The Tractatus Logico Mathematicus: How Mathematics Explains Reality

The Tractatus Logico Mathematicus: How Mathematics Explains Reality

Dr. Thomas Stark

Copyright © Dr. Thomas Stark 2019

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The Ontological Mathematics Foundation

The Thinking Game

Many of the greatest thinkers in history weren’t very good at thinking. How is that possible? They were actually brilliant pseudo-thinkers. The average person can’t tell the difference. Pseudo-profundity seems as profound as real profundity; in fact, often much more so. The Lie casts a spell that the Truth always struggles to match. The Lie, remember, is accepted because it’s what people want to believe, and then they call it the Truth. The actual Truth isn’t what people want to believe, so is shunned and left alone in the corner, unloved and unlovable. Its presence is deemed most unfortunate. After all, it failed to be shaped in man’s image. It failed to suit man’s agenda. Man is the measure of all things, especially the Truth. Man’s truths are always lies. Nietzsche said, What are man’s truths ultimately? Merely his irrefutable errors. It would have been more accurate if he had said, What are man’s truths ultimately? Just his most entrenched lies. Hitler understood the game. He said, [In] the big lie there is always a certain force of credibility; because the broad masses of a nation are always more easily corrupted in the deeper strata of their emotional nature than consciously or voluntarily; and thus in the primitive simplicity of their minds they more readily fall victims to the big lie than the small lie… The Big Lie is all-conquering.

History’s pseudo-thinkers always believed their own propaganda, just like ordinary people. They lied to themselves as well as to everyone else. They always suffered from confirmation bias. They looked for anything that supported their arguments and ignored or dismissed anything that didn’t. They didn’t engage with their critics. Above all, they suffered from a systemic blinkeredness which they never once questioned or sought to change.

Here is the No.1 Law of Critical Thinking. Whatever your Big Thought is, the thought that you believe will change the world, the thought that gets you so excited about its incredible potential (how it will change everything), you can be sure its defining error is present immediately and foundationally. The error is hard-wired into the idea.

All Big Thoughts are wrong, except one – the correct Big Thought, the exclusive answer to existence. The correct answer to existence has a unique property: it preceded the existence of the human race. Unlike lies, it cannot be invented (lies are always inventions). It can only be discovered (the truth always concerns discovery, never invention). It is hidden in plain sight – all around us. The difficulty is one of recognition. Human beings are not designed for recognizing the truth. As Nietzsche said, humans have no organs for truth. He wrote, We have no organ at all for knowledge, for truth: we know (or believe or imagine) precisely as much as may be useful in the interest of the human herd, the species: and even what is here called usefulness is in the end only a belief, something imagined and perhaps precisely that most fatal piece of stupidity by which we shall one day perish.

Big Thinkers start off with their Eureka Moment, some epiphany, some flash of inspiration, some wondrous insight, when they have the magical idea which they believe will solve everything. The trouble is that there are as many Eureka Moments as there are Big Thinkers, and all of them are different, generating contradictory Big Ideas. Which flash of insight is the correct one? How would you know? How could you tell? Aren’t we condemned to a relativism and subjectivism of Big Thoughts? How can we make any progress towards the single, exclusive truth of existence?

No popular Big Thinker ever engages in the science of Big Thinking. This science involves not the Big Thought itself, but what character the Big Thought must have in order to be a valid candidate for the final explanation of everything. If your Big Thought, no matter how popular it is with the masses, does not have certain characteristics, it is doomed to fail. It might achieve great success and popularity for you, but it will never stand the test of time, or the reality test.

People who are not in the thinking game – almost all of humanity – have no clue how advanced thinking is done. Regardless of how complex a subject might seem to be, it is always born from one very simple flash of inspiration. What the Big Thinkers do is take their simple, basic idea then clothe it in endless arguments, nuance and elaborate ramifications, until the original idea, which anyone could grasp, is so far distant, so heavily shielded, so impenetrably wrapped in intellectual padding, that it’s effectively lost or forgotten. Newcomers then wrestle with the monstrous product of the original idea – the theory it generated – and are unable to get back to the original idea, the simplicity of which is often breathtaking, and usually breathtakingly dumb.

Theories do not fail at page 500 of the theory, or the tenth book on the theory. They in fact fail at the originating idea. The most dangerous ideas are those that are wrong yet are taken to be indisputably right and true. Nietzsche captured the problem perfectly when he said, Success has always been the greatest liar. An idea can be wildly successful regardless of its truth content. Religions are based on simple ideas which have proved astoundingly powerful yet are all demonstrably false.

Look at how potent the Jewish idea of monotheism – one God is responsible for everything – has proved. In the West, paganism, with its proliferation of squabbling gods, was swept away. Yet even monotheism then succumbed to a type of atavistic pagan polytheism. Christianity recast one God as three persons in one God – God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit. The reason for this mutation was that Christians wanted God to be humanized, to have walked amongst them (as Jesus Christ), to be capable of understanding them thanks to having gone through the human experience for himself. God, in these terms, became much more humanly relatable. Yet monotheism as a Trinity was a contradiction in terms and proved deeply offensive to monotheistic purists. Islam produced a new take on monotheism. God (Allah) was depicted as incredibly remote and Jesus Christ re-designated not as one person of God but merely as one of God’s most esteemed prophets, inferior to the Muslim prophet Mohammed, the Last Prophet (the Seal of Prophets).

The human side of Islam was provided not by God walking amongst us but by a human being – Mohammed – being chosen by God to walk amongst us and serve as his direct point of contact on earth.

Christians regard Jesus Christ as God on earth. Mohammed is not considered by Muslims as God on earth, but, rather, as a perfect human on earth, rendered perfect through his interaction with God. The better a Muslim you are, the more like Mohammed you are, the more like God you will be. In Christianity, a Christian seeks to emulate God (Jesus Christ), while in Islam a Muslim seeks to emulate Mohammed, a perfect human being, most favored by God.

Catholics seek to ingest divinity via transubstantiation – the conversion of the substance of the Eucharistic elements into the body and blood of Christ at consecration, only the appearances of bread and wine remaining – and thus be closer to God though the miracle of the Catholic Mass. That’s the direct route to divinity. Others prefer the indirect route of reading holy scripture and having faith.

The point to take away is that huge religions, with vast, complex theologies and tens of millions of words written about them, can develop out of extremely simple and usually childish ideas.

What is Judaism reduced to its core idea? – there is a Creator, and he chose the Jews as his special tribe on earth. What’s not to like, if you’re a Jew? But why would anyone else like it? And no one else did. The Christians and Muslims kept the idea of the Creator but got rid of the Jews as his Chosen People and assumed that identity for themselves.

What is Christianity reduced to its core idea? – God loved us so much that he himself went through the human experience and saved us from ourselves by showing how we ought to live, and giving his life for us to placate God the Father for our original and otherwise unpardonable disobedience.

What is Islam reduced to its core idea? – God loved us so much that he chose a simple, illiterate everyman (Mohammed) to communicate God’s will and instructions to us, hence the Koran, the infallible Word of God transmitted to us via a perfect human being (the Last Prophet).

Every Abrahamist buys into one of these ideas then runs with it and bases their core identity on it.

More or less no time is expended by any practicing Jew on pondering the validity of the core idea of Judaism. The same goes for Christianity and Islam. Abrahamists adopt whatever version of Abrahamism they were brainwashed to believe as children, not which one makes the most sense to them.

You will not find a book written by any Jew in which the defining idea of Judaism is challenged to see if it makes any sense. Does the idea of a Creator make much sense? Do we need a Creator? Does the idea of a Creator who is not only obsessed with this little planet earth but also with a particular little, inconsequential tribe of earth-people living in the ancient Middle East make any sense? Hasn’t the Creator got better things to do with his time, and more important things to think about, than the domestic dramas of human beings, and tribal vanity and narcissism?

The idea of God has been reduced by the Jews to something staggeringly mundane; human-all-too-human. It looks much more like the case that the Jewish God is a Jewish construct than humanity is a construct of an all-powerful Jewish Creator. However, no practicing Jew will ever reach that conclusion. It’s an impossible conclusion for them, a conclusion that anyone that believes in Judaism cannot, by definition, ever arrive at. To reach it is to cease to be a Jew.

The existence of the Jewish God is not in any way proved by Judaism, but no follower of Judaism would ever have any desire to contemplate for even one moment the disproof of the God of the Jews. That is the ultimate taboo. To contemplate it is already to have become an apostate, a heretic, a blasphemer, an infidel. All the science, philosophy, mathematics, psychology, theological deconstruction, claims of rival religions, and so on, will never make the slightest different to a Jew who believes in Judaism. The same goes for Christianity and Islam. The same goes for everything.

Once a person has invested their identity in something, it’s almost impossible to retrieve them since you are asking them to change their identity, which is more or less unthinkable to them. Only monumental disillusion with their belief system can bring people back from whatever identity hole they have jumped into. Yet even the biggest disappointments aren’t guaranteed to end a person’s faith. Look at the Jews. Their capital city of Jerusalem was conquered by the Babylonians, the Temple of their God destroyed, and they were all marched into slavery. To a normal person, that would signal the end of Judaism as a viable religion. After all, the facts on the ground had definitively refuted it: the Jewish God had been vanquished. Yet the Jews saw things differently. They concluded not that their God was false but that they were false … they weren’t good enough Jews. Had they been better Jews, so they reasoned, their God would not have abandoned them. Thus, incredibly, they became even more fervent Jews after their apocalyptic defeat by the Babylonians.

Later, the Greeks kicked their asses, and then the Romans expelled them from their Promised Land. Every European nation persecuted them and, finally, in the Holocaust, six million of them were murdered by the Nazis. The question has to be asked – is there anything at all, excepting their total annihilation, that would convince the Jews they are wrong, that everything they believe is provably false? Their God, who once allegedly helped them all the time (Exodus, and all that), never seems to help them at all now, no matter how good they are at being Jewish. Their thesis that to be a better Jew is the way to gain divine help has been as comprehensively refuted as their God. They were saved in WWII only by the intervention of the communist atheists of the Soviet Union, by the glorious Red Army, not by their God who supposedly prized them above all other peoples in the created universe and entered into a solemn and unbreakable Covenant with them.

The Jews are no aberration. The rest of humanity is just as bad, but in different ways, regarding different absurd beliefs.

People aren’t capable of abandoning certain ideas once these have become sufficiently deeply embedded in them. The rightness or wrongness of the ideas is never an issue. They are simply accepted without further debate or doubt. A believer will zealously challenge any belief bar his own, which he clings to as if it were his very life. He is 100% skeptical towards all beliefs bar the one he believes in, towards which he is 100% credulous. This is confirmation bias in its purest, most dangerous and extreme form.

Big Ideas go wrong immediately. As a matter of simple logic, the objective world has only one right answer – the actual truth of reality. But if only one answer is right then it automatically follows that all other answers are wrong, and, moreover, they are wrong straight away, right off the bat, right at the instant they are first conceived. If humanity were actually interested in the truth, it would go through each defining idea, each Big Thought, in minute detail to discover where it goes wrong. Because we know that all but one must be, and are, wrong.

Most people in today’s West believe, or are led to believe, that science has some kind of special connection to the truth. So, what is the defining idea of science, its Big Thought? It’s that observing the world is the only way to understand the world. Well, is that true?

What do you use to observe the world? – your sense organs. These are known to be limited, fallible, unreliable and subject to various biases and delusions. The last thing they are are organs of truth and guarantors of truth, so why should they be the best candidates for being the supreme means to reveal the truth to us? In fact, they seem like extremely poor candidates, and Descartes, the first modern philosopher, certainly invested no confidence in them. It’s completely unknown to what extent the senses accurately show us the world out there. We may superimpose any amount of internal processing – stuff that comes from inside us – over what came to us from the outside, hence we can’t disentangle the external (objective) from the internal (subjective).

The fundamental problem for science is that nothing observed is self-explanatory. You can’t know the truth of something just by the act of observing it. All you get is a bunch of data. Then you have to do something with the data. That secondary process is all about interpretation, not observation.

Let’s grant that your observations are 100% perfect every time. So what? Your subsequent interpretations might be 0% correct because you are always using a fallacious interpretive framework. What if your observations are wonderful but your schema for understanding them is woeful?

In ancient times, divination, the predecessor of science, involved close observation of the natural world. In ancient Rome, an augur was a religious official who carefully observed natural signs, such as the behavior of birds or the state of the entrails of a sacrificed sheep, and interpreted these as an indication of divine approval or disapproval for a proposed action. So, there you go … precise attention to observation of nature, yet an insane paradigm for interpreting the observed data.

Observable data, in and of itself, tells you nothing about reality. You could apply any interpretation at all to it, no matter how lunatic. The interpretive paradigm is always much more important than what is observed. The interpretive framework is never perceived. It is always the product of conceiving, an entirely different activity from perceiving.

The scientific method starts with observation (perceiving), then rapidly changes tack. To understand what you have observed, you have to formulate a hypothesis. Hypothesis construction is not an act that involves any observation at all. If step 1) of the scientific method concerns perceiving (observation of the external world) then step 2) concerns conceiving (formation of a hypothesis to account for the observed data), an entirely different cognitive activity. When does science ever explain this fraught transition from perceiving to conceiving? Are these compatible exercises? If you have switched from perception to conception, are you any longer in the perception game, or have you actually left that game and started an entirely new and different game with very different and incompatible rules of engagement?

Science believes it is about perception but it’s actually about conception. What science does is apply a perceptual constraint to the type of conception that a scientist can engage in. Where religion allows people to conceive of entities (objects of faith or mystical insight) that cannot be observed, hence religion is non-empirical, science demands that scientists form concepts that in some way relate or correspond to observable entities, hence science is empirical. The key point is that both religion and science are conceptual activities, not perceptual, though science chooses to apply a perceptual limiting factor to its conceptions. This in fact gets it nowhere. Ancient Roman augurs applied conceptions to their perceptions yet talked nonsense the whole time. What science does to be successful is apply to its observations mathematics, a purely conceptual subject that has nothing to do with scientific observations and experiments. Therefore, the scientific method based on observations is fundamentally fallacious, yet not a single scientist sees through the con. They all accept the method uncritically, because they want to and can’t imagine doing anything else. Even though theoretical scientists constantly produce theories with no observable consequences, science proceeds as if it were some marvelously consistent subject, wholly predicated on real-world observations that keep it grounded in reality. They are totally deluded, as deluded as religious types.

The part of science that works is the mathematical part, and that part has nothing to do with observation. No ancient Roman augurs were mathematicians. Like modern scientists, they were keen sensing types, observers and experimentalists, yet everything they said was absurd. Mathematics was lacking in their paradigm and it is mathematics, not observations, that in fact links science to reality. If you want the simplest possible proof, remove mathematics from science and see for yourself what is left – nothing but the religion of materialism and empiricism, no more sophisticated than medieval alchemy and ancient augury.

Science is a vast, self-contradicting fraud, but try telling that to a scientist. You would get as far telling a Muslim that the Koran is a vast, self-contradicting fraud. These people don’t want to listen and won’t listen. They are smitten, brainwashed, by the fallacious Big Idea around which their identity is now based.

Scientists can’t get enough of trumpeting the value of the scientific method. Have you ever heard a scientist questioning the validity and logic of the scientific method? That would be as likely as finding a Jew questioning the validity and logic of the Torah.

A quotation spuriously attributed to Voltaire says, To learn who rules over you, simply find out who you are not allowed to criticize. Similarly, to learn what Big Idea rules over you and defines your identity, simply reflect on which idea you never doubt, never criticize, never subject to any critical scrutiny because you can’t conceive of criticizing it. This is the idea you take for granted, and is invariably where you sell yourself the Lie that prevents you from ever accessing the Truth. The thing you take as gospel is always the mistake, except in the unique case where your gospel concerns the right, exclusive answer to existence.

Here’s the thing. If you do not spend years studying the nature that the right answer must possess in order to be the right answer, what makes you think that the particular half-baked idea you support, which you uncritically assume is right, is beyond reproach and beyond challenge? When have you ever seriously considered its merits in relation to those of its rivals? How many Muslims have spent as much time researching Christianity or Hinduism as they have Islam? How many scientists have studied philosophy and carefully considered the grand philosophies of the world’s greatest philosophical thinkers?

No part of science teaching involves questioning the scientific method. You cannot even be a scientist unless you accept the scientific method. You can be 100% certain that scientists never once question their holy cow. Yet aren’t scientists supposed to be engaged in falsification and verification activities? Shouldn’t Nobel laureates be seeking to falsify the scientific method – given that the whole of science is based on it (so if it’s wrong so is the whole of science!) – or finding definitive verification for it? No scientist does that. There is not one scientific paper on the logical and rational justification of science. Science doesn’t even accept the validity of the principle of sufficient reason. This omission automatically renders science irrational and contrary to reason. Science is perfectly willing and happy to claim that things happen for no reason at all.

Science refuses to engage with philosophy. It dismisses philosophy out of hand. Like any religion, it does not accept any criticism. Any scientist who challenges science in any foundational way is immediately purged from science. Given that science claims to be a subject that promotes freethinking, it’s ironic that there is not a single freethinking scientist on earth, i.e. anyone who feels free to challenge the nostrums of scientism.

Science ridicules religious people for their hostility to freethinking. A scientist is allowed to be as freethinking as he likes towards criticizing religion … but is never allowed to be critically freethinking towards science, which simply makes scientism a fellow religion, resistant to all self-criticism.

Scientists are allowed to take issue with details of specific scientific theories, but they are never allowed to question the framework in which science is conducted, and it would never occur to any scientist to do so. Never forget, the exact location of your blind spot is exactly where your core belief is found. You never see its problems and errors.

The thing you least challenge is the thing you should most challenge if you want to be a genuinely serious Big Thinker. What you should be doing is trying to demolish absolutely everything that anyone puts in front of you, whether you like the idea or not. It’s the idea that is the last one standing that you should support, not some idea you were brainwashed into believing as a child, or you just happened to like because it suited your personality type.

Descartes had the right idea. He used the Method of Doubt to demolish everything that could be doubted, until what was left was that which could not be doubted. Whether he personally succeeded – whether he could have doubted even further – doesn’t detract from the extraordinary value of his method. We must discover what is certain, not what we like. Therefore, the nature of certainty becomes the key issue. Here’s what British science popularizer Professor Brian Cox said: Science is not a priesthood passing down wisdom. It is the only human pursuit that succeeds because it is uncertain. It is uncertain of itself. It challenges itself. There are no universal truths in science. That’s the key to its success. It’s a framework of how we currently think the world works. It is a way – as best as we can – of interrogating nature to try and understand it. Every part of this is a self-serving lie, but at least Cox’s ludicrous ramblings prove that no one who is looking for certainty, the absolute, the infallible, the final answer to existence, should ever follow the scientific path.

Cox is contradicted by the American science popularizer Neil deGrasse Tyson who said, The good thing about science is that it’s true whether or not you believe in it. Hmmm, no uncertainty there. Religious conviction, in fact. This is the whole problem with science. It claims not to be about certainty but is in fact totally convinced it is the sole path to genuine knowledge. DeGrasse Tyson said, Philosophy can really mess you up. … I always felt like maybe there was a little too much question-asking in philosophy. ... My concern here is that the philosophers believe they are actually asking deep questions about nature. Listening to this guy is like listening to a rabbi or imam – a religious fanatic that never once doubts his belief system, and pours scorn on anything or anyone that does doubt it.

The Truth is not what you want it to be. The Truth is what it is, regardless of your feelings towards it. The Truth is 100% certain. If it weren’t, it would be an opinion, not the Truth. The Truth existed before human science, therefore human science cannot tell us what the Truth is unless it can explain the conditions that produced the scientific world. It cannot. No serious thinker could ever accept science as a coherent, complete and consistent system. It’s riddled with fallacies and contradictions. Science, ultimately, is pragmatic. It has use value but no truth value. To the extent that science intersects with truth, it’s exclusively via the mathematics it illegitimately uses (it has no logical right to use a non-empirical subject to defend and advance an empirical subject).

If you want the Truth, you can’t go to religion, philosophy or science. So where will you go? There is only one other destination, the one humanity least likes: mathematics. It’s part and parcel of the human condition that the Truth resides exactly where humanity doesn’t want it to reside. It would rather go anywhere else than where the Truth actually lives. Everywhere else, anywhere else, is preferable. That’s humanity for you.

The Kantian Mind Model

Kant’s undertaking is a new description of the human mind. It falls, he says, into two parts: the part which perceives and the part which thinks. The perceiving part of the mind receives the impressions conveyed by the senses, and Kant called these impressions ‘particulars’; the thinking part is the organ of the understanding and the objects of the understanding he calls ‘concepts’. The application of concepts to particulars constitutes ‘synthetic judgments’. … ‘Judgment’ is Kant’s term for ‘proposition’. [Judgments are either analytic or synthetic.] – R. J. Hollingdale

Kant’s philosophy goes wrong immediately. His error resides in the dualism he introduces involving perception and conception. Straight away, a world out there is indicated (something non-conceptual that provides perceptual raw material), which is to be contrasted with a world in here – a mind that involves conception and applies conception to perception. Kant has rejected a coherent monism and created a disjunction between mind and matter, concept and percept, which will inevitably infect everything he says from then on. The very idea that Kant had to cure the problems of philosophy simply raised a whole new bunch of problems. It is always thus in philosophy.

So, Kant’s model of reality explores two different modes: that of perceiving (sensing) and that of conceiving (thinking). According to Kant, our cognitive activity directed at empirical reality involves an inextricable combination of sensory input and thinking applied to it in order to create understanding. Neither sensory input alone nor thinking alone allows us to comprehend reality. We have both a sensory apparatus and a thinking apparatus and they are tightly integrated. This raises profound difficulties from the point of view of science since Kant is asserting that thinking is at least as important as sensing for understanding our reality. Where science is all about observing, Kant’s system also requires us to contemplate a conceptual apparatus that cannot be observed, but which is decisive for how and what we observe. He has thus entered the non-empirical domain, which he refers to as transcendental. This is beyond science.

Science’s method privileges sensing over thinking while Kant’s method in fact privileges thinking over sensing since it says that without a conceptual apparatus to frame sensory data, all such data would be meaningless. The senses would yield nothing that made any sense.

Kant’s philosophy can be reduced to one sentence: Perception without conception is blind; conception without perception is empty. Concepts are forms – boxes – and percepts are content, which populate the boxes. If there are no boxes to organize the content, the content is just noise – chaos. The boxes are the essential provider of order.

Where Kant began with the boxes and then filled them (concepts provide the framework for percepts), science in a sense starts off with chaos – blind percepts – and then tries to construct a hypothesis that gives them some kind of box to order them.

The single action that revolutionized science had nothing to do with observation, even though science regards observation as its defining activity. Instead, it was how science organized, boxed, and framed the sensory data it had collected that proved critical. It did so using mathematics – the quintessential conceptual, rational, logical, ordering subject that deals with pure form.

Where Kant made conceiving and perceiving two modes of mind, science takes the external world to be the world of sensory data, with mathematics providing the internal world of form that we then apply to the sensory data to convert it into a formula that we can apply in any other compatible situation.

For science, mathematics is not real. It is just some abstraction that humans apply to sense data to give it a form and formula. Yet isn’t it much more logical to assume that the mathematics is actually out there in the world, providing the world’s real (not manmade) form? We don’t supply form to the world. It supplies its own form, and what would it use other than mathematics, the simplest possible form-giver?

Scientists apply what they regard as manmade mathematics to nature. Nature, they claim, is not mathematical in any way. If math is invented and has no connection to reality, why is it the only thing that allows us to convert science into endlessly valuable and useful formulae? How can unreality give form to reality? Scientists are completely unable to explain how such a process could ever work. Isn’t it much more natural and logical to assume that the world inherently exhibits mathematical form? – i.e. the world is mathematical – and when we use mathematics to work out what is going on, we are not applying manmade form to nature but discovering the mathematical formulae nature uses to form and order itself. We are not projecting manmade mathematical form onto nature, we are discovering the natural mathematical form that orders reality. Mathematical form is inbuilt into nature. It is not fabricated by us. Science loathes that idea, i.e. that mathematics is true reality. It doesn’t accord with the sacred cow of observation. Reality, as mathematics, is conceptual rather than perceptual.

Mathematics is traditionally thought of in terms of conception, not perception, hence