The Purple Pill: Objective vs. Subjective Reality

We're going to start with primary colours.

Life as you know it isn't as you know it. Life is perception.


Depending on yours, for instance, you might now be picturing me as either a wise guru or as a scruffy-haired stoner with dilated pupils, dispensing paranoid platitudes shakily from its perch. The rest of what I say is going to be coloured through that perspective, and will continue to be as you suss out where else I stand with or against you on your existing perspective on life.


You already don't remember most of what I've actually said. Perhaps less so when you're sedentary at your computer, but the brain is bombarded with information at an alarming rate. You can't and won't take most of it in, filtering it to the back of your mind to focus on what actually matters. Rather than absorbing this post as the isolated string of characters it actually is, you interpret this little semi-circle-shaped squiggle as 'c' and a collection of its kind as a word with the definition you've been taught for it. This post becomes a sentiment that reflects not only my intent, but your interpretation, and it will gradually degrade with each recollection. In other words this post, to the fullest extent of which you are capable of knowing it, doesn't exist.


But of course it does exist, doesn't it? It's here, you can link to it, you can provide evidence of it as an objective fact. As such there are at least two versions of it: the fuzzy one in your head; and the one that's right here and still will be even if, Flying Spaghetti forbid, you suffer a cardiac arrest in your seat right now and your memory fizzles out of existence. Until that happens you are living in two realities, an Objective one that exists outside of your biases and a Subjective one that exists within.


People like to think they're more in tune with the Objective reality than they really are. Daniel Kahneman's research on cognitive biases turned a lot of that on its head, and he won a Nobel Prize in economics for proving what irrational goons we all are and how to make money by exploiting that. (Or averting that, supposedly.) Ask most people and they'll assure you that they're paragons of reason and good sense, whether or not their beliefs and attitudes actually make any. Making good sense is hard, after all, and requires a level of filtration that no one can consistently do on the spot even if they dedicate their life to rigorous self-examination for the more important issues. You can't tune out your emotions, instincts and upbringing fully all the time, nor control your degrading memory of what occurs even as it is occurring.

Sensible people right here. Just ask them.

What I'm saying isn't particularly novel. Fervent philosophers have been saying that life is perception for over a millennia, gathering around to stroke their... beards, shall we say, over semantics to determine the best and most accurate way to view it as such. They soon degenerated into the scruffy-haired stoner standing in for me above, and Ayn Rand soon arrived with her Objectivism to say, 'No it isn't,' some time after that. Gestalt psychology persists to insist that we know not what we see, as does the conventional neuroscience distinction between sensation and perception. Then there's some physics involving a cat that's both dead and alive in quantum mechanics, while the internet can't even agree on the meaning of a dress that's both subjectively white and gold and objectively blue and black.

#thedress, the most news-worthy confoundment the internet could come up with this week.

Your whole life is a lie. Alright, that's a bit dramatic, but I'll present you with a choice: Red Pill or Blue Pill? In which reality do you wish to dwell? In comfortable illusion, or in the thrill of hard truth? This is a choice you've been presented with many times before, both in the Matrix—where you're clearly meant to support the Good Guys' choice and not let yourself be oppressed by the evil robots controlling society that the late 90s were so fixated with (see Equilibrium, Fight Club, the same general theme of bored, middle-class white male protagonist)—and every time someone has told you something you didn't like. There's no heaven, for example. There's no hell. Life is just this and you probably won't end up rich or famous in it. The universe doesn't care about you. You're privileged. As an obnoxious bird who takes great pleasure in telling people these things, let me tell you: most people prefer the Blue Pill. It is usually swallowed with insults and anger.

Unfortunately, life is apparently always a binary choice.

How deep does the Rabbit Hole go? You probably won't like it. At the very least, I'm upfront enough to admit that I don't like it.

The Red Pill: Breaking down free will, the soul, love, God, and who you are.

I am an atheist. No one else in my immediate family is, at least not to the same clear-cut degree, and I became one at the age of six upon learning for the first time—to my great chagrin—that God was not a scientifically proven fact. I expect a fair portion of people reading this to be religious, and my point here is not to alienate so much as it is to illustrate my commitment to objective scientific reason. Disillusionment with the concept of free will, the soul and everything else came later on for me (with both self and institutionalised education), and I owe the first part to Sam Harris.

Thanks a lot, Sam Harris. You've ruined everything.

If you too consider yourself to be a person committed to objective scientific reasoning, at a certain point you may ask yourself where it is you must draw the line. You're hardcore if you don't; I admire you. Certainly, the answer should be that we never draw the line, because with every lie and bias peeled away you should be uncovering another underneath. Learning is or should be a lifelong process, but more frequently overlooked is the necessity of also unlearning to make way. The world is never the same one decade to the next, in culture or in knowledge, which is why my first post on this blog about my generation's inadequacy ought to have set off your pretentious bullshit detector.

The problem with never drawing the line is that you can strip so deep that you grow to question the value of what it is you're trying to expose underneath. Religion was an easy concept for me to unlearn, but I expect free will is harder for most, along with an attachment to the concept of a soul; that being the idea that there is something mystical about you that is 'uniquely you', an essence that is more than just a fleeting and temporary perception of signals in your cerebral cortex. Those who have loved may find it difficult to think of romance as more than a predictable chemical reaction based on hormonal compatibility, and so on. In the end, are we really sure of any concept being objective other than 'matter and energy', as a friend of mine likes to put his reality? Are we more than meaningless specks of carbon doing our weird little thing in the tiny little petri dish of life we're floating in through the Milky Way?

Yes, is my answer. But that's because I can openly acknowledge my desire to swallow the Blue Pill—not as a preference to the Red Pill of Objective Reality, but as an accompaniment that I thrive on, and love wholeheartedly and equally.

The Purple Pill: an alternative.

The soul is real. Forget what I said. So is free will and love. If you want and need him to be, God can be too.

They are real because you make them real in your mind. When I talk about the Objective and Subjective realities as a plural, I earnestly mean that they are both real, simply in different ways. The sensation you might have when reading the dialogue of your favourite character in a favourite book is similar; if you're like me, you might picture them walking in your mind, might begin to see and know their face and feel it become intimately a part of you. Why is your subjective perception of Bilbo Baggins less real than the image you have projected onto your favourite celebrity or politician? And were they to step down from their pedestal, what level of familiarity would be necessary for them to be thought of as real people? To relegate the very real experiencess we associate with equally real concepts to the realm of 'not real' is to me an arbitrary semantic, lacking purpose or use.

I think this is what many atheists mean when they describe themselves as spiritual but irreligious, so I hope putting it this way helps. A soul doesn't have to come from a God or exist outside of my imagination to be real and have meaning.

And so back to the original choice:

Do you take the Blue Pill of Subjectivity and stay in Wonderland, or do you take the Red Pill to see how deep the Rabbit Hole goes?

I advocate the cognitive dissonance of the Purple Pill. The only thing that exists in neither reality, for me, is the presented choice itself.