I hit the University of Texas to meet America’s best philosopher, Professor H. Burglar. As I walk through the campus, I’m excited to meet one of the celebrity philosopher heroes of our generation. Famous for his YouTube lectures on the field of philosophy, psychology and sociology, the professor was thought to be one of the leading thought leaders of, not just the decade, but the millennium. I enter his office. He is wearing his signature black and white striped suit, Panama hat and medical eye mask, Burglar leans against a window looking down at the university forecourt, reading from a book of poetry by Walt Whitman.
“Tell me about your theory.” I say. He looks over at me, flashes his trademark smile and snaps the book shut. He beckons me to take a seat, I oblige, and then the eminent professor begins to explain to me the greatest idea that American philosophy had ever seen. Burger theory.
“Where do the concepts of things come from? If we are to believe Saussure, the concept is generated by the object. It is the ideas that an object, for example a burger, could be defined by different strata’s of reality. There is the absolute reality that exists beyond human perception. There is what we call reality, made of colours, shapes, sounds, smells, taste and so on, things we can perceive. There is then the other strata of reality, that arguably, is not reality at all. It is the idea behind each of those sensory inputs, as well as extra ideas that are more difficult to perceive directly, but are useful in terms of understanding the other strata’s of reality that exist beyond the realm of the reality of ideas. On each plane of reality, objects exist on each dimension simultaneously. There is the absolute reality of the burger, a collection of separate things that have come together. We must not confuse absolute reality with the reality we experience. Absolute reality should not be considered through human senses, culture or conceptualisation. Take for instance, colour. At this level of reality, everything is simultaneously every other colour besides what we can see. The same is true of time, everything happens simultaneously and it is only the time we perceive in the current moment to be the present. At this level of reality, everything exists at all points of time simultaneously besides what we can experience. It is through reducing absolute reality that we comprehend it.
Things that exist at the level of absolute reality exist in ours, like a shadow thrown from a burger. It leaves a trace in our reality that we can see or eat or talk about. In every second of every hour of every day, a human asks another if they want a burger. This constant stream of questioning ripples through the entire population of humanity, if you were to connect each person asking the question with a line and looked at from above it would seem like a pulsating web that covers the planet. With this way of talking about burgers, we have entered the reality of thought, envisioning something that doesn't exist yet both relates to our reality as well as developing our understanding of it. The secret twist is that there is no such thing as our reality. There is only absolute reality and the reality of thought. The two realities interact, and as people we mostly seem to exist in our reality, unaware of the extreme conceptual construction we have built around ourselves and how we perceive absolute reality. By taking strong enough doses of psychedelics, this is obvious, and the psychedelics often act to slow down or close off interactions between neurons. We lack the faculties to experience absolute reality through social constructs, linguistics, semiotics and the limits of human biology. Just as an insect wouldn't be able to conceive a burger, a human is unable to conceive of the absolute reality of a burger. We are chained to the walls of a cave, completely naked and sweating, unable to escape the biocultural destiny that prevents us from understanding the absolute truth of the universe and beyond.
This doesn't matter though. It's actually okay to exist within our reality and the boundaries of the mind. Both the insect and myself might never know the absolute reality of the burger, but both of us can still eat it. Would knowing the absolute truth of the burger enable us to enter a dimension of knowledge that we are unable to conceive of, despite how hard we tried? Maybe. But we must ask ourselves, if an ant was given the ability of human intellect, then what happens? We don't even know what to do with it, after tens of thousands of years of humanity's greatest thinkers, artists, scientists and philosophers, the best we can come up with is "nobody knows". And this is good. Absolute reality is whatever, where we really shine is the reality of our own invention, the reality of thought. There is no burger without us. The collective minds of humanity are connected to each other, billions of people around the world, at different points in time, eating burgers, creating an entire dimension of reality between themselves as the best way of navigating the infinity of time and space. It is remarkable that the invention of agriculture, the domestication of livestock, the development of skills, the unbroken chain of parent and child that reaches backward through time, through species, a single dynasty that led to the first hominid, the explosion of human civilization, the milling of wheat, the baking of bread, the butchery of cattle, the mining of metal, the construction of kitchens, all of this coming together, all at once and there in your hands is a burger and you bite into it. Each bite is but one amongst a choir of millions around Earth singing the triumph of life out to the universe.
There is one flaw in this celebration of our dominion over the reality of thought. As we have made it up, it is easily manipulated. The lens in which we experience absolute reality can vary wildly from culture to culture, person to person. It is the shape it is based on what people think, and people are wrong all the time. They'll hear a single comment somebody made once and base their whole reality around it. A person can read a sentence that can drive them to murder. By relying entirely on the reality of thought, humanity is subject to its own imagination. It would be willing to destroy its own environment out of spite. People can listen to words combined in a certain way that it can make them criminally insane. There is always the potential for the creator to be destroyed by their creation, and as the ultimate creator for a plane of existence, we easily become lost and suffer amongst the architecture of our minds.
This is the importance of burger theory. There's another twist. The reality we thought didn't exist earlier actually does exist, and is actually integral that all mentioned realities are connected. Our reality is real. It is the meat in the middle of the bread of absolute and thought reality. A burger without the patty isn't a burger, it's just two pieces of bread, or a kind of sandwich. The burger can be defined - a disc of edible matter - yet it is flexible, it can change, yet remains itself. The burger cannot be a steak or a chicken leg or a salmon, it has to be a burger patty in order for the combination of burger, bread, and possibly garnish, for it to be considered a burger. Even a patty with a single slice of bread is not a burger. It would be an open sandwich or perhaps a kind of British pie. This is how we can unify both structuralism and post-structuralism. Each element is required for the holistic realisation that each of these dimensions rely on each other to exist. The same can be said for the separate models of reality discussed earlier in burger theory, they can exist separately, but ultimately are combined in such a way that they can't be separated.
This is true of many things.” He says. I nod.
“Yep.”
