order of the government are ineffectual. The genius does not deliver to order.

Only the human mind that directs action and production is creative. The mind too appertains to the universe and to nature; it is a part of the given and existing world. To call the mind creative is not to indulge in any metaphysical speculations. We call it creative because we are at a loss to trace the changes brought about by human action farther back than to the point at which we are faced with the intervention of reason directing human activities. Production is not something physical, natural, and external; it is a spiritual and intellectual phenomenon. Its essential requisites are not human labor and external natural forces and things, but the decision of the mind to use these factors as means for the attainment of ends. What produces the product is not toil and trouble in themselves, but the fact that the toilers are guided by reason. The human mind alone has the power to remove uneasiness.

The questions whether society or the individual is to be considered as the ultimate end, and whether the interests of society should be subordinated to those of the individuals or the interests of the individuals to those of society are fruitless. Action is always action of individual men. The social or societal element is a certain orientation of the actions of individual men. The category end makes sense only when applied to action.

A Critique of the Holistic and Metaphysical View of Society According to the doctrines of universalism, conceptual realism, holism, collectivism, and some representatives of Gestaltpsychologie, society is an entity living its own life, independent of and separate from the lives of the various individuals, acting on its own behalf and aiming at its own ends which are different from the ends sought by the individuals. Then, of course, an antagonism between the aims of society and those of its members can emerge. In order to safeguard the flowering and further development of society it becomes necessary to master the selfishness of the individuals and to compel them to sacrifice their egoistic designs to the benefit of society. At this point all these holistic doctrines are bound to abandon the secular methods of human science and logical reasoning and to shift to theological or metaphysical professions of faith. They must assume that Providence, through its prophets, apostles, and charismatic leaders, forces men who are constitutionally wicked, i.e., prone to pursue their own ends, to walk in the ways of righteousness which the Lord or Weltgeist or history wants them to walk.

The principle of majority rule or government by the people as recommended by liberalism does not aim at the supremacy of the average or common man. It certainly does not mean, as some critics assert, the advocacy of the rule of the mean, of the lowbred, of the domestic barbarians. The liberals too believe that a nation should be ruled by those best fitted for this task. But they believe that a man's ability to rule proves itself better by convincing his fellow-citizens than by using force upon them. There is, of course, no guarantee that the voters will entrust office to the most competent candidate. But no other system could offer such a guarantee. If the majority of the nation is committed to unsound principles and prefers unworthy office-seekers, there is no remedy other than to try to change their mind by expounding more reasonable principles and recommending better men. A minority will never win lasting success by other means.

The customary terminology misrepresents these things entirely. The philosophy commonly called individualism is a philosophy of social cooperation and the progressive intensification of the social nexus.

The liberals do not maintain that majorities are godlike and infallible; they do not contend that the mere fact that a policy is advocated by the many is a proof of its merits for the common weal. They do not recommend the dictatorship of the majority and the violent oppression of dissenting minorities

In our time the most powerful theocratic parties are opposed to Christianity and to all other religions which evolved from Jewish monotheism. What characterizes them as theocratic is their craving to organize the earthly affairs of mankind according to the contents of a complex of ideas whose validity cannot be demonstrated by reasoning.

Experience teaches man that cooperative action is more efficient and productive than isolated action of self-sufficient individuals. The natural conditions determining man's life and effort are such that the division of labor increases output per unit of labor expended. These natural facts are: First: the innate inequality of men with regard to their ability to perform various kinds of labor. Second: the unequal distribution of the nature-given, nonhuman opportunities of production on the surface of the earth.

There is still a third fact, viz., that there are undertakings whose accomplishment exceeds the forces of a single man and requires the joint effort of several. Some of them require an expenditure of labor which no single man can perform because his capacity to work is not great enough. Others again could be accomplished by individuals; but the time which they would have to devote to the work would be so long that the result would only be attained late and would not compensate for the labor expended. In both cases only joint effort makes it possible to attain the end sought.

If and as far as labor under the division of labor is more productive than isolated labor, and if and as far as man is able to realize this fact, human action itself tends toward cooperation and association; man becomes a social being not in sacrificing his own concerns for the sake of a mythical Moloch, society, but in aiming at an improvement in his own welfare.

Mechanization is the fruit of the division of labor, its most beneficial achievement, not its motive and fountain spring. Power-driven specialized machinery could be employed only in a social environment under the division of labor. Every step forward on the road toward the use of more specialized, more refined, and more productive machines requires a further specialization of tasks.

One must not tell the masses: Indulge in your urge for murder; it is genuinely human and best serves your well-being. One must tell them: If you satisfy your thirst for blood, you must forego many other desires. You want to eat, to drink, to live in fine homes, to clothe yourselves, and a thousand other things which only society can provide. You cannot have everything, you must choose.

Praxeology as a science cannot encroach upon the individual's right to choose and to act. The final decisions rest with acting men, not with the theorists. Science's contribution to life and action does not consist in establishing value judgments, but in clarification of the conditions under which man must act and in elucidation of the effects of various modes of action. It puts at the disposal of acting man all the information he needs in order to make his choices in full awareness of their consequences. It

It is always the individual who thinks. Society docs not think any more than it eats or drinks. The evolution of human reasoning from the naïve thinking of primitive man to the more subtle thinking of modern science took place within society. However, thinking itself is always an achievement of individuals. There is joint action, but no joint thinking. There is only tradition which preserves thoughts and communicates them to others as a stimulus to their thinking. However, man has no means of appropriating the thoughts of his precursors other than to think them over again.

Men must try to think through all the problems involved up to the point beyond which a human mind cannot proceed farther. They must never acquiesce in any solutions conveyed by older generations, they must always question anew every theory and every theorem, they must never relax in their endeavors to brush away fallacies and to find the best possible cognition. They must fight error by unmasking spurious doctrines and by expounding truth.

A country's public opinion may be ideologically divided in such a way that no group is strong enough to establish a durable government. Then anarchy emerges.

Faced with the choice between the consequences of obedience and of disobedience, the ward prefers the former and thus integrates himself into the hegemonic bond. Every new command places this choice before him again. In yielding again and again he himself contributes his share to the continuous existence of the hegemonic societal body. Even as a ward in such a system he is an acting human being, i.e., a being not simply yielding to blind impulses, but using his reason in choosing between alternatives.

Complacency, self-righteousness, and hypocrisy exult in scorning the “dollar-philosophy” of our age. Neurotic reformers, mentally unbalanced literati, and ambitious demagogues take pleasure in indicting “rationality” and in preaching the gospel of the “irrational.” In the eyes of these babblers money and calculation are the source of the most serious evils. However, the fact that men have developed a method of ascertaining as far as possible the expediency of their actions and of removing uneasiness in the most practical and economic way does not prevent anybody from arranging his conduct according to the principle he considers to be right. The “materialism” of the stock exchange and of business accountancy does not hinder anybody from living up to the standards of Thomas à Kempis or from dying for a noble cause. The fact that the masses prefer detective stories to poetry and that it therefore pays better to write the former than the latter, is not caused by the use of money and monetary accounting. It is not the fault of money that there are gangsters, thieves, murderers, prostitutes, corruptible officials and judges.

There are people to whom monetary calculation is repulsive. They do not want to be roused from their daydreams by the voice of critical reason. Reality sickens them, they long for a realm of unlimited opportunity. They are disgusted by the meanness of a social order in which everything is nicely reckoned in dollars and pennies.

Such is the myth of potential plenty and abundance. Economics may leave it to the historians and psychologists to explain the popularity of this kind of wishful thinking and indulgence in daydreams

All that economics has to say about such idle talk is that economics deals with the problems man has to face on account of the fact that his life is conditioned by natural factors. It deals with action, i.e., with the conscious endeavors to remove as far as possible felt uneasiness.

needs of all men are of the same kind and that this equality provides a standard for the measurement of the degree of their objective satisfaction. In expressing such opinions and in recommending the use of such criteria to guide the government's policy, one proposes to deal with men as the breeder deals with his cattle. But the reformers fail to realize that there is no universal principle of alimentation valid for all men. Which one of the various principles one chooses depends entirely on the aims one wants to attain. The cattle breeder does not feed his cows in order to make them happy, but in order to attain the ends which he has assigned to them in his own plans.

The value judgments of an individual differentiate between what makes him more satisfied and what less. The value judgments a man pronounces about another man's satisfaction do not assert anything about this other man's satisfaction. They only assert what condition of this other man better satisfies the man who pronounces the judgment. The reformers searching for the maximum of general satisfaction have told us merely what state of other people's affairs would best suit themselves.

For it is impossible to eliminate the entrepreneur from the picture of a market economy. The various complementary factors of production cannot come together spontaneously. They need to be combined by the purposive efforts of men aiming at certain ends and motivated by the urge to improve their state of satisfaction. In eliminating the entrepreneur one eliminates the driving force of the whole market system.

The market economy is the product of a long evolutionary process. It is the outcome of man's endeavors to adjust his action in the best possible way to the given conditions of his environment that he cannot alter.

The orders given by businessmen in the conduct of their affairs can be heard and seen. Nobody can fail to become aware of them. Even messenger boys know that the boss runs things around the shop. But it requires a little more brains to notice the entrepreneur's dependence on the market. The orders given by the consumers are not tangible, thy cannot be perceived by the senses. Many people lack the discernment to take cognizance of them. They fall victim to the delusion that entrepreneurs and capitalists are irresponsible autocrats whom nobody calls to account for their actions.11 The outgrowth of this mentality is the practice of applying to business the terminology of political rule and military action. Successful businessmen are called kings or dukes, their

In an unhampered market economy the capitalists and entrepreneurs cannot expect an advantage from bribing officeholders and politicians. On the other hand, the officeholders and politicians are not in a position to blackmail businessmen and to extort graft from them. In an interventionist country powerful pressure groups are intent upon securing for their members privileges at the expense of weaker groups and individuals.

Freedom and liberty are not to be found in nature. In nature there is no phenomenon to which these terms could be meaningfully applied. Whatever man does, he can never free himself from the restraints which nature imposes upon him. If he wants to succeed in acting, he must submit unconditionally to the laws of nature. Freedom and liberty always refer to interhuman relations. A man is free as far as he can live and get on without being at the mercy of arbitrary decisions on the part of other people.

The ultimate source from which entrepreneurial profit and loss are derived is the uncertainty of the future constellation of demand and supply.

Bureaucratic conduct of affairs is conduct bound to comply with detailed rules and regulations fixed by the authority of a superior body. It is the only alternative to profit management.

Education, whatever benefits it may confer, is transmission of traditional doctrines and valuations; it is by necessity conservative. It produces imitation and routine, not improvement and progress. Innovators and creative geniuses cannot be reared in schools. They are precisely the men who defy what the school has taught them.

Production and consumption are different stages in acting.

one might be tempted to say that modern man in contrasting a producers' policy with a consumers' policy has fallen victim to a kind of schizophrenia. He fails to realize that he is an undivided and indivisible person, i.e., an individual, and as such no less a consumer than a producer. The unity of his consciousness is split into two parts; his mind is inwardly divided against himself.

People sometimes ask my help in making big decisions. They’re usually trying to decide between two options. But that’s not a decision — that’s a self-created dilemma! You have to remember that there are always more than two options. When someone says they have only one option, they’re really saying, “I have no choice,” and you know that’s wrong. At the very least, add “do nothing” and “go insane” as options. When people say they have only two options, it means they got stuck. Once people get two options, they start comparing the pros and cons of those two, and forget to think of more.

Beware of advice Imagine that you hand someone your camera, and ask him to take a photo of you. He does, but when you look at the photo later, you notice that he took a photo of himself by mistake. Imagine you’ve got a big question like, “Should I quit my job and start my own company?” You go ask the advice of some successful people you respect. Because they can’t know everything about you and your unique situation, they’ll give advice that’s really just a reflection of their own current situation. So let’s look at some ways that advice is biased. Lottery numbers: When successful people give advice, I usually hear it like this: “Here are the lottery numbers I played: 14 29 71 33 8. They worked for me!” Success is based on so many factors. Some are luck. Some are not. It’s hard to know which are which. So which do you learn from? Underdog opinion in their context: Someone giving advice doesn’t want to say what’s been said too much already. But he’s basing that on his surroundings, not yours. So if everyone around him is quitting their jobs, his advice to you will be to keep your job. That advice has nothing to do with what’s best for you — it’s just the opinion that seems under-represented in his environment that day. Creative sparks: You ask, “What should I do, option A or B?” He replies, “Zebra!” He’s treating the situation as an invitation to brainstorm, giving a crazy suggestion just to open up more options. Like an Oscar Wilde quip, it was meant to be mostly entertaining, maybe useful, and probably not correct. The problem is taking any one person’s advice too seriously. Ideally, asking advice should be like echolocation. Bounce ideas off of all of your surroundings, and listen to all the echoes to get the whole picture. Ultimately, only you know what to do, based on all the feedback you’ve received and all your personal nuances that no one else knows.

The purpose of goals is not to improve the future. The future doesn’t exist. It’s only in our imagination. All that exists is the present moment and what you do in it. Judge a goal by how well it changes your actions in the present moment. A bad goal makes you say, “I want to do that some day.” A great goal makes you take action immediately.

Inspiration is not receiving information. Inspiration is applying what you’ve received. People think that if they keep reading articles, browsing books, listening to talks, or meeting people, they’re going to suddenly get inspired. But constantly seeking inspiration is anti-inspiring. You have to pause the input and focus on your output. For every bit of inspiration you take in, use it and amplify it by applying it to your work. Then you’ll finally feel the inspiration you’ve been looking for. Breathe in. Breathe out. Breathe in. Breathe out.

I told my old coach that I really wanted to start my new company. He said, “No, you don’t.” I said, “Yes, I do! This is really important to me!” He said, “No, it’s not. Saying it doesn’t make it true.” I said, “You can’t ignore what I’m saying. I know myself well. I’m telling you what’s important to me.” He said, “Yes, I can ignore what you’re saying and just look at your actions. Our actions always reveal our real values.”

He makes his critique of historical monism in order to break down abstract approaches to history, to do away with preconceptions of how things ought to be, and to force a concrete examination of the facts in each specific problem rather than an adjustment of the facts to fit the requirements of some schematic theory. Monistic theories of history, he believes, are a great obstacle to a recognition of the facts.

to the masses and make platitudes and grimaces in honor of the union of the classes. Unfortunately for these great thinkers, things do not happen in this way; violence does not diminish in the proportion that it should diminish

Countless experiences have proved that a firm blow now may forestall a thousand given and suffered tomorrow. A doctor who denied the reality of germs would not thereby lessen the destructive effect of germs on the human body. In politics those magical attitudes which medicine has left behind still prevail. It is still firmly believed that by denying the social role of violence, violence is thus somehow overcome.

“The present study,” Robert Michels writes in the Preface to the English translation of his masterpiece, Political Parties,[*] “makes no attempt to offer a ‘new system.’ It is not the principal aim of science to create systems, but rather to promote understanding. It is not the purpose of sociological science to discover, or rediscover, solutions, since numerous problems of the individual life and the life of social groups are not capable of ‘solution’ at all, but must ever remain ‘open.’

“Napoleon III did not merely recognize in popular sovereignty the source of his power, he further made that sovereignty the theoretical basis of all his practical activities. He made himself popular in France by declaring that he regarded himself as merely the executive organ of the collective will manifested in the elections, and that he was entirely at the disposition of that will, prepared in all things to accept its decisions. With great shrewdness, he continually repeated that he was no more than an instrument, a creature of the masses.”

A man’s conduct (that is, human action) is “logical” under the following circumstances: when his action is motivated by a deliberately held goal or purpose; when that goal is possible; when the steps or means he takes to reach the goal are in fact appropriate for reaching it.

The laws of political life cannot be discovered by an analysis which takes men’s words and beliefs, spoken or written, at their face value.

From the 16th century on, the application of scientific method to one after another field of human interest, other than social affairs, has uniformly resulted in human triumphs with respect to those fields. In every field, science has solved relevant problems; indeed, science is in one sense merely the systematic method for solving relevant problems.

Those who have privileges almost always develop false or distorted ideas about themselves. They are under a compulsion to deceive themselves as well as others through some kind of irrational theory which will seek to justify their monopoly of those privileges, rather than to explain the annoying truths about

A dilemma confronts any section of the élite that tries to act scientifically. The political life of the masses and the cohesion of society demand the acceptance of myths. A scientific attitude toward society does not permit belief in the truth of the myths. But the leaders must profess, indeed foster, belief in the myths, or the fabric of society will crack and they be overthrown. In short, the leaders, if they themselves are scientific, must lie. It is hard to lie all the time in public but to keep privately an objective regard for the truth. Not only is it hard; it is often ineffective, for lies are often not convincing when told with a divided heart. The tendency is for the deceivers to become self-deceived, to believe their own myths. When this happens, they are no longer scientific. Sincerity is bought at the price of truth.

It’s not anyone else’s responsibility to show us the truth. It’s our responsibility to find it. We do that by asking good questions.

Rule of thumb: Compliments are the fool’s gold of customer learning: shiny, distracting, and entirely worthless.

Long story short, that person is a complainer, not a customer. They’re stuck in the la-la-land of imagining they’re the sort of person who finds clever ways to solve the petty annoyances of their day.

You can tell it’s an important question when the answer to it could completely change (or disprove) your business. If you get an unexpected answer to a question and it doesn’t affect what you’re doing, it wasn’t a terribly important question.

The active effort required to resist the slide into entropy wasn’t there, and decay inevitably followed.

Science has heroes, but no gods. The great Names are not our superiors, or even our rivals; they are passed milestones on our road. And the most important milestone is the hero yet to come.

manipulating which meanings go with which words.

Since the days of Socrates at least, and probably long before, the way to appear cultured and sophisticated has been to never let anyone see you care strongly about anything. It’s embarrassing

Curiosity, as a human emotion, has been around since long before the ancient Greeks. But what set humanity firmly on the path of Science was noticing that certain modes of thinking uncovered beliefs that let us manipulate the world.

If you are a scientist just beginning to investigate fire, it might be a lot wiser to point to a campfire and say “Fire is that orangey-bright hot stuff over there,” rather than saying “I define fire as an alchemical transmutation of substances which releases phlogiston.” You should not ignore something just because you can’t define it.

“What is true of one apple may not be true of another apple; thus more can be said about a single apple than about all the apples in the world.”

“People,” Shai said, rising to fetch another seal, “by nature attempt to exercise power over what is around them. We build walls to shelter us from the wind, roofs to stop the rain. We tame the elements, bend nature to our wills. It makes us feel as if we’re in control. “Except in doing so, we merely replace one influence with another. Instead of the wind affecting us, it is a wall. A man-made wall. The fingers of man’s influence are all about, touching everything. Man-made rugs, man-made food. Every single thing in the city that we touch, see, feel, experience comes as the result of some person’s influence. “We may feel in control, but we never truly are unless we understand people.

The real challenge of any public spending idea is whether the country actually has the resources and ability to do the job. We can’t build a colony on Mars not because we “can’t pay for it” but because we literally lack the ability to do

In the case of sincere seekers, the answer is only slightly less obvious: who of us would want to become finders, as long as our search so meaningfully - so nobly! - structures our time and wards off boredom, and as long as the Nothing - which some say lies at the end of our quest - reads at this safe distance much more like an unveiled threat than a veiled promise? No, we have every reason to remain humble seekers! We are not enlightened! The fact is that in us all lurks an existential terror, a powerful and altogether natural resistance to what - seemingly - amounts to sudden death and annihilation.

One of the more beautiful things about the scientific method is that it is cumulative and incremental. Today, many of us can understand things that would have seemed entirely incomprehensible even in principle to our ancestors, maybe even to scientists and philosophers working just a few decades ago. Over time, mystery 20after mystery has yielded to the systematic application of reason and experiment. If we take mysterianism as a serious option we might as well all give up and go home. So, let’s not.

The real problem accepts that conscious experiences exist and focuses primarily on their phenomenological properties.

The fatal flaw of vitalism was to interpret a failure of imagination as an insight into necessity. This is the same flaw that lies at the heart of the zombie argument.

Equally important, it pushes back against the limiting idea that consciousness is just ‘one thing’ – a single intimidating mystery that might elude scientific explanation altogether. We will instead see how different properties of consciousness come together in different ways, across species and even among different people. There are as many different ways of being conscious as there are different conscious organisms. Eventually, the hard problem itself may succumb, so that we will be able to understand consciousness as being continuous with the rest of nature without having to adopt any arbitrary ‘ism’ stating by fiat how phenomenology and physics are related. This is the promise of the real problem.

At any one time we have precisely one conscious experience out of vastly many possible conscious experiences. Every conscious experience therefore delivers a massive reduction of uncertainty, since this experience is being had, and not that experience, or that experience, and so on. And reduction of uncertainty is – mathematically – what is meant by information.

This underpins the main claim of the theory, which is that a system is conscious to the extent that its whole generates more information than its parts.

It’s important to recognise that these challenges – including that of measuring intrinsic information, rather than observer-relative, extrinsic information – are only problems for us as scientists, as external observers, trying to calculate Φ. According to IIT, any particular system would just have a Φ. It would go about its business integrating information in just the same way that when you throw a stone, it traces an arc through the sky without needing to calculate its trajectory according to the laws of gravity. Just because 68a theory is difficult to test doesn’t mean it’s wrong. It just means it’s difficult to test.

More than a thousand years later, but still a thousand years ago, the Arab scholar Ibn al Haytham wrote that perception, in the here and now, depends on processes of ‘judgement and inference’ rather than providing direct access to an objective reality.

The third and most important ingredient in the controlled hallucination view is the claim that perceptual experience – in this case the subjective experience of ‘seeing a coffee cup’ – is determined by the content of the (top-down) predictions, and not by the (bottom-up) sensory signals. We never experience sensory signals themselves, we only ever experience interpretations of them. Mix these ingredients together and we’ve cooked up a Copernican inversion for how to think about perception. It seems as though the world is revealed directly to our conscious minds through our sensory organs. With this mindset, it is natural to think of perception as a process of bottom-up feature detection – a ‘reading’ of the world around us. But what we actually perceive is a top-down, inside-out neuronal fantasy that is reined in by reality, not a transparent window onto whatever that reality may be.

When I look at a red chair, the redness I experience depends both on properties of the chair and on properties of my brain. It corresponds to the content of a set of perceptual predictions about the ways in which a specific kind of surface reflects light. There is no redness-as-such in the world or in the brain. As Paul Cézanne said, ‘colour is the place where our brain and the universe meet.’

In statistics, the essence of prediction is in catering for the absence of sufficient data. Whether this is because predictions are about the future – one can think of the future as ‘insufficient data’ – or about some current but incompletely unknown state of affairs, doesn’t matter.

Thinking about action in this way underlines how action and perception are two sides of the same coin. Rather than perception being the input and action being the output with respect to some central ‘mind’, action and perception are both forms of brain-based prediction.

Our perceptual world alive with colours, shapes, and sounds is nothing more and nothing less than our brain’s best guess of the hidden causes of its colourless, shapeless, and soundless sensory inputs.

The concept of the beholder’s share cries out to be connected with predictive theories of perception – like the controlled hallucination theory. As Kandel put it: ‘The insight that the beholder’s perception involves a top-down inference convinced Gombrich that there is no “innocent eye”: that is, all visual perception is based on classifying concepts and interpreting visual information. One cannot perceive that which one cannot classify.’

I wanted a cup of tea, but I did not choose to want a cup of tea. Voluntary actions are voluntary not because they descend from an immaterial soul, nor because they ascend from a quantum soup. They are voluntary because they express what I, as a person, want to do, even though I cannot choose these wants.

The second defining feature is the feeling that I could have done otherwise. When I experience an action as voluntary, the character of the experience is not only that I did X, but that I did X and not Y, even though I could have done Y.

This is the essence of the real problem approach to consciousness. Accept that consciousness exists, and then ask how the various phenomenological properties of consciousness – which is to say how conscious experiences are structured, what form they take – relate to properties of brains, brains that are embodied in bodies and embedded in worlds