Inside Reality: The Inner View of Existence

Inside Reality: The Inner View of Existence

Copyright © Dr. Thomas Stark 2018

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The Ontological Mathematics Foundation

Introduction

In mythology, the male gaze brings life and the female gaze death. In the tale of Pygmalion, the sculptor carves a woman out of ivory and his creation is so beautiful and realistic that he falls in love with it, losing all interest in women of flesh and blood who can’t compete with his ideal. Pygmalion makes offerings at the altar of Aphrodite and begs the goddess for a real woman who will be the living likeness of my ivory girl. Upon returning home, he kisses his perfect statue, and is amazed that its lips feel warm. He kisses it again, and it miraculously comes to life. Aphrodite has granted his wish. So, the male gaze brings women to life. It animates them, vivifies them, exhilarates them.

Another famous tale provides the opposite lesson. Medusa the Gorgon is a terrible creature with hair made of living, hissing, poisonous snakes. Her face is so terrible to behold it turns to stone anyone who dares to look at her. She is the classic instance of the female gaze, destroying men. She turns them to stone. She is the anti-Pygmalion. Instead of making dead statues into living women, she makes living men into dead statues. The female gaze literally petrifies men.

This book is about a different pair of gazes: inwards and outwards. There are those who look out and never in, and those who look in and never out. To understand reality, you must do both. You need to be like the Roman god Janus, looking in both directions at the same time.

Janus is the liminal god, the god of transitions, beginnings and endings, the sacred and profane, gates, doorways, passages, and every type of duality. With his two faces, he looks to the future and the past at the same time. He looks at the inside of reality and also the outside of reality, thus seeing all of reality, its full range, its complete nature.

There are those, such as scientists, who see only the outside of reality, its appearance, its surface, its phenomenal aspect. They are blind to the inside, the substance, the foundation, the noumenal aspect. They dismiss it as non-existent, or illusion, or epiphenomenon. Scientists are those that believe that phenomena have no underlying noumena. What you see is what you get. Seeing is believing. Everything is appearance. Nothing is concealed. There are no hidden variables, and no unobservables. The scientific method says, Observe. That works only if everything is observable. If there are foundational unobservables, science is catastrophically wrong and has cut itself off from the truth. The only truth it can furnish is that of surfaces and appearances with no substance.

Then, on the other side, there are those, such as mystics and gurus, who believe they can meditate and find their way to the inside of reality, to cosmic consciousness, or non-duality, or the One. They dismiss the outside as an illusion, as mere appearance and surface, as pure phenomenon that conceals the noumenal truth from us, which we must overcome if we wish to access the truth. They are the opposite of scientists.

Those who truly want to understand reality must become masters of both perspectives – inside and outside, noumenon and phenomenon – and see how they relate, communicate and interact.

If you fail to do this, you will never comprehend existence. It will always be a mystery to you.

The Big Bang was the archetypal dual-aspect event, where the inside of reality – a noumenal, immaterial Singularity outside space and time – gave rise to the outside of reality, the phenomenal, material universe of space and time.

The Singularity is eternal and necessary. The universe, its construct, is temporal and contingent. The Singularity is the thing in itself, and the universe its projection, the appearance it confers on itself, how it makes itself visible and tangible.

It’s time to put on your Janus head and come and see reality from two perspectives, inside and outside, and then you will know everything.

Inside-Outside

The inside-outside relation isn’t simple. Think of a Russian doll – a nested doll, a stacking doll – with dolls of decreasing size placed one inside another. What is the ultimate inside of a Russian doll? As we look for the inside, would we keep reaching smaller and smaller dolls, with no end? Unless we reach a definitive end then we are caught in infinite regress, a process which can never come to an end, which has no bottom, no base, no sufficient reason, which belongs to the order of magic and miracle.

Plato argued that the innermost kernel of a doll isn’t a doll at all, but, rather the form of a doll. It’s a mental entity, outside space and time: the physicality of a doll distilled down to the pure idea of a doll. For Plato, all forms/ideas belonged to an immaterial, transcendent domain of mind, a singularity outside space and time that only the soul could access.

Aristotle switched from a transcendent to an immanent view of form. He proposed a system of hylomorphism: matter-form hybrids (substances). He built an inside (form) into all material objects. The only exceptions to the general rule were formless matter (prime matter) and matterless form (God).

Form, for both Plato and Aristotle, prevented infinite regress. Science has no concept of form. Science is all about matter, hence is totally reliant on infinite regress, or on random events, such as the universe popping into existence out of non-existence by chance. Without form, eternal and necessary form, there is no other way to get a Big Bang universe going in the first place.

The ancient Greek Atomists, to prevent infinite regress, expediently decreed that the ultimate things (atoms) were tiny and indivisible, thus providing a finite limit. They offered no explanation of why reality should operate in such a way. Descartes attacked this position in a twofold way: by denying that there was any void in which atoms could move, and asserting the existence of an immaterial, unextended, mental substance: mind. As for Leibniz, he posited that the ultimate atoms were immaterial minds, not physical objects.

Materialism is an outside philosophy, while idealism is an inside philosophy.

Empiricism is an outside philosophy, while rationalism is an inside philosophy.

Here’s the question. Do you understand reality from the outside-in (you look at the external world and then try to work out how it got there), or from the inside-out (you consider the internal world and then wonder how it produced the outside world)?

Inside→out is an a priori, analytic, eternal, necessary, rational, logical, holistic, deductive perspective. Outside→in is an a posteriori, synthetic, temporal, contingent, empirical, sensory, parts-based, inductive perspective. These are therefore opposite worldviews.

All of the problems of philosophy stem from the clash between these opposing perspectives. Materialists come from the outside view, idealists from the inside; empiricists from the outside view, rationalists from the inside; immanents from the outside, transcendents from the inside. Physics concerns the outside, metaphysics the inside.

We can see exactly how philosophy became so disputative: it was impossible for it to reconcile the two clashing views. Kant tried with his transcendental approach, meaning that the structure of our minds, which we couldn’t observe, shaped how we perceived and experienced reality. He rejected transcendence and claimed that reality in itself was unknowable.

God is an inside concept. So is Cosmic Consciousness. Concepts such as infinite regress, randomness, chance, accident, indeterminacy, acausation, indeterminism, statistics, probabilities, and so on, are all outside concepts, ways of bypassing any foundational inside concepts. Science is all about the denial and rejection of inside concepts which can never be accessed via science’s experimental method, predicated on observation.

In the ancient world, Pythagoras declared that the inside view is all about numbers (mathematics). If you could see beyond appearance (externality; the outside), you would reach a perspective of nothing but numbers. All things are numbers, he said. Number rules all.

The pre-Socratics searched for the arche, the foundational inside of reality. The arche means the beginning, origin, source of action, the original argument, first principle, first element, first principles of knowledge, ultimate underlying substance, ultimate undemonstrable principle, the root, the Source, the One.

Thales claimed that the first principle of all things is water. If we combine this with another statement of his – All things are full of gods – then water had a divine, creative aspect. Cicero said, Thales assures us that water is the principle of all things; and that God is that Mind which shaped and created all things from water. This gives a different picture. God – non-water – is now the active inside of reality, and he coexists with passive water, from which he makes everything. God is mind and water is matter.

Anaximander said the arche was apeiron, an indefinite substance from which all things are born, and to which all things will return in due course. Apeiron means unlimited, boundless, infinite, indefinite, without end, without limit, without boundary, of unlimited extent and duration, eternal and ageless. Apeiron is more or less God.

Anaximenes posited air, rather than water, as the arche. Just as Thales ascribed divine attributes to water, or posited a God to order it, Anaximenes did the same with air.

Pythagoras said numbers were the arche while Heraclitus said it was fire. Heraclitus wrote, This universe, which is the same for all, has not been made by any god or man, but it always has been, is, and will be an ever-living fire, kindling itself by regular measures and going out by regular measures. ... The death of fire is the birth of air, and the death of air is the birth of water. ... All things are an interchange for fire, and fire for all things, just like goods for gold and gold for goods.

Where Thales had God as mind and water as matter, Heraclitus had the Logos as mind and fire as matter. Logos means the source and fundamental order of the Cosmos: God as a law or equation, we might say, and deistic rather than theistic. Heraclitus wrote, Listening not to me but to the Logos it is wise to agree that all things are one.

If we think of fire as energy then the Logos becomes the laws of energy. In modern ontological mathematical terms, the Logos is Euler’s Formula, and sinusoidal waves (energy) are the fire from which all things are made. Waves are just numerical sequences, so we see how close Pythagoras and Heraclitus both were to the modern ontological mathematical conception of reality. Where Pythagoras said, All things are numbers; number rules all, Heraclitus said, in effect, All things are fire (energy); the Logos rules fire (energy). Ontological mathematics says, All things are sinusoidal waves; Euler’s Formula, the mathematical expression of the Principle of Sufficient Reason, rules all.

Ontological mathematics posits mathematics as the arche. There is no better candidate, no candidate better capable of supporting and explaining a rational and logical Cosmos, as opposed to an irrational and illogical Chaos.

Plato said that form was the inside of everything. Particularly the Form of the Good. Aristotle said the inside of everything was matterless form (God). Both believed that formless matter – prime matter – existed forever too.

Science transitioned away from the arche and metaphysics – from first principles and the ultimate inside of things – to physics, to the material and empirical, to the observable outside of things.

Ontological mathematics asserts that mathematics is the true inside of science, and thus scientific materialism and empiricism (an outside ideology) can be replaced by scientific idealism and rationalism (an inside philosophy that can also account for the outside).

Kant asserted that the inside of things was unknowable, a noumenon beyond our understanding. Hegel, by contrast, said, The truth is the whole. … What is rational is real, and what is real is rational. The whole of reality could be worked out rationally. Hegel meant metaphysical rationality. Illuminism has now replaced this with mathematical rationality.

Descartes insisted that mind was the unextended inside of reality, and matter the extended outside. Leibniz pronounced that monads (minds) were the inside of reality. Schopenhauer said that irrational Will was the inside of reality, while Nietzsche said it was Will to Power. Hegel said it was Geist (rational, dialectical mind/spirit).

Eduard von Hartmann said the Unconscious was the inside of everything. The Unconscious was his ultimate metaphysical principle, and a new way of referring to what German metaphysicians had previously designated as the Absolute, the German equivalent of the Greek arche.

Wikipedia says, "[Hartmann’s] Unconscious appears as a combination of the metaphysics of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel with that of Arthur Schopenhauer. In von Hartmann’s view, Hegel and Schopenhauer were both wrong in making Idea or Reason subordinate to Will or Will subordinate to Idea or Reason; on the contrary, neither can act alone, and neither is the result of the other. …

The Unconscious is both Will and Reason (the latter concept also interpreted as Idea) and the absolute all-embracing ground of all existence. Von Hartmann thus combines pantheism with panlogism … Nevertheless, Will and not Reason is the primary aspect of the Unconscious, whose melancholy career is determined by the primacy of the Will and the latency of the Reason. Will is active. Reason is passive.

Abrahamists posit God as the inside of reality. God creates the universe out of nothing, i.e. God makes the outside out of nothing.

In Eastern religion, the task is to attain nirvana (nothingness), moksha (enlightenment), or the Tao (the Way), i.e. to mentally shift from the illusion (the outside) to true reality (the inside).

All of philosophical, spiritual and religious thinking revolves around the relationship between the unobservable inside and the observable outside. But science – the dogmatism of materialism and empiricism – is absolutely opposed to any concept of the inside. There is no inside, says science, because it is non-observable and non-empirical, hence non-existent. (Absence of evidence is evidence of absence is the constant, fallacious mantra of scientism.)

Since it’s actually impossible not to refer to an inside in some way or another – given that the outside is not self-explanatory and self-declaratory – even science tangentially refers to an inside. What it talks about is the abstract, unreal world of mathematics (as it sees mathematics), and the abstract, unreal world of mathematical probability wavefunctions. Science refers to the inside as an unreal abstraction, concerned with statistics, probabilities, acausation, chance, accident, indeterminacy, indeterminism and randomness. This is how it bypasses any notion of an eternal, necessary inside, i.e. a God of some kind, whether theistic, deistic, pantheistic, panentheistic or mathematical.

Atheism is in truth a claim that there is no such thing as an inside – whether the mind, the soul or God – and only outside entities (atoms) exist. Outside atoms come together to produce outside bodies and then (by magic or miracle) they produce inside, emergent properties: life, mind, the unconscious, consciousness, subjectivity, qualia, and so on. However, when the organization of atoms breaks down (when the body dies), all of these inside aspects vanish – they unemerge, they de-emerge. They were never real in the first place, just epiphenomena. That’s what science asserts.

Science says that existence is meaningless, pointless and purposeless. That’s what happens when you abolish the inside of reality.

The inside is the eternal, necessary order of existence that provides all meaning. If you get rid of the inside, as scientific materialism does, in favor of what is observable (i.e. the outside), then you automatically get rid of meaning, purpose and any point to anything. That’s why scientism is associated with atheism, nihilism, cynicism, skepticism, and autism.

Scientism is more or less a diagnosable mental illness, closely connected with Cotard’s syndrome. Anne Ruminjo and Boris Mekinulov wrote, Cotard’s syndrome is a relatively rare condition that was first described by Dr. Jules Cotard in 1882. Cotard’s syndrome comprises any one of a series of delusions that range from a belief that one has lost organs, blood, or body parts to insisting that one has lost one’s soul or is dead. Cotard’s syndrome is in fact extremely common: all atheists and nihilists suffer from it. They deny they have minds, souls, an unconscious, consciousness, or free will. According to themselves, they are just purposeless biological machines, made of lifeless, mindless atoms. They are not alive in any true sense since none of their constituent atoms possesses life.

Life and mind, such as they are in the scientific worldview, are merely peculiar emergent epiphenomena with no causal efficacy. Life is meaningless to a scientist. It has no point, no teleology, and ends as soon as the particular organization of atoms that produced it ceases to be organized in just the right way.

Nothing is more important than understanding the inside of reality, the core of existence, the arche. If you don’t know what this is, you don’t know anything. Science not only does not know what the inside of existence is, it denies that existence has any inside! It is arguably the stupidest system ever devised. It works only because, by total accident and no design, it happens to use mathematics, which is the authentic inside of existence. But science says that mathematics is abstract, unreal and manmade.

No task is more important than defining the inside of existence and explaining its relationship to the outside. If we don’t understand the interior, we can never understand the exterior.

Science can never help us. It deals only with outsides. But science itself has an unintended inside – mathematics – and it is this subject that in fact takes us to the heart of reality.

The inside of existence is not available to the physical senses. The senses point out, not in. They are one way, not two way. However, intuition – extra-sensory perception – can give us glimpses of the inside. Intuition looks in, not out. Reason and logic, the tools of mathematics, are what allow us to work out the exact nature of the interior of existence. Why? Because the inside of existence is reason itself – the Principle of Sufficient Reason – which mathematically equates to Euler’s Formula and is ontologically conveyed by mathematical monads: eternal minds. True logic – not flawed human logic – is built into mathematics. Any non-mathematical logic is not real logic.

Monads are autonomous Fourier domains, by which we mean they possess everything required to perform a full implementation of ontological Fourier mathematics. If any individual monad can execute Fourier mathematics then so, of course, can the entire collection of monads. Individual Fourier mathematics produces individual dreamworlds, while collective Fourier mathematics produces the collective world (the physical universe). An individual dream is an individual holographic projection. The physical universe is a collective holographic projection.

The Fourier frequency domain – made of dimensionless sinusoids – is the inside of the monad. By performing Fourier mathematics using its inbuilt, interior frequencies, a monad can create a spacetime domain: the outside of the monad, a dreamworld, an extended projection. The outside of the entire collection of monads is the physical universe, created at the Big Bang.

The Big Bang was a Fourier event whereby a perfect frequency Singularity (mental domain) produced a spacetime world. The Cosmic Mind, made of monads, made the Cosmos (the Cosmic body). The body is the outside of the mind. The mind is the inside of the body.

You cannot get to the inside from the outside since you have to leave the spacetime world of matter entirely. In other words, an ontological phase change is required. You need to go from spacetime to frequency. This is dogmatically forbidden by the ideology of scientism, which denies the existence of an eternal frequency domain. Science cannot go beyond the spacetime veil. It cannot pass to the other side, to the frequency domain (the afterlife).

In science, nothing material can be accelerated to light speed, and matter can be converted into the type of existence compatible with a singularity only via the collapse of stars capable of generating black holes.

Is an inside view of reality already available to science, but it simply refuses to acknowledge it? Consider these remarks by science writer John Gribbin: "The Lorentz transformations tell us that time stands still for an object moving at the speed of light. From the point of view of the photon, of course, it is everything else that is rushing past at the speed of light. And under such extreme conditions, the Lorentz-Fitzgerald contraction reduces the distance between all objects to zero. You can either say that time does not exist for an electromagnetic wave, so that it is everywhere along its path (everywhere in the Universe) at once; or you can say that distance does not exist for an electromagnetic wave, or that it ‘touches’ everything in the Universe at once.

"This is an enormously important idea, which I have never seen given due attention. From the point of view of a photon, it takes no time at all to cross the 150 million km from the Sun to the Earth (or to cross the entire Universe), for the simple reason that this space interval does not exist for the photon. Physicists seem to ignore this remarkable state of affairs, because they know that no material object can ever be accelerated to the speed of light, so no human (or mechanical) observer is ever going to experience this strange phenomenon. Perhaps they are simply so stunned by what the equations say