April 27th, 2025
A philosophical puzzle. Dedicated to Jerry Pethick and Gordon Payne.
I learned this while retrieving a rogue recycling bin.
Arthur down the street has gone philosophical. This isn’t entirely new; Arthur tends to latch onto Big Ideas like barnacles onto a slow ship. Last year, it was competitive pickling, where he argued that the perfect pickle was a matter of personal perception. And the year before, he was convinced that garden gnomes held the key to a new form of renewable energy with their untapped vibrational energy. This year, though, it’s… reality. Or, more accurately, the stunning, earth-shattering, apparently hilarious revelation that fact isn’t objective.
I learned this while retrieving a rogue recycling bin that had escaped in a gust of wind and made a break for his prize-winning petunias. Arthur appeared on his porch, mid-lecture to, I assume, a particularly stoic rhododendron.
“It’s all perception, Bernard!” he announced, startling me and what I maintain was a perfectly objective squirrel. “The colours, the texture of this very railing”—he rapped it with a knuckle that I know is objectively quite bony—“they’re not fixed properties! They’re conscious interpretations! My brain creates the mahogany stain!”
I paused, wrestling with the blue bin. “Right, Arthur. Your brain’s doing sterling work there. Saved me a trip to the dump.”
He waved a dismissive hand, a grand gesture usually reserved for unveiling statues or shooing away wasps. “No, no, think bigger! The entire universe could be a dynamic construction of consciousness. The very ground beneath your feet, Bernard! Not solid rock, but sustained thought!”
I looked down at the cracked tarmac of his driveway, which had recently claimed the better part of my bicycle tyre. “Feels pretty solid when it’s eating rubber, Arthur. And expensive.”
This, apparently, was the old paradigm talking—the rigid, Newtonian, utterly unenlightened view of existence. Arthur was now operating on a different plane, having devoured several highly-marketed books with covers featuring swirling galaxies and single, poignant eyes—a plane where, theoretically, one could perceive things into being. Or, at the very least, unperceived them in it.
His first few experiments were modest. He tried to ‘unperceive’ the persistent patch of crabgrass invading his perfect lawn. He’d stand there, eyes narrowed, muttering about neural symphonies and shifting paradigms. The crabgrass, proving remarkably resistant to subjective dissolution, only seemed to thrive under the scrutiny, often displaying a perverse dew-drop sparkle that Arthur interpreted as ‘dimensional bleed-through’. I just saw healthy weeds.
Then came the coffee incident. Arthur, a man whose culinary skills peaked with toast (burnt), decided his morning instant gravel was a critical test case.
“Objectively,” he explained one morning as I passed his open kitchen window, “this is freeze-dried disappointment. Sulphuric, even. But subjectively? If I truly know it’s a symphony of exotic, single-origin notes, ground by artisanal monks on a distant mountainside… my perception will construct that reality.”
He took a brave gulp. His eyes widened, then narrowed. A slight, almost imperceptible shudder ran through him.
“Fascinating,” he declared, though his voice was a little hoarse. “The resistance is palpable. The objective programming is fighting back! But I felt a hint there, Bernard. A ghost note of apricot and regret.”
A week later, passing the same window, I saw him stirring three sugars into the same mug, eyes darting nervously towards the street. When he saw me, he jumped, sending a spoonful of white crystals skittering.
“Energy boosters!” he blustered, snapping shut the sugar tin with unnecessary force. “Fueling the mind for deeper perception!”
His ambitions grew. He attempted to ‘perceive’ a parking spot directly outside the packed post office. He drove around the block three times, eyes squeezed shut (a manoeuvre nearly involving a pedestrian and a lamppost), muttering, “Space… manifest… perceived void…” He eventually parked three blocks away and had to walk, blaming ‘consensus reality field interference’. It was a classic case of ‘perceiving’ a parking spot and ‘manifesting’ a walk.
The neighbourhood cat, Reginald, a creature whose objective reality included significant disdain for Arthur, became a target. Arthur spent an afternoon sitting on his porch swing, staring intently at Reginald, who was washing himself with typical feline indifference on the adjacent fence.
“Right, Reginald,” Arthur whispered, “Let’s test the higher strata. I am now perceiving you… as a majestic Bengal tiger! Stripes! Power! Existential dread in the face of my gaze!”
Reginald paused his grooming. He looked at Arthur. Then, with slow, deliberate precision, he yawned, stretched, and hopped down from the fence to scratch Arthur’s prize-winning petunias.
I watched from my porch, sipping honest tea that tasted, subjectively and objectively, exactly like tea. Arthur threw his hands up, narrowly avoiding knocking over a gnome.
“Subjectivity is hard!” he yelled to the unresponsive cat. “The universe has terrible latency!”
The beauty of Arthur’s conviction wasn’t just its absurdity but its complete failure to impact anything beyond his increasingly eccentric behaviour. The bills still arrived (he tried ‘perceiving’ them as junk mail; the bank disagreed). The council still gave him a ticket for leaving his bin out too long (‘perception of timely collection malfunction’). Reginald the cat remained resolutely unimpressed and objectively a tabby.
Maybe, I mused, watching Arthur retreat indoors, defeated by a feline and his mortgage statements, objective reality isn’t the illusion. The real illusion is the idea that we have no control over it, no matter how hard we try. Or the actual construction of consciousness is simply the ability to find endless, baffling amusement in the Arthurs of the world, persistently trying to edit a universe that stubbornly refuses their drafts. Either way, it certainly makes bin day more interesting.
