The Third Age of the World: Reason

I kept it in a cage,
Watched it weeping, but I made it stay.
(But now I’ve started learning how.)
I leave it open.
I leave it open.
Kate Bush, “Leave It Open”

Part of The Third Age of the World — return to the main guide for the full series and chapter index.

Deduction All Alone

In Chapter 1 we saw how fractal patterns can be used as a lens for understanding the universe. Even things that do not look fractal on the surface can be approached with the same kind of thinking that explains fractals. That shift matters because it invites us to treat patterns as fundamental, not decorative.

We also introduced a useful distinction. You can “run the fractal” outward through deduction, and compress it inward through induction. These are not the same mental operation. Both are needed.

In Chapter 2 we explored how inductive thinking is often missing from modern culture, and how this absence can make some people appear “out of step” when, in fact, they are retaining capacities that others have allowed to go dormant. With that background, we can now complete the picture of how magicians think differently, and why their view of the world can seem so foreign to a culture dominated by deduction alone.

Deduction evolved as a specialised tool layered on top of induction. When induction is suppressed, deduction tries to run the whole show by itself. The trouble is that deduction operating alone tends to fall into a deep, subtle error. The reasoning can be internally consistent and still be profoundly wrong. The failure is not usually in the steps. It’s in the missing context that should have surrounded the steps.

When inductive awareness is absent, whatever you are thinking about becomes its own background. The mind loses its sense of “what else exists” beyond the selected symbols it is manipulating. A concrete example makes this easier to see.

CYC was an ambitious attempt to make computers more intelligent by giving them a vast network of “common sense” facts. The idea was that humans understand news stories and reports by drawing on countless small background assumptions. If a computer is to read meaningfully, perhaps it needs that same background. So the builders of CYC spent years feeding it facts, then leaving it running overnight to deduce new connections.

One morning the researchers arrived to find CYC had produced a remarkable claim.

Most people are prominent.

Of course it is not true in the usual sense. Many ordinary people are important, but they are not famous. Why did the system “conclude” prominence was normal?

The answer was painfully simple. The researchers had taught CYC about many people, and nearly all of them were famous. It had no grounding sense that for every Einstein there are thousands upon thousands of Julies, Sams, and Terrys who are not known outside their circles. Without the background of the unremarkable majority, the famous became the “default.” The system had turned itself logically inside out.

This is exactly the trap of deduction acting alone. Deduction has to select elements of reality, copy them into an internal space, and then manipulate those representations. Induction evolved to take everything available to the senses and search for patterns across the whole field. When both are working together, it is natural to remember that the symbols being moved around are only partial, extracted representations, and that the real context remains larger than what is present in the mental workspace.

The deductive mind did not evolve to maintain that grounding by itself. It did not need to, because induction normally supplies it. When induction is asleep, deduction loses the “outside,” and the mind begins treating the internal model as if it were the world.

This error repeats endlessly in deductively fixated cultures. Unlike boredom addiction, which some people may resist by temperament or circumstance, inside-out reasoning can trick almost anyone. A whole society can share the same blind spot. The good news is that once you learn to notice the pattern, the mind can recover context quickly. There is no chemical “withdrawal” locking the mistake in place. The shift is primarily educational.

The Universe Knows – We Don’t

With the CYC example in mind, we can look at classic human errors that follow the same pattern. The first is a small logical puzzle that still confuses people trained in formal reasoning.

Imagine you are told two facts.

1) Some liontamers are women.
2) Some women are redheads.

Are there any redheaded liontamers?

People often say the answer is “undefined.” They picture the sets and conclude there is no basis to assert overlap or non-overlap between “liontamers” and “redheads.” In a strict sense, they are right that the information does not force a definite conclusion.

But notice what “undefined” does psychologically. It tempts the mind to treat the situation as empty, as if we have learned nothing. That is the deductive mind’s greed for certainty. It wants a closed diagram in its internal space. When it cannot close it, it calls the whole thing useless.

A more faithful response is “possibly.” The universe either contains redheaded liontamers or it does not. We do not know, because our information is incomplete. But we also know something positive: the two relevant groups intersect a third group. That matters. It narrows the search space. It gives us a reason to look, and no reason yet to stop looking.

“Undefined” tells you nothing. “Possibly” tells you that the conditions so far are compatible with the thing you are asking about. It preserves what you have learned instead of throwing it away.

This distinction is not academic. “Undefined” can seduce people into inaction. “Possibly” keeps the mind aligned with reality, where partial information still has value and where uncertainty does not mean futility.

Some people, watching “logical” thinkers dismiss possibilities because certainty is unavailable, conclude that logic itself is worthless. That is a mistake in the opposite direction. The universe is consistent. The problem is not logic, but a style of reasoning that treats its own internal symbols as the whole of what exists.

That is why teachers like Gurdjieff spoke of developing objective reason, and why Steiner warned against a purely dreamy mysticism that never learns to structure its perceptions. You need both: inductive openness and deductive discipline, working together.

We can see the same inside-out error in a famous probability problem, which is useful precisely because people find it counter-intuitive.

You are on a game show. There are three doors. Behind one is a car. Behind the other two are lemons. You choose a door. The host, who knows what is behind the doors, opens one of the other two doors to reveal a lemon. You are then offered a choice: stay with your original door, or switch to the remaining unopened door.

Should you switch?

Most people say it makes no difference. That answer is wrong.

If you stay, you keep your original 1/3 chance of having chosen the car. If you switch, you take the 2/3 chance that you originally chose a lemon and that the host’s action has now concentrated that probability onto the remaining door. Switching wins about twice as often as staying.

What goes wrong in the common reasoning is not arithmetic. It is the same missing context problem. The deductive mind fixes on a simplified internal picture (“two doors left, so fifty-fifty”) and fails to integrate the host’s knowledge and the information revealed by the host’s action. It treats the internal snapshot as reality instead of as an improving model of external reality.

When this kind of error stays inside puzzles, it is merely instructive. When it enters institutions, it becomes dangerous.

Consider DNA screening used to hunt offenders. A profile might be said to match only one person in a million. If police sample until they find a match, people often leap to: “a million to one, therefore guilty.” But the question is not about the million who do not match. It is about the set who do match in a large population, and the fact that the search was continued until a match was found. Without other evidence, a match may only narrow the field. Treating it as near-certainty is the inside-out error again: the statistical claim is dragged into an internal space without the population context that changes what it means.

A related confusion has appeared in cases involving sudden infant death. Some arguments have assumed that because a tragic event is rare, two such events in one family must be practically impossible, therefore suspicious. But events are not always independent, and family-level risk factors can change the probabilities. A second tragedy is not automatically proof of wrongdoing. Again the missing piece is context.

Modern courts and public debates still struggle with statistical reasoning because statistics are fundamentally about updating beliefs as new information arrives. Bayes’ theorem formalises this: we start with a prior understanding and adjust as evidence accumulates. That is exactly what the game-show problem illustrates. A mind that refuses to update, because it treats its first internal model as reality, will confidently reach the wrong conclusion and then defend it as “common sense.”

Turning Inside Out

Inside-out reasoning is not only a source of wrong answers. It also shrinks the felt universe.

In the real world, relationships exist by default. Things share a common space and therefore interact unless something prevents interaction. Gravity is the simplest example. Every mass tugs on every other mass. You do not have to “authorize” the relationship. It is built into the fact of co-existence.

The deductive mind’s internal space is different. It is passive. Symbols sit there disconnected unless you deliberately draw lines between them. When we copy a slice of reality into that passive space and then treat the model as the world, we invert the fundamental logic of connection. In reality: connection is default, separation requires special conditions. In the internal space: separation is default, connection must be asserted.

Turn everything inside out at once and you still get a coherent picture. It can even feel more controllable than reality. That is why the mistake is so seductive. But the predictions drift away from what actually happens.

This inversion shows up in everyday life. Quality improvement and cost reduction are typically mutually supportive. Reduce waste, reduce returns, reduce rework, shorten cycles, improve morale, and costs fall. Yet people repeatedly respond to cost pressure by cutting quality, as if the relationship were mutually exclusive. The culture “knows” the numbers and still repeats the error, because the mind has lost the living context in which the relationship holds.

Conversely, political promises often offer mutually exclusive benefits as if they were mutually inclusive. People intuitively sense inconsistency, yet the rhetoric still works because the same inside-out habit blurs the connection between inputs and outputs.

A striking technical analogy appears in digital logic. Engineers frequently build using NAND and NOR as basic primitives, then add inversion to obtain AND and OR. Nature’s simplest building blocks can appear like the inside-out versions of the human-preferred forms, reminding us again that our “obvious” mental operations are not automatically aligned with how the world composes itself.

Inside-out reasoning also encourages closed-world thinking. In the real world, many relationships are win-win. In the closed internal space, it is easy to assume every win implies a loss. That shift pushes people toward negative thinking: not just selfishness, but anti-altruism; not just self-denial, but anti-selfishness. Both miss how, in a connected system, improving your environment often improves everyone else’s environment too.

The same pattern fuels the stale conflict between “rational” and “spiritual” camps. Many who call themselves rational actually practice something closer to anti-spirituality: they define rationality as what remains after excluding everything they cannot reduce to familiar mechanisms. Many who call themselves spiritual drift into anti-rationality: they define spirituality as what remains after excluding everything reason can structure. These positions are mirror errors. Reality does not demand the split. The split is a symptom of losing context.

Lost context also produces false fear and false security.

False fear arises when people treat their current internal picture as the total space of what exists. Alternatives become literally unthinkable. People stop experimenting, not because experimentation is costly, but because the closed world makes “failure” feel like an ultimate category instead of an informative outcome.

False security arises when people assume that only explicit, named dangers exist, and that managing those dangers is the whole of safety. This can generate invasive, performative controls that miss the wider reality they claim to manage. The deeper issue is not the specific policy, but the mind that mistakes its checklist for the whole field.

Dualism

When a culture is trapped in inside-out reasoning, even conversations become warped. People can use the same words while referring to inverted meanings. They can appear to understand each other while talking past each other completely.

“Dualism” is a clean example. In one usage, critics imagine that magicians believe in two universes: a material world and a separate “spiritual” world connected by mysterious cords. From that misunderstanding, they label magicians dualists.

But the magical view described in this work is not “two worlds.” It is one material universe in which patterns are as real as the objects that instantiate them. The patterns are not elsewhere. They are the organising reality of the world we already inhabit.

Meanwhile, people who are not trapped in deduction may use “dualism” to describe the opposite problem: the sense, common in modern consciousness, that the self is separate from the universe. The boundary is created by the habit of dragging everything across into an internal space before it can be thought about. That internal border is then mistaken for a border in reality.

This is why the same term can be thrown back and forth with both sides feeling victorious. Each is naming a different inversion.

The boundary illusion feeds many familiar debates. “Nature versus nurture” is framed as a conflict as if the early information encoded in DNA sits on one side of a real dividing line and all later influences sit on the other. But what actually happens is an accumulation and interaction of information in a single system. Drawing a hard boundary is psychologically convenient, not ontologically necessary.

The same illusion shows up in environmental behaviour. There is no way to degrade “your” planet without degrading “my” planet. The separation is imaginary. Nature ignores it. Likewise, safety framed as “my safety at the expense of yours” often backfires because the system remains coupled even when people pretend it is not.

There is no boundary separating us from the rest of the universe. The boundary is a by-product of an internal modelling habit. The remedy is not to abandon deduction, but to keep deduction grounded in inductive awareness so the model remains a model and never becomes a prison.

Social Reality

The traps described in earlier chapters protect each other. When inductive awareness is dulled, people rely on rote explanations and borrowed reasons. They behave repetitively and seek reassurance through conformity. When deduction then becomes the primary conscious tool, it tends to treat the current social picture as complete and self-evident.

This is part of why institutional cultures can drift toward enforcement of “standard reality.” When large numbers of people operate like memorised programs, inconsistencies become threatening. Questioning feels like malfunction. The social machine then treats curiosity as deviance.

Under those conditions, societies can shift from solving problems to concealing evidence of problems. “Keeping up appearances” becomes a substitute for understanding. Anxiety is suppressed rather than addressed. People can look confident while being confused, reactive, and afraid, because the underlying motivational system is being managed socially rather than consciously.

R. D. Laing wrote about the “political” context of enforced reality, and observed that more aware individuals can be singled out as “unwell” by those invested in the prevailing story. Once you recognise inside-out reasoning, many of those knots become easier to see: mutually inclusive relationships are treated as mutually exclusive; positions become anti-positions; and the living context of experience is replaced by a brittle internal schema.

Existentialism entered the modern world as an attempt to restore responsibility to lived experience. It insisted that people must look and decide for themselves, rather than defaulting to inherited definitions of what is “supposed” to be true. In its healthier form, it challenges rote living.

But when existentialist ideas are absorbed by a mind that cannot distinguish internal pictures from external reality, they can invert. If your internal picture is all that exists, then “my reality” is not a perspective on a shared world. It becomes a private universe in which consistency is optional and responsibility dissolves. Disagreement cannot be resolved because there is no common field to resolve it within. The deeper truth that could unify perspectives is never sought, because the existence of a deeper truth is denied.

One of the most striking historical examples of this inversion appears in discussions of quantum mechanics. At very small scales, nature often presents us with probabilities rather than deterministic predictions. Some thinkers responded by shifting focus away from objective reality and toward observation itself, as if the universe has no definite state unless a conscious being observes it. However one approaches the interpretation debate today, the key point for our purposes is this: a philosophy that denies consistent external reality can become an intellectual barrier. It can teach resignation where curiosity is needed.

We can take a simpler lesson.

Reality exists and is consistent within itself. What we know is always partial. When we remember this, the mind becomes more flexible, more accurate, and more capable of growth. Deduction works best when guided by inductive impressions that keep the model connected to the larger field. The universe “knows” what it is doing. We do not. That is not a defect. It is the starting condition for learning.

Originally written in the early 2000s and refreshed for publication in 2026. Companion pages for each section expand the discussion and provide modern context.