Things that physically exist only if you BELIEVE They Exist

Continuing our investigation into the power of purpose

What's wrong in reality 
Feels so right in my fantasy. 
   .Vera Blue, “Private”

Don’t stop believin’ 
Hold on to that feelin’
   .Journey, “Don’t stop believin’”

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When I was young, I wondered:

Is there a way to hide things in the universe so that physicists could never find them?

This turned out to be an excellent question to pursue to understand the hidden role of purpose in reality and the physical structure of the gods.

Indeed, by asking how we might conceal things from physicists and their theories of reality, we can glean answers to other cosmic queries:

How can purpose shape physics?

How can mental activity become a physical thing?

How am I able to communicate with extraterrestrials from my living room?

Contemplating how to cloak things from physicists can also guide us to a truly profound question that few pilgrims ever need to ask:

What is Rainbow Black?

One way to begin tackling all these ambitious queries is to consider a special sort of universe. A universe that empowers us to create new physical entities solely through the power of conviction.

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Imagine, if you would, a world.

A world where physical entities come into existence when a conscious Mind thinks them into existence.

“Oh, so this is a world ruled by an all-powerful deity?”

“No. No One True God. A world that obeys inviolable laws of physics. At the same time, it’s a world where belief summons new objects into material existence.”

Would you declare such a world to be a contradiction? A paradox? An impossibility?

Whatever term you might apply to such a world, apply it to your own. For you are living in such a universe.

We inhabit a cosmos where minds can imagine a new physical reality—and make it so, purely through the power of belief. This is not some quirky and convoluted philosophical perspective, but the physical basis for the evolution of our shared reality.

In this article, we’ll start exploring the many things that exist only if you believe they exist.

Then we’ll see what all this reification implies for the ultimate nature of the Commonality.

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You’ve worked all spring and summer plowing, seeding, irrigating, and fighting off bugs and birds, and now, beneath the dimming autumn sun, you’ve harvested your crops. You fill an entire silo with the corn you’ve earned through backbreaking toil. None can doubt the physical effort that extracted the agricultural bounty from the earth, and none can doubt the physical reality of the corn filling the silo.

A man comes along and says, “I have a few scraps of paper. Can I trade you these scraps for that silo of corn?”

Naturally, you hand over the corn in exchange for the flimsy paper, perhaps chuckling that the man offered too many scraps.

The value of the corn is self-evident to any human—or any racoon, bear, or crow: you can eat the corn and grow stronger and healthier.

In contrast, the value of the paper is non-existent for the racoon and bear, who pay the scraps no heed. The crow might use it for nesting material. No racoon, bear, crow, or any other vertebrate would willingly trade a barrel of food for shreds of paper.

What is going on inside the mind of man that is not going on inside the mind of bear that causes humans to view scraps of paper as precious objects of equal value to a silo full of corn?

Is it because the paper is adorned with portraits of bearded old men?

Is it because the paper is waterproof and has a greenish tint?

No. It’s because the paper is invested with the power of belief. Humans can’t view it as scraps of paper, even if they try. Humans view it as money.

If you doubt this, instruct your friend to view money as paper. Then take a hundred dollar bill out of your friend’s wallet and cut it to pieces with a pair of scissors. Will your friend nod in affirmation that you’ve engaged in a rather mundane restructuring of cotton-threaded paper? Or will she slug you in the jaw for destroying one hundred buckaroos?

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Money does not exist without minds who believe it exists. And yet, if a mind believes in the existence of money, money takes on a very physical existence, like any object in our corporeal reality. These physical properties are not the same as the properties of the “true” object: the properties of money are different than the properties of paper.

Take a hundred dollar bill and cut it in half. Throw half away.

Do you now have fifty dollars—half of one hundred dollars?

No. You have no dollars. Nobody will accept half a bill as legal tender. Nobody believes that half a bill is money.

On the other hand, you do possess half a piece of paper.

All of money’s properties—its ability to be exchanged for other items or services, its ability to grow through compound interest, its ability to start businesses, stop wars, and grant individual humans enormous power over other humans, all stem from the power of belief.

We believe that paper isn’t really paper, it’s money. We believe that money has a special value. We get very upset when someone steals our money because we believe we’ve just experienced a major loss.

Now you might say, “But I did experience a major loss when someone hacked the safe under my bed and stole $100,000 of my savings! Even if I choose not to believe it—everyone else believes it and so it is true!”

That is the key insight for understanding how minds can think things into existence. Such powers of reification require, at minimum, a supermind. It is the supermind’s conviction that converts paper into cash.

Money, and most other things thought into existence, require a community of believers who all believe mostly the same thing. We see this fact clearly with money.

There’s a large human community who believes $5 bills with Abraham Lincoln on them are money, but $5 bills with Jefferson Davis on it is not money. There’s a large human community who believes 100 mark notes with Karl Marx are not money, and 100 mark notes with Albrecht Dürer are not money, but 100 Euro notes with a picture of an imaginary bridge are money.

There was a time when the Confederate supermind believed Jefferson Davis bill were money. There was a time when the East German supermind believed Karl Marx notes were money. The first two superminds no longer exist and so their beliefs no longer exist and so their money no longer exists.

There was a time when the German supermind believed Albrecht Dürer notes were money, but the German supermind changed its mind. It changed its convictions. The German supermind once believed marks were money. Now it believes that Euros are money and marks are paper.

The 100 Euro note contains another surprising lesson about the capacity of purpose to convert imagination into reality. The bridge depicted on the note was originally fictional, so as not to favor any country in the Eurozone. However, a Dutch designer actually built the imaginary bridge in the Netherlands based upon the design depicted on the 100 Euro note. Once again, the power of conviction converted an idea into reality.

Right now, human superminds are struggling to decide whether they believe that digital zeros and ones, unbound to any paper, are money or not.

We should note that physics has no ability to determine whether a physical object is money. Sure, if you explain to a physicist what money looks like, he can build a machine to detect it. (If it’s made of gold, it’s money!)

But what if you land on a distant planet and find a random object on the ground. A seashell. A pile of salt. A round stone. A bronze knife. A silver pyramid.¹

What test could a physicist use to determine if any of these objects are money purely from the physical properties of the object alone?

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Another vital thing that exists only if you believe it exists is beauty.

You won’t find the formula for beauty lurking inside Gauss’ Law or Newton’s Universal Theory of Gravitation. You won’t find a mathematical equation that translates electrons and protons into beautons.

That’s because beauty is invisible to aimless physics!

But not to minds.

The physical presence of beauty—something that exists only in our mind’s eye—can provoke a wide variety of real-world altering activity. Beauty can inspire folks to build physical structures, such as the Venus de Milo or Taj Majal. Beauty launched one thousand Greek ships to go conquer Troy.

Beauty may inspire obsession and stalking—real-world physical activities. The 1950s pin-up model Betty Paige was kidnapped and held hostage by a man obsessed with her beauty. Beauty can even lead to murder. Elizabeth Short—popularly known as “the Black Dahlia”—possessed a striking beauty that led to her brutal homicide.

Beauty, too, demands a community of minds. The Samoan supermind’s idea of beauty is different from the Tibetan supermind’s idea of beauty which is different from the Hollywood supermind’s idea of beauty.

Beauty is an undeniable physical entity that can be manipulated using physical means. Humans actively seek out products to enhance one’s beauty. There is a half-trillion dollar beauty industry catering to our desire to be more beautiful. In India, women purchase Fair & Lovely skin cream to attempt to lighten their skin color in accord with their supermind’s standards of beauty. The Japanese use Kose Sekkisei Emulsion to brighten their skin. African women use Kose Sekkisei Emulsion to nourish and soften their curly hair, in accord with their own supermind.

Yet beauty lies beyond the physicist’s instruments. If a physicist encountered a single extraterrestrial traveling alone in a spacecraft, there is no physical test the physicist could perform on the extraterrestrial to determine whether the alien is beautiful or not, according to the standards of its (unknown and unavailable) culture.

Let’s examine the phenomenon of beauty more carefully and see if we can identify exactly how purpose transforms a creature’s raw physiognomy into material beauty.

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Consider the physical challenge of cracking open a seed with a bird beak.

The physical methods for cracking seeds are constrained, which means there are only a limited number of ways to open a seed with a beak. In fact, the physics suggests that one particular structure works best. The best sort of beak for cracking open seeds is a finch beak: short, stubby, and conical.

Because this structure offers the most efficient physical method for cracking seeds, more than a dozen different families of birds have independently evolved finchy beaks.

Now consider a different physical challenge for a bird:

Choosing a mate.

Unlike cracking a seed, this challenge is unconstrained. There are an infinite number of ways to go about choosing a mate.

You could choose a mate with long toes. With blue feathers over their eyes. With a voice like a hoot. With a scent like strawberries. With a tail that curls over their ears.

Every species evolves its own way to choose a mate. Every species evolves its own unique standards of physical beauty.

That’s why birds come in such a dazzling variety of shapes, colors, and anatomical sizes—peacocks with their elaborate spotted tails, the spiky crests of the secretary bird, the high-impact colors of the bird-of-paradise.

But how, exactly, are such biological standards of beauty created?

It requires an evolutionary dance between the Beauty and the Beholder.

The Beholder’s evaluation of beauty is comparative, simply meaning that the Beholder looks at many potential mates and decides which one is most beautiful, according to the Beholder’s belief. The Beholder’s notion of superior beauty is limited to the specific birds it encounters. (If a black crow never sees a golden crow, it will never come to believe that golden birds are most beautiful.) Beholder’s choice of Beauty significantly increases the chances that Beholder and Beauty’s offspring will resemble Beauty, while valuing bird beauty that resembles the Beholder’s private standards.

So what, then, is the keystone dynamic that enables the Beholder to conjure beauty out of private mental desire and summon it forth into the material realm ?

The very dynamic that distinguishes purpose from physics:

Choice.

Purpose chooses. This mental decision—I choose this mate and not that mate—is the key to converting belief into reality. By choosing, a Beholder establishes both the form of Beauty—and the form of their own Belief.

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There are many other things that only exist if you believe they exist. We’ll examine most of these in future articles.

Justice is one. There is no concept of justice derivable from quantum physics or general relativity. All humans believe in justice, but the form of that justice—like the form of beauty and money—is in the mind of the beholder.

So are democracy, suicide, marriage, nationhood, selfhood, art, and freedom.

Another thing that only exists if you believe it exists is a joke. Once again, no physical theory can account for humor.

And math.

Some other things that only exist if you believe they exist might seem counterintuitive or just plain wrong, since they seem to be objective physical entities rooted in science—rather than subjective articles of conviction:

Genes, species, and cells.

The two primary targets of our investigation, however, are “purely” mental. This pair is tricky to view as a pair of things that exist only if you believe they exist, because they elude physical evaluations of the sort that permit us to confidently declare that, say, Timothée Chalamet is more beautiful than Steve Buscemi.

One of these special mental “things” that exists only if you believe it exists is self-awareness.

The other is freewill.

Neither exists in the universe unless a mind believes it exists.

And once we understand how self-awareness and freewill work, and their underlying mechanisms of reification, we can turn our attention to a place that only exists if you believe it exists—and if it does come into existence, you can go inside.

This enchanted place is called Rainbow Black.

1. All of these have been used as money by humans.