But we now need to make clear the extreme importance of the distinction between these Models, in practical terms.

What I am going to consider is most important to all of us is the quality of our lives. By this I mean only our wanting to have as much joy, contentment, and appreciation as possible and as little pain, suffering, disability, and early death as possible.

For you, I am talking about the quality of your subjective experience. Remember that you are your subjective experience and your whole world is your subjective experience. For you, your subjective experience is all that you have. And your modeling of that subjective experience, your development of your beliefs about all aspects of it, lead you to make decisions that affect the quality of your life, of that subjective experience. Your Subjective Model is all-important to you. For you, it is "existence," yours and that of everything in your life. In fact we know that if the quality of life for you became terrible enough, you would probably try to end it.

And we have seen that the beliefs you have about your subjective experience play a role in what you decide to do from moment to moment. And I don't believe it is necessary to clarify how strongly dependent the tendency to produce pain, suffering, disability, and even early death is upon what those beliefs are. Many mistakes, of course, are "minor," but we can easily, right now, imagine decisions that we could make that would make our lives horrible. Thankfully, almost all of us have learned to avoid making those mistakes, meaning that we have developed Subjective Model beliefs that are so accurate that decisions based upon them turn out not to be truly horrible. However, occasionally we fall victim to our own inaccurate beliefs, with results that can indeed be quite regrettable.

But as you know and now understand in the terms of this presentation, with its Tripartite Model, we humans have acquired abilities that have led to something that no other animals have (unless perhaps to a very, very rudimentary extent), and that is the set of beliefs that are a part of the Objective Model. And I am sure I do not have to repeat how important the Objective Model is to all of us, and how it has added enormously good (and of course enormously bad) capabilities to do what would seem like, to someone not having his or her part of the Objective Model, amazing miracles.

However, there is no subjective experience within the Objective Model. The contents and quality of the Objective Model definitely have an impact on your subjective experience, but the Objective Model is simply an additional set of models, acquired almost completely from what is learned from others. Its primary reason for existence, the main reason we work on it, is in order to be able to predict much more accurately than we can by using our Subjective Model beliefs. So it is simply an amazing tool, making us much, much more capable. Thus, it should be honored as perhaps our most important tool, even though, as we have noted, it certainly is not perfect. It is not perfect, but it is always ultimately headed in that direction, because any additions to it or changes within it are ones expected to produce "more perfect" predictions.

So the conclusion that we can draw from the above is that it is important to you, and to each and every one of us, that we take care of our Subjective Model and our Objective Model, doing whatever we can to enhance the accuracy of them. And doing so will have its effect not only on how we feel (and look forward to living) but also, through our behavior based upon those beliefs, how we impact the quality of life of others.

Both Models are important, and should be optimized.

And then there is Reality. Here it is important to recall that there is only one thing that we can attribute to it, only one "experiencing" of it, and that is the phenomenon of predictability. It is what makes the Subjective Model and the Objective Model possible. But all we have access to, all we can ever deal with, is our Subjective Model and our Objective Model, which will necessarily always be incomplete Models of that Reality. There will always be things to learn (and unlearn). This indeed should produce some degree of humility, manifested by always being open to discovery of inaccuracy of belief, whether within the Subjective Model or within the Objective Model. And what this means is that one of our most valuable activities is the sharing and comparing of our beliefs, and the conscientious effort to discover, if they are different, why they are different, so that those beliefs can move in the direction of increasing accuracy, as demonstrated by increasing predictability. That is our species' most important and defining attribute, conscientiousness about learning, especially about how to treat ourselves and each other.

(It is quite possible that you may be thinking, "Yes, all of this makes sense, but you have not explained why "existence" is such that the Tripartite Model is indeed the best Model, and more specifically, you have not explained why there is such a thing as subjective experience, upon which this whole presentation is built. My answer is first to refer you to the chapter on Causation and Explanation, and then to point out that whatever Model I proposed as such an explanation would still need another Model above it to explain it, and so on, so it seems that explanation has to arbitrarily stop somewhere. And regarding the wish for an explanation of the existence of subjective experience, I believe this is at least close to the wish for an explanation as to why there is something rather than nothing at all, this being an unanswerable question, since whatever explanation was given could be responded to with the question as to why that, in turn, was so. So I believe these questions are unanswerable, and that an effort at presentation of possible answers would contribute nothing to our knowledge, our capabilities, or the quality of our lives. If there is such an answer, I will defer the task of finding it to someone else. I believe the Tripartite Model is as far as we can go, and I will wait to be shown that I am incorrect.)

So I now wish to consider some of the problems our species faces that are intimately tied up with the "mind-body problem" and the "free will versus determinism problem," and to suggest some very important practical implications of these philosophical issues, usually deemed so esoteric.

This part of my presentation will be different.

What I have written up till now I believe, rightly or wrongly, should make sense and be acceptable to anyone who conscientiously reads it in the order written, not skimming it but really attempting to understand each sentence. It may well be that reading it two or three times and discussing it with others will be necessary to fully understand it, because I believe (from my own experience) the ideas require opening up new, alternative pathways in the brain, something done only with difficulty. Nevertheless, I believe that what I have written is consistent with the rules of logic and the rules of evidence and is satisfactorily clear linguistically, and therefore should be acceptable to others. And in fact I believe it is understandable, with appropriate study and help, even by children in late elementary school.

What follows, however, is, I believe, a lot less certain. It represents my opinions. I do believe fairly strongly what follows, but I recognize that it is based upon very complex issues about the way the world is and what works best or would work best in that world, and I do not claim a lot of wisdom about the way the world is. For instance, my knowledge of history, politics, economics, and information technology is quite meager.

Nevertheless, the issues I wish to discuss are of enormous importance to the survival and wellbeing of our species, and they are related to the issues so far discussed. So at least I hope to raise awareness of the possibility of looking at things in certain ways that are not very common at all, but may have much to offer.

What I have so far discussed has been mostly epistemology. What I now intend to discuss is basically ethics, by which I am going to mean the study of what we should do. And as my ultimate ethical principle, used ultimately to legitimate (give a reason for the acceptance of) ethical propositions, rules of conduct, and other principles, I will be using only what I have referred to elsewhere as the "rational-ethical ultimate ethical principle" (REUEP), or perhaps better named the "Humanian ultimate ethical principle," after "Humanianity," a personal religious orientation (for everyone) that I advocate for elsewhere but will not be describing here.

[Edit 09/16/2020: Indeed a significant change in terminology has taken place in that the ultimate ethical principle of Humanianity has become labeled the Humanian Ultimate Ethical Principle (HUEP), a Humanian being someone committed to trying to live in rational consistency with that principle. There can be other ultimate ethical principles that could be adhered to rationally, but would be unacceptable to most people.]

That ultimate ethical principle, already alluded to, is that:

We should do that which will promote not only the survival of our species but also the good life for everyone, now and in the future, the "good life" being defined here as "as much joy, contentment, and appreciation as possible and as little pain, suffering, disability, and early death (PSDED) as possible."