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Transcendental Mathematics
by Mike Hockney
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562 pages8 hours
Summary
Science is about the mundane, visible world. Religion is about the transcendent, invisible world. Atheists believe that science is the only way to explain the world. Agnostics think it’s the best way. But is science actually a system of explanation at all, or merely a good problem-solving tool and method that achieves practical success in the observable world? Isn’t science, like God, in need of an explanation? What is its ontological and epistemological basis? What limitations does it have? How does it define “Truth”?
Immanuel Kant, via his philosophy of transcendental idealism, attempted to explain science within a philosophical and even religious context. This attempt ultimately failed, but the project itself need not be abandoned. This book shows, via a detailed investigation of Kant’s philosophy, that the only way to make sense of science is via transcendental mathematics.
Publisher: Lulu.comReleased: Jun 16, 2015ISBN: 9781326311643Format: book
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Transcendental Mathematics - Mike Hockney
Transcendental Mathematics
by
Mike Hockney
Published by Hyperreality Books
Copyright © Mike Hockney 2015
The right of Mike Hockney to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the author, except in the case of a reviewer, who may quote brief passages embodied in critical articles or in a review.
Table of Contents
Transcendental Mathematics
Table of Contents
Introduction
The Moulding Mind
The Three Types
The Proofs of God
The Three Problems
The Nexus
The Trinity
The Cosmological Argument
Existence as Predicate?
Not God
The Three Faculties of Soul
The Transcendental
The Eternity Argument
The Ontology of Mathematics
Cogito Ergo Sum
Transcendence
Inner and Outer
The Truth of Space and Time
Limits?
Pure Reason
The Thing in Itself
The Ontological Argument
Ens Realissimum
Different Directions
The Mind
The Transcendental Ego versus The Empirical Ego
The Unreachable?
Means and Ends
Nothing Higher
The Noumenon
Kant’s Four Perspectives
Inner and Outer Intuition
Analytic and Synthetic
The Unconditioned
The Mirror of the Mind?
The Mind World
The Absurdity?
The Immortal Principle
Phædrus
The Universe and Us
The Tools of Understanding
The Prior State
The Metaphysical Deduction
Concepts and Percepts
The Answer
The Transcendental Self
Ego and Non-Ego
It’s Not How It Appears
The Beautiful and the Sublime
The Beginning of Knowledge?
The Godlike View
The Spectators and the Theatre
Soul, World, God
Knowing the Unknowable?
Transcendental Idealism
Infinite Beings
Different Selves
Space and Time Twice?
Reason and Evolution
How Can We Know?
The Third Eye
The Unconditioned Absolute
The Symmetry Imperative
Nobel Idiocy
The I
The Imaginary Focus
The Eternal Laws
Mathematical Experience
Experience versus Knowledge
Antinomies
Clever Clogs?
The Triple Problem
The First Law of Life
The Scarab Beetle
Hume’s Fork
Free Souls
Termination Point
Eternal Energy
The Meaning of Number
The Dialectic
Sophia
Gnosis
Authority
Miracles
The Natural Deceiver?
A Different, Higher Understanding
The Non-Vanishing Illusion
The Transcendental Dialectic
Worms and Gods
Numerical Souls
Conclusion
Introduction
Science is about the mundane, visible world. Religion is about the transcendent, invisible world. Atheists disregard the invisible and believe that science is the only way to explain the observable world. Agnostics think science is the best way to do it, while remaining open-minded that there may be a non-scientific world out there.
Despite science’s power, it has a fundamental problem. Is it actually a system of explanation at all, or merely a good problem-solving tool? Is it a method that achieves practical success in the observable world only by using crude ad hoc and heuristic techniques, combined with materialistic ideas that are not connected to ultimate reality at all? Atomic theory, for example, has proved immensely productive, but do atoms really exist? Given the wave-particle duality indicated by quantum mechanics, what are we to suppose atoms actually are? They certainly aren’t tiny but unambiguous lumps of solid matter such as the ancient Greeks believed in. Atoms, in the modern sense, are almost entirely empty space, and look more and more like bundles of mathematical information describing a host of potentialities and force fields.
If atoms are actually mathematical functions rather than solid lumps of matter
, aren’t we playing a word game when we say that objects are made of atoms? Aren’t they really made of math? After all, it’s math we use to define their properties.
Imagine we never referred to atoms
at all, but merely to mathematical functions. Wouldn’t our conception of reality be 100% different? We would no longer be talking about a material
world, but a world of interacting mathematical functions, i.e. we would have moved away from a scientific to a mathematical, informational conception of reality.
Some two hundred and fifty years ago, Jesuit mathematician Roger Joseph Boscovich developed an atomic theory where he sought to marry Newton’s gravitational theory and Leibniz’s theory of monad-points. He held that that the ultimate elements of matter are indivisible point-atoms, which are centres of force, and this force varies in proportion to distance, and manifests either attraction or repulsion depending on how far apart one point-atom is from another point-atom.
Wikipedia says, [Boscovich] developed a concept of ‘impenetrability’ as a property of hard bodies which explained their behaviour in terms of force rather than matter. Stripping atoms of their matter, impenetrability is disassociated from hardness and then put in an arbitrary relationship to elasticity. Impenetrability has a Cartesian sense that more than one point cannot occupy the same location at once.
Boscovich denied that bodies were composed of continuous matter and instead claimed that they comprised countless point-like structures
reflecting a single, complex force equation (the first modern, scientific, grand unified theory of everything).
Well, given quantum mechanics, can you clarify the difference between mass
and force
? A force conception of reality is entirely different from one based on matter. It can be made entirely consistent with mind, and not matter, as the basis of reality. Moreover, what’s the difference between force and ontological mathematics? Leibniz said, The very substance of things consists in a force for acting and being acted upon.
His metaphysical monads were force centres, and could equally be considered as mathematical centres.
If mathematical forces can produce the illusion of matter, why should we accept the existence of matter at all? Bishop Berkeley said that matter is simply an idea in our minds, and no one has ever disproved him. In other words, the materialist hypothesis is an assumption, belief and opinion, not any kind of fact
.
Wikipedia says, Energy is a physical quantity that describes the amount of work that can be performed by a force.
Via E = mc², Einstein proposed that mass is a form of energy (hence directly connected to force). Via his theory of special relativity, Einstein said that mass can change according to speed, and become infinite at light speed (indicating infinite energy and infinite force). Einstein’s theory of general relativity – summarised as matter tells spacetime how to curve, and curved spacetime tells matter how to move
– then linked mass/energy/force to space and time. Referring to matter
, Einstein said, Concerning matter, we have been all wrong. What we have called matter is energy, whose vibration has been so lowered as to be perceptible to the senses. There is no matter.
Thomas Kuhn, explaining his Incommensurability Thesis
in which he highlights decisive and incompatible shifts in the meanings of key terms in science from one theory to another, said of mass
, … the physical referents of these Einsteinian concepts are by no means identical with those of the Newtonian concepts that bear the same name. (Newtonian mass is conserved; Einsteinian is convertible with energy. Only at low relative velocities may the two be measured in the same way, and even then they must not be conceived to be the same.)
So, at the end of all of this, what on earth are we supposed to understand by any scientific reference to mass
? Isn’t it just a label with an ever-changing meaning? It seems to be a protean concept involving aspects of force, energy, motion, space, time, matter and light. What’s for sure is that it has no ontological definition (and nor does science ontologically define any of the other things we have just listed). Science has no idea what mass actually is. What it knows
is how to pragmatically measure it via instruments and put the resultant number into a formula to work out something else (which will also end up as a number). Doesn’t that mean that mass is really just a number? Isn’t that the real logic
of science? Isn’t science just a means of labelling numbers as if they were empirical, material things?
Isn’t scientific materialism, like God, in urgent need of an explanation? What is its ontological and epistemological basis? What limitations does it have? How does it define Truth
? Don’t its claims regarding the basis of existence collapse under any serious scrutiny?
Science is merely a model that its practitioners manipulate successfully. However, a model isn’t reality.
Imagine that the scientists of an alien species on a faraway planet subscribe to a model in which there is no concept of matter, and the entities that human scientists refer to as material atoms, their scientists refer to as mental packets of mathematical information called monads
. Presuming that their model of reality is every bit as successful as humanity’s, how would we decide who’s right? Their scientific model of reality is based on mind as the true reality; humanity’s on matter. These are totally different conceptions of what is fundamentally real.
People imagine that science tells us about reality, but it simply doesn’t. Science tells us about the scientific model of reality, and nothing else. At no point does it tell us what reality actually is. It’s impossible to link science’s model of reality to ultimate reality. There’s no conceivable bridge, no necessary and inevitable links. No matter how successful a model may be, it’s never anything other than an interpretation of reality, unless it can analytically prove that it necessarily and eternally describes reality itself.
Consider quantum mechanics and Einsteinian relativity theory. These are two highly successful, highly experimentally verified theories, but they are based on two mutually exclusive models of reality (which is why science has been trying for decades, with no success, to unify them). If no experiment can be devised to falsify one of these theories, then science has to continue in its present absurd state – simultaneously endorsing two totally contradictory models of reality.
Whatever your opinion of science, it’s a simple fact that it’s in the modelling game and not in the Truth business, and there’s no way for its models to prove themselves reflective of reality itself. For sure, these models may approximate reality in some way, but in what way? We just don’t know. We would need to know what ultimate reality is in order to understand how good an approximation science is to it, but we can’t know what reality is just by looking out of our window, or conducting a few experiments that already assume a particular scientific model of reality.
How many scientists support the view that we live in a mathematical rather than scientific world? None at all! Yet mathematics is essential to the success of science, and all scientific theories are expressed in quasi-mathematical terms. Why is mathematics so indispensable to the success of science if this is not in fact a mathematical world? What scientist has ever explained what mathematics actually is ontologically, and, if scientists can’t even explain what mathematics is, why should we imagine that they can explain what anything else is? If science can’t do without mathematics, but doesn’t know what mathematics is, how can it be credible as a putative explanation of everything
? You’d need to be mad to believe that science is explaining reality. What it’s doing is modelling – or simulating – reality and that’s an entirely different thing. As Nietzsche said, it’s describing, not explaining.
It provides us with a sensory Mythos – a narrative we use to make sense of things. However, all narratives are fiction. Whenever you read a popular science book by someone such as Brian Greene, never forget that you are not reading anything about reality, but merely about the scientific materialist Mythos. All science books are literally science fiction. The fact that it’s an elaborate Mythos that most people struggle to understand doesn’t make it true. After all, no scientist on earth understands what quantum mechanics actually means ... what is tells us about reality.
If scientists were more careful thinkers, they would realise that Einsteinian relativity is every bit as bizarre and unreal as quantum mechanics. Neither can be used to establish a formal ontology and epistemology, and so both are false. Their practical success is to do with the mathematics they use, not with the materialist and empiricist manner in which their mathematics is interpreted.
Consider the scientists of the world depicted in the famous sci-fi movie The Matrix. If those scientists managed to work out the exact rules of the simulation in which they were trapped, they would then be forced to concede that they had no idea whatsoever about what lay beyond that simulation. The scientists of our world are in exactly the same position. They have constructed a model of reality, but, by definition, they have no idea what lies beyond that model, and, equally, they have no idea, and no way of proving, whether their model has any true connection with Reality.
A model that works well in various situations is not, ipso facto, a model that reflects Truth. The only thing you can conclude is that the model approximates reality quite well, but Truth isn’t about approximation, it’s about necessity, infallibility, immutability and eternity! It must be 100% incontestable, or it’s mere opinion, conjecture, belief and interpretation.
Immanuel Kant, via his philosophy of transcendental idealism, attempted to explain science within a definitive philosophical, and even religious, context. His ambitious attempt ultimately failed, but the project itself need not be abandoned.
This book shows, via a detailed investigation of Kant’s monumental philosophy, that the only way to make sense of science, and to genuinely link it to ultimate reality, is via transcendental mathematics.
What Kant got disastrously wrong was the ontology and transcendence of mathematics. He failed to successfully define, in a complete and consistent manner, what mathematics is. Once this failure is rectified, a full explanation of science can emerge. It’s not one that relies on God
but on a God Equation – the foundation of the true grand unified, final theory of everything. Only a single, analytic, precise, infallible, absolute mathematical formula can explain the whole of existence – just as Boscovich understood.
This world of ours is not a scientific world but a mathematical world, of which science is a particular interpretation (actually, misinterpretation), based on the fallible, unreliable, evolutionary human sense organs.
Mathematics, unlike science, is compatible with religion – with an invisible, transcendent reality – via the two most mysterious and mystical numbers of all – zero and infinity. All the deep issues of existence flow from these two numbers that surpass all possible sensory experiences (i.e. everything on which science relies).
Science, built on mathematics, is a model of reality. Mathematics itself is reality! Science works as well as it does purely because it uses mathematics, hence can’t help but approximate mathematical reality.
Science regards itself as real, and mathematics as some weird abstraction. In fact, the exact reverse is true: mathematics is reality, and science is a weird, materialistic, sensory, contingent, temporal misinterpretation of immaterial, non-sensory, necessary, eternal, mathematics.
You are about to enter the rabbit hole. You have no idea how deep it goes!
The Moulding Mind
The first thing you have to grasp about reality is that it’s about the mind, and not matter (as science fallaciously claims).
Kant boldly argued that the mind moulds the reality we encounter. This means that knowledge
, in Kant’s system, is much more to do with the constitution of our own minds than with anything outside them. In other words, we never gain genuine knowledge of external objects, as science supposes. Rather, we come to know
objects by virtue of what we impose on those objects, and that means we don’t know those objects in themselves at all. We have no way of knowing what they are like in the absence of our minds, in the absence of how we mentally construct them. Knowledge, in the Kantian view, is not something we take from the world, but something we ourselves superimpose on it. We never gain knowledge of the world; we only gain knowledge
of how our minds process and interpret the world. That’s a very different type of knowledge.
There are objects and there are the minds that contemplate those objects. We, as minds, can never avoid our contemplation of objects, so we can never know of an uncontemplated object ... an object-in-itself ... but that means we can never know ultimate reality. We are always trapped by how we process, interpret and model reality via the constitution of our minds.
If Kant is right, the entire scientific project – what it believes it’s doing and accomplishing – is radically undermined. Scientific subjects such as cosmology, quantum mechanics and relativity theory would have to be considered in relation to the inbuilt structures of our minds, and not as subjects that stand on their own, independent of our conception of them.
But is Kant right? In fact, neither Kant nor science is right. The correct answer to everything is mathematics.
In transcendental, ontological mathematics, the world is made of nothing but minds (monads), and minds are made of sinusoidal waves, hence the world is made of mathematical sinusoids. When the mind looks out at the world, it’s looking at exactly the same stuff of which it is itself made, and that’s exactly why it can interact with it, experience it and know it. The world
is simply an externalised version of our internalised mind.
The world
is the product of the Monadic Collection – the ensemble of all monads – but that doesn’t alter the fact that it’s a mental construct. Precisely because all monads contribute to it, it’s an objective mental edifice, with systematic rules, rather than a subjective dream
where the rules can change at whim.
Our individual, subjective minds inhabit, we might say, a collective, objective dream. When we go to sleep, we remove ourselves from the objective dreamworld and enter our own subjective dreamworld. When we awake, we leave our private dream and reinsert ourselves into the public dream. Mathematics is the language of dreams, both private and public. Mathematics unifies everything, and allows us to know the nature of the world in itself.
We have mathematical minds that look out at a world made by mathematical minds. There is no disastrous and unbridgeable knowledge gulf between objects and the minds that contemplate them given that those minds constructed them in the first place!
Once you become a master of mathematics, you become a master of dreams, and then you can be as all-powerful as Neo in The Matrix.
*****
[Kant held that we receive] impressions from the environment, from the ‘thing-in-itself’, but that the mind is of such a nature that it shapes these impressions into ideas. The mind, for him, is like a bowl with many crevices and strange depressions in its contour. When one pours water into the bowl, it takes the shape of the bowl, filling all the crevices. In the same way the environment pours impressions into the mind and they are received by the mind and shaped in accord with the nature of this mind.
– S. E. Frost, Jr., Basic Teachings of the Great Philosophers
The problem with this analogy is that we know we are pouring water into a bowl. In Kant’s system, we have no idea what the impressions are that we are putting into the mind. We can never know what they are, so how can we refer to them at all? Why assume that the mind isn’t doing the whole thing? Who needs unknowable impressions
?
[According to Kant] we organise impressions into ideas. But these are ideas of the mind and cannot be applied to a world outside the mind. This leads to the conclusion that we cannot know the world outside the mind.
– S. E. Frost, Jr.
If there is no world outside the mind (i.e. all things are mental), this argument is fallacious, and we can indeed know everything, which was the position taken by Kant’s successors, Fichte, Schelling and Hegel.
Empiricist philosopher John Locke argued that there is an objective, external world that we can know via our senses (this is also the default position of science). Bishop Berkeley said that we cannot know anything beyond what is in our mind, and, since the material world – being material and not mental – is not in the mind, we cannot know of it (so either it doesn’t exist or might as well not exist since it can have no effect on us). For Berkeley, God (the highest level of mind) gives us the Idea of the objective world that exists externally to us, i.e. it’s not a material world that’s outside us, but the mental world constructed by God for us. (In Illuminism, it’s not God
, but the Monadic Collective that constructs the objective mental world that we all encounter.)
David Hume argued that all we can have are ideas ... a constant stream of them. We don’t know of the reality of anything external, of any God, any soul, any material world. We don’t even know of causation. We might be making it all up as we go along. We might be permanently tripping
, hallucinating, dreaming, fantasising. We can’t form any necessary connection between our ideas and anything we believe lies outside them. It’s as if we’re locked in a permanent subjective dream. So, Hume became ferociously skeptical, nihilistic and solipsistic. Kant’s whole philosophy is an attempt to rebut Hume’s anti-knowledge philosophy.
For Kant, there is an objective, external material world but we can know nothing of it as it is in itself. What we can know is what our mind makes of it, what appearance our mind gives to it, or projects onto it. But we emphatically can never know what it’s like unmediated by mind.
Fichte, Schelling and Hegel argued that there is nothing that is not mind, i.e. there is no non-mental reality external to us. For Hegel, the evolutionary, dialectical task of mind is to reach a full understanding of itself, and thus of all of existence (since everything is mind). This constitutes Absolute Knowledge, God Knowledge.
The Absurdity
While Kant admitted the existence of a world other than the mind, a world from which the mind received impressions, he held that the mind can know nothing of this world, this ‘thing-in-itself.’ The mind receives impressions according to its nature or its categories and shapes them into patterns which conform not to the world outside mind, but to the nature of mind.
– S. E. Frost, Jr.
What’s the point of contending that there’s a world other than the mind? Such a claim immediately raises the problem of Cartesian substance dualism and how two wholly incompatible substances can interact. It violates Occam’s Razor by multiplying entities unnecessarily. If we can explain the world via mind only, we must endeavour to do exactly that, rather than inventing something non-mental called matter
. Matter
is the basis of science’s model of reality, but since there’s no such thing as matter, science’s model is false. Science works as well it does because the objective, mathematical, mental world constructed by the Monadic Collective can be heuristically treated as if it were material. If we think it’s useful, there’s no harm in creating the fiction of matter. However, this fiction becomes disastrous if we then attempt, as science does, to account for mind using the non-mental fiction the mind has constructed. Illuminism dismisses all notion of scientific matter, and accounts for reality purely in terms of mental sinusoidal waves.
All we are required to do is show how such waves can produce the fiction of matter, and this is exactly what Fourier mathematics accomplishes via its ability to translate immaterial, frequency functions into material, spacetime functions. It’s all in the math, in the extraordinary properties of mathematics that dictate 100% of reality.
The silliness of the materialist claim becomes apparent when it has to be conceded, as Berkeley, Hume and Kant showed, that if a non-mental world exists, we can know nothing of it in itself. In that case, how do we even know it exists? Why do we bother referring to it all? Why not accept that it’s a world made of exactly the same stuff as our minds? That was the real problem Kant should have addressed. Instead he invented a different problem: how can mind know
a non-mental world. His answer was that mind can know
only the appearance it places over matter, but can’t know matter in itself.
In Illuminism, everything is made of analytic sinusoidal waves, grouped in complete and consistent sets into autonomous, monadic mathematical minds, meaning that everything is knowable mathematically, and there is absolutely nothing outside this mathematical system. There is no non-sinusoidal reality.
The Corporeal World
Take away the thinking subject and the entire corporeal world will vanish, for it is nothing but the appearance in the sensibility of our subject.
– Kant
Take away minds (monads) and there is no world at all, least of all a corporeal world of space, time and matter. Matter, space and time are produced via collective Fourier spacetime mathematics applied to individual Fourier frequency singularities (monads). In the cosmic state prior to the Big Bang (which was a mathematical, Fourier event), there is only the world in itself ... immaterial and outside space and time. That world is the noumenal, mental world of the ontological mathematical Singularity, made of nothing but monads (comprising sinusoidal waves). There is nothing else.
If everyone in the world went to sleep at once, there wouldn’t be a tangible world anymore (for the duration of their collective sleep). What would exist would be mental, mathematical information, capable of being interpreted as a tangible world as soon as a waking mind encounters it. The world we experience and observe is the world that results from how our minds process and interpret sinusoidal wavefunctions.
*****
Although Kant denies the existence of a corporeal world, such as scientists conceive of, he does not deny the existence of some kind of corporeal precursor, some sort of Aristotelian prime matter
, onto which we project corporeal forms with our minds. He does not accept that there is no corporeal world at all, either in actuality or potentiality, either phenomenally or noumenally. He does not agree with Berkeley that there are only minds and their ideas, and he does not accept the Leibnizian thesis that the real, unseen, noumenal world is made of nothing but monadic minds. So, there is a fundamentally materialist, corporeal element in his so-called idealist
thinking about ultimate reality. This means he’s not a true idealist at all. He’s much closer to empiricism and materialism than rationalism and idealism, much closer to Newtonian science than Leibnizian mathematics. Like so many people, he was fooled by the apparent success of science, and didn’t realise that mathematics was the source of this success. (Without mathematics, science
is just medieval alchemy!)
*****
"Kant held that the understanding cannot know but that which is experienced. However, reason can go beyond this and conceive of a world of which we can have no actual experience. Thus it transcends, rises above experience, and gives us transcendent principles.
Reason gives man an idea of soul as the summation of all mental processes. Although we can never experience the soul, the idea of the soul has value and therefore it is legitimate for us to think of it.
– S. E. Frost, Jr.
Kant has to use reason to transcend the understanding
on which his philosophy is predicated, yet, given his own philosophy, this process must be illegitimate since we can have no experience of this domain of pure, non-empirical understanding and thus it’s purely speculative. We cannot know and can never know that Kant’s scheme is true. We are simply expected to accept it.
Kant used the adjective transcendental
to describe his philosophy because, so he said, only by accepting this unverifiable claim (which transcends our experience) can we account for our a priori knowledge of objects.
*****
There is no knowledge without a knower. Imagine the first instant of the Big Bang conceived by scientists. No knowledge
existed in that system (since there were no knowers present). In fact, according to scientific empiricism, knowledge
comes into existence only when lifeless, mindless material atoms miraculously arrange themselves into human beings capable of observing and experiencing the world. Knowledge, according to science, jumps into existence out of non-existence via illusory or epiphenomenal minds – since science denies the autonomous existence of mind – with no causal efficacy and no free will. Try working that out! It means that knowledge
is itself wholly illusory.
As for Kant, knowledge
enters his world only at the point at which minds are designed (by whom or what?!) to generate it. But since it’s constructed knowledge, it cannot be real knowledge (independent of our construction).
With Illuminism, we can have real knowledge – knowledge of eternal, necessary, ontological, transcendental mathematics. With this real knowledge, we can work out exactly what state preceded the Big Bang, despite having no conceivable experience of that state, and no possible means to observe it.
If you do not accept mathematics (rationalism) as the basis of knowledge, if you insist on empiricism, then you can never know what state the universe was in prior to the Big Bang, and that means you can never know what existence is in itself. That’s an unassailable fact.
Knowing
?
Locke: there is an external material world that we can know via our senses. This is the common sense
view.
Berkeley: the external world is mental, not material, and is created by God as an act of creative thought. (God created the world out of nothing
in a mental sense ... this makes much more sense than creating a physical world out of nothing.)
Hume: we can never know if there is an external world, whether material or mental. This is an utterly skeptical, solipsistic and nihilistic view.
Kant: there is an external world, but we can know nothing of it beyond the appearance of it that our minds force it to take, and there are vital elements (such as God
and the soul) that take on no appearance at all. This proposed world must, however, be made a kind of material precursor since Kant denies that everything is made of mind (although, given his own philosophy, he cannot possibly know this!).
Classical science: see Locke.
Modern science: there is an external material world but it exists, when unobserved, as abstract mathematical potentiality (via unreal
wavefunctions). Modern science is a total repudiation of classical science, although scientists never bother to talk about this or even think about it. Classical science was entirely deterministic; modern science is predicated on indeterminism, acausation, randomness, chance, accident, statistics and probability.
Ontological mathematics: there is an external mental world that exists as mathematical, noumenal actuality at all times. There is no matter independent of mind.
The Faculty of Reason
Kant believed that the mind had the faculty of Reason, a faculty engaged in bringing together the various processes, events, or occurrences into wholes or Ideas. These Ideas, though not matters of experience, are legitimate bases for man’s reasoning. And the results of such reasoning are to be accepted as legitimate bases for beliefs and actions. ... Kant argues it is legitimate for us to go beyond experience to ‘transcendental ideas’, ideas created by Reason independently of experience.
– S. E. Frost, Jr.
It’s remarkable that when it comes to morality (an inherently interpretative, subjective ideology of nothing but opinion and belief), Kant is willing to grant that we should accept the diktats of Reason (or, rather, his Reason), but will not grant that we should apply Reason to the noumenal world via the perfect, complete and consistent system of ontological mathematics.
*****
Basic to [Kant’s] position was the thesis that there is a higher truth than that of the sciences, the truth of the moral nature of man. The moral law within man is a guarantee of the world beyond the senses, a world in which freedom applies. Faith in this world was Kant’s way of escape from the deadening world of experience.
– S. E. Frost, Jr.
The higher truth than that of the sciences isn’t morality but, rather, the queen of the sciences – mathematics. As for freedom, it’s possible only in relation to eternal, uncaused, causal agents – mathematical monadic minds. These are not subject to scientific determinism. Rather, scientific determinism is one of their collective effects. Monads are the true origin of all causation. They are the uncaused, first causes, the prime movers (just as God
is traditionally considered to be, i.e. each monad has many of the same ontological properties that religion assigns to God: each monad is a potential God).
Pure and Practical Reason
"Belief in God, Hume taught, does not come from man’s reasoning but from human desire for happiness, fear of death and future misery, and the thirst on the part of many for revenge. Because we have these emotional and instinctive characteristics as human beings, we construct a belief in God and then seek to prove that such a belief is justified by reason. Hume writes at length in his attempt to show that while, from the point of view of reason, we must be skeptical about God, from the fact of our impulsive and emotional nature we do believe in God and construct a theory about God which is necessary for us. This approach to the problem of the nature of God was, as we shall see later, the part of Hume’s philosophy which stimulated Immanuel Kant to make a distinction between pure reason and practical reason." – S. E. Frost, Jr.
Practical reason isn’t reason at all – it’s self-serving justification by faith, feelings and the senses. Nietzsche dismissed it as nothing but interpretation. True reason is ontological reason, conveyed by ontological mathematics.
God, for Immanuel Kant, is the notion or highest Idea which man can have, the idea of the highest unity, of the one Absolute Whole including and encompassing everything. This idea transcends experience and cannot be obtained from experience. It is one of the results of reason which brings under one head all happenings.
– S. E. Frost, Jr.
In ontological mathematics, the mathematical Singularity performs the functions of Kant’s God. Hegel’s Absolute performs the same role.
Kant insists that we must never forget that we have formed the idea of the whole of experience. It is nothing that we can know as we do one of our ideas arrived at through experience, for we cannot experience the whole universe. After we have formed this idea, we make an entity of this whole and personify it. Thus for us it becomes God.
– S. E. Frost, Jr.
If we resist personifying this Whole, we do not need to call it God
. It in fact remains what it is: the God Equation = the Principle of Sufficient Reason. It’s perfect and explains everything, and is ontologically implemented as mathematics.
The Principle of Sufficient Reason transcends and fully explains empiricism. Reason can account for experience. Experience cannot account for reason. Reason is the dominant partner, not the servant of experience, as empiricists such as Kant believed. Kant, despite labelling himself a transcendental idealist, was really the last empiricist, his rational
or transcendental empiricism being the cure
for Hume’s skeptical empiricism.
The true successor of Leibniz, the great rationalist, wasn’t Kant, but, rather, Hegel, the great rationalist idealist. Kant belonged to the camp of the empiricists rather than rationalists. His philosophy is really an amalgam of Locke, Berkeley and Hume’s, with some specious rationalism added to try to save it from Hume’s nihilism.
Kant argued that belief in God was necessary for a moral life. However, there is no Creator, and nor is there any morality. We should do the rational thing, and that, ultimately, dialectically, proves the moral thing too (or what passes as the moral thing) since it requires that we should all cooperate with each other and be fair and just to each other.
Through rationalism, we arrive at the core of Kant’s moral philosophy, namely, the categorical imperative: Always act so that you can will the maxim or determining principle of your action to become universal law; act so that you can will that everybody shall follow the principle of your action.
This is not a moral injunction at all, but a rational one. If everyone dutifully obeyed it, we would appear to be living in a perfectly moral world.
Kant used reason in a perverse way to manufacture a fantasy of God. When that fantasy is abolished, what remains is rational, ontological mathematics, which is perfect, eternal, ubiquitous and all- powerful (all the things typically associated with God
). God
is not good
; God
is rational.
"Man cannot experience God. At best, he can blow up or inflate his meagre and small ideas to infinity and call that God. Kant agreed with those who held that we cannot know God through reason. But, he added, we need God. Therefore, reason can bring God back as a necessary unknown." – S. E. Frost, Jr.
What is a necessary unknown
? That’s a rationally untenable concept. How can we know it’s necessary if it’s unknown (and unknowable)?
What reason leads us to is exactly what you’d expect – the Principle of Sufficient Reason as the explanation of everything, as that which gives us knowledge of everything. The Principle of Sufficient Reason is the True God that creates, designs, orders and patterns the universe, and it does so through its ontological expression: causal mathematics. It’s not a person, although it’s implemented via monadic beings. These are perfect mathematically, but wildly imperfect as regards self-knowing. They arrive at self-knowledge only after a great dialectical journey ... an immense cosmic process to render subjective reasoning as infallible as objective reasoning (i.e. mathematical causality).
Kant, in the end, was just an irrational Protestant, trying, like Luther, to justify his faith in God, and having considerable contempt for reason. There’s no need of faith and no need of God. The Principle of Sufficient Reason gives us everything we require: a universe fully knowable through the exercise of mathematical reason.
If you reject reason as the answer to everything, it’s because you yourself are irrational, and would prefer to believe in your feelings or your senses, in Mythos rather than Logos. That’s your choice. That’s the way your mind works.
The Truth is not for all. People can choose to be ignorant and wrong. People can choose to oppose reason, which of course merely proves how irrational they are!
The Three Types
"[Kant’s] concepts – the objects of understanding – are of three types: a posteriori (abstracted from sense perception and applied to it), a priori (applicable to sense perception but not abstracted from it), and a third type called Ideas, which are concepts neither abstracted from sense perception nor applicable to it. The a priori concepts of science and other forms of knowledge [Kant] calls ‘categories’." – R. J. Hollingdale
Kant’s system is bogus because he introduces the fallacious "synthetic a priori" category of judgment. Reality is constructed on just two categories: 1) analytic a priori (Form; eternal truths of reason; not abstracted from sense perception; prior to experience; innate; necessary; deductive), and 2) synthetic a posteriori (Content; contingent interpretations of fact; abstracted from sense perception; inductive). Ontological mathematics deals with the former and science the latter.
In reality, there are no such things as Kantian Ideas
, i.e. concepts neither abstracted from sense perception nor applicable to it. All true concepts belong to noumenal, ontological mathematics, and all are applicable to the sensory domain of Content since all mathematical Form is necessarily accompanied by Content as its flip side. The whole sensory domain of phenomenal experience is conditioned by noumenal reality, and that noumenal reality is fully knowable because it’s pure math.
Kant was as ingeniously wrong in philosophical terms as Einstein
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