If life has taught me one thing, it's this:

We live in the same reality. We might as well recognize it.

Don't let anyone tell you objectivity is egotistical or wrong or impossible. It's none of those things. Even when those things are involved, it's none of those things.

What riches are more valuable than seeing the truth?

Show me those riches and I'll show you a truth that matters more.

Most people if you talk to them are not actually dualistic. They separate the physical from the psychological, the psychological from the mental, and the mental from the spiritual. We all draw these lines differently and often use different words, and some of us dismiss certain categories entirely, yet explicitly. For example, if I say I don't believe in an eternal soul or anything like it, and I'm convinced it's "biology all the way down" and consciousness is an illusion, then I am still separating the spiritual out in order to deny it.

Psychologists differ from most of the public in their willingness to explore and question and expand on these boundaries. And I think we often put the lines in different places. For many people, "mind over matter" is sufficient detail when struggling to push through the struggle. And if that works, it's valid enough. For others, to distinguish the psychological from the mental would be bizarre and artificial. They could even cite evidence and dissect it. But overall I think psychologists have a deeper and more nuanced sense about the spectrum or spectra that live where most people see monism or dualism or simply religion.

Brain activity is physical. To say about any activity that it "physically changes your brain" is borderline meaningless. If you remember something, your brain has been permanently altered. Even if you learn it and forget it, your brain has been permanently altered. For that matter, I doubt you can experience anything at all without some permanent alterations, whether you form a memory or not. Our candles burn down. The clock ticks. All known experience is accompanied by brain activity without which it would not transpire. Your most spiritual experiences are - probably - almost certainly - also physical. If you had enough and small enough and advanced and coordinated enough nanobots swarming your system, any of your subjective experiences could be tweaked, and so could, in all likeliness, any of your decisions. It isn't unlikely that the physical process by which you make conscious, free decisions could be tapped into, and your free decisions directed externally. The irony is that if this were true, those decisions might be about as free as they were before.

Most people would regard that view as monistic: it has replaced all the mental and spiritual questions with physical ones, or, at least, it hypothesizes that in the end, the hierarchy is flat and they all amount to the same reality, which objectively exists, with physical extent.

You can believe it's "biology all the way down" and the spiritual is all ultimately part of physics and still look at life and see these: physical, psychological, mental, and spiritual. Because you might disagree with me on those, and on their boundaries, I'll tell you, for the sake of discussion, what I see this way of slicing up the pie to mean. It's maybe informal. I'm not even sure that this is how I usually divvy up. But I am confident that I think obsessively around this topic and examine it more closely than most people you will meet.

The physical would be something like a wart on your foot. It's caused by a virus, which itself barely qualifies as living (if at all) and is widely regarded as possessing no mind, consciousness, or will. If you are not conscious of the wart, it is still there. If you are conscious of the wart, it is also there. That the wart might upset you or make you laugh or change your behavior, or that your behavior might include putting on a wart removal patch or going to get it cut or frozen off, does not make the wart a psychological entity itself, or any less physical. In this aspect, the wart is largely like a rock or a distant galaxy. Even if thinking about the wart differently could get it to go away, that would be through immune system activity acting on a physically real viral infection and eradicating it. Now, I could have started with rocks, but I wanted a more illustrative example. A wart lives in living tissue and is itself alive. However, it is fully physical and not psychological in nature. Looking at the moon and wondering at its beauty does not make the moon psychological, and the same goes for the ugliness of a wart. Most medical questions are physical, unless they are about behavior, emotions, communication, etc.

The psychological level, then, you will notice, is contained in the physical, but separated from it by practice. For a parallel example, vegetation would include fruits and nuts, but when we say vegetation, we typically don't mean fruits and nuts. Similarly, perhaps nuts are themselves fruits (it depends how you define both), but when we say fruits we don't mean nuts, and when we say nuts we don't mean fruits. When we say movement, we specifically mean something a little unlike a TNT explosion. If it were a TNT explosion, we'd call it an explosion or a blast. If we say it's a movement, even though a blast really is movement, we are pretty strongly implying an action other than a blast. It's worth going into detail about levels of specificity and the exclusions we imply when we use them, and it happens that this (mostly) is how I see the four categories I've mentioned. It's worth putting in seams.

Psychological versus physical is important in practice, because what's physical generally doesn't change just by noticing it or thinking about it. They are not exactly mutually exclusive (and one, I'd personally argue, is fully contained in the other, though I'd leave a little room for surprises on that front), but they are qualitatively and practically different. For example, motivation is psychological. By one definition, without motivation, you will not do anything: if you do anything, motivation is always part of the equation, as motivation is that inner fire that nudges or persuades us to move at all. We may influence motivation different ways, but we do not ultimately control it directly, nor do we exactly bring it into being or know how it works. Motivation exists before us, before what we understand as our identities and choices. We can shape it but not stipulate it. If I am not motivated to get up and go out for tacos, then, by one definition of motivation, there is no way I will do so. Pushing or being pushed to go, to move from a state of no motivation to acting, would involve the introduction of some form of motivation. Without the motivation, no motion.

In this sense, heartbeat is physical - it happens however we think about it, though we can intervene and influence it, much as we could choose to move a rock, or knock one aside while carrying a sofa through the garage door. Heartbeat is physical, but dreams at night, shared memories, humor, jealousy, anger, pride, anxiety, care, romantic love - these are psychological. They are primarily mental phenomena that are however somewhat spontaneous and somewhat outside of direct conscious control. This is the realm of feelings, but also of much of mental illness, and an underpinning of top performance in any field.

There is also, I would argue, the mental. This is the level of engagement with thought that is at least somewhat distinguished from feelings. For example, searching for the solution to a sofa stuck in the garage door, or for a mathematical proof, is a consciously initiated process that most of us would accept operates outside the realm of feelings. It doesn't matter whether you are upset or assured - a solution will either work or not, on its own merits. This would seem to harken back to the physical, but then, let's not forget, so does the psychological - we've already claimed these are all somewhat like babushka dolls.

Finally, many of us would claim there's a spiritual level. This is the level, perhaps, of consciousness itself, or, if you believe in it, of free will, or of the eternal soul. It's what's heightened by meditation or art or an epiphany or the birth of a child or loss of an elder. It is of course related to mentation, feelings, and the atom-ridden brain tissue that may support all these other levels. It's the level of responsibility, determination, higher love, mind over matter, good and evil, compassion, and so on. These all tie into the other levels, or even derive fully from them, but they take on another significance at the spiritual level.

This isn't an original division at all. All I'm really doing is personally codifying the pieces of a popular tarot spread: body, heart, mind, soul. These of course are not original to the tarot world either. I don't know who came up with them. But I do think it's a useful way to put seams in the map.

More to the point, I believe psychology is often about, and psychologists often preoccupy themselves with, these distinctions. That is, maybe I can't fully control my motivation to get out of bed rather than hit snooze, but it can certainly be instructive to say: this is a mind problem, not so much a mechanics problem. I can get out of bed, joules-wise. I know how not to hit a button with my hand. Though my motivation has a physical basis, the issue isn't much like the sculpture outside the building that no one person is bulked enough to rip out by hand. This isn't about rudimentary skill or raw activation energy. It's psychological and therefore probably susceptible to influence by the mental and the spiritual. It's liable to change from day to day or depend on how I interpret the issue. The problem may still be incredibly difficult. It could prove more difficult to solve than many purely physical problems. But it's useful to categorize it as psychological foremost, and then dig into what details you can uncover.

I invite you to look at any problem you have, big or small - and maybe the bigger one is more fun - and examine it from each lens: physical, psychological, mental, and spiritual. I think you'll find they're all relevant, and you'll probably feel that one is the most appropriate category. But after putting it in a bin, don't forget the others. Every human problem has tendrils in each one of these regions, and we solve the tangle by investigating and experimenting.

The most difficult problems are usually - not always - best approached from multiple defensible angles, rather than going all in on one attack at a time. For example, the snooze problem might dissolve after steps taken on each of the four levels above. Or a heart problem might be neutralized with two or three dozen little health and lifestyle changes that, together, are more powerful than any single known step.

Convincing others and finding the truth are like drafting and editing. The different modes appear separately. Yet one rarely lives entirely without the other. And there are moments of blending them about equally, and effectively - real moments, but difficult to bring about intentionally.

Negentropy is a physics term that fell out of fashion. It's the opposite of entropy. If the latter is "chaos" or "disorder" or "decay" (not exactly, but usable impressions) then negentropy is "order" or "efficiency" or "usable energy." My understanding is that entropy is better seen as uncorrelation, negentropy as correlation. If the moving parts in a gadget get out of sync, if a gear slips, or if systems decouple entirely, that's a boost in entropy, which is the number of independently moving pieces (or else how independent they are - entropy sort of means "units of independence").

The Big Bang is the ultimate example of negentropy, because everything was correlated together into the same point, form, location, time: little to no freedom as to where anything was. Before exploding in all directions (a vast increase in entropy which still continues), it was the ultimate in focused energy - aka, negentropy. The image below (from an article at The Conversation called "A concept from physics called negentropy could help your life run smoother") goes in reverse - entropy on the left, negentropy on the right. The tangle on the left is more difficult to describe exactly than the neat alignment on the right, which is why entropy is associated with information. You could store data in different types/patterns of tangle. You can't really store any data where there's only one allowed pattern. No options means no message. But firmly coordinated energy, as on the right, is also how to make things happen. To call it "also necessary" is a big understatement! Batteries supply negentropy. So does food. So does the sun.

JamesBrey/iStock via Getty Images

Writing with the letters of the alphabet gets more "tangled" (or entropic) than leaving a pristine sequence of identical dots. That's how language carries messages - via the entropy/tangle. But the letters versus dots example isn't about how simple a dot is compared to a letter. Choosing letter after letter from the alphabet to construct a message also involves more tangle than pasting a picture of the Mona Lisa over and over and over: as with the dots, you can't send a secret message with identical copies of the Mona Lisa in a perfectly uniform row. The key is in the choosing, moment to moment. When you can choose, you can leave a message. If all your cards are the Mona Lisa and you must play, and there's only one way to play any card, there's no message when you play Mona Lisa. That's negentropy: everything lined up perfectly, so inflexible that no meaning can get through. However, the unity can be used as a battery or pair of tweezers. (More on this in a moment.)

You might notice that the tangling on the left (in the picture) takes up more room, and it seems easy to imagine it moving while the lines on the right stay stable. No coincidence! Both space and time are ways Nature tracks interrelationships that are more elaborate and involved than "all is one" (pure negentropy, perfect correlation in all things).

That's a simple (maybe overly simple) but intuitive explanation for why matter and energy seem to stretch space and time, or even generate it. The universe needs space and time for interactions between pieces that aren't all unified. If they were all fully unified, causality wouldn't occur, and the universe wouldn't need space or time. And it seems weird and unrelated to the social process theme in the article, but black holes show that connection. Maximum data storage capacity and computing power (components of all interaction), according to black hole physics, depend on the quantities of mass-energy and spacetime. Furthermore, a certain amount of space can only hold a certain amount of stuff (mass-energy in a pattern), even if that stuff is bunched into a small piece of that space. Information and spacetime, if you believe cosmologists, are intimately connected and almost the same thing.

While this admittedly goes far beyond any expertise I can claim, spacetime seems to relate to the number of patterns available to stuff, which relates to the amount of stuff (and not, as you might think, to some preexisting background emptiness unfolding or "watching" through time regardless of what's in it). Matter, energy, patterns, space, and time interact and depend on each other. Spacetime seems to be how Nature allows multiple possibilities for arrangement, and then allows some of them to happen. Arguably spacetime warps and stretches around and inside a big blob of stuff (like a black hole) because the pieces of energy can't all ever fully unify, and keep making more space for themselves, and more timeline.

Anyway, look at the picture again, imagine the movement on the left (and maybe a little vibration on the right, as nothing is ever in complete stasis), the left being entropy and right being "negentropy," and that's a good mental model to get started.

Technically negentropy isn't negative entropy, but very little entropy, which is why the term fell out of fashion. It's a misnomer to call it "negative." Yes, an energy source can be used to tidy things up and reduce local entropy: the entropy of the energy flowing in is relatively close to 0 but still positive. This is a lot like ice-cold water, which always carries some heat (even ice would), yet freezes your hands. Cold water is hot compared to dry ice, yet it will cool your warm hands down - that's similar to the "negative" in negentropy.

The photons in a laser beam are highly correlated - so, nearly 0 entropy. They're almost just a bunch of the same photon copy-pasted over and over (remember the negentropic Mona Lisa game?). And they're all going the same direction. If that neat laser is used to jostle atoms one by one into a neat row, then, well, maybe this won't surprise you: in that tiny area, the low-entropy laser is, just there, reducing entropy. The atoms get less scattered. So the effect appears as if a negative entropy were acting.

But that's just how it seems. If you melt scissors or tweezers, you've increased the freedom or entropy of the metal atoms (the metal "relaxes" and flows around) so far that you can't use the tool. But the scissors' metal has some positive entropy either way. Neither scenario resembles all the metal scrunched into one point like the moment of the Big Bang, and even scissors have a lot more individualistic shape than a laser. Now, the opposite of scissors crushed to form a black hole (negentropy) would be an expanded vapor. That would be lots of entropy, perhaps maximum entropy. Even if you melt scissors, the metal atoms gain freedom, yes, but the metal certainly hasn't vaporized and evenly coated the whole universe, like oxygen filling a scuba tank (that would maximize its entropy). So it's by virtue of a low-ish entropy that scissors have a definite, non-uniform appearance - some specificity, shape, and clear unity. The atoms are correlated into a scissors pattern.

With this low amount of freedom (the metal is still gently vibrating, which gives some freedom), you can rely on the atoms to be in certain regions, and can rely on the scissors to hold their shape so that work can be done. Similarly, the laser carries positive entropy, just not much, and its low quantity of entropy, ie, the predictability of its shape, can be used like a scalpel or tweezers. When we talk about laser focus and its ability to cut precisely, we're talking about using negentropy.

Another perhaps helpful comparison is centrifugal force (how things seem) versus centripetal force (almost the opposite - the physically real, operative force, which is pulling, not pushing). Negentropy is a way things can look, whereas entropy is always positive as far as we know. That in theory was true even at the moment of the Big Bang, when the entropy of everything was at its minimum.

Just about everything we find interesting is a pretty balanced blend of entropy and negentropy. That's often called "complexity." Things that grow and develop are complex.

The sustainability problems of modern industry and society can be understood in terms of entropy, negentropy, complexity, etc. It's a useful lens.

There's a famous expression, Garbage In, Garbage Out. GIGO. Every programmer knows it.

But it applies to real life, and the wording is deceptive.

What GIGO means is that even a small error in reason - whether that's in the logicky part or the factual premises it works on - can destroy the entire argument and its conclusion.

So, if you want to apply GIGO to everyday life, the first thing to know is that Garbage In could look absolutely right to you. A small flaw is what makes it "garbage" and ruins all the logic.

The presence of many big flaws could be worse, and that's the image conjured by the expression. But actually, many big flaws could be no worse in consequence than one tiny one. That's logic for you, unfortunately, and why devices glitch out - and why every programmer knows GIGO.

We don't all apply it elsewhere in life. That's an additional skill.

But it does apply, and does it!

You've often heard about people who, well, everything they're saying is reasonable, but you just know they aren't right. It's given as evidence that logic doesn't work the way it's supposed to, and you can be "too reasonable."

So, any time this feeling is on point, if you look closely enough, you'll find it's because there's something subtly wrong with the logic. Maybe, for example, they're saying "always" when the reality is "almost always." You've probably heard of "black swan"-type errors? We can all rely on the common-sense fact that there are no black swans, or real-estate always goes up... until, well, we encounter the reality that there are black swans, and sometimes real-estate goes down, and so on. The shock of "black swan" events comes from mistaking "almost always" for "always." For most people most of the time, that difference is negligible, and they may not even know it's there. But for logic, it can make a gigantic difference. When "black swans" are disruptive, it's a simple example of GIGO. And that's it. No more complicated than that. (Usually "black swan" implies a long-tail probability distribution, which can itself carry just as much import, but that isn't relevant here.)

The black swan effect falls under GIGO, but to hear either phrase, you wouldn't know it. "Swans are white" doesn't sound like garbage. But that's a perfect example of the G in GIGO. (This isn't meant to be a statement about race, by the way - but on that note, prejudice ranges from obvious garbage to subtle garbage, and technically is all Garbage.)

Anyway, it isn't that hard to fix: "These swans have white feathers. Some others have black feathers. We have no data on other feather colors yet." You could add, "Swans were once believed all to be white." And you could give numbers and geographical regions. But the process of making this less Garbagy is a little more precision and a lot more openness to data. This is why logic and a feeling of absolute certainty do not go well together. Good logic comes from breaking down absolute certainty - and thereby standing the best chance of acquiring it.

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Most of this is obvious. The thing most laypeople don't quite fully appreciate is that a grain of sand can wreck a spaceship when you're working in logic. Of course it might not, but it can. And more importantly, the danger doesn't go on vacation when we talk about everyday life, or when our goal is only to be sure we know what we're saying. The grain of sand might not destroy the spaceship. But in logic (and in arguments about and descriptions of energy and matter, which is logical), there isn't really a limit to how much a little thing can mangle. Anything in the same system, the same set of contingencies, is vulnerable to a little slip.

We all, of course, have plenty of experience with little mistakes that turn out to be superficial. Oh, sure! Absolutely! (See my previous post.) Just don't let that lull you to sleep. All too easily, it can. All too dangerous, it does. Don't forget: the Shuttle Challenger blew up because the temperature tolerance of one rubber gasket was off, and so it got damaged by frost, then tore when it was needed most. In the context of billions of dollars, the lives of the crew, and many launches, that's pretty much a grain of sand.

The Mars Climate Orbiter crashed into Mars because a programmer used the wrong unit somewhere. That's GIGO. But it isn't some detail of coding. It all but is coding. To use logic, you must deal with its Achilles' heel constantly. You can't write more than a line of code without those tiny things trying to catch up with you. And again, and more importantly, it isn't specific to code. It's specific to computation and by extension reason in general. It's specific to making any kind of conclusion or prediction. So - that's big, right?

The point isn't to intimidate anyone into thinking they can't use logic right, just because they don't have specialist knowledge. You can use logic.

Actually, it's kind of a one-two punch:

1) SIMPLE. Make the logic as simple as possible, so you can see it all easily and hunt down any errors creeping in (at the edges or in plain sight).

2) UNASSAILABLE. The facts that you rely on must be unassailable. Not probably right. Not everyone knows this is right. Unassailable. You need error bars on that - preferably. Ideally, you want to know how that fact was verified. And you want to welcome criticism of the fact, not shun it. You want to know any potential weakness. Your facts are your rubber gaskets.

If you do 1 and 2 really well, you will reason better - by which I mean more reliably, more accurately, making better predictions - than almost anyone you know.

The best way to know things for sure is to start with unassailable facts, and use simple logic carefully on them, checking it all repeatedly. You listen carefully to all feedback. Others don't tell you how to conduct your own mind, but they do tend to give useful information if you let them.

From there, you can branch out, get exploratory, speculate, have fun, etc.

The base allows that. You need the base. 1. 2. Then have some fun.

I dunno. It sounds too simple, or elementary, or something.

You'd be amazed.

Our minds are extremely probabilistic. They are good at that. They are not too good at certainty. We think they are. That's why we need computers, in a sense. Computers reason shockingly more reliably than humans, within their established scope. We underestimate quite how big that difference is. A typical CPU goes through more cycles in a second than the heart in a lifetime of beats. In a minute, that's another 59 lifetime+s, and typically, zero errors are made. Imagine 60 extra-long lifetimes doing math constantly and making no errors. (That first minute is just a taste. There isn't good public data on CPU errors, but CPUs are so accurate that they don't have built-in error-correction the way memory and hard drives do. If there were many more errors than this ballpark, that couldn't be true. Various kinds of marketplace ensure it. You'd run the same simulation twice and get different results. That's an experience people tend not to have at all. If the output is different for the same inputs, that typically means there's random number generation in the simulation, which means the two runs aren't precisely the same.)

Unless you stop to think about it and poke around, you have no idea how much better computers are at certainty than we are.

On the bright side, we are great at probability. We do need to remember that the bets our minds place in constructing an image of reality are colored by a wide variety of biases. But an excellent way to do this is to recognize that the kind of thinking we do is betting. It isn't too competitive in the domain of certainty. Knowing this makes immediate differences: for example, it's quite tough to hate a group of millions of people if you realize your opinions, feelings, and conclusions might be ill-founded.

What our brains do really, really well is heuristics (aka rules of thumb, guidelines, pro-tips), and overall the process falls under Bayesian reasoning/statistics. To put it all briefly, in logic, you aren't allowed to reverse IF-THEN statements. Sometimes the statement reversed is true, but whenever the reverse is true, that is its own new fact, a surprise that you would have to specifically know. It's lethal to presume THEN-IF also holds. In everyday life, though, we are constantly speculating about THEN-IFs. We do this so routinely, and find it useful often enough, that we rarely if ever stop to realize that what we are doing is not logic and very far from certain. Bayesian reasoning is a way to make informed guesses about when THEN-IF might also be true. And that's what our brains do 24/7. In terms of daily living, most of we think we know is an informed guess. But we cannot, if we want to be really sane (beyond the group "common sense" handed to us, which can also lead us astray), confuse the conclusions of this kind of reasoning with actual certainty.

Obviously it isn't all hopeless, and it's unwise to believe nothing and stand for nothing (nihilism and absurdism are forms of sophomorism, anyway). Combine critical thinking (including skepticism and knowing that THEN-IF isn't logic) with open-mindedness (which includes what I call positive skepticism: "It's possible" or "You never know" or "I could be wrong" or "Breakthroughs happen" or "Everything isn't always as it seems" or "There are more than two sides to every story"). This in no way at all prevents you from seeing that B is much more plausible than A. The mistake is shutting out uncertainty as if you've now conquered it. That rarely if ever happens.

Think of driving a car. Do you choose the right position to put the wheel in and leave it there? Or do you keep your hands and arms supple and responsive to the perpetual stream of updates from your eyes, etc? That's objectivity.

Even musicians use objective flexibility, or the suppleness of objectivity, in search of an optimal performance, believe it or not. According to top experts: to play violin better, stop tensing up. Relax your body as much as possible. Let it be ready to respond sensitively to the slightest thing. Tenseness is a presumption. You have to undo it first, then do the work of responding. So lose the tenseness, and respond to input. Respond to conditions. Don't resist new information, but process it, realizing that your process is heuristic, is a series of bets, is not much like a CPU. That's objectivity. That's making best use of humanity's gift.

When I was younger, I was a determinist. Some would call that a fatalist: I believed that whatever happened was what was going to happen anyway. It was all equally fate. We experienced ourselves making choices from an insider's perspective, but that didn't mean they didn't happen step by step according to causality and the laws of physics.

The reason I'm not a fatalist is that there's nothing to lose. If I'm predetermined from birth to death, then I can't help it anyway: so if I believe in free will and that somehow harms me, I could not have done otherwise; those were always the fixed rules of my game.

If I'm not predetermined completely, then in some sense I stand to lose anything I could possibly lose by getting this wrong and thinking "I have no choice." I stand to lose anything and everything choice might offer, including my life itself.

A lot depends on what we actually mean by "I," but that's a rabbit hole I don't want to get lost in right now. My organism can have a choice the same way an NPC can have a choice based on how you're playing. "Having a choice" doesn't mean "non-deterministic," necessarily. Your FitBit could "have a choice" to wake you up with an alarm that depends on your current biometrics - that is, on whether it calculates this to be a good time or not. By human standards, that isn't a choice, because it's deterministic. But from some definitions of the FitBit's "I" (if there is one), that's a choice anyway. It can't know your biometrics in advance, so it's waiting for your input, which when it arrives will inform its action. The process of that informing and that action could in theory "feel like something," even if it can only flow one way that time. The FitBit is in some sense "surprised" by your biometric data, as it didn't know it in advance: that's the definition of information, and of surprise, which are now often defined as the same thing.

I find the idea of all this experience - some really painful - very wasteful if we don't actually, in that experiencing, gain the power to co-invent the course of nature.

If I have nothing but determinism in me, what do I gain for my pain?

Learning, awareness - but I could learn from data without experiencing that. So why experience it?

I'm convinced we feel something because we are participating in the creation of the universe.

Creation, not just unfolding.