182 A Programmer’s Guide to the Mind
Three solutions to the split between logical facts and emotional 'truth.'- Follow Mercy emotion: Make gods out of your ancestors. Follow an
absolute dictator. - Use Perceiver logic: Learn to think for yourself. Search for principles
of cause and effect. - Do nothing. Accept the internal contradiction as a part of culture.
This is the method practiced by Western society.
Oh no. Here we were about to start on the imposing subject of self-
identity and I opened yet another can of worms which is just as big if not
even bigger. Fear not. As your tour guide, I told you that the path would
contain interesting sites. Now don‟t complain when we do find something
that is worth checking out. Remember when we encountered the seemingly
insignificant topic of time-based objects? Hidden within that innocuous
connection was the whole concept of conscience. I suggest that we have
stumbled across another treasure trove. Except, this is a double mother
lode, containing two fundamental issues: personal identity, and the modern
split between various forms of objective and subjective. I suggest that these
two topics are extensively related, and that an adequate understanding of
these issues will give us the mental tools which we need to handle many of
today‟s crucial problems.
Objective versus Subjective
Let us start our analysis by examining some of the implications of a
societal split between objective and subjective. After this, we will look at
the two forms of conscience which result from this split. Finally, we will
see that our discussion of conscience is actually the connecting passageway
which leads to the issue of objective and subjective identity.
Subjective (^) Objective