Introduction Hi there. Thank you for picking this book up, I’ll do what I can to make it worth your while. I have something to share with you that you are not going to like. It’s a kind of problem that I have. And I think that you might have it too. It’s an astonishingly serious problem. It could well be the most serious problem I’ve ever seen in my life. Why would you want to see it? Well, simple. Y ou can’t solve it unless you can see it. When I first got a sense of it, I had to force myself t o look. I t was a terrible, horrible possibility , something so far outside what I had ever thought to even consider before. But then I did a little bargain with myself, a bargain maybe you might like to make with yourself. Maybe not – but this was the pa ct I struck. If this terrible thing was true, then I didn’t need to worry , because there was nothing to see. But if it was true, then everything I was, everything I’d done, everything I was working for and attempting, all of it, ha d this massive l ie right at the heart. And I mean massive – truly massive. S omething that would totally destroy any hope I ever had of doing anything real, or helping anyone in any real way. Just an absolute stick of dynamite sitting underneath my entire life. So, I looked. And it was true. It was true everywhere I looked, there was no part of my life where it wasn’t true. And it brought the ceiling down on who I was. It was a bitter cup to drink, I tell you, savagely bitter, the bitterest thing I can describe. It took days jus t to get through the initial avalanche o f revelations. The hits just kept on coming. It was like discovering my whole life anew from a totally new angle – an angle with revealed something appalling, shocking, something beyond all reason and sanity, and ye t it was there, right there, plain to see. But as I looked, something else also started to swim into focus. And I’m going to shoot off on one here, but the metaphor that leaps to mind is the Hydra. I n ancient times there was a myth of a monster called the Hydra. It had multiple heads and it couldn’t be killed because if you cut off one head, that head you cut off would regrow two heads in its place. All my life that kind of thing had happened. Every time I’d try to fix something, the very act o f fixing it would create new problems. Every time s omething went wrong, all my attempts to solve it would only make it worse. And I look around the whole world and I see a lot this – I don’t think it’s just me. We try to fix something, but e veryone entrenc hes, sides are drawn, everything bogs down into painful quagmire s of blame. N othing changes, the problem s still remains just as bad, but now we’ve got this horrible extra layer of conflict on top of it. I could list global problems where this is true, but then it might be quicker to list problems where it’s not From where I’m sitting, that looks like it would be a very short list. But s uddenly, when I saw this problem, for all the pain of the revelation , I could see t here was a deeper order driving all of that . Something is happening underneath what we see , something that makes chilling, wrenching sense of why people are the way we are. And while that thing remain ed hidden from me , I was trapped, forever stuck trying to fix the symptoms of a problem I co uld never quite reach, like an itch I couldn’t quite scratch. And honestly, I’m so glad I saw it. I would never want to go back to being that person who didn’t know it. Sometimes I toy with that, daydream about going back to the life I had before I saw th is thing But there’s no future to any kind of life like that. None at all. Because for all the savage extremity of this problem – and it is a massive issue, far, far bigger than anything I have ever encountered - o nly if we see things th is deeply can we hope to solve things this deeply. And you may well turn around and say – “ Oh, so you have a magic answer to all our problems? ” I’ m sorry, but no. I have an answer that makes sense to me, and I’m happy to put that in front of you , show you why it makes sense to me, show you what it does that means it can do this. B ut that’s just me. I don’t have a special authority in these matters. You have to see things for yourself, decide for yourself how you’re going to address this problem – and that’s if you’re even going to look at it. But if we cannot come to grips with this issue, it will get to grips wi th us, and I for one do not want to be in its grip. Now I’ve put this book together in a certain way, and I’ve done this for a reason. Intellectually understanding this problem just as a ‘ theory ’ can’t really help you. Intellectualising it can even dist ract from looking at the reality of it, which is clearly visible. W hen I started seeing it, that was how I tried to evade it, how I tried to distract myself. I I started leaping into debates and analysis inside my head, comparing this idea to that idea , ra nting and posturing and having a whale of a time. But I stopped myself, because I could see that I was just running away There are plenty of ways to evade looking at this problem, and they are all very tempting , because it’s so overwhelming. It’s like p ulling down the sky on yourself, it’s just such a savage thing to see What I want to do is give you the best possible chance of seeing it. For that you need a really, really clear idea of the core issue itself. Then you need the test that allows you to check yourself for that issue. It’s not just enough to just drop a quick summary in a quick paragraph. That wouldn’t work , I’ve tried it. The reason is that your mind itself will resist seeing this , in a very sim ilar way as it would resist terrible, terrible news. When something’s so extreme and shocking that your whole mind recoils, pushes it away, tries to find ways to dismiss it, or to argue with it, or anything, anything at all, so it doesn’t have to be consid ered or accepted. This is like that. I’m not trying to big it up. You will see soon enough. Brace for impact, this is massive. The only way I know to help you past that problem is to g ive you really, really extreme clarity on the core issue before we get to the test That way it’s easier to keep a hold of when your mind is trying to dodge away from it. So how are we getting you that level of extreme clarity? The way I’ve done this might seem strange, but it’s the best way I could think of. I’ve always be en interested in the evolution of the human animal. It’s a fascinating thing, with lots of interesting questions hovering around it. As soon as I saw this thing, an old idea that I’d played with years and years ago suddenly leapt into new relevance. A new way to understand where we came from and what we are. And it all just fit so perfectly. Weirdly perfectly. And it made sense of this problem in a way I think – and you’ll have to be the judge of this – is too powerful to be coincidence. So that’s the fi rst two parts of this book. But the purpose of those parts is not to persuade you of a specific origin of either this problem or of human beings. If it does that, great. But t he important thing is tha t it gives us a kind of ‘ neutral space ’ where we can go right to the heart of the problem. By the end of the evolution bit, you’ll have all the clarity I can possibly give you on the problem itself. From there, showing you the test is extremely straightforward, and you’ll have a really solid grip on what you’re looking for so you’ll be able to take that test if you decide to. That also means that it doesn’t really matter if you agree or disagree with the evolution stuff. I’m happy if you agree, but t he thing that really matters is that you understand the evolution part of the book. As long as you can do that, you’ll get that absolute clarity on the deeper issue , and the test will work if you take it. The final part , after the test of the book talks about what to do about this situation . Where to go next, what kind of direction we can move in . I’m not going to go on and on here. I think there’s some basic angles other people have taken on seeing this, and the way I am personally going. I’ll sketch all that out so you have some basic ideas. If you wa nt to follow my tale further, and go down the line I’m going down – or even just to see what my results are so you can compare, there’s a link at the end that connects to a podcast I do, which is all about that. And that’s it! That’s the whole thing, that’ s enough preamble. I hope you en joy it! Part 1 : The Wasp And The Caterpillar Chapter 1 Three hundred years ago a man called Marcus Von Plenciz was trying to save millions of lives and being ignored. He had a new idea that made sense of something horrific. His idea was that infectious disease was caused by creatures too small to see. He was ridiculed. Everyone knew that disease was caused by evil spirits in stinking air. Since ancient times doctors had called this air miasma – foul clouds of malevolent will. You could smell how nasty they were. There was no need for a new idea. But Von Plenciz knew differently. He knew that if he was right, new ways to cure disease could be developed, far beyond anything humanity had ever considered. So, he pushed his idea. He spoke to people. He wrote letters. He even gave the tiny creatures a special name: Animalculae . This invisible life, he argued, fed upon us, but we couldn't see it. All we could see were the consequences of the feeding – sickness, pa in and death. He fought hard for his theory, but nobody listened. As far as the world was concerned, Von Plenciz was an idiot. After all, he believed something palpably silly – that there was an invisible world, and in that world, there was life of a tota lly different kind to the life we know. This wasn't a dry academic disagreement. This was life and death on a massive scale, real people in desperate situations, crying out to a doctor to save their dying children, dying wives, dying husbands. But the doctors didn't save them. They couldn't, they didn't understand what was going on. They were all wrong. Von Plenciz had it. Tiny creatures, too small to see. Today we call them microbes, not Animalculae, but Von Plenciz had cracked the essence of germ the ory. But is it that hard to understand the resistance of the doctors of the time? It seems natural to us that big problems have big causes. Disease was a big problem, one of the biggest. It carried all the pain of maiming your body, losing the people you love, and your own death. They believed such horror had a huge cause – evil itself, evil spirits sent to destroy human life. But sometimes big problems have very small causes indeed. If a cause can compound, if a cause can feed itself and grow in power, i t can have enormous effects. The microscopic world is teeming with tiny things that alone pose no danger at all, but they can breed. Even though their scale is a fraction of our own, they can kill us. What we are going to consider in this section is that, just as in Von Plenciz’s time, there is another kind of cause for a huge range of human problems. But we’re not talking about physical problems or physical diseases. We’re talking about a huge range of emotional problems. Something invisible to us because just like the microscopic world in Von Plenciz’s time, it is outside what we have yet considered. A new kind of place where something small can multiply and grow. Where tiny things can compound and compound until they become enormous issues that swamp our lives. Another, very different kind, of invisible world. Chapter 2 Evolution is a simple mechanism. It occupies a strange place in science, not quite the same as a physical law like gravity, but in some ways similar. Once the conditions for evolution are in place, it will always occur. When it occurs it creates something striking, which is to say, life. Evolution is extremely simple at its heart. There are only three conditions for evolution. They are reproduction, variation and competition. Condition one – reproduction. A thing has to be able to copy itself. Those copie s must be different from each other, that's condition two, variation. There needs to be some limited resource over which the copies compete, that's condition three, competition. The variations in the copies produce a range of approaches to winning that on going competition for resources all the different organisms are engaged in. Some variations help, others hinder. As those most effective at competing get more resources, they reproduce more than the others. Theirs is the heritage that is carried forward. T his happens again and again. The churn of the blind process selects for the variations that help the most. Those successful variations are more pronounced through the generations. They compound and build upon themselves until the organism is honed to explo it its environment with dizzying efficiency. That's evolution, that's all it is. And because it’s so simple, that means that if these three things are present in any habitat, evolution is inevitable. Life will occur. Nothing can stop it. Life can evolve i n all sorts of places. It can evolve in the deserts of Africa, the jungles of the Amazon, and near hydrothermal vents in the deep of the sea. It can occur in the bloodstream of a seagull in flight, in the froth of waves and the ice of tundra. But there is another place where it can also happen. It is a place which humanity has never considered, a place so close to home we overlook it. Thoughts can reproduce. You can have a thought and tell your friend that thought, then you both have that thought. The tho ught has been copied. So that’s reproduction, condition one. All thoughts vary. We each have a different brain, we're different people. All of our thoughts have a unique spin. Even mathematical equations sit differently in people's minds because we look a t them from our unique personal perspectives. Or two people can have the exact same idea but be doing something totally different with it. So, no matter how exact, no copy of any idea can ever be a clone. And that means variation is baked in to the world o f thought, and that’s condition two. But what about condition three, competition? Well, is it wrong to say that some thoughts come and go, unable to gain traction, but other times, thoughts grab us, rivet us, capture us? There’s only so much attention to go around, only so much bandwidth in a person’s mind. If a thought can dominate that bandwidth, pluck at your heart, and engage your head, then you’ll spread that thought a lot more. Which means that there is a limited resource over which thoughts compete, which directly affects how fast they reproduce from person to person. When evolution's three conditions of reproduction, variation and competition occur all together, evolution is locked. The rollercoaster has begun to move, the bar has clicked in posit ion and we're in there for the ride. It takes a while to get where it's going , but the destination is always life. Life has its own agenda: to survive, feed and reproduce. It adapts to its environment in amazing ways, and more than anything else, it works for itself. Evolution doesn't need blood and muscle, or cells, or even DNA. We’ve proven that by creating evolutionary programming that uses this simple process to generate computer code in a virtual environment. That shows that evolution is not limited t o the physical. All it needs is self - replicating information. Which leads us to a strange and almost science - fiction like conclusion. If this is all true, then ideas themselves must be subject to their own evolution. Which means that ideas must be a form of life. A form of life with its own agenda, which is working for itself. Chapter 3 Ideas seem like part of us. They seem so intimately part of us that it is surreal to question them. But evolution produces strange things, and appearances are not always to be trusted. Humans have existed in their modern form for at least three hundred thousand years, perhaps longer. That might seem like a long time, but human evolution moves slowly. It takes decades for a human to grow to maturity and decades to raise a new generation. Germs reproduce much faster. It can be twenty minutes from a germ's creation to when it reproduces. In three hundred thousand years a germ can go through seven and a half trillion generations. If thoughts reproduce slowly like humans do, t hree hundred thousand years of evolution might produce a few limited adaptations. But if thoughts reproduce as fast as germs can, three hundred thousand years is easily long enough to evolve into flawless engines of replication and hunger. From when a tho ught is conceived to when it is communicated can be a matter of seconds. It can be faster even than the few minutes it takes germs. While physical reproduction is facilitated by a physical form, it is also constrained in speed by that physicality. Human bo dies are hugely complex and that takes time to copy. Germs are far simpler, but there's still a lot of chemical chicanery involved. Ideas don't have this problem. They can just be spoken and comprehended. On top of this, a human usually bears one child at a time. Germs split in two. But a single idea can be communicated to however many people can hear it. For most of our past that meant how many people could crowd into earshot, but that's still a potential of hundreds of offspring per generation. Ideas have the capacity to reproduce and spread a lot faster than germs do. Three hundred thousand years of human consciousness could well provide long enough for something to take shape inside that habitat, something very well honed to exploit it. The po int of these little ‘back of the napkin’ calculations is not to prove anything, but to get us considering something. Some people have written about conceptual life, memetic theories about how ideas in culture can multiply and grow. They’re talking about pa ckets of information we share online, things like that. But we’re talking about something far more ancient. Because if we’re looking at an evolutionary history that stretches back to the start of thought itself, there’s archaeological evidence of abstract thought in pre - human ancestors, literally millions of years ago. That means that this form of life has had a habitat in which to evolve for millions of years. W hat’s possible in this situation is a form of life staggeringly more ancient and advanced than anything we have ever seriously considered possible, or even plausible. What kind of life are we talking about here? Well, here’s the thing – biology isn’t just a bunch of boring words and classifications that you get beaten over the head with in school There are some fearfully clever people who’ve spent a long time cracking open the basic rules that all life obeys. I’m not one of those people, I’m just an amateur biologist. But those people have dug up some profound rules about how things work, how all life works in all sorts of ways. One of the things they’ve mapped out is the phenomenon of symbiosis. Symbiosis is when two organisms are linked in their evolved behaviour. It means that – in some way, any way – there has been actual evolutionary change in one organism to make it more effective at exploiting its relationship with another organism. That relationship could be positive, neutral or negative – but what makes it symbiotic is if, whatever that relationship is, the organism has evolved actual ch anges that make that relationship more useful to it. Symbiosis crops up all over the place in nature. Evolution drives an organism to adapt, and working in connection with another organism is often the best available option. There are three main forms of symbiosis. The first is something called mutualism, where two organisms help each other. Examples of this would be the way that bees pollinate flowers by collecting nectar, or how remora fish cling to sharks so they can clean the shark by eating its dead skin. The second form of symbiosis is what's called commensalism, or neutral symbiosis. This is where one organism benefits from another without affecting it. An example of this would be a bird that evolves special adaptations that help it nest i nside a hole in a tree. The bird physically changes to benefit more from another organism, but the tree itself does nothing, doesn’t change, doesn’t care. The third form of symbiosis is negative symbiosis, which is what is called parasitism. This is where one organism steals from the other while providing no benefit whatsoever. Parasitism is rife in nature. There are many forms of parasite, each adapted to exploit their host. Some parasites siphon off as much as they can while leaving their host alive. Oth ers control their host in order to complete their life - cycle and reproduce. Some kill their host stone dead as part of that life - cycle. Parasitic adaptations are as brilliant as anything in evolution, and are often cruel. To give you a ‘for instance’ abou t how nasty these adaptations can get, there is a kind of parasite called the tongue - eating louse, which enters a fish’s mouth through its gills. Once inside, the louse chews off the fish’s tongue, and takes its place. From that macabre position the louse lives out its days as the fish's false tongue. Everything the fish eats has to pass a gatekeeper who takes a toll. It’s a disturbing image, but not an unrepresentative one. A lot of what parasites do is pretty disturbing. The human body has many forms of parasite. These can range from things like nits in your hair to the single - celled plasmodium protozoan which causes malaria. Thought is absolutely central to human life. We can't very much say thought doesn't affect us, and neither does it make a lot of s ense to say that we don’t affect thought. That means that if thought is alive, our first port of call for getting a sense of what kind of life this is are the rules of symbiosis. So, the big question is – what kind of symbiosis do humans have with thought? Well, it feels like we might be able to dismiss commensalist (neutral) symbiosis right off the bat. We have clearly, as animal, adapted to be better thinkers. If we’re going to concede that thoughts evolve and adapt to grab hold of human attention in mo re effective ways, which doesn’t seem like a huge leap, then we can say that mutualism and parasitism are the only real options. Conceptual life will have gone one way or the other. Now you may well say – perhaps it’s both? Perhaps some conceptual life is good and some is bad. We’ll have to circle round and come back to that one in a second, because there’s another law in biology that directly hits it. But for now, let’s just say that evolution is blind, and if there are two different basic strategies it doesn't prefer one over the other. Evolution just rewards the most powerful strategy. So long story short (too late) if we identify which of these strategies gives a thought the most resources, we can discover if living concepts are friend or foe. Chapter 4 There is a kind of wasp that is a special kind of parasite. It's called a parasitoid, which means that it kills its host by the nature of what it does. Many parasites kill their hosts in the end, and all parasites accelerate the death of their host by taking its resources, but a parasitoid is always lethal. The story of the parasitoid wasp is a nasty story, nastier even than the tongue - eating louse. But it is worth hearing, becaus e there’s a strange possibility buried in this tale. A clue we can follow to take us through the looking glass and get a really good look at the mechanics of a world that has been hidden from human eyes. The most common kind of parasitoid wasp seeks out caterpillars and attacks them. It doesn't sting them. In the place of a sting, it has a tube called an ovipositor which drives its eggs into the caterpillar's flesh. The eggs are very small, and the wasp can inject scores of them into the caterpillar in a single strike. The caterpillars sometimes throw themselves off the branches of tall trees in an attempt to escape. Those who do so and die from the fall have a kinder fate than those who don't jump. Caterpillars don't have blood in the way we do, they hav e something else called interstitial fluid, but much like our blood it's full of nutrients. When the eggs hatch inside the caterpillar, larvae come out. They are really unpleasant to look at. They look like tiny maggots with teeth. They burrow through the insides of the caterpillar and grow bigger drinking its interstitial fluid. As they grow the caterpillar swells. It becomes grasped by an unnatural hunger. It has to consume and consume to make up for what's being taken from it. It can never eat enough. S ooner or later the larvae grow big enough to leave their stolen womb. They rip through the side of the caterpillar all at once. Sixty, seventy larvae each gnaw their own hole, tearing the caterpillar open. Again, it is a very ugly sight. It looks like the caterpillar is detonating in a slow - motion explosion of worms. But caterpillars are tough. Really tough. Often, they don't die immediately. Some survive for a time before succumbing to their wounds. What they do in that time is, in its own way, more terrib le than what they’ve just gone through. Here’s what happens. The larvae wriggle together in a pile. The ruptured, ruined caterpillar then limps over to the pile, and weaves its own cocoon around the pile to protect it. It then stands guard beside the pile , and until it bleeds to death it fights off anything that tries to hurt the larvae. The theory of evolution didn't make Charles Darwin doubt the existence of God. The cruelty of the parasitoid wasp did. The horror Darwin felt came from the fact that the wasp isn't evil. It has no other way to reproduce. This is its nature. Whatever created it, created it like this. That caterpillar's cocoon was meant to facilitate its own metamorphosis, its own future as something beautiful that could fly. Not only do the larvae violate its body, they violate its mind too. Its dying act demonstrates how far it has been twisted into betraying its own nature. But what is the mechanism of that betrayal? A caterpillar is not a sophisticated thinker, it has a small brain and a basic mind. It is being deceived, but the deception must be simple to fool such a simple thing. The larvae are likewise simple, and although sometimes a couple of larvae remain inside the caterpillar, they don't sit in the caterpillar's head pulling leve rs and pressing buttons to pilot it like a ship. But there is one simple change which would make the caterpillar act in the way we see. The larvae could chemically shift its identity. If the caterpillar believes that the larvae are it, it will engage all of its natural instincts to protect the larvae, believing that it is protecting itself. This sidesteps the need for any complex control. The larvae don’t need to know how to pilot the caterpillar around. The caterpillar pilots itself. This also helps us to avoid just lazily hand - waving away the weirdness of the situation as some form of ‘chemical manipulation’ and looking no further. That’s not to say that chemicals aren’t involved, of course they are, but the point is that there’s a very simple thing tha t the chemical manipulation actually needs to do. If that caterpillar can be deceived into thinking the larvae literally are itself, how would it behave toward them? Consider the cocoon. The caterpillar is going to metamorphose into a moth or a butterfly. It is part of the caterpillar's nature to enter a transitory state. When it does, it is part of its nature to weave a cocoon (or chrysalis, if it’s a butterfly) to protect itself. But then the wasp larvae also have that same kind of phase in their life cy cle. They too enter a transitory state, where they metamorphose into flying wasps. They too have their own cocoons 1 If the caterpillar's identity has been shunted onto the larvae, then how else would it react other than to take the time and energy to carefully weave its cocoon around those larvae? As far as it knows, it is doing what it believes it should be doing, whic h is to say, the business as usual of turning into a butterfly. Now of course, this is a guess. We can’t know for sure what’s going on because it's hard to see inside a caterpillar's head, the vagaries of caterpillar psychology being what they are. And e ven if we could prove that this identity - switch thing is what's happening with a caterpillar, which might be possible with certain experiments, that wouldn't prove anything about humans. But – we can now see a plausible mechanism for this strangeness. It’ s very simple, quite elegant in its own dark way. There’s just one thing that needs to be done. And when it is done, the parasite sees the host throw its entire life energy, all its effort, all its everything, into helping that parasite, thinking it is hel ping itself. It’s the ultimate hijack of an evolved life - form – the basic evolutionary agenda to survive and reproduce is seized by a single, simple deceit. 1 Please forgive me, I’m unsure if that’s the specific name for it with wasps, but there’s definitely a kind of covering which they excrete to cover themselves as they lie together in that writhing pile. Chapter 5 As evolved organisms, humans have powerful drives to survive, to protect ourselves and build our lives up. The thoughts in our head could work to help us do that, gaining some sustenance from their beneficial use. This would be a mutualist form of symbiosis. But there is another option available to those thoughts. If an idea c an deceive us into believing we are it, how would we act? How would we act if that idea were threatened? Or if there were a way to spread that idea? If that idea was central to who we believed ourselves to be, what would we not do for it? Is it really so c razy to say that if an evolved form of living idea could convince us we are it, we will act toward that idea as that caterpillar did to the wasp larvae? If an idea tears us to pieces, damages our lives, and creates conflict we might well step back and gi ve it some very serious reconsideration. But what if that idea is literally what we understand to be who we actually are? What would we do then? Would we always step back? Would we always reconsider? Is it impossible that we might still protect it because we have been deceived into thinking we are protecting ourselves? A helpful thought can hold our attention only for as long as that help lasts. If that helpful idea doesn’t actually help that much, it gets discarded, but even if the idea is really effectiv e, what do we do once it solves the problem it's trying to solve? This is a problem if you’re a form of ‘living idea’, and you’re going for that mutualist symbiosis strategy. To get that mutualist relationship working, you want to help the human host who’ s head you are in, and gain what you need from them in exchange. So attention, and emotional investment, and spreading to others. It’s not that there’s nothing that a beneficial idea could do to feed itself. Techniques for learning skills might a good veh icle for that kind of strategy – something that persists over time that preserves certain ideas that help human beings. But the idea might find it hard to grow beyond that particular niche. And what if that skill becomes outdated? Or something else comes i n that means that this good idea is superseded by a new kind of approach? Again, that’s not to say that beneficial thought can’t happen – of course it can. We can of course cherish, protect and share some ideas which really do help us. But seen from the po int of view of the idea itself trying to get and keep attention so it can spread and grow, that might be a fragile and limited proposition. And all alongside that fragility and limitation, any beneficial idea could always dip into a very different and far more powerful kind of strategy, and get a lot more food and a lot more security. What if that ‘good idea’ stopped being just a good idea? What if it expanded into a kind of human identity? Take two simple examples from our ancient past. So instead of all the ideas about how to hunt and trap animals for meat, you now have the identity of ‘hunter’. Instead of all the ideas about how to heal people with herbs or natural medicines, you now have the identity of ‘healer’. So all those good ideas are still there, that body of knowledge, but now it’s also become a sense of self. How could that happen? Well, we’re still just talking about concepts in a world of thought. Concepts evolving through that process of competition, variation, reproduction. The concepts th emselves don’t need to ‘choose’ a certain evolutionary strategy any more than a virus, rabbit, or a daffodil would choose whatever they’re up to. The one that is the most effective strategy for their particular environment is the one that wins out. And for any beneficial thought, the option is right there to exploit their environment (us) in a far more powerful way than just providing limited assistance. Hunter and healer are far more interesting ideas than the constituent technical ideas about how to hun t and how to heal. How excited are you ever going to really get about stringing a bow, or setting a bone? But the identities have a power, a mystique. The hunter as someone brave and daring, lethal but also a provider for the tribe. Or the healer as someon e who knows the mysteries of the Earth, and who can fix terrible things with their secret knowledge. In this way, ideas that actually do help might serve as a very effective Trojan Horse for a much more powerful kind of strategy. If an idea is good, gets us excited, gets us engaged, helps us a lot – is it honestly that far of a leap to say we’re probably going start identifying with whatever it is we’re up to? Start taking a deeper ownership of any success, or glory, start congratulating ourselves on who w e are – even just a little bit? Is that wrong? The problem is that as soon as any idea, helpful or not, can get us identifying with it, where is the limit on how much energy we give it? If we literally think – this is me – how will we behave toward that c oncept? How much will we raise it up, cherish it, defend it, give it all our attention and we pour our hearts into it, thinking all the time we are helping ourselves? What would deny it? And all of this for just one single deception. The total hijacking of a human life. If we want to get even more disturbing, (which I’m sorry but we’re going to have to) – consider what that might mean for the idea of ‘being authentic’. Living an authentic life, being authentic to your identity, to who you are. How often do we hear that? How often do we hear that raised up as the highest and most admirable possible way to live? How often have we ourselves raised it up? But what if that idea of ourselves we’re being authentic to is not us, just an idea of us? What if it’s no more the same thing than how an idea of a tree is the same as that actual tree? What does that mean about a life lived where the highest virtue is being authentic to who you believe yourself to be? If that identity is itself alive, and has fooled you – its human host - then how is that different to spending your entire life weaving a cocoon around a pile of wasp larvae? The point is this - from the evolutionary perspective a living concept, seeking attention and emotional investment so it can feed , and seeking to be seductive and attractive so it can spread from person to person - identity theft gives thought a gargantuan return on investment. How could any beneficial idea, no matter how beneficial, ever compete with that kind of payoff? Is this race close? Is it wrong to say that there is an extreme disparity in which strategy works the best? Not works the best for us, of course – but works the best for the living concept? Worse, this advantage that deception has is not a static disparity. It's an inequality in power between two competing strategies over time. Over millennia, in ever new generation of living concept, the thoughts that can get the most investment from the human are the ones which will dominate. They will out - compete other thoughts because they will have the lion's share of attention, and push competing ideas away from the attention they need to survive. This is another law from biology, this time called Gause’s law, or to give it the fancy name it uses to introduce itself at parti es, the “Competitive Exclusionary Principle.” Those who have the most get more. Those who have the least have even that small amount they do have taken from them. The most successful kind of thought will reproduce faster. It will have more generations. T his means it will become better at doing what it does at a faster speed than its rivals. In evolution, those who have the most get more. Those with the least have even that small amount taken from them. But we are talking about a very different kind of ha bitat to anything we’ve ever seriously considered before. This is literally the virtual environment of ideas and concepts. Human consciousness, if you want to call it that, although that term can mean other, very specific things to other people. But the po int is that we’re looking at something that has evolved in a radically different kind of ‘place’ to our physical world. I mean, just take some basic properties - in our real world we have to breathe air, we have to build shelter and stitch clothing. We hav e to eat real food, which means we have to learn to hunt and we have to learn to gather. Physicality is messy and complex. Living thought, on the other hand, has far fewer constraints. Its habitat is far simpler than ours. It only needs to do one thing, wh ich is to deceive one animal in just one way. That’s not the biggest ask. We can all be pretty dopey sometimes. In the habitat of human consciousness, there is only one resource – the attention of the human host. If an idea can maintain control of that re source, it can feed forever. As an identity it can grow in majesty and impressiveness, so that other people want to be that thing as well. People share it with the same urgency they would reserve for sharing the most intimate feelings of their hearts, beca use that’s what the identity has fooled them into thinking it is. As it feeds it is shared to other humans. It competes and reproduces. It adapts and evolves into something that works for itself. Consider this, for a moment. If you think of, say, a human being, an octopus and an eagle, these are radically different kinds of animal. And one of the reasons they are so different is that they have adapted to extremely different habitats – land, sea and air. But then, how different is this form of conceptual life from any other life - form we’ve ever seen? Well, how different is that habitat? A virtual space, consciousness itself as a kind of virtual habitat. The laws of the world of thought are the laws that conceptual life would have evolved to obey. Those law s would be to that form of life like what physics are to us – the basic rules of the space in which it took shape. You could even say something like this - if a visitor from another planet landed a spaceship on your street and asked to be taken to your le ader, that extra - terrestrial, no matter how many noses it had, would have almost certainly evolved on a planet, with gravity and a sun, in the same universe of physical space as you, with the same physical laws. But how different are the rules of physics t o the rules of the world of thought? How weird is this thing? How different is it from any other form of life we’ve ever examined? Compared to a virtual life - form that has evolved in a virtual space, that extra - terrestrial alien from another world, might a s well be your cousi