Barrack Obama has been criticized for being too honest in talking about his past drug use. Unlike Bill Clinton and George Bush, Obama spoke openly about drinking and using drugs as a young person. His critics feel that too much information can be harmful to young people. Others feel that in speaking openly he did the right thing. But how can we know?

An Oprah.com article today discusses the benefits of developing an optimistic rather than pessimistic perspective on our lives. Good advice perhaps if for those who tend to be neurotic and hard on themselves. Not such good advice for those who blame everyone except themselves for their problems.

The formal field of psychology has exploded in the past half century, but as an informal area of investigation and observation it has been practised for thousands of years. For as long as we’ve been able to frame ideas and concepts, we’ve been able to wonder why we behave as we do. Psychology is insight into human motivation. Why do we do what we do. Why do we think what we think. Unfortunately, psychology too often puts an appealing layer of frosting on reality, gooey and sweet and distracting, but not very nutritious.

Without understanding the underlying principles that shape our motivations, we can’t hope to map out a solid and reliable foundation for our psychological insights. The psychological studies that get press and attention tend to focus on narrow and specific aspects of human behavior. But what is the big picture? If we want to understand motivation from first priciples, where do we begin?

We must begin, I believe, with the principles of existence. After all, psychology comes about from the application of abstract principles to human behavior. And human behavior comes about from the principles that shape evolution. And evolution comes about through the operation of the universal principle of persistence (see the meaning of life) in living things over time.

Once we accept that all human behavior derives in some way shape or form from the instinct or impulse to further the persistence of life, we have a skeletal framework upon which we can begin to build a self-consistent science of psychology.

For example, if we want to figure out whether Obama is right or wrong for being honest about his drug use, we need to understand the pros and cons of honesty as it relates to the strength of society, and we need to understand the pros and cons of admitted drug use. Honesty would seem integral to a strong society because it promotes trust and trust promotes collaboration and empathy. Admissions of drug use in and of themselves would seem to diminish taboos about drug use by our elders or those in authority, but this in turn would seem to remove one of the strongest impulses for the young person deciding whether to try drugs — the desire to rebel and be different from those in authority.

We could further flesh out this trivial inspection to include other perspectives and layers of insight, digging down into the subordinate impulses to relate them to the persistence of life. The deeper we go, the more nuanced will be our insight. And if we use the principle of persistence as our guide, we will run less risk of going astray.

Until we have a solid foundation for arriving at conclusions about people’s motivations, the science of psychology will remain messy and maleable, and pretty much useless as a vehicle for helping society move forward. But if we adopt a rational, reality-based foundation, guided by the principles of existence, we can take our understanding on a new, productive and fascinating path.

(If you want to read more, LIFE! Why We Exist… And What We Must Do to Survive further explains the origin, elaboration and application of the principle of persistence.)

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“Do not believe in anything simply because you have heard it. Do not believe in anything simply because it is spoken and rumored by many. Do not believe in anything simply because it is found written in your religious books. Do not believe in anything merely on the authority of your teachers and elders. Do not believe in traditions because they have been handed down for many generations. But after observation and analysis, when you find that anything agrees with reason and is conducive to the good and benefit of one and all, then accept it and live up to it.”

(Hindu Prince Gautama Siddharta, the founder of Buddhism, 563-483 B.C.)

If we reject received ideas and observe and analyze the world around us we gain insight that reflects the only truth we have — our own impressions. This doesn’t mean we should ignore everyone else, our mental and emotional reactions can provide valuable impressions, too. But we should not simply accept without first deciding whether we can reasonably agree.

We can be skeptical about our impressions, too. We can logically conclude that none of our impressions are reliable, that we can’t be sure that the world exists. But, as Schopenhauer concluded (in The World as Will and Representation), what do we gain by such a conclusion? What do we have to gain from saying that we can’t believe in anything? This conclusion leads us to a dead end.

If we accept that our impressions are indeed impressions, that they are, for the most part, not fictions, then we have a place to work from. We can begin to analyze which of our impressions seem more reliable, more complete, more reasonable. We can discuss our impressions with others and find out whether they share the same impressions. We can form hypotheses based on our impressions and see whether we can validate these hypotheses. When we accept an impression as an impression, a whole world of potential understanding opens up.

With his theory of forms or Ideas Plato recognized that in order to hypothesize and analyze we use abstract concepts. Whenever we think about something in general terms (chairs as opposed to “this chair I’m sitting on”) we use abstract concepts. (As I think about this, as I have before, I conclude that consciousness is the ability to manipulate abstract concepts.) So what are the forms or concepts that shape our existence?

This question has nagged at people for thousands of years. But given what we know about the world (through observation and analysis) we can now set out the answer!

It’s important to go back to Schopenhauer. Schopenhauer’s philosophy made great strides in identifying the principles or abstract concepts through which we can understand our existence. He recognized that our impressions of existence come to us through what he called a “fourfold root.” The fourfold root was the three dimensions of space and time (or causality).

All of our impressions concur with the idea that space has three dimensions and that things exist through time governed by the principle of cause and effect.

What Schopenhauer didn’t understand (because not enough was known at the time of the way that the universe evolves over time) was that the earth and heaves weren’t a fixed and static thing, that our existence follows after a whole long stream of prior events. We now know a great deal about that string of events. We can see back in time by looking out into space, and by digging through the layers of earth beneath our feet. We have a great deal of insight into the evolution of the universe.

This insight into the evolution of the universe adds to Schopenhauer’s principles. It tells us that existence isn’t static. That the matter in the universe consists of energy. And that energy changes from one form to another.

So what is the principle by which the evolution of existence has lead to our existence? As I describe in my book, the principle is one of persistence: The more likely a form is to persist, the more likely it is to remain in existence.

This applies to the persistence of fundamental particles, cosmological systems, molecules, and life.