Academia Iluministă (4)
Maggio 5th, 2019 Posted in Mişcarea Dacia
Descartes
“The visible world is merely an illusion that hides the real mathematical reality of things. Mathematics exists separately from human beings and is prior to the creation of the universe itself.” – Descartes
This is the classic Platonist view of mathematics that it pre-exists everything else i.e. is the cause of everything else. It implies, for those of a Creationist inclination, that God is a mathematician and uses mathematics to create something from nothing and order it into the cosmos, although mathematics is of course entirely absent from Abrahamic texts, notwithstanding the laughable claims of Kabbalists that the Torah is full of mathematics (what they mean is that numerology can be applied to the words of the text).
“I shall bring to light the true riches of our souls, opening up to each of us the means whereby we can find within ourselves all the knowledge we may need for the conduct of life and the means of using it in order to acquire all the knowledge that the human mind is capable of possessing.” — Descartes
Descartes was the first modern philosopher and declared of himself, “I am a spectator rather than an actor in the comedies of life.”
In terms of revealing the secrets of the universe, his greatest contribution was to divide the universe into mind and matter, distinguished in terms of what he called “extension” (length, breadth and height). While the material world was entirely concerned with extension, the mental world was unextended, hence “outside” the material world. Although this definition worked wonderfully in terms of clarifying the difference between mind and matter – and remains the ultimate definition – it created an enormous problem: how could they interact since they were so different and did not occupy the same space?
This conundrum created two radically different philosophical schools: materialism and idealism. Materialism was championed by science and denied that the independent mental domain existed at all: it wasn’t extended hence it wasn’t there. After all, it was impossible to detect with the human senses. No one could see it, hear it, touch it, smell it or taste it. What experiment could possibly reveal its existence? How could you collect any scientific data regarding it? Wasn’t it just exposing the reality that the immaterial, unextended domain of the soul and God was a fantasy?
Science is, at core, pure empiricism, materialism and atheism. These terms are all effectively synonymous. Although there are scientists who profess their belief in God, these are intellectually dishonest individuals who are trying to have their cake and eat it. If you accept the materialist paradigm, you have left no room for God, the soul or even for free will. You have placed the whole universe, including human beings, within an inexorable chain of physical cause and effect determined by scientific forces. Since no one claims that the laws of science have free will and can “do their own thing” whenever they feel like it, there is therefore no conceivable mechanism by which free will can operate.
Kant, an idealist, addressed the Cartesian problem by declaring that while there was only one universe (the mental one), it had two aspects: a noumenal universe of “things in themselves”, which was entirely unknowable, and a phenomenal universe of these things in themselves as they appearedto our senses, which had all the characteristics of the material world, without of course being material. We understand the world so well because it is in fact created by our own minds. Since we can’t ever escape from our minds, we can never see things as they truly are, free of the constructions our minds have imposed on them, free of the systemic illusion to which we are prey.
So, for Kant, the phenomenal world corresponded to the world of science ruled by deterministic laws of cause and effect (created by our minds and NOT inherent in any alleged external material world). However, the unknowable noumenal domain afforded Kant the opportunity to claim that it was there that God, the soul and free will existed, although, as he admitted, we could never know anything about them. This was an ingenious and highly influential scheme that explained the scientific world while, unlike scientific materialism, leaving legitimate room for the free will that we all believe ourselves to have.
Scientists of course dismissed Kant’s dualistic philosophy, just as they had previously dismissed Descartes’. They said that the so-called noumenal universe was, by definition, unknowable and beyond any form of detection, hence was an entirely spurious, redundant and empty concept. They also rejected the notion that the scientific universe was a creation of our minds rather than exactly what it seemed to be: an external material world obeying scientific laws that come from outside rather than inside our minds.
What Kant had effectively done was to recast the Cartesian philosophy in slightly different terminology, and with one radical twist. Descartes had proposed two domains, mental and physical. The physical domain was exactly as scientific materialists conceived it: an objective, external reality subject to inexorable scientific laws. The mental domain, on the other hand, was unextended and scientifically undetectable. Scientific materialism immediately dispensed with it altogether – especially since no one who supported Descartes could convincingly explain how mind and matter interacted.
Kant’s noumenal universe is much the same as Descartes’ mental domain – outside space and time, unextended and undetectable. However, whereas the mental domain, for Descartes, was strictly for consciousness (“I think therefore I am.”), the mental, noumenal domain for Kant is for everything. Every phenomenal object has a noumenal counterpart. Kant’s extraordinary innovation was to say that our minds operate mentally on these mental objects (noumena) in a coherent, systematic and predictable way that turns them all (other than minds themselves) into phenomenal rather than noumenal objects i.e. into objects in space and time, subject to the inexorable cause and effect of scientific law.
Kant said that space and time provide the conditionsfor sensory experience: “The formal principle of our intuition (space and time) is the condition under which anything can be an object of our senses.” This means that spatial and temporal relations are only experienced by the passive, receptive part of the mind, which Kant called intuition, as opposed to the active part concerned with intellect.
In other words, everything, for Kant, is actually mental, including space and time. Minds impose the systematic illusion of a scientific, lawful, objective, material universe.
One way of thinking about Kant’s noumena and phenomena is within the context of Plato’s domain of Forms and his Demiurge (“the public craftsman”). For Plato, the Demiurge took the eternal Forms and imprinted them on the universal clay (matter) to fashion a material copy of the perfect domain of mental Forms. For Kant, Plato’s well-defined Forms are replaced by the mysterious noumena – seeds of ideas, we might say. Our own minds take the role of the Demiurge. We fashion the noumena into the stuff of the phenomenal world not by stamping them on matter but by applying mental categories and intuitions to them, most especially of causality, space and time.
Rather than have a strict Cartesian mind-matter dualism, Kant has one mental world that manifests itself dualistically: 1) things as they mentally are in themselves (which are never observed and are unknowable, especially minds themselves), and 2) things as they appear to our senses – as material objects of science located in space and time and subject to causality.
Kant had thus unified mind and matter by claiming that everything is in fact mental, but then divided them again as knowable mind-created, “material” phenomena and unknowable mental noumena. He had resurrected the material world but it was no longer actually material but “phenomenal” – of the order of appearance rather than reality i.e. a grand illusion.
As we have observed, scientific materialists were unimpressed and ignored all such talk. For them, the scientific world was absolutely real and no kind of mind-created phenomenon. Nevertheless, Kant’s scheme – known as transcendental idealism because it pointed to the existence of higher truths that transcended our experience – was so intellectually ingenious and imposing that it caused an explosion of interest in idealism, led by great German geniuses, and culminating in the awesome Illuminatus Hegel.
Idealism addresses the Cartesian problem of mind-matter dualism by taking the opposite stance to materialism. Idealists say that the only reality we actually experience is the mental one. The only knowledge we have about the world is mental. We are nothing but entities that experience ideas, thoughts, feelings, sensations, impressions, intuitions: all mental rather than material states. If you removed our ideas of the world, you would have removed the world. Our ideas of the world ARE the world. So, whereas the materialists abolished the Cartesian mental world, the idealists abolished the Cartesian material world.
According to materialism, there is an objective world independent of our minds controlled by scientific laws of cause and effect that are equally independent of our minds. A scientific materialist can happily think of the universe as containing no minds at all, including his own. Science is about revealing the “objective truth” of a kind of dead, mindless, mechanical universe. Science has made no inroads at all into explaining life, mind or consciousness. All of its great successes concern the universe as a cemetery, or as a great clockwork mechanism incapable of exhibiting free will, desire or passion.
According to idealism, our minds create the universe and there is no objective universe “out there”. The laws of science are created by our minds and do not exist outside them. (It is in fact extremely difficult for materialists to account for the existence of scientific laws – if they are part of the extended material world, they must somehow be material. So where are they are? What are they? Where are they stored? How can they affect everything all over the universe? How can any material thing “know” what laws to obey and indeed how to obey them? Where did these laws come from? Where were they before the Big Bang? In fact, how can laws exist at all? Why shouldn’t the material world be a completely random, lawless place?
Everything in the material world decays and runs down, but not the laws themselves which always stay the same, hence are of a totally different and alien kind from the rest of the material world. Why are they immune to change when nothing is? No materialist has ever accounted for the laws of matter. Scientists talk of the heat death of the universe being caused by entropy and the Second law of Thermodynamics, but of course the Second Law of Thermodynamics is not itself subject to any decay and heat death i.e. laws are of a wholly category from what they control. Why?
A Platonic dualism has been invalidly introduced by science: eternal, immutable, perfect laws contrasted with transient, physical, imperfect objects relentlessly running out of usable energy. But scientific materialism rejects Plato, so it is therefore presented with a challenge so great that it has never once addressed it: are the laws of materialism themselves material? If they’re not then how can they exist since only matter exists? If they are then why aren’t they subject to material decay like all other matter? It’s not clear that any scientist has ever grasped the magnitude of this problem. By itself, this philosophical problem destroys the whole ideology of scientific materialism. Scientific materialism cannot be true because it cannot explain its own laws. It can’t explain what they are ontologically, hence they are like magic. They’re from fairyland!
People take scientific materialism seriously not because of its philosophical coherence but because it works pragmatically and its successes have indeed been wondrous.
Materialism and idealism can both make strong cases that the opposing school is false, yet neither has ever landed a knockout blow. Isn’t that astonishing? How can two so radically different views somehow bothbe powerfully true and persuasive? Surely this points to the need for a tertium quid – a third thing – that reconciles the opposing schools. Illuminism is precisely that tertium quid, and it fulfils the task through the ultimate truth: mathematics.
Unfortunately, Illuminism has two immense obstacles to overcome. On the one hand, scientific materialism has been staggeringly successful in terms of technology, manufacturing, the military-industrial complex and medicine. It has authentically changed our world beyond recognition. To any thinking person, science is immensely persuasive. It’s no surprise that someone like Richard Dawkins, a fervent atheist and materialist, is so widely admired. Yet even Dawkins and his followers can do nothing to dent the confidence of the second obstacle, the irrationalists i.e. the Jews, Christians, Muslims and Karmists.
The Abrahamists have actually become more fanatical and irrational as science has grown stronger. They are in much greater denial than ever before. They hate reason and prize irrational faith with a great passion. A medieval thinker such as Dante was aware of no serious conflict between science and religion. In fact, the two disciplines seemed in beautiful and perfect harmony, united by reason. It is in the present day that the gulf between mainstream religion and science has become unbridgeable. It is no longer rationally possible to think that Abrahamism has anything in common with science. If you accept the scientific facts then you cannot be an Abrahamist. Abrahamism has been formally refuted as a logical possibility in the scientific world. Many Abrahamists have therefore cultivated an extreme distaste for science. They are perfectly aware that if science is true their beliefs are false. Rather than abandon the beliefs with which they were brainwashed since birth, they have chosen to abandon reason. Like Luther, they have declared that reason is the Devil’s whore.
Nowhere is the abyss between science and Abrahamism clearer than in the case of Darwinian evolution. The situation couldn’t be simpler. If evolution is true, the Creator God of Abrahamism does not exist. The whole point of evolution is that it requires no Creator. It is a self-propelling process. Natural selection has nothing to do with truth or morality. It cares only about reproductive success, about the passing on and spread of particular genes, hence Dawkins’ famous and brilliant book The Selfish Gene.
Now, some Abrahamists seek to claim that their Creator God created the evolutionary process. But this is untenable, and indeed spectacularly so. Why would a Creator God establish a process so savage, so amoral, so far from truth and goodness, that it looks like pure evil? The brutal and bloody law of the jungle is what you would expect in hell, not heaven. If “God” were responsible for evolution then he would be Satan, not God. He would have created an arena of endless killing and pain, for no apparent reason. How can a moral God create a process devoid of morality?
Is a shark an immoral serial killer, or does it simply kill to live? Humans are killers par excellence. They kill for fun! A God who sets in motion a perpetual death machine of mind-boggling cruelty cannot be God. When “God” ordered Abraham to kill his own innocent son for no reason at all, he made it clear to all people possessed of reason that he was not God.
Since evolution requires no one to get it started – it’s just part of the fabric of the universe – why would God invent a system that makes him look superfluous? Is he actively trying to baffle and bewilder people? Is he perverse? If so, he cannot be God.
If God is the true Creator, why didn’t he simply create, just as it says in the Bible? Why didn’t he create one planet, one moon and one sun, and put humanity on the planet? What point in Creation is served by the countless planets, moons, stars and galaxies that litter the infinite universe? The universe is so incomprehensibly large (and expanding) that there are things out there that humanity will NEVER see. So why are they there? For whose benefit? What do they have to do with Adam and Eve on Earth, the alleged centrepiece of God’s universe?
The hypothesis of a Creator God cannot be sustained in the face of evolution and an infinite universe. Only someone insanely opposed to reason would continue to support the concept of a Creator God. What’s the difference between irrational people and mad people? Can we distinguish between the two? If you reject reason, can you even be called human or are you just an animal?
Descartes, a supreme rationalist, expressed the view that mathematics provides the fundamental structure shared by all branches of knowledge. That being the case, why does neither the Torah, Bible nor Koran refer at all to mathematics? If mathematics is the key to existence, the last place where you will discover the secrets of reality is in the Abrahamic holy texts. Can anyone point to even one item of worthwhile knowledge offered by the three books allegedly authored by the Creator of the universe? Does God hate knowledge, or does he hate the idea of human beings having knowledge? The books of Abrahamism are irrational texts of anti-knowledge and hatred of intellect. They contain no intellectual sustenance at all. They are books of Pavlovian dominance and submission.
Reason
Given that Descartes believed in two essentially separate domains of matter (extended) and mind (unextended), he could not conceive of a vacuum existing in the material world. If a vacuum contained “nothing”, it would be unextended, hence mind-like: an impossibility in the physical world of extension. Therefore, Descartes argued for the existence of a “plenum” – a completely full material universe, with no empty space whatever. He also rejected the concept of indivisible atoms. If they existed in the material world then, no matter how small, they were extended, hence divisible. Instead, he referred to infinitely divisible “corpuscles” (although he never considered what should happen if they reached their indivisible limit: Leibniz did and made them his dimensionless “monads”).
These corpuscles, Descartes said, had “primary”, objective qualities, intrinsic to themselves, of extension, motion, mass, volume, position, number etc. They also had “secondary”, subjective qualities that were not intrinsic to them but resulted from the effects they had on the human senses. These secondary qualities were colour, smell, taste, the sounds they caused us to hear and the way they felt to touch. In other words, all of our sensory information is secondary, subjective and unreliable. Think of colour. It can be radically changed by the prevailing conditions. In a red-lit room, everything appears reddish. As it gets darker, our colour vision fades to black and white (just look around your room before you go to sleep – there’s no colour!)
Descartes’ material universe was thoroughly mechanistic, mathematical and predictable, and gave a huge boost to scientific thinking. He advised researchers to divide all big problems into smaller ones (the reductive, analytical approach), to argue from the simple to the complex and to check everything carefully.
As a rationalist, Descartes thought that only pure reason yielded reliable knowledge, and reason relied on mathematics and logic. He was dismissive of the knowledge we get from our unreliable senses. No sure knowledge could come from such a dubious source.
The opposing school to rationalism is empiricism, which asserts that only our senses can yield knowledge about the external world. How can staying in a room using your pure reason tell you anything about a frog? You can learn about frogs only by gathering information about them via your senses. Without that information, reason is superfluous.
Rationalism and idealism are a natural alliance while empiricism and materialism represent the opposite alliance.
In order to explain the source of irrationality, Descartes contrasted will and intellect. He asserted that, driven by will, we often choose to believe confused, unclear ideas. Will power, it seems, has primacy over reason. This is a critical point. Abrahamists are irrational because reason, it appears to them, takes them down the road of atheism and certain death whereas Abrahamism promises them eternal life in paradise, albeit without any rational basis. Is it any wonder that legions of ill-educated, fearful people find reason rather less appealing than irrational faith? Our free will often leads us into absolute irrationality. It is never emphasized enough that only a small proportion of humanity is guided by reason. The rest are controlled by will. Therefore, there’s little point addressing the masses with rational arguments. You must target their emotions and will if you want to win the debate. Moses, Jesus and Mohammed were classic irrationalists making crude appeals to emotion and will, and using threats of extreme and indeed eternal pain for anyone who disobeyed them.
Humans are creatures of will, not of reason and intellect. Will is emotional and full of desire. If we want to evolve as a species, we must learn to moderate our will and increase our reason.
Imagine we were programming artificial intelligences that we wanted to be something like us. We certainly wouldn’t make them exclusively logical and rational. But here is the big question – how do you programme will into a machine? How do you make machines irrational? Aren’t will and irrationality what truly separate man and machine?
How can humanity progress without increased reliance on reason? Can increased will lead to any evolution? Or does it just drag us back to the jungle, and even further back to the primordial slime? A huge amount of capitalist advertising is directed straight at the will and emotions. Capitalism revolves around the will and emotions, not around reason. Abrahamism revolves around the will and emotions.
We can’t take the path to divinity unless we embrace reason. We have no choice.
** Platonism**
“Platonism”, derived from Pythagoreanism, is used to describe the stance of those mathematicians who assert that mathematics pre-exists humanity, is indeed eternally coded into the universe, and determines its structure. Mathematics is thus “real” and has independent existence. As far as Descartes was concerned, all human knowledge might one day be mathematized. Although Descartes wasn’t an Illuminatus, he shared exactly the same vision as the Illuminati – a complete mathematical explanation of existence. If mathematics is indeed universal and integral to existence, any rational alien race would also be mathematical. The only language in which we would be able to infallibly communicate with them would be mathematics.
So, is mathematics something that rational people discover about the universe, or is something that rational minds invent? The latter option seems inconceivable and yet if it were true it would surely lend maximum support to Kant’s hypothesis that minds create reality. If a mind can construct something as complex as mathematics, what couldn’t it invent?
The position that mathematics is an invention of mind is known as “formalism” or “relativism”. It asserts that mathematics is something akin to an enormously more elaborate version of chess. It has its rules and immensely complex games can be played, but they have no connection with reality. We use the initial rules to create additional yet consistent rules, but all we are ever doing is playing a more and more sophisticated game.
An argument has been advanced that mathematics is a “closed” system, hence cannot yield any knowledge about anything other than itself. There are no avenues for introducing non-mathematical parameters, hence mathematics can never provide “new” knowledge. This argument is actually key to the entire Illuminist project because Illuminism asserts that mathematics is indeed a closed system but it further asserts that there is nothing at all external to mathematics i.e. mathematics is EVERYTHING. To say that mathematics is closed is not to place any limitations on its explanatory power since there’s nothing outside it, nothing else to which it would have to open itself.
Illuminism declares that everything that exists and all authentic knowledge of everything that exists are entirely defined mathematically. Mathematics is IT. There’s nothing else. By the end of this series of books, we hope we will have persuaded you of this astounding fact.
Just look at the best theories of science: almost entirely expressed mathematically. If mathematics is simply a formalism, a self-consistent game, then the same must also be true of the most successful scientific theories, which means that we know nothing of the world and it might as well be Kant’s noumenal universe (about which we must remain silent).
Just look at computers and computer simulations – wholly mathematical. Where would we be without our computers? Has anything proved as successful as applied mathematics?
The abstract work of Bernard Riemann on non-Euclidean curved spaces would once have seemed to be mathematics in the purest formalist sense, with no connection with external reality (assumed to be entirely Euclidean), yet this work became the bedrock of Einstein’s general theory of relativity and is used in the cosmological theories describing the evolution of the universe.
“Platonist” mathematics is what we define as ontological mathematics.
The Home of the Soul
Descartes famously identified the pineal gland as where the mind or soul exists and interacts with the physical body. He imagined the soul as a “homunculus” – a little man – who receives all of the information flowing in from the senses and processes it all, adding his own reason and logic to make sense of it. It is as if our soul is in a private cinema watching the images being sent, via the eyes, from the external world. The soul itself does not interact with the external world while the body that does is in some sense just a human automaton. Behaviourist philosopher Gilbert Ryle referred to this model of a private soul inside a kind of mechanical man as the “ghost in the machine”.
For Descartes, Nature, in its material aspect, is an automaton, and he held that animals have neither souls nor feelings. They are just machines. In fact, even humans are just machines materially, meaning that doctors are not healers but mechanics and repairmen. In Descartes’ mechanistic universe, matter affects matter only through physical contact. Matter, motion and collisions are the only elements in this system. There is no “action at a distance” – no forces operating across space. It was a corollary of this position that if the motions of all particles were known, we would be able to know the future by calculating how the system would evolve with time. Everything, in principle, could be explained. This is still, more or less, the position adopted by scientific materialism.
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Tags: Academia Iluministă
