The ideas outlined in this work are based on a fundamental premise:
Every human life is an entirely subjective, internal, and bounded experience. We define our life on a timeline of past, present and future, yet we experience time as a self-constructed and constantly changing present moment that is always focused on the immediate future.
There are two key aspects to this. The first is that our sense of our life consists entirely of our experience of living. What does this mean? Well to begin with, we experience our whole life from within our body and therefore from our own subjective point of view. As an individual, we can only ever know what we observe through our senses and in our bodies – physical sensations and actions, emotional states and thoughts. We spend our lives interpreting all that information and act habitually or intentionally to take care of our concerns, primarily survival. The implication is that we can never be objective as, by definition, this requires an absence of subjectivity. There is certainly an objective reality in which we live, but our view of it is always subjective. It cannot be any other way.
Our experience is always bound to our own personal biology. We cannot have anyone else’s experience nor can they have ours. They might tell us about their experience but we can only interpret what they tell us from inside our own experience which occurs in the context of our past experiences. If the experience is unfamiliar we will still draw on something from our past to create an interpretation as best we can. As we only have our own experience of living then the best we can do is guess at others’ experience. Most of that process of interpretation and guessing is done outside of our awareness. We just do it and fortunately we are very good at doing it but only to a point.
If we are all walking around guessing about others’ experience and they are guessing ours, then how can we ever build relationships and communities? The human brain has a phenomenal capacity to see and interpret patterns. We do this throughout our lives. Think about what it means to know and use a language. At birth, we are subjected to the languages into which we are born. Initially this noise is just that, noise. However, we quickly learn to distinguish breaks in the noise and common sounds that we come to recognise as words that are connected to something we observe. We learn to distinguish chairs, tables, mother, father, myself, anger, happiness and so on. Unless you invented it yourself, everything you can name at some point you learnt to name from some other source. We also initially learnt what these things mean to us from others. They told us what was good and bad based on the stories that make up their worldview.
This does not mean that we share their worldview as they hold it, rather we interpret in our own way and build our own worldview. Unfortunately, we tend to assume we see the world as it is rather than as our personal subjective interpretation of it. From this basis, we then assume others view objective reality as we do. We also assume they observe and interpret as we do. These assumptions are the cause of ongoing and extensive confusion in life.
The second aspects of the fundamental premise relates to time. We have socially constructed a common sense idea of time known as the ‘arrow of time’. This idea has been around for millennia and is made manifest in our calendars and clocks. We generally think of the arrow of time in terms of the past, the present and the future. Most people assume we are always living in the present, but this begs the question what is the present? If the past, present and future are all found on the arrow of time then there must be boundaries that separate the past from the present and the present from the future. Here it is important to distinguish between how the present is defined on the arrow of time and how we experience it.
If we assume we are always moving through time then I assert the present is not a space but a boundary. It is simply the boundary between the past and the future. However, human beings have memory and as such we hold aspects of the immediate past in our short term working and sensory memory. We also have brains that are largely predictive in nature. That is to say, our brains are constantly predicting and simulating what will come next, although all this happens outside our awareness. This connection to our very recent past and a constant sense of the future can be seen to provide us with an experience of a present moment.
Our way of being is fundamentally set up to step into the future rather than living in the present. We do not respond to the world we observe rather we predict what we will observe and how we will act and then observe to see if we have guessed correctly.
This idea of stepping into the future rather than living in the present may seem somewhat pedantic but it sets up a very different way of looking at the human condition. The future is always uncertain and so to always be stepping into the future means we are always stepping into uncertainty. The implication is that life is always about uncertainty and risk. So the challenge to leading a successful life lies in developing better ways of navigating uncertainty.
