Willingly

Stuart K. Hayashi



I keep hearing from Sam Harris fans that neuroscience proves that humans don’t have free will. They want me to mull over their case and concede their correctness. Yet my opting — in contrast to the alternatives available — to take the initiative to contemplate their case and weigh the evidence for it is something that depends on my having the capacity to will myself freely to do all that.

 

Stop Saying There’s No Such Thing As Originality

Stuart K. Hayashi



There are many philosophic YouTube videos (including at least four TEDx Talks), putting on a pretense of profundity, saying that because all new ideas are inspired by prior ideas, no artwork or invention or even scientific idea has ever been original. That’s a straw man, as originality doesn’t hinge on the complete absence of prior developments to provide inspiration and impetus for the new development. The presence of any greater-than-zero degree of novelty is sufficient to demonstrate originality’s existence. But I’ll give four examples of ideas that, when introduced, were truly original: James Clerk Maxwell proposing the existence of the spectrum of electromagnetic radiation airwaves, Marie Curie explaining radioactivity, Karl Landsteiner explaining blood type, and Antoine Lavoisier explaining the oxygen theory of combustion.



James Clerk Maxwell and the Invisible Spectrum of Electromagnetic Waves
We know from Aristotle that descriptions of the phenomena of magnetism go back at least as far as ancient Greece with the culture’s earliest-known philosopher and scientist, Thales. During the Song dynasty, Chinese sailors invented the compass for navigation. Benjamin Franklin explained the phenomenon of electricity. Michael Faraday, André-Marie Ampère, and Carl Gauss each wrote mathematic formulae to describe electromagnetic phenomena that they observed. But none of these people knew the exact mechanism that caused these phenomena.

James Clerk Maxwell relied on the observations of all these predecessors. The originality is in where he went farther than they did. He proposed that electricity and magnetism were ultimately the same, and, going farther still, he said that light is ultimately the same as well. Not even such scientists as Faraday, Ampère, and Gauss identified this connection between light and electromagnetism. And Maxwell said that all of these phenomena are explained by a spectrum of waves that, with the exception of light, are invisible. With the exception of light, these electromagnetic radiation waves cannot be observed directly by the senses. However, many *effects* of these waves *can* be observed directly by the senses, as exemplified by the observations of Thales and Song-dynasty Chinese sailors.

Heinrich Hertz’s experiments used sensory data to prove, empirically, the existence of the phenomenon that Maxwell deduced. Radios, mobile phones, and wireless internet connection operate according to these principles. Thales and Benjamin Franklin and Michael Faraday observed electromagnetic phenomena, but Maxwell made truly original additions to understanding that even Thales, Benjamin Franklin, and Michael Faraday did not anticipate.



Marie Curie
Likewise, Marie Curie’s description of radioactivity was original. Since ancient times, human beings have handled hazardously radioactive materials. Photography pioneer Abel Niépce de Saint-Victor — cousin to photography(specifically, heliography) inventor Joseph Nicéphore Niépce — observed radioactivity in one respect. In 1857 he noticed that even when he was working in the dark, photographic emulsions could be exposed by uranium salts. But he did not go farther than that. In 1895, Henri Becquerel discovered that uranium emitted waves. But he did not extrapolate from that an entire scientific principle.

The explanation of the principles of radioactivity was original to Marie Curie. What was new was her explanation that, rather than the observed rays being a chemical reaction, they were an atomic property inherent to particular elements such as uranium. With her husband Pierre, she isolated particular highly radioactive elements and proved this.



Karl Landsteiner and Blood Type
And then there is blood type. Throughout the Renaissance, doctors attempted blood transfusions. They were repeatedly met with failure as the patients died. This was a cause of consternation, as, theoretically, the blood transfusions should have worked. In 1900, Karl Landsteiner explained that there are different particular blood types, and that, if you have one blood type, whether you survive the transfusion depends on the blood type of the blood you receive. The successful transfusions that followed are a testament to the efficacy of Landsteiner’s idea, an idea that was truly original.



Antoine Lavoisier Proving the Oxygen Theory of Combustion
Antoine Lavoisier’s explanation that the addition of oxygen is required for combustion to occur is an explanation that followed a long series of missteps in science. In ancient Greece, Empedocles said that fire was one of four elements that could not be reduced to simpler form. Aristotle said the same, except Aristotle added a fifth element he called “ether.” This was the dominant model among alchemists until Robert Boyle formalized chemistry as a hard science involving a strict and consistent methodology. In the 1600s, the German alchemist Johann Joachim Becher started what would, for a century, become the leading scientific authority’s leading theory in how objects catch fire: phlogiston theory. The *phlogiston* refers to the Greek root *phlox*, which means “flame.” Becher’s phlogiston theory was that all objects have an innate “fieriness” in them that is stored but dormant. When the object catches fire, said Becher, it mean the innate fieriness was no longer dormant, being activated and releasing material. According to Becher, the moment of combustion was the exact moment that the object lost mass.

In the 1700s, Joseph Priestley and Carl Scheele each independently discovered the element oxygen by isolating it from all other elements. In the 1600s, the English alchemist John Mayow discovered that for an object to start to combust, something from the air must be added to it. But he did not know which chemical or chemicals it was; as a placeholder he used the term *nitro-aerial spirit*. Then in the 1700s, Antoine Lavoisier put it all together: at the moment that an object began to combust, another greater-than-zero quantity of mass had been added, contradicting phlogiston theory. And that additional mass was a specific element that he was able to identify by isolating: oxygen. It was even Lavoisier — not Joseph Priestley or Carl Scheele — who gave this element the name of *oxygen*.

Other scientists had preceded Lavoisier in introducing parts of the theory. Priestley and Scheele each discovered the element oxygen in particular through isolating it, but did not notice that the introduction of oxygen was needed for combustion. Conversely, John Mayow did know that a sort of particle from the air needed to be added to an object for it to combust, but Mayow did not know which chemical it was, and he could not prove which chemical in particular it was as he did not isolate the oxygen. When Lavoisier put it all together, the result was something greater than the sum of its parts: for there to be an explanation that would advance scientific understanding, all of this theory’s elements — pun intended — had to be in place. In putting the important pieces together in the exact places where they properly fit, Antoine Lavoisier was truly original.

Humans Are a GMO and Have Been One Since the Stone Age

Genetically Modified As an Effect of the Technology of Our Apelike Ancestors

Stuart K. Hayashi

Photo by Wolfgang Sauber;
courtesy Wikimedia Commons

In the near future, human couples might use in-vitro fertilization and then, while it is still an embryo, alter the DNA of their future child to edit out particular DNA sequences that would otehrwise predispose the child to hereditary diseases. This is formally called germline genetic engineering and derided with the pejorative label of “designer babies.” People fear the idea of technology altering the DNA of humans. They fret that this will bring about an unprecedented level of horror as depicted in such classic science-fiction dystopias as Brave New World and Gattaca. But the truth is that our species, Homo sapiens sapiens, has been a GMO from the start. Our species was genetically modified and outwardly physiologically altered as a consequence of the technology of our ancestors, ancestral species as recent as Homo erectus and possibly something as far back in the past as the much-hairier Australopithecus afarensis (as shown in the Wikimedia Commons photo on the left).

As of this writing, there have been no fewer than two proposed courses through which Stone-Age technology has produced, at least indirectly, revisions in the genetic makeup of the first Homo sapiens sapiens — yes, the sapiens is listed twice in our species’s official name. One route has do to with fire: that gift from that premodern Frankenstein, Prometheus. When meat is raw, the meat-eater has to expend a lot of calories to chew and digest it. When Homo erectus began cooking meat, it was a way for Homo erectus to complete part of the digestion process even before the meat entered anyone’s mouth. In this respect, a cooking fire or stove’s burner can be thought of as a “stomach external to the human body.” When the meat was cooked, it reduced the number of calories that Homo erectus had to expend on chewing the meat.

The paleo-anthropologist Richard Wrangham theorizes that the calories left over then went to expanding the brains of the Homo erectus. Our ancestral environment “selected” for individuals who were genetically predisposed to have their brains grow larger in response to the leftover calories. Hence, someone whose genes had predisposed her brain to enlarge from the leftover calories was one who was likelier to transmit this trait to successive generations. I thank the cultural commentator Scott A. Corbitt for pointing this out to me on the social medium Threads.

However, yet another avenue of Stone-Age technology altering our gene pool goes back even further in time. This one has to do with our ancestors dynamic with stone tools, as observed by cognitive archaeologist Natalie T. Uomini. Our two-legged ancestors would sharpen their stone tools. This was practiced even by species that predated the genus Homo; archaeologists have uncovered evidence of this practice being performed by the hairier, more-apelike Australopithecus afarensis. This practice would involve holding one stone still with one hand, usually the left, and scraping yet another stone against it using the other hand, usually the right hand. Anthropologists refer to this as “flintknapping” or “stone-knapping.” 

In these activities, it was advantageous for a man to have one hand be more dexterous than the other. This practice “selected for” the men who were genetically predisposed to have a dominant hand. Men with a dominant hand were more likely than ambidextrous men to have children and then raise those children into adulthood. (I first learned of this explanation from Michael C. Corballis’s book The Lopsided Ape.) Additionally, Alastair Key and Chris Dunmore have found that this flintknapping also “selected” for thumbs to be more robust. Both of these physiological changes were already noticeable in Homo habilis, which pre-dates fire-making Homo erectus.

As our predecessors Australopithecus, Homo habilis, and Homo erectus already applied their conceptual faculties to restructuring objects from the wild to suit their own purrposes, it follows that our species, Homo sapiens sapiens, has never been without technology. But, more than that, our own species was already genetically altered, albeit unknowingly, by the technology of our ancestors going back at least as far as the chimp-faced Australopithecus.

Even the ancestors who altered us — Homo erectus or a similar contemporary — were genetically modified as a result of the technology of other hominin species that begat them. Homo erectus having genes for thick thumbs and a dominant hand was a byproduct of the technology of the predecessor Homo habilis or some contemporary to Homo habilis. Homo habilis, in turn, inherited the genes for those traits from Australopithecus or something closely related to it. The uses of particular technologies were customs that were ultimately chosen volitionally, and yet these choices influenced which genetically-caused traits were transmitted to successive generations and which were not. The conterminous transmission of chosen customs and unchosen inborn genetics is what ethologists Charles Lumsden and Edward O. Wilson dubbed gene-culture co-evolution.

This ancient pattern of technological transformation educing a corresponding transformation in the human genome and visible physiological traits had continued into the Bronze Age, at least in the region stretching from Europe to Asia. The new development was the switch from hunter-gathering to the farming of grains now being the primary method of obtaining food. In words written by Doug James, Nicky Thomas, and Ben G. Thomas for Seven Days of Science, this is how presenter Emilia Evans paraphrases this discovery of Ali Akbari and David Reich of Harvard and the rest of their team:

...the rate of human evolution has accelerated over the last 10,000 years. ...cattle-herding populations from the Steppes of Eurasia moved into western Europe, bringing with them Bronze-Age technologies. ...cities have been constructed... ...farming and different ways of living seemed to have had profound effects on the human genome. Hundreds of versions of particular genes have become either more or less common over the past 10,000 years, indicating that these accelerating societal and cultural changes have, in turn, driven the acceleration of the evolution of the human genome. ...[Quoting lead author Ali Akbari,] “Everything has changed in the way we live, and that’s reflected in our genome and how it’s trying to catch up.”

Ali Akbari, David Reich, and the rest of their team have identified particular physiological traits that became more prevalent as a ramification of these trends. Such traits included red hair and lighter skin. They were accompanied, strangely enough, by a reduction in the prevalence of male-pattern baldness.

There is a lesson in this for those who abhor technological alteration  as some unnatural tampering with biology. Stone-Age humans were the original ones to conduct genetic engineering on themselves and subsequent human generations, including us. That happened millennia prior to any technician going into a laboratory, placing a cell in a petri dish, and employing chemical methods to splice a foreign DNA segment into that cell.

Ridley Scott’s confusing Prometheus — his prequel to Sigourney Weaver’s Alien movies — portrays humans as having been engineered into existence by extraterrestrials through technologies far beyond what we have today. It turns out that aspects of that story may well be true, except that our technological creator was from Earth and that the technology employed in this endeavor didn’t even need to be as complex as ours.

There are at least two options in how we can interpret this. Should we think of Australopithecus as being in a category separate from ourselves, then, inasmuch as we have descended from Australopithecus or something like it, this Australopithecus was a mad scientist and we humans are his Creation. However, if we include Australopithecus and Homo habilis in the category of “us,” then, insofar as technological restructuring is a form of creativity, this process is an instance of autopoiesis: modern man is indeed self-made. Ultimately it is not the angels but we humans who are, in the words of Lucifer in Paradise Lost, “self-begot, self-raised...”

The technologies employed by our ancient ancestors — flintknapping, fire-making, and farming — were consciously chosen, but their lasting influence on changes to our genetic code were a byproduct that was not consciously chosen. Our Stone-Age ancestors didn’t even know of these effects. By contrast, when future couples engage in more-direct editing of the genetic codes of their children, those edits will indeed be consciously intended choices. For that to happen, these people will have in mind which specific DNA sequences to isolate in order to alter the very specific traits they are targeting. That is an important distinction between the technology-caused gene modificatoin of the near future versus the Pliocene past. But what has remained the consistent pattern since the prehistoric origin of our species is the presence of technology to influence the genetic codes of descendants. 

We would be best off giving up any aversion to GMOs-as-such. Our family lineage had become technologically-created GMOs in the Stone Age prior even to our becoming Homo sapiens sapiens. Far from technological innovation being some sort of deviation from our naturalness, the employment of technological innovation is inherent to human nature itself. Artifice does not refer necessarily to fakery; etymologically it means craftsmanship, being the root of artisan and artwork. And in the present and in the Stone Age, such crafting of both one’s surroundings and one’s own genetic makeup has been the way of the human. Thus, to be artificial is to be natural. It has always been our Stone-Age adaptation as an organism.

Libertarians and the Myth of the Winner-Takes-All Patent Monopoly

Stuart K. Hayashi




The libertarian political movement claims to be all about free markets and privatization, and yet this is contradicted by its maligning of intellectual property rights. That is the movement’s party line, which dates at least as early as the 1970s. In that decade, Murray N. Rothbard and Roy A. Childs, Jr., began with misrepresenting the nature of patents. Samuel E. Konkin III and Wendy McElroy then added the mischaracterizations about copyrights.

According to the party-line straw man, an intellectual property right is an arrogant proclamation of a single party to be the exclusive owner of an “idea.” And this “idea,” continues the misrepresentation, is one upon which many other parties arrived on their own independently, but of which they are now deprived of implementing because that one other party has a government-enforced monopoly over it, the patent or copyright.

In the straw-man depiction provided by The Adventures of Jonathan Gullible, a lawyer gaining a patent on the axe confers upon him a seventeen-year monopoly on the general product category of “axe,” or, as Jonathan Gullible calls it, “SharpMetalOnAStick.” Further according to such an argument, were someone to have a U.S. utility patent on a “paperclip,” she would usurp a seventeen-year government-enfranchised monopoly on the production of paperclips. The same would apply to “electric can-openers” and “the mechanical pencil.”

As this narrative proclaims that only one party gets the patent, whereas all the other chronologically-parallel-inventing parties end up bereft of anything to show for their own respective research-and-development, such libertarians would have us believe that intellectual property rights are themed on “winner takes all.” And the government-decreed winner who takes all, a Rothbardian-anarchist libertarian tells us, is the one most skillful in cozying up to politicians and having pull with them. I call this the Myth of the Winner-Takes-All Race to Patent. It is also the Myth of the Winner-Takes-All Patent Monopoly.

As the author of Jonathan Gullible put it to me, this is the situation as he sees it. Perhaps in 1915, two separate parties — one named Charles and the other named John — are each, unbeknownst to the other, working on a new invention: mechanical pencils. Then, continued the Jonathan Gullible author, when Charles gains the patent on “the mechanical pencil,” it is even worse than Charles merely gaining a State-enforced monopoly on this product. It will be the situation, the Jonathan Gullible author told me, that if John continues to pursue his own R-and-D on his own mechanical-pencil project, Charles will sue him successfully. 

Thus, the Jonathan Gullible author concluded to me and a whole audience, not only is Charles using the government to claim ownership over his own ideas, but Charles is even claiming ownership over John’s ideas and the ideas of all rival inventors. In effect, Charles’s patent is about the State being Charles’s henchman in Charles’s usurpation of control over the ideas of other parties against their consent.

But the scenario the Jonathan Gullible author described is not what happens in reality. It is time for us to look at the actual record.

Within a Span of Seventeen Years, Why Are There Multiple Patents on the Same Type of Product?
There are resources online whereby you can see actual U.S. patents, many dating all the way back to the nineteenth century. Such resources include Free Patents Online and Google Patents. Over the years I have gone through them and made tables of multiple U.S. utility patents on the same general category of product.

Here is a non-exhaustive table I compiled of various U.S. utility patents on “the paperclip” from the years 1867 to 1957 — a nine-decade duration.

Note the intervals of years between the patents: every interval is shorter than seventeen years. In effect, each U.S. utility patent on the paperclip was granted prior to the expiration of the one directly preceding it. Had it been true that a U.S. utility patent conferred a government-enforced monopoly on an industry and product category for a period of seventeen years, then how could this be? And if the first patent on a paperclip claimed ownership over the “idea” of “paperclip,” then why were there so many subsequent utility patents on the paperclip? Wouldn’t the U.S. Patent-and-Trademark Office have granted a single seventeen-year patent on “the paperclip” and thereafter been done with it?

The answer is in the convenient conflation when libertarians say that an intellectual property right is a demand that the government enforce someone’s monopoly on an “idea.” Here, the libertarian expects you to interpret “idea” as a general idea — a general idea for a general category of product, this one being “paperclip.” From that misreading, we are to assume that if in the year 1867 the U.S. Patent-and-Trademark Office (PTO) certified Samuel B. Fay’s rightful patent over his paperclip, that would preclude the U.S. PTO from certifying ten years later Erlman Wright’s patent on his own paperclip.

Actually a patent does not claim ownership over a general idea for a whole product category such as “paperclip” or “mechanical pencil,” and it does not grant to its owner a government-enforced monopoly on any industry — not for seventeen years or any other duration.

Rather, patents — this applies both to utility patents and design patents — are the State’s acknowledgment of a party’s already-existing rightful ownership over a specific original design, delineation, or configuration. The reason why there have historically been so many different U.S. utility patents on the paperclip for almost a century is that there have been differences in design in terms of the object’s exact shape and size and the material with which it is comprised.

In effect, a utility patent on a paperclip is not a utility patent on the paperclip. That applies even to the first-ever paperclip to be patented.

There is a very logical basis in a constitutional liberal republic recognizing ownership over a specific original configuration instead of over general ideas. Political economy is about what happens in practice, and intellectual property rights are the means by which we translate theory into such practice. A truly unprecedented conception cannot be put into practice when it stays nebulous in parameters and definition; for it to be implemented, it must be given specificity in form.

I have previously written another blog post that discusses other aspects of the fallacy of libertarian conflation about “ideas” — about their false insinuation that the patent arrogates to a single party some governmental control over just about any vague, hazy, broadly-defined and unrefined “idea” into which just about anyone can passively and serendipitously fall in. To stigmatize intellectual property rights as a government-enforced monopoly on an industry, it is important to libertarians that they mislead people into believing that patents are defined and enforced much more broadly than they truly are. 

 In person, the author of Jonathan Gullible would often repeat the same canned rejoinder.  Similar to Jonathan Gullible’s titular character, every time you point out the distinction between what is specifically patentable versus ideas that remain too foggily defined, he smirks, “What you just said is a good idea. Who has the patent on that?” That equivocation should fool the reader no longer.

Both Utility Patents and Design Patents Are for Specific Original Designs
Yet another misconception must be cleared up with respect to the word design. There are occasionally some people who think of themselves as free-marketers — many of whom do not share in the Rothbardians’ vehemence against patents — who nonetheless misunderstand the distinction between “design patent” and “utility patent.” According to their misunderstanding, it is only design patents that protect a specific original design, whereas a utility patent’s enforceability is much broader and, unlike a design patent, does confer a government-enforced monopoly on an entire industry.

That misconception is belied by the fact that all of the U.S. patents listed in my “paperclip” table are utility patents, not design patents. A U.S. design patent is designated by its patent number beginning with the letter D.

Both utility patents and design patents are to protect only specific original designs. The actual distinction is this. A utility patent protects a specific design with respect to the aspects pertaining to its practical functionality. Conversely, a design patent protects a specific design with respect to the aspects pertaining to its aesthetic qualities.

When Frédéric-Auguste Bartholdi drew up his plans for the Statue of Liberty, for it he earned U.S. Design Patent D110,23S. This was on account of how Bartholdi raised funding for Liberty by selling handheld replicas of her. He therefore did not want imitators to snatch the aesthetic of his work and produce their own statues in the exact likeness of a woman in Greco-Roman garb, adorned with a Mediterranean “radiate crown” and holding up a torch. Likewise, celebrated filmmaker George Lucas earned U.S. Design Patent D264,109S for his “Boba Fett action figure.” Lucas did not want other toymakers producing their own toys, absent of his authorization, that were in the exact likeness of his own Star Wars character Boba Fett. Ralph Lauren had U.S. Design Patent D319,932S on a bed of a particular shape and U.S. Design Patent D259,098S on the fancy appearance of a cologne bottle.

I hope that it is now clear that design patents are about artistic features, whereas utility patents are about operational features, and both types are on specific original designs — what, for further distinction, we might also call specific original configurations, delineations, or plans. In short, a design patent is on how a specific design looks, and a utility patent is on how a specific design operates. For another blog post of mine about the line of demarcation between utility patents and design patents, and how both pertain to discrete aspects of the design, you can go here.

Other Examples of How, Within Seventeen Years, There Can Be Multiple Utility Patents Within the Same General Type of Product
These principles are not confined to the market for paperclips. They also apply to a more-complex machine. Here I present a table I made on various U.S. utility patents on the electric can-opener from 1948 to 1990. Including all of 1948, that would be forty-three years. Mind you that this table does not even include patents on more-traditional manually-cranked can-openers. Even when it comes to the more-specific category of electric can-openers, there is this much variation.

Once again, when each U.S. utility patent to certify the already-existing moral right to one’s specific configuration is codified, it is prior to the expiration of the other patent on the electric can-opener that directly precedes it. Once again, there are differences in design with respect to the moving parts that turn the blade; there are differences in the location of the motor and on whether or not the electric can-opener needs to be held by hand as the motor turns the blade.

In January 2026 I decided to look into another invention, the mechanical pencil. You may have seen my drawings on my blog, and their first drafts begin with what I have done on paper using a mechanical pencil. The earliest-known patent on a mechanical pencil is said to be with silversmith Sampson Mordan and engineer John Isaac Hawkins in England in 1822. Similar patents followed in the USA some years later. Not all of these are recoverable, as a fire in Washington, D.C., destroyed many important federal government records, including many patent documents from the early nineteenth century. 

Still, from 1836 onward and going strong for a century, we see the same pattern as before: each patent was awarded while the preceding one from the same general product category was still active and enforceable. These early versions do not exactly match what we think of today when we say “mechanical pencil.” The earliest-known one that can be called a modern mechanical pencil — it has refillable pieces of pencil lead, with a mechanism inside the pencil that propels the lead out the cylinder’s tip — is from 1915 with Charles Keeran.

There were so many U.S. utility patents alone on the mechanical pencil, that I was able to make five tables. And even these are far from exhaustive. The tables range from the years 1836 to 2024 — a span exceeding 185 years. All the while, each new utility patent on the mechanical pencil arrived even as the one directly preceding it remained in effect.

There is great variety in the exact shapes of the parts of the mechanism that propels the pencil lead through the cannister; they come in pieces varying in number and material. In the final table you can see the brand that I use: Pentel of Japan.

Someone prolific in the list of inventors was “Lucifer J. Most.” Another one was “Christ Andonov.” Among the respective inventors of the mechanical pencil are Lucifer and Christ.

How Competitive Was the Market for Incandescent Lightbulbs in the Timespan When Thomas Edison’s Patent Was Most Strongly Upheld and Enforced?
Someone else who looked into these matters was associate professor John Howells of Aarhus University in Denmark. He and Ron Katznelson have busted four myths (1, 2–4) that are routinely presented as case studies in how patents have supposedly slowed down technological innovation. One such myth is that Thomas Edison’s U.S. Utility Patent No. 223,898A — on the incandescent lightbulb with a high-resistance carbon filament — awarded in the year 1880, slowed down improvements in this industry. The U.S. Supreme Court definitively upheld this patent in the year 1892 and it was set to expire in 1897. Were the “monopoly” narrative accurate, this five-year period would be one where Edison did the most to exercise his monopoly powers, such as in hiking prices.

John Howells shows that, in fact, it was in this five-year duration that incandescent lightbulbs had their steepest drop in real price. 

The reason is that patent law allows for the principle of “design-around.” In “design-around,” a party’s engineers examine the specific task a patented or likely-to-be-patented configuration performs, and then seek to produce their own configuration that performs that same task through an alternative route or method. With respect to incandescent lightbulbs, Edison’s competitors came up with their own unique configurations — on which they received their own respective U.S. utility patents — that performed the same tasks as Edison’s.

Anticipating the 1880 approval of Edison’s carbon-filament incandescent lightbulb patent, inventor William E. Sawyer and attorney Albon Man arrived at their own version in 1878, U.S. Utility Patent No. 205,144A. Working in Great Britain, Joseph Swan had his own version receive a U.S. utility patent also in 1880 — U.S. Utility Patent No. 234,345A. The prolific Black inventor Lewis Latimer, whom Edison would hire two years later, produced his own competitive version in 1882, U.S. Utility Patent No. 252,386A. And Hiram Maxim, who today is most-remembered for his automatic machine gun, did his own design-arounds. In 1880 he was awarded U.S. Utility Patent No. 230,309A, and, in 1881, it was U.S. Utility Patent No. 237,198A and U.S. Utility Patent No. 247,380A. In 1891 Reginald Fessenden, who would later be renowned much more widely for his developments in radio, gained U.S. Utility Patent No. 452,494A. In 1893, William Emery Nickerson and Edward Egbert Cary received U.S. Utility Patent No.507,558A.

Companies in competition against Edison in the electric lighting business clamored to pay licensing fees for these other patents. George Westinghouse — Thomas Edison’s main rival in this industry — paid licensing fees on William E. Sawyer’s patent (1, 2). The Beacon Vacuum Pump and Electrical Company paid royalties to William Nickerson and Edward Cary for theirs.

As U.S. utility patents are on specific original configurations and not on the general idea, that the U.S. Supreme Court upheld Edison’s 1880 patent in 1892 was unable to withhold from the market the incandescent lightbulbs configured in the patents of William E. Sawyer and William Nickerson. And to keep up with the competition from these other versions of the incandescent lightbulb, in the period ranging from 1892 to his patent’s scheduled expiration in 1897, Edison still had to cut his own prices.

John Howells and Ron Katznelson explicate what should now be clear: “...a patent is not an economic monopoly...”

What About the Claim That Multiple Parties, All Unknown to the Others, All Arrive at the Same Invention Chronologically Parallel to Each Other?
Left to be addressed is the allegation that multiple parties, each unbeknownst to the others, all arrive at the exact same invention at the exact same time. What actually happens is that separate parties, working independently of one another, arrive at the same general idea within relatively close temporal proximity to one another. The exact specific original designs, though, are different, and it is not unusual when these parties each obtain their own specific patent. When these parties dispute one another in court, it has to do with “overlap” in terms of the aspects of their respective designs that are similar.

One such example, provided by Adam Mossoff (1, 2) is with different sewing machines patented by Elias Howe and Isaac Merritt Singer, the latter being the namesake behind Singer Sewing Machines. They eventually resolved the disputes by pooling all of their patents into a single trust — a patent pool. Such patent pools are not uncommon.

Another case study has to do with the integrated circuit that is vital to today’s personal computers. At Fairchild Semiconductor, Robert Noyce came up with one version, and, with another Fairchild cohort, he would co-found Intel with this invention as its basis. And within a short distance of time, Jack Kilby had his own version at Texas Instruments. Kilby’s patent was on the body of the device on its own, whereas Noyce’s placed more emphasis on the arrangement in which this was to be connected with other components.

With respect to where the two patents were similar, the two firms eventually arrived at something else that would become commonplace — a cross-licensing agreement. This meant that each company could use both its own patents and the other’s as far as the integrated circuit was concerned.

That is not the winner-takes-all model that the Rothbardians promulgate.

To reiterate, the Rothbardian narrative against patents, such as in The Adventures of Jonathan Gullible, is that many parties invent the same “idea” at the same time, and, with but one of these parties gaining the patent-enforced monopoly, the R-and-D of the other simultaneously-inventive firms come to nothing. And, concludes the Rothbardian misrepresentation, the one solution to this dilemma is nothing short of the abolition of intellectual property rights outright.

And as we see with the sewing machine and the integrated circuit, the reality is far different.

Let us imagine that within times relatively close to each other, seven separate firms independently arrive at the same general idea. Those seven firms each receive their own patent, but, at first, there is difficulty in terms of similarities among the patents. Here we find that it is not the case that but one of the firms receive the patent and the other six see their efforts wasted. Rather, they have a cross-licensing agreement. Note how this is solved without capitulation to the drastic demands of the patent-hating libertarians.

In the patent pool, the firms that have invested their own resources into research-and-development still reap the benefits of that effort. Commensurately, the many-more firms out there that made zero contributions to that same R-and-D are not able to pilfer, through piracy, the specific original configurations resulting from that R-and-D. But, had the patent-hating libertarians gotten their way, the firms that invested no R-and-D would be able to free-ride off the seven firms that did do the R-and-D.

Clearing Up What the U.S. Constitution’s Copyright Clause Means By Exclusive Right — Hint: Pay Attention to “Their Respective Writings and Discoveries”
With this understanding, we can observe the clause in the U.S. Constitution that enshrines copyrights and patents. Pertinent here, we can ascertain how the opponents of intellectual property rights mischaracterize the meaning of the clause. U.S. Congress, says the document, is tasked “to promote the progress of science and useful arts by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries.”

The patent-haters seize on that phrase exclusive right and misrepresent that as a State-enforced monopoly. But here we should see that a party has an exclusive right to what that particular party originated. Suppose you claim a plot of wilderness and improve upon it and then live on it, with the State recognizing that homestead as your private property. That would not confer upon you a State-enforced monopoly on the entire real estate market. Likewise, points out Revolutionary Era attorney Daniel Webster, a “man’s right to his own invention ...is no more a monopoly for him to possess ...than to possess his own homestead.”

We can see that with U.S. utility patents on the mechanical pencil. Lucifer J. Most’s 1939 U.S. utility patent on his own mechanical pencil was an exclusive right on this particular configuration. Note from the table above that in the seventeen years that followed, the patent did not confer upon Mr. Most some State-enforced monopoly on mechanical pencils. 

The essential phrase in the Copyright Clause is not exclusive right but respective writings and discoveries. Let us read the clause again, this time with Lucifer J. Most’s situation in mind: “...securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries” (emphasis added). Here, respective means that Lucifer Most’s U.S. utility patent covers only the specifics on what he originated. 

Mr. Most did not originate mechanical pencils in general, and the patent does not secure for him any exclusive right over the entire market for mechanical pencils. Nor was it secured for his predecessor in producing the overall modern and general version of the mechanical pencil that we use in the present, Charles R. Keeran in 1915. Lucifer J. Most did originate, though, his own specific arrangement of the inner workings of a mechanical pencil. Hence, the U.S. Constitution is securing for him the exclusive right over his respective “writings and discoveries,” meaning the specific aspects he devised himself. And, thankfully, throughout our history the U.S. courts have been remarkably consistent in respecting that distinction.

Indeed, the absurdity of the libertarian accusation that intellectual property rights are a government-enforced monopoly on an industry is even more apparent when applied to copyrights than it is with utility patents. His copyrights on his Percy Jackson series of books don’t give Rick Riordan a State-enforced monopoly on the literature market. He has a “monopoly” only on his specific Percy Jackson prose, as he should, as he is the one who composed it.

Conclusion: Homesteading, The Original Intellectual Property Right 

Daniel Webster is apt in identifying the connection between the right to homestead and the right to patent — the former forms the basis of the latter. And this exposes yet another self-contradiction of the Rothbardians who hate intellectual property rights so much. They denounce intellectual property rights and yet wax enthusiastically about John Locke’s discussion of how, by improving the land he has settled on, the homesteader gains proper ownership over it. Indeed, the homestead is the original intellectual property right. Karl Marx wanted to pretend that this right was all about the physical toiling. But such toiling improves the land no more than the extent to which it has been properly planned — the work of the intellect, of the mind. The homesteader has to identify the right crops suited to this environment. The homesteader has to plan properly in the irrigation.

Just as with works that are patented and copyrighted, it is through the devising of a rational plan — the proper configuration and design — that the homesteader produces, from the homestead, a net increase in economic value. And as with the patenter and copyrighter, this is a newly emergent value that had not previously existed or circulated anywhere in any society’s economy. The homesteading principle that the Rothbardians worship is the origin of the intellectual property right that these same Rothbardians try to deny.

And as libertarians stubbornly affix themselves to their antiquated opposition to intellectual property rights, the ship of moral progress is sailing and leaving them behind. Fortunately, increasingly there are academic philosophers recognizing that the homesteading of a plot is the original intellectual property right, and that trademarks and copyrights and patents and plant variety protections are mere extensions of the same principle. Such academic philosophers include Justin Hughes and Adam D. Moore.

Libertarians presume that economic “scarcity” applies only to tangible objects, and therefore “intellectual property-rights” is an oxymoron. I have addressed their falsehood about that over here. More pertinent to this particular discussion, the truth is the opposite of the the libertarians’ conclusion. Poverty has always been the default for our species, and economic value is created through the application of the human mind to produce it from nature’s raw materials. As the application of the intellect is the source of economic value in units of private property — including the artificial improvements to every homestead — the term intellectual property-right turns out to be a redundancy. Private and specific intellectual effort is what ultimately begat the economic value to be rightfully privately owned by its respective creator.

Sadly, libertarians repeat their misrepresentations ad nauseum, trapping themselves in the very same intellectual stagnation from which patents and copyrights have freed those of us who are much more curious. Fortunately, we need not let them hold us back. Nay, we can hold true to the U.S. Constitution’s Copyright Clause and continue to advance human progress. We do so as we remember that U.S. utility patents are not winner-take-all monopolies but instead the means by which inventive parties protect their financial identity and are thereby able to reap the rewards of their respective specific innovations.

From Feb. 2–3, 2026, I added the mentions of academic philosophers Justin Hughes and Adam D. Moore and of how intellectual property rights are a protection of financial identity. On Feb. 3, 2026, I added the mention of the immature “What you just said is a good idea. Who has the patent on that?” quip. on Friday, May 1, 2026, I added the point about the term “intellectual property-rights” actually being redundant. On Monday, May 11, 2026, I added the paragraphs about the fallacious claim that if both Charles and John are racing to be the first to patent a mechanical pencil, then Charles’s patent is Charles’s way of trying to police and usurp John’s ideas as well.

Sensory Observation Does Prove the Existence of Atoms

Stuart K. Hayashi




I have heard people say, “I’ve never seen an isolated atom, and yet I know atoms exist. Therefore, you can know something exists even if its existence has never been confirmed by sensory evidence.” But the truth is that atomic theory is indeed confirmed by sensory evidence. Chemical formulae in a compound — such as how, in water, for every one atom of oxygen, there are two atoms of hydrogen — are a model to explain the principles in Nature, and, the accuracy of that model is verified in how it is used successfully to make predictions that are confirmed, accordingly, by sensory observation to be likewise accurate. The following essay is inspired by discussions of similar points in David Harriman’s book The Logical Leap.

It was through sensory observation that in the years from 1797 to 1799 the tirelessly working chemist Joseph-Louis Proust had discovered the Law of Definite Proportions. The chemical compound he used was copper carbonate — CuCO3. He found that regardless of how the copper carbonate was procured, and no matter the quantity it was in, the mass ratio of copper to carbon to oxygen will consistently be a respective 5.3 to 1 to 4. Whatever quantity of copper carbonate you have, for every 5.3 grams of copper it has, it will correspondingly have 1 gram of carbon and 4 grams of oxygen. Within any chemical compound, the separate elements only could always configure together in the same proportions to one another like that

1. if each element ultimately consisted of tiny microscopic units that could not be divisible any further at the chemical level, and
2. if the chemically-indivisible units of each element bonded with the others always in the same ratio to one another.

That is how we know that a chemical compound can be reduced to separate molecules, and that each molecule of the compound consists of two or more elements with each element coming in a whole-number of chemically-indivisible units (no fractions or decimals for each number of atoms in the molecule).

Proust was able to measure the quantity of the mass of copper, carbon, and oxygen each in his samples of copper carbonate as he knew how to trigger particular chemical reactions to break down the copper carbonate into its separate elements. He heated the copper carbonate to evaporate the water and carbon dioxide. This left him with copper oxide (the result of a bond between copper and oxygen). Then, using hydrogen but not adding it, Proust was able to remove the oxygen, leaving only the pure copper. As measurements of weight were a reliable proxy for measuring mass, Proust weighed the remaining sample at each stage of the process. First he weighed the complete copper carbonate. Then he weighed the separate copper oxide, water, and carbon dioxide. Finally he weighed the remaining sample of pure copper. You can see an English translation of his own description of the procedure over here. All this involved direct sensory inputs.

Joseph-Louis Proust could not see any isolated atoms. But he did use his senses directly in measuring the quantity of each element’s mass within the compound and observing first-hand how consistent was the ratio in the quantity of mass for each element as compared to the others.

Proust observed directly through his senses the consistency of his Law of Definite Proportions. What explained this consistent principle was that, on a microscopic level, the copper carbonate consisted of tiny uniform particles, molecules. And furthermore, within each molecule were no-further-chemically-divisible units of copper, carbon, and oxygen each coming in a whole number of units, with the whole numbers of units for each of those respective elements themselves always coming in the same ratio to one another. That no-further-divisible-at-the-chemical-level units for each of those respective elements always came in a fixed ratio to one another within the copper carbonate explained why the respective directly-observed masses of those elements always arrived in a fixed ratio to one another.

Likewise, no matter the quantity of water you have, the mass ratio of hydrogen to oxygen will always be 1 to 8. For every one gram of hydrogen, there will always be eight grams of oxygen. This only could have been true if, at the chemical level, water consisted of tiny microscopic particles (molecules) in which there was an arrangement where a particular whole-number of no-further-divisible units of hydrogen existed in a constant ratio to a whole-number of likewise-no-further-divisible units of oxygen. Remembering the ancient Greek idea of Leucippus and Democritus that all matter might ultimately consist of microscopic further-irreducible units, physicist John Dalton gave these chemically no-further-indivisible units the same name that these presocratic philosophers did: atoms.

Joseph-Louis Proust’s findings were corroborated further by the similarly-named Joseph Louis Gay-Lussac. Gay-Lussac found through his experimentation that whenever the gasified elements with which he experimented bonded with one another to form compounds, their respective volumes had to be in whole-number ratios to cause such a reaction. Through his sensory observation of his measurements, he detected that it always took two exact liters of hydrogen gas to react with an exact single liter of oxygen to produce two exact liters of gasified water — water vapor. Likewise, it was consistent that a single liter of hydrogen gas reacted with a single liter of chlorine to produce two exact liters of hydrogen chloride.

From Gay-Lussac’s experiments Amedeo Avogadro induced the theory that when two different elements in gas form are each in containers of the same volume to one another, each container contains the same number of molecules as the other. And a noble gas can consist of single-atom molecules. The two liters of hydrogen with which Gay-Lussac started the trial consisted of the same number of molecules as the two liters of water vapor at that trial’s conclusion. The findings of both Proust and Gay-Lussac were synthesized to arrive at measurements of the mass of each uniform atom of each element.

Clearly, no one can observe the mass or weight of an isolated atom. But from experiments like Proust’s, John Dalton ascertained that the mass of an atom of a particular element would consistently be greater than the mass of an atom from another type of element. For example, an atom of oxygen will always be of greater mass than an atom of hydrogen. Hence, Dalton ascertained that the discrete masses of atoms from different elements could be found by comparing them against one another, with the consistent mass of an atom from a particular element —hydrogen — being used as the consistent standard.

Through successful repetition of Gay-Lussac’s trials, scientists ascertained that in water, each molecule consists of two hydrogen atoms and a single oxygen atom. And as prior experimentations already demonstrated that in water, there are 8 grams of oxygen for every 1 gram of hydrogen, the atomic weight of oxygen could be ascertained. Using the mass of a hydrogen atom as the standard — the assigned atomic mass of hydrogen being “1” — it is the case that a single oxygen atom is of a mass sixteen times that of a hydrogen atom. Hence, the atomic mass of oxygen is 16.

This is the calculation. We are solving for the atomic mass of oxygen, y. The atomic mass of hydrogen is x. 2x/1y = 1/8. And we know x = 1. Therefore, 2/y = 1/8. And so y = 2 * 8 = 16.

Aristotle is not recorded to have conducted controlled experiments, but note that all controlled experiments rely on Aristotle’s Law of Identity. To the extent that the variables in two different samples are the same in the pertinent respect, they are of the same type. Everything in the control sample and the experimental are the same in the pertinent context except for the one variable being tested. Gay-Lussac’s experimental results were meaningful because all of the other variables (the volumes, the temperature, the pressure) were, in the pertinent context, the same. By having all variables in both the control sample and experimental sample being the same except for the one variable we are testing, we can ascertain that this one variable is what causes the differences in results between the control sample and experimental sample. Also, all equations, such as the one above, rely on the principle that if A equals B, and B equals C, then A equals C, and that itself is a rephrasing of the Law of Identity. Hence, although the man himself was doubtful that all matter ultimately consists of atoms, the application of Aristotle’s Law of Identity was crucial to the eventual validation of atomic theory.

It was through the application of the Law of Identity that Amedeo Avogadro ascertained that Gay-Lucsac’s findings could be applied to ascertaining the atomic masses of other elements. And once chemists and physicists figured out the atomic masses of copper (63.546) and carbon (12.011) respectively, they could go back to Joseph-Louis Proust’s findings about copper carbonate to ascertain that a molecule of copper carbonate consists of 1 copper atom, 1 carbon atom, and 3 oxygen atoms.

Yes, an isolated atom cannot be seen. But the model that says that all matter ultimately consists of atoms is a model that, when applied, is vindicated through its observed practical results. Sensory observations confirm the validity of atomic theory.

Complexity of the Human Mind Allows for Reality and Ethics to Be Rendered Simple Enough to Be Understood

Yet Those Who Deny Free Will and the Human Capacity for Intellectual Originality Try to Reverse That Fact



Stuart K. Hayashi

On this blog I have previously written of two fallacies. In this essay, I will say how I think the two are related. I will also discuss the manner in which I think they are connected to a third fallacy that I have also addressed. And I will conclude with an iteration of how I think my rejection of the third fallacy is the result of my having a conclusion that is the perfect inverse of the implicit premise of advocates of the first two fallacies.

These are the first two fallacies:

1. the denial that humans possess free will, and 
2. the denial that humans are capable of originality in art and invention.

There are deniers of free will who deny it on the basis of supernatural claims. They pronounce that God, gods, prophecies, or the “movements” of stars directly determine the entire courses of our lives. But here I am thinking of those who deny free will on an allegedly secular basis. Following in the tradition of the philosopher Baruch Spinoza, they purport to show that Aristotle’s Laws of Identity and Causality themselves preclude free will. I have refuted the argument in more detail over here, here, here, and here. 

For the purpose of this new essay, I will say that the deniers presume that because the human brain can be reduced to flesh and chemical reactions, it follows that there is no free will. And they continue that if your decision-making is influenced by any preexisting context, then that precludes free will. They say that in what you mistake for decision-making on your part, you are really a machine that is made out of meat and is ultimately running on the programming of chemical reactions and conditioning from environmental stimuli.

There are also those who deny that anything in artwork or invention is truly original. They propound that any artwork or invention that is initially praised for being original turns out not to be. They say that their reason for concluding as much is that every allegedly-original artwork or invention was at least partially inspired by other, preexisting artworks or inventions. The mere existence of any influences prior to the new artwork or invention, they assert, precludes any originality to be found in the new artwork or invention. They say that the idea of “originality” is misleading at best and quite illusory. As a substitute, they continue in their rhetoric, we should concede that any artwork or invention that we value should be praised simply as a competent “re-mix” and nothing beyond that. They would prefer that we settle for the belief that every innovation we value is nothing more than a “re-mixing” of long-established conventions, and they say that resigning ourselves to that conclusion is the best we can do. I have refuted that fallacy over here.

It is not unusual for deniers of originality to be, at least implicitly, deniers of free will as well. I have noticed this pattern over the years in philosophically-utilitarian Libertarians on Facebook. This has been especially a pattern in utilitarian Libertarians who stitch together very trite straw-man arguments against the validity of intellectual property rights. Now I think I know the connection.

Intellectual originality is something that requires the deliberate taking of initiative. The capacity for producing something original relies upon someone being proactive in willingly choosing to venture into areas of thought that do not have well-established precedent. And the secular denial of free will is something that denigrates, from the outset, any acknowledgment of the very same proactivity. When a man downplays and denigrates acknowledgment of the necessity of free will in producing works of originality, that man encounters cognitive dissonance insofar as he celebrates artworks or inventions that he senses, at least implicitly, to demonstrate a sizable degree of novelty.

The attempted solution to that cognitive dissonance is to denigrate these praised-as-original works as a fortuitous result of people still doing something that, when it comes to how they use their nervous systems, is much more passive than what proactive originality would entail. In this interpretation, people passively “re-mix” the same conventional practices in art and engineering that have always have been “re-mixed,” and the works that stand out the most are the most serendipitously beneficial “re-mixes.” In lieu of acknowledging the proactiveness — the free will — in originality, the deniers of free will and originality pronounce that our favorite artworks and inventions came about as the most-fortuitous effects of relatively psychologically-passive “re-mixing” of traditions that humans have always practiced. Hence, the explicit denial of originality is the logical corollary to the irrational presumption that an adult’s actions cannot be attributed accurately to the proactively volitional choice-making of the adult herself.

Now we come to the third fallacy, the fallacy I most want to address in this essay. Many of the same deniers of free will and originality have another favorite stock-conclusion. They tell me, “You Objectivists want to believe that reality — even ethics — can be understood in terms of relatively simple principles. Yet reality itself is too messy and complex for your nice-and-neat logic. And that means reality is, in turn, too messy and complex for your simplistic principles.” 

You may note that part of the third fallacy is largely a simpler restatement of Immanuel Kant’s fallacious “Analytic-Synthetic Dichotomy.” I have already refuted the “Analytic-Synthetic Dichotomy” over here. That is the part that says that the material reality you experience is too chaotic for Neat-and-Tidy Logic to apply to it. Rather than refute that fallacy again, I here want to address how I think it relates to the other two fallacies, the denials of free will and originality. I find it ironic when the deniers of free will and originality say that reality is so complex that to live by principles is to try to oversimplify life. It is ironic, as the deniers’ pseudo-definitions of “free will” and “originality” are the actual oversimplifications. 

As a faculty of the human mind, free will is complex enough that it is not precluded if decision-making is influenced by factors external to the decision-making consciousness. Likewise as an important function of the human mind, intellectual originality is complex enough that the originality within an artwork or invention can still be recognized and appreciated even as that artwork or invention was inspired by previous works. Yet in their proclaiming reality as too complex for logic, the deniers’ implicit message is that logic and rationality themselves are too existentially simple even to begin to become applicable in the face of the complexities of reality and ethics.  

As an example, the fallacy in presuming the human mind as too simple in the face of reality’s complexity and messiness is visible in an otherwise-correct takedown of pseudoscientific health-advice “wellness” podcaster Andrew Huberman. In his more-professional capacity, Huberman is a professor of neuroscience at Stanford’s medical school. But as a science podcaster, Huberman takes the role of sciolist and ultracrepidarian who issues superficial pronouncements on scientific subjects where he holds no expertise or proper understanding. Pointing out the inaccuracies of Huberman’s podcast pronouncements should be sufficient, but one cardiologist on the social media website Threads faults Huberman for something else.

This medical-doctor detractor of Huberman’s pontificates that the true danger is that Huberman’s approach “gives the impression...that biology is exact, mechanistically simple, logical.” We are to believe that any such approach is false, as biological principles are not as consistent as are “computers,” for there is too much “complexity.”

But the reality is that upon validating properly the principles of nature, one does find that applying such principles enables an understanding of physiology that is, at least on a general scale, “exact, mechanistically simple, logical.” For instance, if you as a biologist study a particular ecosystem where members of a particular vertebrate species suffer a high mortality rate, the complexity of the process through which mutations occur will make it futile for you to predict exactly when a beneficent mutation might occur in that species that enables a reduction in the mortality rate. However, what does remain “exact, mechanistically simple, logical” is the fact that you know that in this and every other ecosystem, the principles of natural selection do still apply.

Even if you cannot predict exactly when a beneficent mutation will occur, it is the case that if you are able to identify the main environmental factors that wipe out most members of that species prior to their being able to reproduce, then you know that, provided those environmental conditions stay the same, you can make plausible predictions on what sort of mutations would enable future generations of that species to be better-adapted and to thrive with a reduced mortality rate. For a person — scientist or not — to presume that our species is forever doomed to ignorance and existential helplessness on account of the complexity of man’s environment is for him to underestimate the complexity of man’s mind and its capabilities. Such a commentator presumes that a proper understanding of nature cannot be made simple because that commentator presumes that it is the human mind that is too simple.

Regarding Dr. Huberman versus his cardiologist detractor, the falsehood in question is this. Dr. Huberman says that just as exercising a muscle makes it bigger, it follows that if you “do anything” mentally “that you don’t want to do,” a part of your brain likewise “gets bigger” physiologically. Even with Huberman being a neuroscientist, he is venturing into a specific area where he is not so knowledgeable. The cardiologist detractor faults Huberman’s falsehood on Huberman expecting that there are principles in biology that are “exact, mechanistically simple, logical.” In saying this, the cardiologist detractor is presuming that the context is the same in both trying to exercise a muscle and in trying to exercise the brain. In reality, the reason why the general principle in the first scenario does not apply to the second is that each scenario is a different context. Insofar as we are dealing in the same context, an understanding of that context does allow for the application of principles that are relatively “exact, mechanistically simple, logical.” And the human mind is complex enough to understand that a relatively simple principle that holds consistently in one context will not apply in another context that is wholly dissimilar.

Hence, people who accuse Objectivism and me of oversimplification in my trying to make sense of reality and ethics are the ones doing the actual oversimplification. They are trying to push an interpretation of human volitional consciousness that is oversimplified to the point that it cannot countenance the factual existence of free will or originality. I find that when public commentators like Sam Harris try to portray the mind as so simple that free will and originality are presumed not to exist, those commentators can conclude that human behavior is explained not by complex internal psychological phenomena but instead simpler and more-predictable unconscious bodily functions and environmental stimuli. That is, when a man denies the complexity of the mind and its volition, that man can “explain” (pseudo-explain) human actions as though they are relatively simple and predictable. 

But that oversimplified interpretation of human behavior does not leave room for addressing the seeming nuances of ethics. That leads these people to write off the discipline of ethics as too complicated to be understood in terms of principles anyway. (Of course, that is an internal contradiction: if science “proved” that the chemical processes of the mind are too simple for the mind to possess free will and understand reality in terms of consistent principles, then the mind would not be capable of knowing that science “proved” as much!)

I think I know how to phrase it now: in its necessarily volitional nature, the human mind is complex. And it is the complexity of that volitional nature that allows the mind to induce relatively simplified principles by which Nature and even ethics can be understood accurately. But the deniers of free will and originality try to reverse that: they presume the mind to be too simple even to possess the capacity for original thinking and the free will that intellectual original thinking requires. And the corollary to that presumption is the conclusion that reality and ethics must be too complicated for that same overly-simple mind to comprehend in the form of consistent principles.

For Sam Harris-type deniers of free will and utilitarian Libertarian economists who deny originality, it is the mind that is simple — too simple to exercise free will and originality — and the mind being simple makes material reality and ethics too complex to be understood in the form of principles. By contrast, my interpretation is that the human mind is complex, and that complexity allows for the mind to study the complexities of material reality and ethics to the point where they can be understood in terms that can be made relatively simple. Those relatively-simple terms are the valid principles.

On Monday, October 6, 2025, I added the quotation about the simplicity in the approach of pseudoscientific grifter Andrew Huberman.

Your Ability to Imagine a Scenario Does Not Make It “Theoretically Possible”

or, Where Imagination Does and Does Not Help You Understand What Is Possible

Stuart K. Hayashi

Introduction
In my home state of Hawai‘i, superstitions abound. Every New Year’s Eve, one does not merely practice particular rituals but also eats particular foods. I have been assured that this will please the spirits and they will reward us with good fortune throughout the year. I think these celebratory rituals can be fine and maybe even wholesome when recognized and practiced just as general symbols of desire for happy outcomes. But I worry when they take on priority because it is believed, on some level, that they might be true literally. When I ask different people if they believe in all this literally, they usually give the same reply. They shrug, laugh sheepishly, and say, “Well, ya never know. It’s possible there might be something to all this.” People believe this might possibly be true simply because they can imagine it.

This notion that if you can imagine a scenario, that proves that it is possible, is very common. It serves as the major excuse for belief in the supernatural, such as fortunetelling, ghosts, demons, and deities. It is also a rationalization that underpins so much pretentiousness in formal philosophy.

This is may be familiar to you. It has become routine that, after taking Philosophy 101 class, someone will say, “Gee, maybe my whole life is not real. Maybe all of my experiences are an illusion, and I am actually a brain in a jar imagining my life. This is theoretically possible.”

Such talk was popular long before the release of The Matrix. It has an extensive history of being entertained copiously in formal philosophy, in some form or another. Immanuel Kant had a version of it, and it is famously associated with Plato. The idea was also extolled by the ancient Chinese philosopher Zhuang Zi. He said that one day he dreamed he was a butterfly, but maybe he is actually a butterfly dreaming that it is Zhuang Zi. Buying into the assertion that what we interpret as sensory evidence might all be misleading, the philosopher Karl Popper proclaimed seriously, “...we never know what we are talking about.” (To that I reply, “Speak for yourself, buddy!”) And although Rene Descartes ultimately did not affirm his agreement with this idea, he still presumed it deserving of very serious consideration. 

There is also the nineteenth-century Romanticist poet William Blake. Blake famously disparaged scientists in general and Isaac Newton in particular. In his estimation, for Newton to discover the principles of Nature is to rob Nature of its beauty and wonder. I rebut that assertion here. Along lines similar to these other fantasists about imagination, Blake asserts, “Everything possible to be believ’d is an image of truth.” Hence Blake constructs a straw-man misrepresentation of rationality that is most unflattering. He pronounces, “The idiot Reasoner laughs at the Man of Imagination.”

Disturbingly, the Enlightenment Era philosopher David Hume was explicit in saying that his ability to imagine a scenario was sufficient grounds for deeming it a theoretic possibility that deserves your study. This starkly contradicts Hume’s reputation among today’s professors — that he was a strict empiricist all about sensory experience. As worded by Hume, “To form a clear idea of any thing [that is, to imagine something vividly] is an undeniable argument for its possibility and is alone refutation of any pretended demonstration against it.”

We will return to this erroneous supposition of Hume’s a bit later in this essay. Although Hume made some very sound arguments for free-market economics and having a laissez-faire and constitutional liberal republican Night Watchman State, much of his influence in the area of epistemology, such as with what he has said above, has contributed to setting much of Western society on the wrong track. It is based on his own arbitrary imaginings that Hume pronounces that all conclusions from inductive reason are perennially and existentially suspect, as a philosopher “cannot defend his reason by reason.”

People who indulge in this talk — that being able to imagine something is proof that it is possible — have no actual basis for doing so.

I already knew that years ago, and I would offer them this same reply.

I can imagine an isolated ice cube falling to the bottom of a glass of water and remaining on the bottom for eternity. My ability to imagine this is still no basis for introducing this scenario as a theoretic possibility. For a proposition to be worth some consideration as a theoretic possibility, there must be evidence to support it.

And, as far as I was concerned, that was that. However, on Thursday, July 27, 2023, I came up with some additional points about this. These additional points, I think, make use of more-formal logic. My new manner of phrasing the matter goes farther down to the foundation of metaphysics and epistemology. The main purpose of the essay you are reading is for me to present my argument in this new form. But, first, I must give some background information that serves as the basis for my new argument.

 

 
The Context Behind the Issue
This idea that your sensory experiences might be distorted or illusory, and that there might be a truer plane of existence with which you have not yet made contact, is called metaphysical Idealism. This is not to be mixed up with moral Idealism, which is a persisting commitment to ethical principles. And the ramifications of metaphysical Idealism are not confined to metaphysics. In the realm of epistemology — the discipline that studies how do we know what we know — metaphysical Idealism is frequently accompanied by epistemic Rationalism, which should not be confused with rationality.

This epistemic Rationalism is the notion that there are valid and true ideas we hold that are innate, à priori, and which are truer than knowledge that we can induce à posteriori, meaning from from sensory experience. Someone can be a Rationalist without agreeing that it is theoretically possible that all sensory experience is suspect or misleading or illusory. Still, being an epistemic Rationalist is a very convenient position for someone who agrees that all sensory experience is illusory.

For a metaphysical Idealist, epistemic Rationalism is supposed to answer the question, “If everything learned from sensory evidence is subject to doubt, how do you know that all of that sensory evidence is thrown into doubt?” Once again, people say that their ability to imagine that waking experience is an illusion is enough to make it a theoretic possibility. Those who are most adamant in metaphysical Idealism and epistemic Rationalism go farther, saying they know all this conjecture is a legitimate evaluation.

There is a name for this idea that your consciousness can recognize truths — truths about entities that exist outside of your  own consciousness — independently of investigation of those entities by means of sensory experience. That is, the idea is that even if no one ever investigated the matter by means of sensory experience, you can still know what is true about the entities existing outside of your own consciousness, entities such as trees and flowers and volcanoes and clouds and galaxies and other humans.

The name also applies to a still-more-radical idea. The more-radical idea is that, independent of going through sensory motions to affect the entities outside of your own consciousness, your consciousness alone can will those entities outside of your consciousness to change their nature and behavior. The name that the writer Ayn Rand gave those ideas is “the Primacy of Consciousness.”

It is true that your own consciousness can sometimes influence the entities outside of it. But your consciousness can do this only by means of going through motions with the realm of sensory experience, not merely thinking with your consciousness but acting in reality, through physical motions, to implement the ideas from your consciousness.

For example, the Wright brothers conceived of — imagined — heavier-than-air flying machines when none had existed. Then, through their efforts, they created airplanes in reality. In this respect, what once manifested only in their imaginations had also become real entities that existed independently of their consciousness.

But they did this through sensory experience. They observed that, as birds flew, the birds changed the direction of their flight by changing the direction of their wings and the angles at which edges of their wings had bent. The brothers then employed their bodies to draw up plans and diagrams that they formulated to accommodate such observations. They built models and prototypes of a flyer, and they employed their senses to observe the results of tests they ran on such prototypes. By contrast, for the Wright brothers to employ a Primacy-of-Consciousness mindset would have been for them merely to attempt to wish or pray airplanes into being. After all, their father was a priest. 

Likewise, here is another example of the Primacy of Consciousness. Suppose that on Monday, I pray that Hawai‘i will not be hit with an earthquake on Tuesday. Then, on Tuesday, Hawaii experiences no earthquake. Then I chalk up the absence of such a disaster to my having prayed to God. I still performed a physical action — I put my hands together and spoke with my mouth. But there is no evidence that this had any causal effect on seismic activity. Moreover, because God supposedly can read my mind, it probably would have been just as effectual if only in my head did I ask God that there to be no earthquake. Hence, this is the Primacy of Consciousness at play.

It is also the Primacy of Consciousness when my loved ones eat a particular dish on New Year’s Eve to bring good luck. Here, good luck refers to steady finances and the good fortune of a hurricane not hitting Hawai‘i months later. Again, this ritual does involve a physical action with entities outside of people’s consciousness. Still, there is no actual evidence of a causal connection between eating a particular food and Hawai‘i having averted a catastrophe. In practice, this is the same as trying to wish away the tropical storms.

In contrast to the Primacy of Consciousness, Ayn Rand discusses the Primacy of Existence. It starts with the most obvious observation you can make — something exists. Something that exists is called an “entity.” Your recognition that something exists will produce a corollary recognition: a consciousness exists — your own. Were it not for Existence, there would not be something there for your consciousness to recognize, and there would definitely be no consciousness there to recognize it. Likewise, were it not for Consciousness, there would not be anything to recognize the existence of itself or anything else.

Your consciousness is clearly important. But when it comes to your consciousness recognizing what is real and true, or at least theoretically possible, looking at Existence must be the starting point. In the realm of Existence — what I also call Nature with a capital N — we find there are some principles that apply consistently. The law of gravity is an example.

And every entity has attributes through which your consciousness can distinguish it from other entities. The pertinent attributes of an entity are what we call the entity’s nature. It is in a tree’s nature, for example, to consist of cells, to grow, and to release oxygen as it takes in sunlight to produce its own food. By contrast, it is not in the nature of a tree to transform into a 400-meter-long rhinoceros and stampede over a city. We discover the respective natures of entities through repeat observations with the senses.

Recognition of an entity by its pertinent attributes is Aristotle’s Law of Identity. Here is how you apply that law. You observe one entity, Entity 1, whose attributes allow you to place it in a particular classification, a particular category — the concept of it. Then you observe Entity 2, which shares the same pertinent attributes as the first entity. Applying the Law of Identity, you recognize Entity 2 as being of the same category as Entity 1.

Entities perform actions. A cloud above you is an entity, and it sending raindrops down upon you is its action. Actions are caused by the respective natures of entities. In the past, when you observed clouds become a very dark gray, these clouds followed up by raining upon you. Today you see another cloud that is a dark gray. Applying the Law of Identity, you predict that this dark gray cloud will likewise send rain.

Derivative of the Law of Identity is the Law of Causality. The fact that entities have particular respective natures is a fact that affects the events that these entities cause. When two entities are of the same type, A, and they are under the same set of pertinent conditions, B, the same stimulus, X, will cause them to react in the same manner, Y.

We have two mobile phones, A, that are similar enough in the pertinent context to be regarded as being of the same type. These are phones 1 and 2. Both of them are under the same condition, B — they are not broken. On Phone 1, I input your phone number. This is the stimulus or causal agent X. This results in your phone ringing, effect Y. Applying the Law of Identity, we ascertain that if, after you have hung up from the first call, I punch in your number on Phone 2 as well, it will likewise cause your phone to ring. We infer that the action of my inputting your number will be consistent in causing your phone to ring. As Ayn Rand phrases it, “The Law of Causality is the Law of Identity applied to action.”

These are the same sensory observations denigrated by metaphysical Idealism, epistemic Rationalism, and, implicitly, by all those who presume that their ability to imagine a scenario is sufficient to prove that it is possible.

Again, the vast majority of philosophy instructors will tell you that David Hume was a consistent empiricist. That is, he was the opposite of a metaphysical Idealist and epistemic Rationalist, of which Plato was both. If they could put aside their prejudicially motivated revulsion toward Ayn Rand long enough to learn her terminology, philosophy instructors would say that admirers of Ayn Rand’s should concede that Hume argued from “the Primacy of Existence.” But I find, sadly, that what Hume has said about imagination and theoretical possibilities is an instance of him showing favor to the Primacy of Consciousness.

In contrast to metaphysical Idealists, epistemic Rationalists, and — in this instance at least — David Hume, I shall now present my new argument about why a posited scenario must have evidentiary backing before it is to be welcomed as a theoretic possibility.

 

 
My New Way of Phrasing It
Again, many people in Hawai‘i say that it is theoretically possible that if we appease spirits on New Year’s Eve by eating a particular lucky food, those spirits will help protect us throughout the year. And, again, many people chirp that it is theoretically possible that their whole lives are an illusion and they are actually a brain in a jar being made to dream the dream that is their lives.

As with any supernaturalistic claim, these people begin by imagining a scenario arbitrarily, and then they try to rationalize it after the fact. This approach exemplifies the Primacy-of-Consciousness mindset. Now let us proceed from the other end. Let us acknowledge the Primacy of Existence.

We start off by looking at entities — the objects that exist. To speak of what is “possible” is to speak of a judgment made about some posited event. “Events” are just actions performed by the entities. That is why we look at the entities before we consider their actions and the events or possibilities associated with them. Moreover, the qualities of an action are influenced by the qualities of the entity performing it. Hence, it is only by learning about entities and their attributes that we ascertain what is possible for them.

That is why there is no proper basis or justification for us to speak of what is “theoretically possible” for an entity in the absence of observational knowledge of that entity’s attributes. Facts and evidence about an entity are epistemically foundational, and “possible” is a derivative attribute of that entity’s actions that hinges on such an epistemic foundation.

To be rationally justified, then, in saying that an event is theoretically possible is to say the following. It is to say that even if we are not sure that this particular event will take place, we have gained enough knowledge of the pertinent entities — enough evidence — for us to make an educated guess that they possess the necessary attributes that would enable them to contribute to the occurrence of this event.

Here is how humans actually arrived at the concept of possibility. Nature has many attributes that we understand at least on a general level. When we say a particular outcome is possible but not certain, what is uncertain is a specific outcome. The specificity of it is crucial to our discussion. Should you roll a conventional six-sided die 🎲, it is uncertain whether you will roll a 1 instead of a 6. However, from our knowledge of what is certain on the more-general level, we do know that the possible outcomes fall within a set of particular parameters that is substantiated by evidence, often substantiated to the point where the parameters themselves are certain.

That we know it’s specifically uncertain whether the roll will result in a 1 or a 6 is based on our observation-based general certainty of the conventional six-sided die’s attributes. It is certain that the respective faces of the conventional six-sided die 🎲 are 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6. This certain knowledge of reality’s attributes is the actual basis for the theoretic possibilities to contemplate. Based on reality’s attributes, it is theoretically possible that we may roll a 1 or a 6. By the same token, it is not theoretically possible for this conventional six-sided die to land on Infinity or 3.14 even if we imagine it.

Rather than any arbitrary postulation that can be imagined, “possibility” refers to uncertainty over a specific outcome among other specific outcomes that can result. And even when the specific outcome is uncertain, sensory evidence has given us enough general knowledge to be confident about the range that those specific still-uncertain outcomes fall within. And at the center of that general range is evidence for which we can be rationally certain. “Possibility”-and-“uncertainty” over something specific still presupposes a more-generalized certain knowledge about it.

By contrast, when someone floats an arbitrary postulate, such as that astrology predicts the future, often this person issues a particular challenge and advances a particular insinuation. The challenge is for any would-be doubter to put forth an effort to disprove the postulate completely. The insinuation is that, in the absence of such an effort, those who initially doubted the postulate must now concede that the postulate has gained clearance for admission into consideration as a theoretic possibility. Anyone who refrains from entertaining the postulate as deserving of consideration — even if that refraining was originally by passive default — is allegedly duty-bound to engage with arguments for and against the arbitrary postulate, on the pain of otherwise being exposed as intellectually lazy and intellectually dishonest.

It is that challenge and insinuation that are intellectually lazy and intellectually dishonest. There is no limit to the number of arbitrary postulates being foisted in our culture. Anyone who tried to engage with all or even most of them would waste all time on this pursuit, and partake in nothing else in life. On any occasion in which someone floats an arbitrary postulate, it is not incumbent upon me to poke holes in it to justify my passively refraining from entertaining that postulate as a possibility. When someone wants me to welcome the postulate as a theoretic possibility, the burden is on him or her to show evidence for the existence of conditions that can contribute to its occurrence. Thus, we do not rule out possibilities from limitless arbitrary imaginings. Instead we rule in possibilities based on their evidentiary support. 

There is only one set of circumstances in which we have a firm footing in ruling out what was previously considered a possibility. It is this. Initially, based on the knowledge we have, we rule in a set of theoretic possibilities, such as A, B, and C.  Then we conduct further investigation. Based on the additional knowledge, A and B still appear viable. However, the new information we have gained about the attributes of the pertinent entities exist in such a manner as to preclude C from happening. At that juncture, we can rule out C.  But insofar as any proposition is made in the absence of evidence, that proposition is not to be ruled either in or out as a possibility. It deserves simply to be ignored so that we can devote our precious time and attention instead to propositions that are buttressed by evidence.

That is why it is inappropriate — why it is the Primacy of Consciousness — when people start with some arbitrary imagining, call it “theoretically possible,” and then try to rationalize it after-the-fact. To understand the Primacy of Existence is to start with observations and facts. And it is after we learn about an entity’s capabilities that way, when we can apply imagination to imagine possibilities in such a manner that can actually get practical results.

Yes, even when an outcome is uncertain but possible, all the possibilities fall within a particular range. When experts dismiss a possibility as impossible only for it to come true, it is because they misjudged the edges or boundaries of that range. We will shortly get to a case study in that. When experts’ proclamations about the possibility or impossibility of an outcome are proven wrong, their misjudgment over the boundaries of the range in possibilities does not vindicate the presumption that arbitrary postulation imagined may fall within the range of possibilities.

And it is through sensory-based data-gathering that we learn about what does and does not fall within the range of theoretic possibilities. By gathering more data for the senses to observe, we can properly revise our understanding of where are the outermost edges of that range in possibilities. Yes, what we consider possible or impossible can be rightly revised, but those revisions are always based on the evidence of the senses. That is an essential point when it comes to the Wright brothers and the experts who, in hindsight, were unwise to ridicule them.

 

 

 

What About People Who Accomplish What Was Previously Thought Impossible?
The invention of airplanes provides an instructive case study in ascertaining what is and is not possible, and in imagination’s proper role in rendering such judgments. The Wright brothers were highly imaginative. They conceived of a heavier-than-air flying machine at a time when none had existed and in which the consensus was that such a product of their efforts would never take off — pun intended.

“We knew,” said Wilbur, the older Wright brother, “that men had by common consent adopted human flight as the standard of impossibility. When a man said, ‘It can’t be done; a man might as well try to fly,’ he was understood as expressing the final limit of impossibility.”

It was for such reasons that the prospect that the Wrights would succeed at flying was widely dismissed. It was dismissed even by the eminent physicist and entrepreneur Lord Kelvin, who played a major role in laying the first transatlantic telegraph cable and who provides the namesake of the scientific unit for measuring temperature. “...I have not the smallest molecule of faith,” he wrote, “in aerial navigation other than ballooning or of expectation of good results from any of the [aeroplane] trials we hear of.” 

In 1899, Scientific American magazine, too, expressed doubt. A major obstacle to the invention of the airplane was developing a method for safe steering. As the ability to duplicate the method by which birds steered themselves seemed unlikely, the periodical determined that aeroplanes would not have “commercial or military utility.”

In light of a spectacular failure of another experimenter, Samuel Pierpont Langley, attempting heavier-than-air flight, the New York Times pronounced in October 1903 that though such manned flight could happen one day in a far-flung future, it would not happen any time soon. “It might be assumed,” said the Times

that the flying machine which will really fly might be evolved by the combined and continuous efforts of mathematicians and mechanicians in from one million to ten million years...

That same year, on December 10, a second New York Times editorial stated that such a brilliant enthusiast attempting flight should not

put his substantial greatness as a scientist in further peril by continuing to waste his time and money for further airship experiments. Life is short, and he is capable of services to humanity incomparably greater than can expected to result from trying to fly...

A week later, the Wright brothers made their first flight.

To the dismissals in general, the younger Wright brother, Orville, retorted, “If we all worked on the assumption that what is accepted as true is really true, there would be little hope of advance.”

Of course, in their endeavor to prove it possible for humans to produce heavier-than-air flying machines, imagination was necessary but not sufficient. For what they imagined to manifest as possible, the Wright brothers always had to account for the evidentiary facts of Nature they observed. The reason why the Wright brothers were right. whereas Lord Kelvin and Scientific American magazine and the New York Times were wrong, was that when it came to this issue, the Wright brothers took all the pertinent evidence into consideration much more logically and consistently than did Lord Kelvin, Scientific American, and the New York Times.

What the Wright brothers understood to be “theoretically possible,” at least implicitly, was (a) what they imagined and (b) what they understood to be within the at-least-general bounds of evidence.

Here is a story that is an example of that. To make their first tests on the wings of their contraption, they produced a large kite — the “glider.” The first airplane would have a motor, but, as far as their early experiments were concerned, the glider did not need one. They took the then-motorless glider to Kitty Hawk exactly because its strong winds would carry the glider. In these experiments, they initially relied on “lift tables” provided by another aviation experimenter, Otto Lilienthal.

Lilienthal had experimented on using different shapes for his airfoils — objects to sustain lift in flight, such as wings and tail rudders. The tables were the records he made for the lift-to-drag ratio for each of the various airfoil shapes. Eventually, the Wright brothers noticed major discrepancies between Lilienthal’s lift tables versus their own results. Rather than take Lilienthal’s lift tables on faith, the brothers had to admit to themselves that the tables were inaccurate. They therefore had to apply both their imaginations and empirical knowledge to develop their own lift tables.

Their bicycle shop proved fortuitous in this. They built their own small wind tunnel out of wood. A 1-horsepower engine from their bike shop powered a fan that produced airflow. Out of bicycle spokes and hacksaws, they assembled a “lift balance.” Mounted on top of the lift balance would be (1) an airfoil section they intended to test and (2) a flat plate with a surface area equal to that of the airfoil section. As the airflow impacted upon them, the respective torques of the airfoil section and the equivalent-surface-area flat-plate had to be equal to one another. When the respective torques were equal, the Wrights were able to make accurate measurements of lift-to-drag ratio for 48 different airfoil sections.

Observe the need for both logic and imagination even in just these wind-tunnel experiments. The Wrights had to be logical in accepting the faultiness of Lilienthal’s lift tables. They had to be imaginative in devising their own wind-tunnel experiments. And they needed both imagination and logic to understand how this wind-tunnel model would apply to the actual airplane’s flight later on. This smaller part, and the wider project overall, required both logic and imagination.

It was through such empirical observation that the Wright brothers gained further confidence that the flight of an airplane was indeed possible. Orville said, “I believe we possessed more data on cambered surfaces, a hundred times over, than all of our predecessors put together.” Note his mention of data — as in “sensory evidence.” The data came first — and, from it, the Wrights could ascertain what was, and what was not, theoretically possible. Here, we see that, although “theoretic possibility” is permeated with many still-unknowns, it remains within parameters set tentatively by what is known, including that which is recently-discovered.

Four years before the first flight, Wilbur Wright wrote to the Smithsonian Institution asking for information on what had already been tried. His letter touched implicitly upon the basis in evidentiary support for any theoretic possibility. “I am an enthusiast, but not a crank in the sense that I have some pet theories as to the proper construction of a flying machine. I wish to avail myself of all that is already known and then if possible add my mite [own information-gathering]...”

Yes, de facto, the Wright brothers’ approach was Facts come first; then we apply those facts to revise our understanding of which of our imaginings fall within the range of actual theoretic possibilities.

 As my late father wrote on January 19, 1973, “An idea is not a reality. An idea is a method of perceiving reality.”

It is true that imagination is important. I even argue that imagination is imperative to logic itself. Any time you recognize a causal relationship — where you recognize that if C happens rather than D it will result in E and not F — you are using imagination. In any instance where you consider future consequences to any action, that is imagination at work. When you read a noun and understand the literal entity that the noun denotes, that understanding, too, involves a form of visualization — that is, imagination. Reasoning cannot take place in the absence of this faculty.

In contrast to William Blake proclaiming that the idiot Reasoner laughs at the Man of Imagination was L. Frank Baum, creator of the Wizard of Oz franchise. Baum understood, at least partially on some implicit level, the need for both imagination and logic. In the preface to his book The Lost Prisoner of Oz, he pointed out,

Imagination has brought mankind through the Dark Ages to its present state of civilization. ... Imagination led [Benjamin] Franklin to discover electricity. Imagination has given us the steam engine, the telephone, the talking-machine and the automobile, for these things had to be dreamed of before they became realities.

And, in accordance with the case study I provided in this essay, to Baum’s litany of developments we can add the Wright brothers and their airplane.

I can be killed by something I eat — I might choke or be poisoned. But the fact remains that eating is for survival. Likewise, although this essay is about how people often use their imaginations to indulge in arbitrary falsehoods, imagination is ultimately the tool for adhering to reality. That is what the Wright brothers teach us.

Yes. Imagination is all about reality. That is provided that one remembers that imagination is necessary but not sufficient for discerning which scenarios count as scenarios of possibility.

The reason why Lord Kelvin, Scientific American magazine, and the New York Times were wrong in dismissing the possibility of heavier-than-air flying machines being invented by 1903 was that they misjudged the location of the outermost edges of the range of possibilities. This does not mean that anything imagined deserves to be entertained as being within the range of possibilities. Rather, through their additional sensory-based data-gathering, the Wright brothers were the party that had earned a much-more-solid understanding than did these other parties of where the range of possibilities lay.

The farther we get to the edge of the range of possibilities, the more we find that though we have evidence, the evidence being less plentiful or strong renders the possibility to be one of less confidence until we have additional evidence. And insofar as there is more to learn, the edges of the range of possibility may be fuzzy. But the closer we get to the center of the range of possibilities, the more we can be certain of propositions as they have an abundance of evidence has thoroughly substantiated them.

I have made a diagram to explain this. I apologize that this thumbnail image of it is blurry. You can click on it for a clearer image of the text.    

For a further exploration of where imagination can and does help understand what happens in reality literally, you can read my follow-up essay “Good Fiction Is the Truth” over here.

The Fallacies in Saying “Maybe Our Sensory Experiences Are a Distortion of Reality, and We Are Ignorant of What Is Actual Reality”
I now want to give special attention to the arbitrary postulate that perhaps everything our senses tell us is a misleading distortion, and that there may be a truer reality that exists beyond our ability to perceive anything. According to this postulate, what our senses inform us is not reality but merely a representation of reality — or, more precisely, a misrepresentation of reality. This postulate is an obfuscation of the very means by which we identify what is a representation or misrepresentation of anything.

To say that R is a representation of Q is to say that R is not literally Q but that R at least symbolizes Q in our minds. Moreover, we know R is a representation of Q because it has enough pertinent similarities in attributes with Q for us to recognize R as representational of it. For instance, we know that a toy truck from the brand Hot Wheels or Micro Machines is not literally a truck. But a toy truck from Hot Wheels or Micro Machines provides enough visual and other sensory cues for us to recognize the toy as a representation of a truck.

Here is a pertinent question. If you present a toy truck to a baby before she has ever seen a real truck, will she recognize the toy as a representation of a truck? She will not. You can recognize R as a representation or simulation of Q no more than the extent to which you have knowledge of what Q itself is like literally.

The same principle applies when we talk of a misrepresentation, or at least a representation that has been found to be inaccurate. Consider how whales are depicted on maps of the Atlantic Ocean that were drawn during the high Middle Ages. Of importance here are some facts about whales that became well-known in the twentieth century. First, whales do not possess scales like those of carp — goldfishes and koi — and the arowana fish. Also pertinent are tail flukes — these are the triangle-shaped parts of the tail fin found on fishes and whales. On whales, the tail flukes are horizontal — there is a fluke on the left and another on the right. By contrast, when a fish has tail flukes, they are more likely to be vertical — there is a fluke on the top of the tail and maybe another on the bottom. Not all fishes have vertical tail flukes, but it is the case that all whales only have horizontal tail flukes.

Now take a gander at a medieval map of the Earth and its oceans, and examine what that map labels a whale. Conventionally, the “whale” will be covered in fishlike scales and sport tail flukes that are vertical like a fish’s, not horizontal. These are inaccuracies in representation. The charitable way to interpret this is that the map’s illustrators labored in earnest and the inaccuracies came from their not having the information about whales that became more accessible from the twentieth century onward. But whatever the cause of the inaccuracies, we know of the representation’s inaccuracies only because we have some knowledge of what actual whales are like.

 

 Thus we discern the illogic in someone saying that all our sensory experiences are no more than a representation of reality, whereas the truer reality is unknown to us. We can discern something as a representation of objective reality no more than the extent to which we have already experienced objective reality directly and thereby gained knowledge of it.

Further, we can discern the even-bigger fallacy in proclaiming that our sensory experiences might be a false representation of an alleged truer objective reality that remains unknown. For us to have a basis in speculating that our sensory experiences might not match reality exactly, once again we would have to know what objective reality is like literally. And yet in this scenario we have already been told that we are wholly ignorant of that very same objective reality.

 

 
Conclusion
When someone proclaims, “It’s theoretically possible that all our sensory experiences are deceptive or unreal, and we are in complete ignorance of reality as it truly is,” that proclamation remains wholly arbitrary. And it is to be written off as such.

In sum, the existence of entities and the facts associated with them are primary, and to discern what is theoretically possible for those entities is contingent upon those facts. That is why, just because you can imagine something happening, that is not sufficient for calling it a “theoretic possibility.”

On Friday, August 4, 2023, I added the part about Scientific American magazine. On Monday, August 7, 2023, I added the paragraph about how, subsequent to ruling in a theoretic possibility with the evidence we had at the time, C, we are justified in ruling out C as a possibility upon our discovering further evidence that precludes it. That same day I embedded the YouTube video about how many animals were represented inaccurately in the European-authored bestiaries of the high Middle Ages. On Sunday, June 2, 2024, I added the quotation from my father. On Saturday, September 7, 2024, I added the case study of what the Wright brothers did about the lift tables. The sentences where I use the word literally were added on Friday, December 27, 2024. On Monday, December 30, 2024, I added the sentences about how imagination is actually a tool for living in reality, provided that one continues to adhere to the rules of logic.  On Sunday, June 29, 2025, I added the passages about William Blake. On Wednesday, January 7, 2026, I added the quotation and observation by L. Frank Baum. On that same day I added the point about how the concepts of “possibility” and “uncertainty” over something specific still presuppose a more-generalized certain knowledge about it. Also on that day I added the diagram to explain how the presence of evidence is what separates which propositions do deserve to be considered as theoretic possibilities from those propositions which do not. on Thursday, January 22, 2026, I added the quotation from David Hume about how human beings cannot defend reason using reason.