Using my mind to control reality
When I was six, I had many peculiar beliefs, both about myself and others. One of them was a belief that I could control reality (and by extension others) using my mind.
For example, if I wanted something good to happen, such as my parents buying me a new toy, I would first imagine them coming home with nothing. Then, based on my reasoning, they would appear with the toy I wanted when they came back from work—I believed that all I had to do to get what I want was to imagine the opposite of what I wanted.
Fortunately (or unfortunately) for me, it turns out that for everything that goes right, there are a million ways for it to have gone wrong, which meant I had a convenient explanation each time it didn’t work (e.g. I didn’t imagine the “correct” opposite scenario). This meant that I would remain convinced of the ability even if it failed.
In addition, I would remember the times it did work far more than the times it didn’t—the failed attempts were quickly forgotten. But this was just the start; I still hadn’t noticed any problems with my beliefs just yet.
Is someone behind me?
Somewhere around the same time, I started believing that I had yet another superpower: the ability to sense somebody approaching me from behind—I would be able to “feel” when someone was behind me, and every time I turned around I would be right!
Was I? This went on for quite some time at first, but as I got older I started to notice a few problems I hadn’t noticed in the past (I was around seven at this point). I started wondering why I wouldn’t remember the times when I turned around only to find nobody there, or why I would identify people literally a hundred metres away and tell myself they were whom I detected.
I started to wonder what this “feeling” really was, or if it even existed (was I merely hearing the sound of footsteps?), so I started doing some “experiments” with myself. It started with a simple bet (back then I simply thought I had lost the ability): if I failed to detect someone behind me, or if I felt it when nobody was there three times, it would mean that I had lost the ability.
So I started wandering around the neighbourhood, often turning around quickly to make sure the “person behind me” didn’t have time to run away.
Intentionally trying to keep track of the attempts made forgetting the failed ones harder, so it wasn’t long before I hit three failed attempts. Not convinced (I really wanted to have superpowers), I raised the criteria to three times in a row, while brushing off many failed attempts using a variety of excuses such as being distracted or having a ghost haunting me.
I also had some latent beliefs of my predictions being always the opposite of the future, which contributed to even more failed attempts being disregarded by affirming that I “predicted” it by imagining the opposite.
What was that about?
A year or so passed, and my family moved to a place much farther away. As I became both older and busier with school, I left most of my memories—including my “superpowers”—behind, including these memories of my first attempts at scientific reasoning.
Because, for the next few years, I never really tried to investigate it further, and it was almost a decade later when I started reading about philosophical reasoning and logical fallacies (followed eventually by cognitive biases). Then I came across confirmation bias: I felt like I was struck on the head by the most obvious and yet oddly… familiar error?
I started to recall where I first encountered the confirmation bias and the memory has stuck with me ever since. Perhaps, I had never really forgotten after all.
Unfortunately, by the time I started getting into philosophy, I was already a few millennia late, so the psychologists (one of them was a double major in Psychology and Philosophy) I talked to would often criticise me for “reinventing the wheel” and tell me that I was wasting my time—there was no new territory left to explore within my elementary grasp of philosophical reasoning.
In retrospect, I think he was also irked by a 14-year-old’s obsession with existential nihilism and wanted the conversation to end quickly, not to mention that CBT doesn’t actually work when the problem doesn’t stem from necessarily fallacious or distorted thinking. It would be years before I even knew who Nietzsche was, but I’m trying to avoid reading his books these days as the last two left me with a healthy dose of existential crisis.
It’s easy to see why Nietzsche is often referred to as the most misunderstood philosopher, as his writing is very difficult to understand, often leading people to misquote, misrepresent, and point out non-existent contradictions, but as someone who grew up with similar philosophical ideas (and a fair share of existential crises), his book, The Gay Science, quickly became one of the best things I’ve read to date; it felt like I was finally understood by someone—I felt vindicated and less alone; it was liberating knowing that I wasn’t the only “crazy” one in this world.
Nobody likes a contrarian
Growing up, nobody would understand anything I was talking about—not even the adults. They would misunderstand and misrepresent me so often by the time I was 15 I started spending most of my time alone just thinking about philosophy instead of trying to talk to people. It was especially difficult to make friends, as they were all too naive and immature to understand me—even the adults felt like they were too young to talk to.
I say that partially because of hubris, but also because of the following reason: I think far too much for most adults and children my age to comprehend. I would come up with my own arguments and counterarguments, almost like playing chess with myself (a rather lonely activity).
All the adults I talked to then were still stuck at an earlier stage of reasoning—prototype stages I had long forgotten, leading me to believe they were still very underdeveloped and immature, thus “too young” to talk to. It occurred to me that age wasn’t a reliable indicator of how long someone has spent thinking—that people can live for a very long time without really using their brains.
To accuse me of excessive hubris at that time would not be entirely incorrect, and I would have been luckier if I had met an educated adult who would quickly put that growing hubris under control. Perhaps, people didn’t want to talk to me because I thought they were immature.
Eventually, out of loneliness, I started wondering how I could inspire more people to become interested in philosophy. Believing that I would have more friends to talk to this way, I started questioning everyone’s opinions regardless of which “side” they were on, assuming the Socratic method (or at least my interpretation of it) would be well-received and would inspire more people to become interested in philosophy.
If you’ve “facepalmed” at this point, so did I at the time of writing this, but I was naive enough to believe it would work back then. Needless to say, I quickly acquired a new nickname: “Nobody cares”. Or at least, that’s what people would say whenever I became involved in any conversation.
I would also present my arguments to people often, regardless of which side they were on—even if one holds the position currently most supported by our best reasoning and evidence, if they don’t actually have the reasoning or evidence to justify their position, then… they’re wrong. It could be a wild guess, it could be peer pressure or following trends, it could be inspired by emotion, either way, it’s bad reasoning.
I have had a lot of experience arguing ludicrous positions by playing the Devil’s advocate, thinking I was helping people improve at least to the point they can counter my “obviously incorrect” arguments, though it wasn’t long before I met people who would actually believe these fictional positions, causing me quite a bit of headache.
I learned that, with good enough reasoning, even the most abhorrent and illogical positions can seem legitimate in the absence of contradictory and competent reasoning, which, when left unchecked, can devolve into unwarranted and excessive confidence just like they did to me in the past.
Closing thoughts
Today, I am far more cautious than I used to be—winning an argument means nothing unless the interlocutor is competent, and I have generally become much less certain about my beliefs (even if it doesn’t always seem that way). I have seen people become convinced by ludicrous reasoning, and have been the cause of some of them myself, so how can I remain sure that I have not been misled?
There have also been times where I’ve “won” an argument against someone with poorer reasoning ability but abandoned my stance afterwards because the counterargument I created in their stead showed me that they were actually correct. Just because someone is worse at reasoning doesn’t mean they’re wrong.
The more I learn, the more muddy my beliefs become—the more my philosophy becomes a hodgepodge of ideas from the many contradictory and unique philosophies from the past.