Fundamentals of Philosophy

― an introduction ―

J. A. Durieux
truth@in•biep•org

A short introduction written for use in the People’s Republic of

China, where certain subjects cannot be addressed too directly.

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Contents
Scepticism.............................................................................................................................................3
Reasons for scepticism.....................................................................................................................3
Thought versus intuition..................................................................................................................4
Sense input.......................................................................................................................................4
The diallelus.....................................................................................................................................5
Epistemology........................................................................................................................................6
Direct and indirect knowledge.........................................................................................................6
Thoughts..........................................................................................................................................7
The actual world..............................................................................................................................7
Without a transcendent mind.......................................................................................................7
Metaphysics..........................................................................................................................................9
The actual world with a transcendent mind.....................................................................................9
Empirical knowledge (knowledge a posteriori).............................................................................10
Good and evil............................................................................................................................11
Lies and errors...........................................................................................................................11
The transcendent mind...................................................................................................................11
Our world.......................................................................................................................................12
Existentialism.....................................................................................................................................13
Tertiary relating..............................................................................................................................13
Primary relating.............................................................................................................................13
Secondary relating.........................................................................................................................14
Mixing levels.................................................................................................................................14
Freedom....................................................................................................................................14
Immanent and transcendent solutions.......................................................................................15
Freedom from the transcendent mind.......................................................................................15
Ontology.............................................................................................................................................16
The transcendent mind...................................................................................................................16
Freedom....................................................................................................................................16
Our world.......................................................................................................................................17
Abstract notions.............................................................................................................................17
Ethics..................................................................................................................................................18
Goodness........................................................................................................................................18
Goodness and freedom..............................................................................................................18
Quarantine.................................................................................................................................19
Morality.........................................................................................................................................19
The state of the world................................................................................................................19
Incarnation................................................................................................................................19
Solidarity...................................................................................................................................20
Our choice.................................................................................................................................20
The consequences......................................................................................................................20
Teleology............................................................................................................................................22
Meaning.........................................................................................................................................22
Intrinsic and Extrinsic meaning.....................................................................................................22
Value, goodness, love, and happiness............................................................................................22
Belonging.......................................................................................................................................23
The solution...................................................................................................................................23
Aesthetics...........................................................................................................................................24

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 Chapter 1
Scepticism
Scepticism is the philosophical position that we cannot know anything1. A true sceptic cannot even
know he is a sceptic.

Reasons for scepticism

I have a pain, and my friend recommends some traditional Chinese medicine. Does this tell me that
that medicine is good for me? After all, my friend, not being a physician, may be wrong. I can go
to a medical doctor, but how do I know he is right? He might be just repeating what he learned,
which might be wrong. He might even be a cheat, and not a real doctor at all.
I might study medicine myself, but how can I trust all the information in the books? I might do all
the research myself, but how can I know the methodology is correct? And how can I know my eyes
are not deceiving me, that I am not dreaming or hallucinating, that I am not making errors in
drawing my conclusions?
A man with jaundice may believe the world is yellowish, because his discoloured cornea gives
everything he sees a yellowish hue. How is he to know the world is not really yellowish? How can
we know there is not some condition that makes us see the world incorrectly?
How can we even know there is a world out there, and that we have eyes? It might all be a dream
we conjure up.
Even mathematics and logic do not escape from this scepticism. How do we know the thinking
rules we are following are reliable? How do we know our memories are reliable? Any argument
that purports to establish the basic reliability of our memory or thinking is based on that very
memory, that very thinking. They are classic cases of circular arguments. How do we know the
rules of logic we follow are not approximations that are not really correct – the way Einstein
discovered that Newtonian physics was only an approximation? Or that they are so wrong that they
cannot even be used to reason out that they are wrong?
Our experience is full of hints that we cannot trust our senses, memory, or thinking. For memory
this is well-known. It has been shown that it is easy to induce false memories in someone. True
memories change whenever we recall them, especially in the context of a somewhat corresponding
story. And even flash-bulb memories, memories of shocking events such as hearing about the 9-11
attacks, as vivid as they may be, are notoriously unreliable.
But the situation is worse: how can we even – other than by memory – know there is a past to be
remembered? We can’t go back to check! So much for memory. Let us now look at thinking and
sensing.
1 Most philosophical terms have several meanings. I’ll try, whenever I use a technical term, to indicate the meaning
in which I use it.

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Thought versus intuition
Evolution tells us our brains have only recently developed from monkey brains that are incapable of
advanced logic thought – so how can we trust the conclusions drawn by those brains 2? There are
many so-called veridical paradoxes, cases where intuition (which exists already in the
invertebrates) clashes with rational thought – and why believe rational thought in such cases?
A case in point is the Monty Hall problem. A TV show host has the habit of offering the contestant
the choice from three doors, one of which hides a prize. After the contestant has chosen a door, the
host opens one of the other doors, always a losing one, and offers the contestant the option to switch
and choose the remaining door instead. Most contestants stick to their original choice, whereas a
little thought tells us that switching doubles one’s chance of winning. Are those contestants wrong
in trusting their intuition, which has been tuned for more than a billion years of evolution, over their
thinking, which has had only a million years of evolution, and that in a very small and only slowly
replicating population?
Or take Simpson’s paradox, which, in a somewhat simplified form, occurred as follows. It was
found that a Californian university with two faculties (Science and Art) discriminated by sex: male
students got higher grades than female students. The question came up whether both or only one
faculty favoured men, but upon investigation it was found that either faculty gave higher grades to
female students. Again intuition made many people declare that this was impossible.
In all such cases, careful reasoning tells us that thinking has it right, and intuition has it wrong.
Does that mean that we should choose thinking over intuition? Why? Indeed, thinking may tell us
that thinking is better than intuition, but intuition is likely to tell us otherwise.

Sense input
Neurological research has discovered that what we see is only tenuously related to what is “out
there”. Most people know about optical illusions, but those only form the surface.
Processing the image of an approaching car takes about half a second, which may mean the
difference between a safe traversal and a painful death. So our brain edits the image, and moves the
car forward the amount it guesses it will move in that half second – we “see” the car where it
probably is by the time we have processed the image, and not where our eyes saw it. In the case of
sudden changes in direction this system will not work, and arbiter decisions on whether a tennis ball
was in or out are notoriously unreliable, as the advent of film has shown.
A phenomenon called “change blindness” makes that we tend not to see even major changes, as
long as they happen during a saccade (a jump of the eye orientation from one point to another).
There are puzzles where it is hard to spot some major differences between two images, and there is
a computer set-up where the screen shows a changing whirl of random letters, but the person whose
eye movements are tracked sees a static, meaningful text. An amusing test was done where a
2 As Darwin put it to William Graham (3 July 1881): “But then with me the horrid doubt always arises whether the
convictions of man’s mind, which has been developed from the mind of the lower animals, are of any value or at all
trustworthy. Would any one trust in the convictions of a monkey's mind, if there are any convictions in such a
mind?” That is, if blind evolution is true, we can never trust the mind that discovers that fact.

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student asked directions from a passer-by. During this interaction they were interrupted by two men
carrying a door. Under cover of that door, the student switched with another, of the same sex but
otherwise very different – and the majority of passers-by didn’t remark a thing!
Other research has shown the large extent to which we see what we expect to see, even under
careful scrutiny. Neurological literature abounds with examples showing how little of what we
believe we see (or hear) we actually perceive. But if that is so, how can we trust our senses? And
how can we trust the very senses of the neurologists who studied the brain and discovered this?

The diallelus
We all have met cases of false memories. Psychiatry tells us people can have really weird beliefs –
so how can we know we are not madmen with utterly false beliefs?
What about safety in numbers: if I have observed something often, or if most people agree with me,
I will probably be right. But without already trusting my memory, or believing I am not dreaming,
how can I know that I have observed often, or that other people agreeing with me exist? Or without
already trusting my thinking, how can I know there is safety in numbers? Maybe I am wrong, and
general agreement is a sure sign of error instead! One million lemmings can’t be wrong!
Most people, when confronted with questions such as the above, get impatient and will shrug and
brush them aside, because they don't know any answers and yet are sure they can know things. And
they are right: we can know things (and in fact, we know just that), so the scepticism that those
questions seem to point to is unnecessary. But we also know we are often wrong, and with a bit of
thinking we realise that any world view according to which we cannot know things must be wrong.
And that is where the diallelus kicks in.
I can know that I am in pain, or that I experience yellow. I can know that because I myself am the
paining one, or the one experiencing the yellow colour. I might be wrong regarding the cause of the
pain, or even in my belief I have a body – after all I might be a dreaming ghost –, but the pain itself,
or the sensation of yellow, is undeniable, as I myself am the source of that knowledge. But how can
we know anything of which we are not the source?
This is the diallelus: if we have a criterion to separate true external knowledge from falsehood, how
can we know that criterion is correct in the first place? How can we know we can trust any given
source and path of information?
(As an example, we already saw that an evolved brain may contain reasoning errors, just like
programs may contain bugs. Our intuition, which is far older, is quite buggy after all.)
The diallelus states that external knowledge is impossible, because whatever criterion for truth we
use in establishing that knowledge, we should first have to know that criterion – leading to an
infinite regress.
And that means that only world views in which the diallelus doesn't apply have a chance of being
true. If we know that we can know something, the world must be such that we can know that, and
any world view that describes a world in which we cannot must needs be false.

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 Chapter 2
Epistemology
Epistemology is the study of knowledge: what is needed for someone to know something.

Direct and indirect knowledge

The most basic facts we have been questioning are direct knowledge3, things we know before
experience (knowledge a posteriori) can teach us: unless we already know that we can trust our eyes
– and that we have eyes in the first place – we cannot learn from visual experience, and the same is
true for the other senses. Examples of direct knowledge include the fact that we are not mad,
believing believe things that are utterly wrong; that we are not dreaming, and deluded by our own
fantasy; that there is truth and falsehood, there is good and evil, there is a world “out there”, there
are other minds, there is time …
We do know that we know these things, so we must live in a world in which we can know such
things. What kind of world is that?
The most acute problem is that of knowledge and truth. Maybe goodness, or minds, can be
explained some way or other by the structure of the world – but we cannot rely on the structure of
the world to explain truth and knowledge, because without already knowing that truth and
knowledge exist we cannot know about the structure of the world to start with.
What can be the source of that knowledge? We cannot trust any source of purported knowledge
unless we already know that source to possess the truth, and to be reliable. I can tell you that John
is Mary’s brother, but unless you already know that I am not wrong myself, and that I am not lying
to you, my words do not give you knowledge about Mary and John.
On top of those two requirements, we must be able to trust the communication path: nor my mouth,
nor random sounds in the air, nor your ears or auditory nerves should deceive.
This explains why the diallelus does not forbid me to know that I am in pain, or experiencing
yellow. I can know that I am in pain, because I am the source myself, and the communication path
is of zero length – the knowledge is immediate. But that source cannot tell me anything about the
external world, if there is one. The pain is there, but the stubbed toe may not exist.
If external knowledge is at all possible, there must be a first source of knowledge that we can trust –
and that we can know we can trust. But for any possible source in the world, we have no grounds to
trust it. So how can we know anything?

3 Direct knowledge can be separated in knowledge a priori, which is all the stuff we “just know” without having to
learn it through experience, and direct experience, such as the knowledge one is aware of pain, if one is.

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Thoughts
For this paper we define thoughts as intentional abstracts – as abstract things that are about
something.
Let's look somewhat deeper at thoughts. There are all kinds of thoughts: emotions, longings,
convictions, fantasies.. Fantasies show us that minds can produce worlds, and worlds with other
minds. And there is something interesting: if I am dreaming, I cannot be wrong about my dream. If
I dream that Mary has red hair, then in my dream she does have red hair. If I don't lie to the
characters in my dream, I can be a reliable source of knowledge for them. And since they are my
thoughts, the communication is immediate – all the criteria are satisfied!
We define a mind as the medium in which thoughts, including fantasies, exist. That means that a
mind is intentional, in that its thoughts are about something.
My dreams and fantasies, stories in books, the fantasies of characters in my dreams – all of these are
worlds, and all of them have a transcendent mind on which they depend. And those worlds form a
forest: every world depends on a mind, and that mind may live in a world again – all the way up to
our world. Would we be the top? Or would there again be a mind above us?
Science, that is: knowledge beyond immediate experience, is based on the principle of uniformity,
the assumption that the same fundamental principles hold through everywhere 4. We assume that
there is gravity on Jupiter, because here on earth mass causes gravity. We expect magnets to attract
iron tomorrow, because they do so now and have done so in the past. The principle of uniformity
implies that if we find something to be true in all cases that we can check, then we should expect it
to be true too in all similar cases. Applied to our question: if all worlds where we can check it have
a governing mind that explains the existence of that world, then we should also expect it for the one
world where we cannot check it – the one we live in. But expectancy does not yet imply certainty.

The actual world

We know there is a world out there, but so far we haven't discovered yet how we can know that.
There are two possibilities: either the actual world is thought by a transcendent mind, or it isn't.
(That is the law of the excluded middle, another bit of a priori knowledge.) Let's look at either
option.

Without a transcendent mind

If there is no transcendent mind, then the actual world is fundamentally different from all other
worlds. This goes against the scientific principle of uniformity. It also goes against Occam's razor,
because we need to assume two different kinds of world: dream worlds, and the actual world.

4 Without the principle of uniformity (also called the Copernican principle, or the principle of symmetry) no
generalised learning is possible. I may learn that at this moment the world is such and such, but I need uniformity
in time to conclude that my house will probably still be there tomorrow. This principle of uniformity itself must
again be knowledge a priory, because it cannot be learned from experience – the so-called induction problem:
without already trusting induction I cannot take the fact that induction has worked up till now to conclude it will
probably work tomorrow.

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For all our philosophical questions about dream worlds, we have a good answer: the transcendent
mind. If the actual world has no transcendent mind, then those answers will not apply there, and we
are left with a whole lot of unanswered questions, such as:
• How can matter create minds (human beings are matter, but mysteriously have minds)? In
dream worlds, minds share in the transcendent mind.
• What provides unity between the parts of the world: what is the structure that makes that one
particle can influence another? In dream worlds, the unity of the transcendent mind
provides the unity of the world.
• What is the source of identity, what makes that the me of ten years ago is me, even though
my body no longer has the same matter. In dream worlds, the intention of the transcendent
mind (who wants this identity) is the source.
• What is the source of the uniformity, the laws, of the world? In dream worlds, again, the
intention of the transcendent mind to have exactly those laws provides the uniformity.
• .. and so on, and so on. A world view in which the actual world has no transcendent world
still needs all the answers for dream worlds, but besides that needs different answers (that no
one has found so far) for the actual world. Such a world view is like a centaur.
But worst of all: if the actual world has no transcendent mind, then we cannot know anything
external. Why is that?
Well, whatever the source of such external knowledge may be, without a governing mind it must be
something in the actual world. Dream worlds below us are part of our thoughts, and are fully
internal, and there is nothing above us, so other things in the actual world are the only option. But
in order for such other things to be sources of knowledge, we must first know they are reliable, and
then that the communication path from them to us is also reliable – and we cannot know that
because that is already external knowledge. Also, no source or collection of sources of information
can declare itself reliable. Both the liar and the truth speaker will claim to speak the truth 5. Catch-
22: we cannot pull ourselves out of that morass by our bootstraps.
And if we cannot know anything external, then we cannot know the rules of reason, such as the law
of the excluded middle we used above. That means we cannot trust any reasoning we make,
including the reasoning in this article. We are reduced to meaningless babble, the cackle of the
madman who makes no sense, whatever his feelings about making sense may be.
This means that any claim that the actual world has no transcendent mind cannot be correct. If
there is no transcendent mind, the claim has no meaning, and if there is a transcendent mind then
the claim makes sense, but is obviously wrong.
We shall look at the other option in the next chapter.

5 Which is why the sentence “I am lying” is a paradox: neither a liar nor a truth speaker would say it.

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 Chapter 3
Metaphysics
Metaphysics is the philosophy of being: what does it mean to be, or to exist; what is the
fundamental nature of being; and what are the primary things that exist.
We have seen that the hypothesis that the actual world has no transcendent mind leads to all kind of
problems. But what if we do assume a transcendent mind?

The actual world with a transcendent mind

If the actual world does have a transcendent mind, the situation is very different. In that case the
situation is uniform (all worlds are ontically the same), and Occam's razor is satisfied. All the
philosophical questions for the actual world are easily answered, because we know the answers for
dream worlds, and for the actual world they are the same.
Finally, a transcendent mind can be a valid source of knowledge. If I dream, I can decide what the
characters in my dream believe or know – just like I can dream, say, someone who is fearful, I can
dream someone who is knowledgeable. But is that real knowledge? Let's look at the criteria:
• If some mind dreams me, I am a thought of that mind, and likewise my thoughts,
knowledge, understanding, and so forth are all thoughts of him. That means any
communication is immediate; there is no need for any (possible unreliable) communication
path.
• Because the dreamer is master over his dream, he can give me justified knowledge that the a
priori knowledge he gives me is reliable.
• A dreamer is necessarily omniscient and infallible regarding his dream, because his dream is
his thought.
• That leaves us with the last criterion: is he good? If he is a possible liar, whatever
information he gives me is not knowledge. If, on the other hand, he is good, then his
information will be knowledge, and he can give me the justified knowledge that he is good
(because he knows it, and I can share that knowledge in an immediate way). More
precisely, he must be loving.
We define love as the intention (the will) to be good to others.
So, without a governing mind for this world, no knowledge is possible – we saw that immanent
entities can be no primary source of knowledge – but with the right kind of governing mind
knowledge is possible. In other words, knowledge is possible if and only if the actual world has a
loving transcendent mind.

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In order for the transcendent mind to give us knowledge, he must be able to govern the world it has
created – he must be sovereign to that world. We often find that we cannot dream what we want,
because the world around us restricts us (as in having a nightmare after having seen a horror
movie). Likewise the mind transcendent to our world can influence us, or we can simply be too
limited to imagine the world we want to imagine. In all those cases, the information we give to the
actors in our dream may be incorrect – and information that may be incorrect is unreliable, and is
not knowledge.
So a transcendent mind that is able to confer knowledge to us necessarily is unbounded, and
unrestricted by a world around it or a meta-transcendent mind above it.
(There are several solutions, but from our point of view they all amount to the same thing: the
transcendent mind providing knowledge and ruling our world is the most high.)

Empirical knowledge (knowledge a posteriori)

With these prolegomena we can now turn to the world as we experience it. In light of the
preceding, one fact presents itself with force: our actual world contains evil. We had seen that only
a good transcendent mind can confer knowledge, so how can its product, this world, contain evil?
After all, goodness is transitive: goodness implies wanting the good for the other, and if the
transcendent mind is good for, sovereign over, and has full knowledge of the world, then one would
expect the world to be good too. In order to answer that question we shall have to look at the nature
of goodness.
Both the transcendent mind and our minds are intentional – they can be about something.
Goodness for intentional beings has two aspects beyond goodness for unintentional ones.
1. Intentional goodness must be a free choice. A pillow is good if it does what a good pillow
should do – nobody requires that it freely do so. But a man who does good under
compulsion only is not considered a good man. Doing good and being good do not
coincide, because he does not act from a free intention.
2. In beings capable of intentionality, goodness implies love, wanting the good for the other. If
the other also has the capacity for intentionality, “the good for the other” will include love in
the other as well, so necessarily love will want love in that other too.
As a result of these two facts, a good transcendent mind will want love in us – free love. He must
enable us to choose the wrong, in order for any choice for the right to be a good choice. In other
words: the goodness of created intentional beings is inherently unstable – It can turn into evil.
We know that some things are good and others are evil. We may disagree or be unsure about what
is good and what is evil, but we know that the difference exists. Without transcendent mind, this is
inexplicable: the world is governed by amoral physical laws. A good transcendent mind, however,
would distinguish between acts that agree with how the dreamed world should be and acts that go
against it.

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Good and evil
The good transcendent mind necessarily has dreamed a good world, but our world contains evil, so
we know that the free beings in that world have chosen evil – against the intention of the
transcendent mind. This has a whole lot of implications, some of which we'll try to discover.
1. If our dream doesn't go the way we want, and we are not constrained (as in a nightmare), we
simply discard the dream and make another, which pleases us better. This is because we do
not really love our dream characters. A perfectly good and loving mind does not have that
option – just as loving parents will not discard a handicapped child. True love is
unconditional.
2. A perfectly good mind cannot freely deal with evil thoughts. That means there is a barrier
between the dream and the dreamer that is not there when the dream is completely good –
the dream is in quarantine, so to say, and no longer directly ruled by him. That means that
much more can go wrong – and that is exactly what we see happening: there is evil beyond
human decisions, such as earthquakes.

Lies and errors

Because of these conditions evil remains in existence as long as we choose it, and this evil has two
influences on our ability to know.
1. We can choose evil. Epistemically that means lying. We believe one thing but
communicate another. This communication can be through words or through behaviour.
There are many kinds of lies, but here the only relevant thing is that if we don't know
whether someone is lying we cannot trust whatever he tells us (again, through words or
through behaviour).
2. Because the world is in quarantine, there is impersonal evil. This leads to errors. Again,
there are many kinds of errors, but the important element is that in the presence of potential
errors we cannot trust any process – be it reasoning, communication or otherwise.
So this brings us back to the beginning, and explains why we cannot trust any mediate knowledge.
The fact that lies and errors exist is external a priori knowledge again – only the transcendent mind
can let us know that we should not be totally naive.

The transcendent mind

Above we saw that if we can know anything external at all, it is true that there is a transcendent
mind – but we didn't learn much about it, other than that it is good (and therefore loving) and
unrestricted. But in fact, from it being unrestricted we can derive many more properties – including
another proof of his goodness.
In order to see this, we must look at an important distinction: prior properties versus posterior
properties.

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Prior properties can exist on their own, whereas posterior properties can only exist by the grace of
the corresponding prior property. For instance, take 'rest' and 'movement'. Rest can exist on its
own: a world in which all is at rest is perfectly possible. Movement, on the other hand, requires an
anchor point: something moves with respect to something else, which is then considered at rest. So
'rest' is prior, and 'movement' is posterior.
Or look at 'absolute' and 'relative': it is impossible that everything is relative – that absolutely
everything is relative. Likewise, 'plural' is posterior to 'singular', 'false' to 'true', 'negative' to
'positive', and so on.
If something is the only thing, it can only have prior properties – because if it had a posterior
property, something else would need to have the corresponding prior property. That means that the
transcendent mind can only have prior properties. And in fact, the properties of the transcendent
mind we have found so far (unboundedness, goodness, love) are all prior.
The metaphysical proof of the goodness of the transcendent mind: Deviations from a standard are
posterior to that standard, so evil is posterior to goodness. Therefore the transcendent mind is free
of evil.
Imperfection, as a deviation from perfection, is also posterior, so the transcendent mind is perfect.
Plural is posterior to singular, because the plural consists of several singulars. Therefore the
transcendent mind is single. Likewise, a composite is posterior to its parts, so the transcendent
mind has no parts: it is simple.
Along the same lines we can prove he is benevolent, unchanging, absolute, et cetera – so we see
that we can derive quite a bit about the transcendent mind. And what we derive corresponds with
what we learn from other sources. We already saw that with respect to unrestrictedness and
goodness, but it is true for other properties too.
Omniscience is a prior property, and we already saw that minds are omniscient with respect to their
dreams. We also saw that we could know things about ourselves, and as there is nothing but the
transcendent mind and his dream(s), it is plausible that he can know everything.
Omnipotence is another prior property – and indeed, if there is no external influence, an infinite
mind would be omnipotent with respect to its dreams. (In fact, even we are already quite powerful
over our daydreams).
So we see that the information we get from different arguments is coherent and consistent –
underlining the strength of our conclusions.

Our world
Then there is our world. The transcendent mind may dream myriads of other worlds – we don't
know that –, but we do know our world is there.

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 Chapter 4
Existentialism
Existentialism is the philosophy of our relation to the world. It has sometimes been called the
philosophy of the grammatical persons, because as we shall see it is about first-person, second-
person, and third-person relating.

Tertiary relating
To start with the latter: tertiary relating is what the sciences do, and what we all tend to do when we
see objects. We see things “out there” and tend to think about them without at the same time
thinking about ourselves as observers of those things.
It is in fact this tendency we have to forget our own rôle in the process of perceiving the external
world that gives materialism its superficial plausibility: we can only see matter and its behaviour.
When scientist try to interpret behaviour, they either can find a law that predicts that behaviour
completely, or they cannot. In the first case the behaviour is called deterministic, whereas in the
second case it is called random. Remark that randomness is not about cause of the behaviour, but
only about the ability of the scientists to predict it. People who don’t understand this sometimes
talk about some behaviour “caused by randomness”, but that is nonsense. Scientists try to describe
random behaviour in probabilistic terms – by describing how often the one or the other behaviour
tends to occur.

Primary relating
Tertiary relating has brought us an immense amount of knowledge, and it is extremely useful – but
it breaks down when we try to apply it to ourselves. We may watch other people, and maybe look
into their brains, and predict what choices they will make – but we can never predict our own
choices that way.
When we look at ourselves “from the outside”, as just another object, we see a being that may or
may not behave a certain way. But when we look at ourselves “from the inside” we see something
completely different. Someone else may see brain cells firing – I feel the weight of an important
decision, with moral and aesthetic implications. I know I have a certain obligation, and a certain
feeling about the outcome. Tertiary observation is fundamentally unable ever to discover such
things.
In myself I also experience freedom, the ability to choose either one way or the other. This freedom
is what prevents scientists from fully predicting my behaviour – the source of what they call
randomness.

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Secondary relating
And once I have “discovered myself” that way, I can go further and discover other persons, who
then become “you” to me, and cease being objects. In fact, it is in the relationship with the other
that I truly become myself: in a world with only objects I cannot fully be a person.
And I am built in such a way that I want to give myself to the other – to trust that other. This
relationship is called intimacy. But given the evil in this world and in each of us, I cannot really
trust anyone. Only the transcendent mind is fully reliable, and I find that only in him I can truly
become myself and reach my potential as a person. With immanent beings I always hold back, and
give only part of myself to be known – but the transcendent mind knows everything about me.
Ethical obligations exist because of the other. I should not kick someone because that other person
is not just a thing, but has an inner side and can feel pain. Maybe I should not break a vase, because
there is a person who owns that vase and will be hurt. Ethics is much richer than just avoiding hurt,
but that is an important part of it.

Mixing levels
A scientist who only relates in a tertiary way could argue that, as among all the particles and forces
that make up the universe there is no such thing as an obligation, or a moral requirement, everything
is permitted. It would of course be stupid to steal and be caught, but if one can steal without being
caught (either because one is not detected or because one has the power to protect oneself) one
would be stupid to do so. And in fact, many materialists think that way, and act on it once they are
high enough in power.

Freedom
Freedom gives another good example.
We saw there was freedom, as required by love. Our thoughts are free, and it is that freedom which
allows us to choose to love (or to reject love). (Since our thoughts are thoughts of the transcendent
mind, he is free too: our free thoughts are his free thoughts.)
Without freedom there would be no responsibility. The thief would have no choice but to steal, and
the judge would have no choice but to convict or release – not because convicting or releasing is
just, but because the particles in the judge's brain happen to make him take that decision.
Scientists sometimes dismiss freedom as an illusion, because all that exists is determinism and
randomness. We already saw the error of turning randomness into a “force”, but let’s say the world
were fully deterministic. Would that preclude true freedom? No way: I can dream a deterministic
world in which nevertheless things happen the way I want them to happen – all I have to do is to
dream the causes for those events too. So I am free to dream the story of my fantasy world however
I want it to be, even while dreaming that that world is utterly deterministic.

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As my thoughts are thoughts of the transcendent mind, he can dream our world to be deterministic
too, while still respecting our choices – though given our evil, he might strictly limit our freedom to
act (while leaving us the freedom to think): he may allow me to walk, but not to fly.

Immanent and transcendent solutions

On the level of our world, there are already several ways in which this can happen. Our life-
harbouring planet is immersed in a huge universe, almost each part of which is utterly hostile to life.
It just might be that the transcendent mind thinks this lifeless cacophony of particles in interaction
in such a way that particles reach earth and interact with our brains exactly in such a way that our
resulting actions are the ones we freely chose. In this scenario, the particles in the lifeless part of
the universe “encode” all free decisions taken at all times and places by all free agents.
Another option is quantum mechanics. It becomes more and more clear that what seemed an
incomprehensibly strange world of quantum matter is actually a very comprehensible conceptual
world. When I dream a tree, I do not necessarily dream every leaf on that tree – and such vagueness
allows me to steer my dream. I might decide that there was actually a cat under the sofa, and have
it show up and interact with the world, which corresponds exactly to the “collapse of the wave
function” that has baffled physicists for so long. Up till then there was “maybe a cat”, and now
there is (or, if I want the dream to go in a different way, there isn’t).
Those are options that science shows us – immanent options. There is, however, a much more
fundamental option, transcendent compatibilism: the possibility that the freedom of the
transcendent mind allows him to dream the world such that its deterministic rules result exactly in
the situation he intends. Understanding this requires the introduction of the distinction between
ontics and economics, which brings us to our next chapter.

Freedom from the transcendent mind

Now there is another issue to be explained: how can we be free from the will of the transcendent
mind if he is thinking all of our thoughts. This is answered by his secondary relating: he respects
us, and allows us to steer his thoughts – even when our thoughts go against his will, as our evil
shows. This is like a parent giving freedom to his child reaching adulthood, allowing him to do
even the things the parent is opposed to, because he believes allowing the child to be autonomous
and responsible is the more important thing. Of course the parent will still want the child to do the
right thing, but refrains from imposing it.

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 Chapter 5
Ontology
(This chapter can be skipped if it is too difficult.)
Ontology is the philosophy of what exists and the relations between existing things. As such it is
closely related to metaphysics, but where metaphysics limits itself to the primary beings, ontology
goes further and looks also at derived beings. So the transcendent mind is of metaphysical concern,
but our minds are of ontological concern only.
There are many so-called “ontological proofs” – this chapter is not about those.

The transcendent mind

Up till now we have reasoned about the transcendent mind as if it were subject to the same rules as
we are – but we have also seen it was not subject to anything. So there seems to be a contradiction,
and in fact, there is, if we do not carefully distinguish between the levels.
We cannot know anything about how the transcendent mind is on his own level, because there
simply is no structure through which to describe him. We cannot say he is one or many, true or
false, good or evil – all those notions are structures that the transcendent mind has laid on our
world, but that may have no meaning on his level.
So ontically we cannot say anything positive about the transcendent mind. This is recognised in
what has traditionally been called the “via negativa”.
There is however another way in which we can talk about the transcendent mind, namely the mind
as he is to us. He stands in a relationship with our world, and therefore can be considered “from
below”, as it were. It is in that sense that we saw that he must be unbounded and only have primary
properties. These properties will necessarily be approximations of the reality, and this has
traditionally been recognised in the “via analogica”.
This second way is called the “economical”, as it deals with the transcendent mind's management of
the world, and it is this transcendent economy which is important for us: we want to know what the
transcendent mind is like in relation to us. Without saying so explicitly, in all of our previous
reasoning up to transcendent compatibilism we have dealt economically with the transcendent
mind.

Freedom
And now it should be clear that the very dreaming of the transcendent mind is an ontic event, not an
economical one: it is prior to the world it is dreaming. But that means it is not bound by the rules of
our level of existence, but is free to create a world both deterministic and running according to the
intentions of the transcendent mind.

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Our world
Another problem solved by this distinction is that of the one and the many: if my brain is only the
mereological sum of my connected brain cells, and some cells see the sunset and others feel the
beauty, where is the “me” that enjoys the beautiful sunset? It cannot be one of the cells – or rather
one particle in the cell, because the cell is still complex in itself – but must be something non-
material distinct from the brain. So the mind is where the one and the many come together.
This universe is a complex compound too, so what makes the particles know each other, what
enables them to influence one another? There must be a point where all these come together. This
cannot be immanent, because an immanent entity would simply be one more item to integrate with
the others. It also cannot be matter, because any complex form of matter is a compound itself.
Without a transcendent mind, this question is unsolvable.
This insight leads to the ontological proof of the existence of a transcendent mind: without a
transcendent mind, the many of this universe could not be one universe.

Abstract notions
The existence of the transcendent mind also solves another famous philosophical problem: that of
abstract notions – do they exist or not? Does “two” exist? If so, what is it? If not, what does a pair
of shoes have in common with a pair of parents?
Universalists maintain that redness, visibility, joy, beauty, truth, and all such concepts do exist,
whereas nominalists claim they are just names that don't refer to anything existing. Both positions
are problematic, but looking at the transcendent mind we find a new answer. Everything in our
world is a thought in the dream of the transcendent mind – and “existence” means “being thought of
by the transcendent mind”. And that means that as soon as we think of, say, the notion “unicorn”,
so does the transcendent mind, because our thoughts are his thoughts (he has no doubt many more
thoughts than we do, though), and because he thinks the notion, the notion exists.
This answers the question: all such notions exist, and their content is the thought of commonality
that exists in the transcendent mind.

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 Chapter 6
Ethics
Ethics is the part of philosophy that thinks about moral issues: what is good and evil, and how
should one behave. Fundamental ethics, is about the first question, and morality about the second.

Goodness
What is goodness, or obligation? There is the famous philosophical problem of “the is and the
ought”. All our senses only observe the world as it is (if we are not deceived), not as it ought to be.
So how can there be an “ought”, an obligation, and even if there were, how could we know it?
The naturalistic fallacy is the mistake of trying to derive moral imperatives from the world we live
in – including maybe a God who prescribes. The fact that anyone, even a god or God, prescribes
something does not in itself make it good, and even if it were good, that in itself would not obligate
me to do it. This argument is called “Hume's guillotine”.
However, the transcendent mind is thinking this world, and his thoughts necessarily are truth – we
already saw that he was omniscient and infallible regarding our world. But that also means that if
he thinks something is good, or that we ought to do it, it is good, and we indeed ought to do it.
So, in short, some things are good, and we ought to do them, because the transcendent mind is
thinking a world in which these things really are good and ought to be done, and being good himself
he prescribes just those things. So that meshes beautifully with our earlier discovery that the
transcendent mind is fully good, again strengthening the confidence in our conclusions.
This also answers Euthyphro's dilemma: “Is something good because the gods approve of it (which
would mean goodness is arbitrary and subjective), or do the gods approve of it it because it is good
(which would mean they are subject to an external standard)?” The answer is: “It is good because
the transcendent mind thinks a world in which it is objectively good, and he commands it because it
is objectively good.” The Greek immanent gods would indeed be unable to create objective
goodness, but the transcendent mind is able to.
Other objective standards, such as logic and truth, are built into this world in the same way.

Goodness and freedom

But how can the transcendent mind be both totally good and totally free? If he is free, then he
cannot give us knowledge, because at any point he might decide to lie, isn't it?
The answer to that is simple: part of goodness is freely choosing always to be good. Someone who
holds open the option to do evil someday is not really good. So, in his freedom, the transcendent
mind has chosen to restrict himself to what is completely good – and because our thoughts are his
thoughts, we can immediately know that choice, and know his reliability.

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Quarantine
How can an evil world exist as the thought of an absolutely good transcendent mind? Here the
answer is love. Can a loving mother still feed her child, even if he has turned bad? Yes, of course!
If her care would be conditional on his goodness, it wouldn't be real love. She can allow things to
become difficult for him, in the hope to call him back, but she won't let him starve completely.
And the quarantine, the barrier between us and the transcendent mind, is not of his making: we have
moved our orientation, and because of that we are no longer aligned. If I drive away my car while
filling up the tank, the process will be interrupted, but not by any fault of the filling station.
Respecting our freedom, the transcendent mind necessarily gave up control over his dream –
comparable to our nightmares.

Morality
So far we have done some abstract thinking about what we can know, and about what is. Now we'll
start thinking about what ought to be – about what we ought to do. So the results of this chapter
will put a moral obligation on us. Many people are afraid of that, and stop their thinking here.

The state of the world.

So far we have seen that the transcendent mind is good, and that we freely chose evil, causing our
alienation from the transcendent mind. This world no longer corresponds to the moral rules that
form part of its basis, and therefore it contains evil of all kinds. In other words, there is damage
done, and we are responsible for it.
(Intuitively we know this: if we introspect honestly, we see that we are rotten within. Of course we
try to find all kinds of reasons to deny this: blaming others, or comparing ourselves to others instead
of to the standard of goodness, filling our life with other things to avoid having to think about it..)
We also have seen that goodness includes respecting our freedom, so the transcendent mind cannot
simply take the easy way out (discarding this dream and starting a new one). So, being good, he is
committed to repairing this world while respecting both its moral rules and our freedom.
The moral imperative calls us to be good, without forcing us to. It is, in the most literal sense, the
"love call" of the transcendent mind, who calls us back to himself, because that is the best for us
(good being better than evil).

Incarnation.
The fact that the transcendent mind will respect the moral rules of our world makes it easier to
reason about his approach. Within those rules, justice requires reparation of wrongs. Now if you
break my window, I have only four options (plus mixes of those four):
1. The window stays broken. This is not good, as the wrong would not be repaired.
2. I require you to pay. This would be just, because you broke it, but it would not be loving of
me – especially if the price of the window is much higher than you could ever hope to pay.

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 3. A third person pays. That would mean treating that person both unjustly and unlovingly. If
that person would pay freely, he would be loving, but I would not be in letting him.
4. I myself pay. That would be both just and loving of me.
The transcendent mind, being fully good – and therefore both fully just and fully loving – only has
the fourth option. And he is able to exercise it, because as we have seen he is omnipotent. In order
to repair this world “from the inside”, he has to enter it, and that is called incarnation. We all have
many dreams in which we appear ourselves, dreams in which we incarnate, so if we can already do
that, the transcendent mind certainly can.
He must necessarily dream himself as a human being, and one able to pay the full price of repairing
this world, i.e. taking the full punishment for all the evil human beings have done – from mass
murders to the smallest selfish thought, because even the least bit of wrong is already a complete
rejection of absolute goodness. It is a choice for partial, relative goodness, which is a complete
rejection of the absolute standards of the transcendent mind.
This person will then invite us to accept his payment, his punishment, as a substitute for the
payment we are due – but leave us free to accept or reject it.

Solidarity
But is it just if one person pays for another person's debts, if one person takes the punishment for
another person's transgression? Well, is it just if I-today am punished for what I-yesterday did? If
my skin is beaten for what my brain did? Or should only the one brain cell that took the final
decision to act be punished? This is the problems of the one and the many, and of identity, at play.
In a general partnership, if one partner makes debts, all can be persecuted, because they have
declared solidarity. Parents can – and should – pay for the damage caused by their children.
Members of the same sports club, or even of the same country, can say: “We won!”, even if they
didn't play, because they identify with the club or country.
It is this solidarity, this mutual identification, which creates the unit that bears responsibility. The
transcendent mind declared his solidarity with us by incarnating; it is up to us now to declare
solidarity with the transcendent mind in order to be able to accept his offer. We must, in a very
literal (though not physical) sense become parts of the same body.

Our choice.
So now it is up to us, to find this offer, and to accept it. If we do, we can be assured that the
transcendent mind, who already did not destroy us after we had rejected his standards of goodness,
will certainly never destroy us after returning to him. If we reject the offer, we reject him, and
permit him (or even ask him by our rejection) to retract fully from us.

The consequences.
So everyone must make that choice. At some point all those choices are clear, and the transcendent
mind will retract from those who did not accept him. As he is absolute goodness himself, this
means absolutely no good will remain with those people. On the contrary, he will fully be with

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those who accepted him, repair their beings, and allow them to make the choice he himself made: to
be absolutely good. These persons will forever be in an absolutely good environment, and be
absolutely good themselves. This certainty of future goodness is called hope.

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 Chapter 7
Teleology
Teleology is the philosophy of goals and meaning. Under materialism there are no goals – things
happen because of deterministic causes in the past, not because of goals in the future.

Meaning
We see that some things, some activities are meaningful, have a goal: they are part of something
bigger that gives them a reason for being. A tyre has meaning, because it helps make the car run;
the car has meaning because it allows me to get to Beijing; my trip has meaning because it allows
me to teach; my teaching has meaning because it allows people better to speak Chinese – all this is
relative meaning. If it turns out to be useless that people speak better Chinese, then my teaching
has no absolute meaning, nor has my trip to Beijing, et cetera. In the end, whether anything in this
world has absolute meaning depends on whether this universe as a whole has meaning.
Science tells us that at some point in the future this universe will either collapse with a big crunch,
or expand into infinity and undergo the “heat death”, where all our efforts will be lost. That means
that absolute meaning cannot come from the future. (Likewise it cannot come from the past
because of the big bang.)
If there is no transcendent mind, there is no real meaning to anything we are or do. If, on the other
hand, there is a transcendent mind, then our world finds its meaning in that mind – the way our
dream can be meaningful for us. Elements of our world can be meaningful if they agree with that
mind and if that mind in itself is good.

Intrinsic and Extrinsic meaning

Immanent meaning is extrinsic, that is: it is put on from the outside. When I took a branch and
made it a walking stick, it is not true that that branch ought to be a walking stick – I just imposed
that on it. Likewise the meaning of a slave for his master, or of a citizen for the state, is extrinsic:
the master or state do not have any rights, other than what the slave or citizen may have freely given
them. (They may have power, but there is a huge distinction between might and right.)
If I dream, it is different: the things and people in my dream only exist because of the goal I have
with that dream – their meaning is intrinsic. If that goal is good, then I have the right to expect that
they act according to that goal. And if I am good, I’ll have made them such that the people in my
dream will enjoy acting in that way.

Value, goodness, love, and happiness

A good knife is meaningful to us – it is valuable. So meaning and value are closely connected.
Likewise, a knife is meaningful if it does what it ought to do, so meaning is closely connected with

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morality too. In fact, the source of its meaning is also the source of its value and the source of the
principles what it ought to do – it is us, and the fact that we like that knife. In the same way, the
source of our meaning, our value, is the love of the transcendent mind.
As the transcendent mind is wholly good, he also connects happiness with this meaning. A bird is
happy when it can fly, a fish is happy when it can swim, a dancer is happy when she can dance – we
are all happy when we can do what we are meant to do, and even more happy when we understand
that what we do is useful and valuable.

Belonging
Meaning is also connected with belonging, with being at home. There can be a wonderful sense of
belonging together when a group works together for some good cause. Yet, as long as the meaning
of that good cause is only relative, that happiness is only temporary and limited. Our parents
worked hard to build up the country after the war, but we realise there is no inherent good in this
country as opposed to another country, and we rightly feel unwilling to spend our lives that way.
And because we have chosen evil, we also miss out on the truly good: many of our goals are not
really good – and because of that we feel guilt. We may try to hide this feeling, or silence it by
being busy with entertainment, but deep inside it is there, until we accept the payment by the
transcendent mind. If we look at meaning or love it is the same thing: if we limit ourselves to the
actual world we’ll only find relative and disappointing meaning and love.
Under materialism there is no belonging. Particles are where they are. Materialism can say that the
splinter is in my foot, but not that the splinter does not belong in my foot. My body is a collection
of particles, but so are all the left eyes of the inhabitants of Beijing. Who says that my body
belongs together but all those left eyes don’t? Only a transcendent mind can create belonging, by
thinking it.

The solution
Only in our connection with the transcendent mind we can be really at home, really loved, really
happy, really good and free from guilt, and really meaningful. We know that these are goals for us:
we want to be happy, loved, et cetera – but often we don’t reach those goals, because we search for
them directly, instead of reaching them indirectly by doing what we were meant to do, and being
what we were meant to be. And if we do that, we’ll only end up frustrated if we don’t get there, or
bored if we do. Only by returning to the transcendent mind we can find true meaning, true love,
true happiness, true belonging, true goodness, true freedom – and many other desirable goods about
which I haven’t had the chance to write here. First search the transcendent mind, and those other
things will be given you.

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 Chapter 8
Aesthetics
Aesthetics is the part of philosophy that deals with beauty.
Sometimes we are deeply moved by a tender flower, a majestic sunset, by the harmony of music, or
by a painting, sculpture or well-written story, and we call those things beautiful. An artist who can
make beautiful, moving art is celebrated as a master.
Under materialism this makes no sense. Our brains are such that triggering a certain cell creates
this feeling, and we just happen to be wired in such a way that seeing a flower triggers that cell. We
could rewire our brains such that seeing a rotting corpse, or experiencing a dirty public toilet would
trigger that cell: the feeling has nothing to do with the object (the flower, or the toilet), but only with
the subject (me) – I am the one able to have that feeling, and it is my brain that decides what
situations make me have it. If there is anything to admire or celebrate it would not be the flower or
the music composer, but ourselves, for being able to have these feelings.
Without a transcendent mind no objective beauty is possible.

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