152 A Programmer’s Guide to the Mind
Being a baby is hard work. The growing child pays a huge price in
agony and frustration in order to gain the Perceiver confidence that is
needed to live within a world of solid objects. But, because as children our
identity was not yet fully developed, we generally forget about the
emotional trauma that we endured learning common sense. The end result
is that we as adults take our common sense for granted, and assume that it
will always be there. But, we did not always have common sense. Our
minds had to acquire it—at
great cost.
Imagine, for a moment, a
world where common sense
did not rule. In this world, you
would drive along a road and
the car coming the other way
might leave its lane and head
straight for you. Or, maybe
instead of confronting you it
might turn into a fire-
breathing dragon. As for the road, it could decide today to be a flowing
river, or perhaps a pile of orange pansies. Even the sky might transmogrify
suddenly into a beautiful shade of green, with rising pink speckles.
Possibly your body would mutate and grow an extra hand or head. And,
just maybe, the section of road—if it still is a road—in front of your car—
if it still is a car—would vanish into some empty void of nothingness.
But, common sense tells us that nothing like that could ever happen.
Exactly, common sense tells us, and that common sense was acquired as
children, through years of learning. As adults, we can, with sufficient effort,
unlearn the common sense that we obtained as children and begin to
question even basic principles such as the continuity of objects.
For instance, the English philosophers Berkeley and Hume had real
problems believing in physical objects. They wrote deep tomes discussing
whether trees and chairs really were there when people were not looking,
or whether the tree that you saw after you opened your eyes was the same
tree as the one which was there before you shut them.
I am sure that this endless discussion tired them immensely and that
they often popped down to the local pub in order to relax over a pint—
confident that both the beer and its container of glass would still be there to
welcome them when they arrived, even though no one had kept an eye on
them to stop them from disappearing.A
A When we look at Facilitator persons, we will see that they have problems
with knowing and can find it difficult to integrate their system of belief
into everyday life. Their desire to know can lead them into a study of
philosophy in which they often get lost in an esoteric world of words and