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L U C I D WA K I N G The Answer to the Problem of Consciousness
Jack Tanner
Copyright © Jack Tanner 2021 All rights reserved.
Table of Contents Lucid Waking The Consciousness Conundrum The Consciousness Confusion The Hard Problem? Sense Consciousness? The Location of Consciousness? In Dreams Suggestion Separate Minds? Universal Hallucinations Induced Synesthesia: The Birth of Language Mood Writing A Sentence Language and Free Will Language Synesthesia Language and the Brain The Mute Tribe The Surgical Removal of the Unconscious? Narcolepsy: The Sleeping Sickness The Ur Language Hypnotism Habituation Consciousness and First, Second, and Third Person Tourette’s Syndrome Zen Bullshitism Metaphor Love and Light God Hegel and Language The Absolute in Ontological Mathematics Creating “Consciousness” Experience versus Knowledge Organ for Truth Sense-Certainty Syntax and Semantics
Capitalism and the Mind? Outer and Inner speech The Big Problem Induction The Consciousness Game Perfect Consciousness The Community Leibniz and Language Intrusive Thoughts The Jews Imaginary Friends The Writing is on the Wall Empiricism The Problem of Consciousness The Inner Voice The Third Man The Joke Philosophy Reincarnation and Language Wittgenstein The Basic Building Blocks It’s All in the Mind The Thing Itself What about AI? The Obstacles The Exceptional The Human Mind Conclusion
THE CONSCIOUSNESS CONUNDRUM thanks to consciousness that humanity can contemplate the universe, yet I t’sscience has no idea what consciousness is. Nor does academic philosophy, nor does religion, and nor does any spiritual system. The greatest mystery of all for the human race is the very thing that makes us human and puts us in the position to think about the nature of existence and allows us to pose the self-referential question: What is consciousness? Some people, spiritual types in particular, believe that consciousness is the foundation of existence, yet also the ultimate mystery, meaning that existence has no answer. The nature of consciousness, they say, can inherently never be elucidated since you need to use consciousness to ask what consciousness is. How can consciousness explain itself? What means would it use? There seems to be a Catch-22. To address the problem of consciousness, you first of all need consciousness. If you didn’t have consciousness, you couldn’t ask what it is. As you walk around in the world, you can’t use your eyes to look at your eyes. You use your eyes to look at everything else. Similarly, so some people contend, you can use your consciousness to reflect on everything else, but you can’t use it to reflect on itself. Yet we can see our eyes in mirrors and pictures, we can dissect the eyes of the dead, and we can do all manner of experiments regarding eyesight. We can therefore gather a vast amount of information about eyes and how they function. Why is consciousness any different? Aren’t there equally productive ways to study consciousness? The central problem lies in defining what consciousness actually is. As it turns out, it’s easy to mistake it for other things which actually have nothing to do with consciousness per se. The academic world is making no progress with the problem of consciousness because it doesn’t know what it’s looking for. It doesn’t know how to specify the problem and separate it from other issues that obscure it.
Consciousness, it can’t be stressed enough, is not a fundamental property of human beings, which is why scientists and philosophers are looking in the wrong place, for the wrong thing. Even less is consciousness a fundamental property of the universe. There was no consciousness in this universe at the Big Bang. Consciousness is not foundational. Something else is. It’s by understanding this other thing, this foundational thing, that we can then understand what consciousness is. There is nothing baffling going on in the universe. There are no impenetrable mysteries. All problems can be resolved in exactly the same rational and logical way: by applying the Principle of Sufficient Reason and its corollary Occam’s Razor (the law of parsimony). This is not the most perplexing universe. It’s the reverse. The basis of existence is literally the simplest possible. What possible reason could reality have for rejecting the simplest basis, and on what possible basis could it create some arbitrary, more complex basis? Reality deals only with the simplest basis, and wouldn’t know how to construct anything else. It doesn’t have any choice in any of this. Reality doesn’t say to itself, “You know what, I don’t like the simplest solution to existence so I’m going to try something else … how about, let me see, Solution X, twenty-three percent more complicated than the simplest solution. Let’s do it. Er, hold on, maybe I prefer Solution Y, twenty-four percent more complicated than the simplest solution.” Nothing like that happens. It’s the simplest solution, and that’s it. Nothing else is ever attempted, or ever could be. Nothing else could be calculated. Existence is based on absolute simplicity. Therefore, consciousness can be cracked, just like everything else. If you don’t understand that existence in itself is literally as simple as it can possibly be, you will never understand existence. You will always get it wrong. You will always believe in falsehoods and fantasies. The No. 1 problem isn’t what consciousness is. The No. 1 problem is what existence is made of. This is the Ontological Question. Once this is answered, all other problems can be answered, because they all necessarily reflect the properties of what existence is made of. Scientists believe that matter is foundational, which means they believe that consciousness originates in matter. No scientist has ever produced any plausible hypothesis for how matter – a lifeless, mindless, purposeless
substance (in science’s estimation) – produces consciousness. No scientist ever will. Science will not resolve this problem. The solution lies elsewhere. Science is inherently anti-mind. It’s all about matter. There is no bridge from matter to mind, and if you can’t get to mind, you can never get to consciousness. It’s not rocket science!
THE CONSCIOUSNESS CONFUSION problem of consciousness is so daunting because philosophers and T hescientists don’t even know what it is they are trying to explain. They have been unable to define the problem. The whole phenomenon is a mystery to them and that of course is why they have made no progress with it. The defining mistake they have made when it comes to “consciousness” is that they have entirely confused it with “subjective experience”. All philosophers and scientists are wrestling with a drastically different problem from the actual problem of consciousness. The problem these people are addressing is how can you extract subjective experience from a system of atoms of lifeless, mindless matter, with no subjectivity, no mentality, and no need whatsoever of subjective experience. This is an enormous problem in its own right, but it is not the problem of consciousness. It is the problem of sentience, something which is a precursor of consciousness but is definitely not consciousness. The core of the sentience problem is “qualia”. Wikipedia says, “In philosophy and certain models of psychology, qualia (singular form: quale) are defined as individual instances of subjective, conscious experience. [JT: Note how subjective experience is instantly, and wrongly, linked to consciousness, thus confirming our point.] The term qualia derives from the Latin adjective quālis meaning ‘of what sort’ or ‘of what kind’ in a specific instance, such as ‘what it is like to taste a specific apple, this particular apple now’. … As qualitative characters of sensation, qualia stand in contrast to ‘propositional attitudes’, where the focus is on beliefs about experience rather than what it is directly like to be experiencing. Philosopher and cognitive scientist Daniel Dennett once suggested that qualia was ‘an unfamiliar term for something that could not be more familiar to each of us: the ways things seem to us’. … There are many definitions of qualia, which have changed over time. One of the simpler, broader definitions is: ‘The “what it is like” character of mental states. The way it feels to have mental states such as pain,
seeing red, smelling a rose, etc.’ ... Frank Jackson later defined qualia as ‘...certain features of the bodily sensations especially, but also of certain perceptual experiences, which no amount of purely physical information includes’. Daniel Dennett identifies four properties that are commonly ascribed to qualia. They are: 1) ineffable; that is, they cannot be communicated, or apprehended by any means other than direct experience; 2) intrinsic; that is, they are non-relational properties, which do not change depending on the experience’s relation to other things; 3) private; that is, all interpersonal comparisons of qualia are systematically impossible; 4) directly or immediately apprehensible in consciousness; that is, to experience a quale is to know one experiences a quale, and to know all there is to know about that quale.” If consciousness is linked to qualia then it becomes impossible to assert that animals are not conscious because who today would seriously question the reality of subjective experiences in animals? Descartes was the last notable philosopher to assert that animals were just glorified machines with no internal subjective experiences, even if they looked like they were having them. (For Descartes, animals were pure matter and did not have souls, hence they did not have mental experiences. Curiously enough, modern science more or less says the same thing, and also reduces human beings themselves to soulless automata, devoid of free will.) By any process of logic, a system of objects cannot produce subjectivity. It’s a category error to insist that objects can make subjects. Science commits exactly this category error. It has no choice because all it believes in is matter, and matter is attributed no subjective properties at all. Why would matter need to have internal experiences? The very idea is absurd, yet science, to the extent that it even believes in subjectivity (and it really doesn’t), has to maintain that matter produces subjectivity because it has no other tools to deploy to explain internal experience. It’s matter or nothing. Matter, in science, must explain everything, whether free will, the unconscious, consciousness, subjectivity, life, or whatever. But it can’t explain any of them! It can’t even explain itself. Science has to claim that matter randomly comes from non-existence (from the total absence of matter), another category error. Nothing ordered can come from randomness, which is associated with chaos, not its opposite (i.e., a cosmos, a domain of order). The obvious truth is that if you put random groups of lifeless, mindless
atoms into entities called bodies they will not then start having subjective experiences. Computers are complex collections of lifeless, mindless atoms. Computers are not having any subjective experiences. Does anyone seriously imagine they are? Are rocks or sand dunes having subjective experiences? You must be joking. Subjective experience comes from the nature of mind itself. It is built into the properties of mind. If mind is denied, what then? How could anyone explain subjective experience when they have claimed that mind in itself – substantive mind; immaterial mind outside space and time – does not exist? More or less all academic scientists and philosophers deny the reality of mind as something different from matter. Under no circumstances would they accept mind as the true basis of matter (i.e., matter is actually mental). You would not be employed in a university science or philosophy department if you did not accept a fundamentally materialist, empiricist, positivist, “natural” worldview. It is exactly that fallacious worldview which cannot explain subjectivity. When you get rid of the fallacy, you get rid of the “problem” of subjectivity. There is no hard problem of subjectivity. There is a hard problem – indeed an impossible problem – of explaining mind without mind, life without life, and subjectivity without subjectivity. How can you explain subjects via objects? No one could. No one ever will. University science and philosophy will never explain subjectivity, and will therefore never be able to move on to the different problem of what consciousness is. They’re permanently stuck. Their paradigm is unfit for purpose.
THE HARD PROBLEM? he hard problem of consciousness, as it is called by academic philosophers, is no such thing. The real hard problem for scientists and philosophers is that they have no comprehension whatsoever of life, mind and subjectivity. They are trying to explain these via lifeless, mindless, material objects. This is a category error, a contradiction in terms, a logical impossibility, on a par with the academically intractable problem of Cartesian substance dualism. In fact, it’s actually the same problem, just cast in different terms. If you choose the wrong paradigm, you create “hard” problems that aren’t hard in reality but are in fact impossible in terms of your chosen, fallacious paradigm. They are artifacts of the paradigm, not problems that pertain to the real world. There is no conceivable path – given the materialist paradigm – to reach mind, life, free will, the unconscious, consciousness and subjectivity. As soon as you subscribe to materialism, you are never going to understand subjectivity and consciousness. Some academic philosophers – the “panpsychists” – accept scientific materialism, but think it’s lacking an ingredient. What they want to do is add a little mind, a little consciousness, to atoms so that anything made of atoms will therefore be capable of expressing mental properties, including subjectivity and consciousness. Of course, there is absolutely no way to add mind to matter. Science wouldn’t know where to begin since it doesn’t believe in mind at all. Science is an exclusive faith in matter. The panpsychists believe they can smuggle subjectivity and consciousness into materialism by, somehow, supplementing matter with mind. Their attempts are uniformly comical. They don’t make any sense at all. Moreover, they show a catastrophic misunderstanding of science and the scientific project. Panpsychism is as futile as Cartesian substance dualism, of which it is simply a less coherent variant (it’s similarly trying to get mind and matter to coexist even though they have nothing in common). Panpsychism would be much more viable if cast in terms of idealism rather than materialism, but
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more or less no academic philosophers have any interest in idealism, i.e., in mental rather than physical reality. The academic world believes in the power of matter, not the power of mind, which is somewhat ironic since these academics are supposed to be intellectuals, people of the mind. If only! If consciousness is not found in subjectivity (sentience) then where is it located? In recent decades, the seminal text in this regard is The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind by psychologist Julian Jaynes. This book has something of a cult following, but it ought to be one of the best-known books in the world, and taught in every school. The reason it isn’t is that scientific materialists show enormous resistance towards it because it changes the problem of consciousness from a scientific problem to a cultural problem. It switches the problem from genetic to memetic. Consciousness becomes concerned with the colonization of the brain by verbal memes, and, above all, by the conveyor of verbal memes, namely language. Consciousness arises when the unconscious learns and internalizes language. Richard Dawkins wrote, “Do we have to go to distant worlds to find other kinds of replicator and other, consequent, kinds of evolution? I think that a new kind of replicator has recently emerged on this very planet. It is staring us in the face. It is still in its infancy, still drifting clumsily about in its primeval soup, but already it is achieving evolutionary change at a rate that leaves the old gene panting far behind. The new soup is the soup of human culture. We need a name for the new replicator, a noun that conveys the idea of a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation. ‘Mimeme’ comes from a suitable Greek root, but I want a monosyllable that sounds a bit like ‘gene’. I hope my classicist friends will forgive me if I abbreviate mimeme to meme.” Gene evolution is staggeringly slow. Meme evolution is staggeringly fast. The right memes – good ideas – can transform the human race overnight. But the wrong memes – bad ideas – can send humanity back to the Stone Age. We are living in a time of staggeringly bad ideas, which are being catastrophically amplified by social media. We are in a meme war and the bad memes are winning hands down. Practically no one is interested in good memes. The memes of the Idiocracy are in full control. The lunatics are running the asylum. Dawkins wrote, “Most of what is unusual about man can be summed up
in one word ‘culture’. … Cultural transmission is analogous to genetic transmission in that, although basically conservative, it can give rise to a form of evolution. Geoffrey Chaucer could not hold a conversation with a modern Englishman, even though they are linked to each other by an unbroken chain of some twenty generations of Englishmen, each of whom could speak to his immediate neighbors in the chain as a son speaks to his father. Language seems to ‘evolve’ by non-genetic means, and at a rate which is orders of magnitude faster than genetic evolution.” This is a critical point, essential to understanding consciousness. Consciousness does not arise from biological evolution, but from cultural evolution. It proceeds by way of a different replicator: cultural memes rather than biological genes. Anyone who is looking for consciousness in the body, matter, genes, and biology is looking in completely the wrong place. Memetic language, unlike the genetic Darwinism of Richard Dawkins, reflects Lamarckism, a theory of evolution based on the principle that changes associated with organisms during their lifetime can be transmitted to their offspring. Children can pick up the changes to language made by the preceding generation, and can also start making their own changes. Language changes cause consciousness changes, and consciousness changes alter human evolution, making memes more important than genes, and the dominant force of evolution. Consciousness is actually incredibly easy to understand. Once the neocortex of the brain reaches a sufficiently complex level, it achieves massive overcapacity in terms of processing power and can take on the considerable burden of handling sophisticated language, which then dictates consciousness. Most brains – the brains of all animals except humans – are totally preoccupied with detecting the external sensory world and reacting, instinctually, to it, moment by moment. Animals can’t plan. They can’t reflect on the past and work out how to have a better future. They just live their life in a permanent “now”. That’s all their simple brains can cope with. But what happens when the brain has outgrown mere biology, mere living in the moment? It wants more, it demands more. It has to use all of its extra evolutionary capacity. After all, that’s what nature does. It uses as much as is available to it. If the external world cannot supply the neocortex with enough stimulation, it will start generating its own internal content. It will start
dreaming. It will undergo visual and auditory hallucinations. These will start off in seemingly quite a haphazard way, but, like all such things, they will evolve, and they will become more and more organized and powerful. The more useful the internal hallucinations, the more they will be “naturally selected”. What is the internal hallucination to which the vast majority of us are subjected all of the waking day? It’s the amazing auditory hallucination that we know as the “inner voice” or “internal monologue”. Not only does this constant auditory hallucination not seem like a hallucination at all (even though it is), we actually regard it as the voice, the vehicle, of our consciousness! We are all constantly being spoken to by an internally generated voice, but we are not alarmed by it because we regard it as our own voice, rather than some disturbing alien voice. Yet, if we were schizophrenics, we would hallucinate rather different voices: menacing, persecutory voices, which seemed to come from external entities. Schizophrenics are those who are having auditory hallucinations that have spiraled out of control, and their own consciousness in effect starts to splinter and fragment. Schizophrenics are actually no different from the rest of us. They do not differ in kind from normal people, only in degree. Their hallucinations are much more powerful. They are unable to inhibit them and take ownership of them. Joan of Arc was directed by “voices”. Self-evidently, she was a schizophrenic, subject to powerful hallucinated voices of a religious nature. She was simply the latest in a long line of religious nutcases. Abraham, Moses, Jesus, Saul of Tarsus, Mohammed, and so many others, were all schizophrenics, hearing religious voices. More or less all of mainstream religion was produced by schizophrenics. Even Socrates heard a voice (his daimon), and he had a huge influence on philosophy. Hallucinated alien voices are responsible for most of human culture and what most humans find most sacred! So, humanity created (hallucinated) internal content because human brains weren’t sufficiently occupied by external content, and thus internal content – visual, and especially auditory – was needed to provide extra stimulation. This internal content evolved rapidly. Visual hallucinations were mostly shunted off into dreams (into the domain of sleep, so as not to interfere with the waking world, which is primarily presented to us visually), while the auditory hallucinations became extremely organized, and highly
coordinated with the external visual world. They turned into language, conveyed by one, constant hallucinated voice, which internally narrated our life. This proved so useful that it became essential to us. It was none other than our consciousness. We didn’t have auditory hallucinations now and again (as in Julian Jaynes’s bicameralism, based on intermittent voices in people’s heads to give them commands in crisis situations), we had them continuously, and they merged into one, familiar voice, none other than our internal monologue. As for our visual hallucinations, they became the continuous stream of images that constitutes a dream. Consciousness resulted from auditory hallucinations. These hallucinations were memetic and evolutionary. Hallucinated, memetic, auditory content could and did evolve at a markedly different pace from genetic content. It perhaps started off slowly in terms of organization, but, once it had reached a certain level of development, gathered speed rapidly. It morphed from grunts, into primitive language, into effective spoken language (and later gave rise to sophisticated written language). Language, itself inherently memetic, became the perfect platform for the generation and assimilation of new memes, expressed in language, and also in associated images. Hallucinations produced memes, and memes produced language (the framework for organizing memes), and language conveyed our inner monologue, aka what we take as our consciousness. Consciousness is memetic not genetic, cultural not biological, mental not material, acquired not innate. Consciousness is a systemic, continuous auditory hallucination that we direct, just as lucid dreamers direct their dreams. Daytime consciousness is lucid waking as opposed to lucid dreaming. At night, our consciousness becomes passive (if we are not lucid dreamers) and we instead watch a continuous visual hallucination – a dream! Our language skills are severely degraded during dreams, meaning that our consciousness loses its agency. A lucid dreamer is someone who can maintain their language fluency during dreaming. Memes began as hallucinated internal mental content, then colonized our brains and took over the whole show. We are different from animals because our brains can support advanced hallucinations, and theirs cannot. Our brains can host a plethora of memes, and thus culture. We can organize our hallucinations into language, and language can then out-compete the combination of sentience and instinct relied on by animals. Our memetic
language, our consciousness, can be trained, it can learn, it can become highly intelligent, and it frees us from the slavery of instinctual responses. Richard Dawkins wrote, “Examples of memes are tunes, ideas, catchphrases, clothes fashions, ways of making pots or of building arches. Just as genes propagate themselves in the gene pool by leaping from body to body via sperms or eggs, so memes propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain via a process which, in the broad sense, can be called imitation.” Imitation is the name of the game. Humanity is a mimetic species. Monkey see, monkey do. Back in the day, consciousness literally spread like a virus. It remains a virus, one with which we deliberately infect every child, in particular via schools and education. Language is our way out of our biological prison. It allows us to evolve at the speed of gods, if we let the wisest humans run the show. But that has always been humanity’s defining problem. Humanity despises wise humans and wants nothing to do with them. In his Republic, Plato gave the blueprint for rule by the wise. No nation has ever implemented Plato’s system. Everything else was tried, but never sapiocracy. Humanity loves the sentient, but not the sapient. Many millions of people own dogs. How many of these same people also own books? The answer is extremely few. Dog ownership is a key marker for hatred of sapience. Dog owners are overwhelmingly feeling and sensing types. A typical dog owner is manifestly not interested in good conversation. If they were, they would cultivate human company and not animal company. Humanity does not want to imitate wisdom. It wants to imitate wealth, power and beauty. It wants to imitate emotionalism. It’s not at all interested in wisdom. Human intellectual progress has been left to an astonishingly tiny number of human beings. They are responsible for everything glorious about the human race, for all human advancement. Dawkins wrote, “If a scientist hears, or reads about, a good idea, he passes it on to his colleagues and students. He mentions it in his articles and his lectures. If the idea catches on, it can be said to propagate itself, spreading from brain to brain. As my colleague N. K. Humphrey neatly summed up an earlier draft of this chapter: ‘... memes should be regarded as living structures, not just metaphorically but technically. When you plant a fertile meme in my mind you literally parasitize my brain, turning it into a vehicle
for the meme’s propagation in just the way that a virus may parasitize the genetic mechanism of a host cell. And this isn’t just a way of talking – the meme for, say, ‘belief in life after death’ is actually realized physically, millions of times over, as a structure in the nervous systems of individual men the world over.’” It’s a key point that memes actually constitute a “structure in the nervous system”. They have become an essential, acquired operating system for the human psyche, which exerts command and control functions over the human body. We humans are what we are because our brains did not just process signals coming from the external world, but started to generate their own content. We took in visual and auditory signals from outside and then started to imitate them internally, so that we no longer relied on the external world. These internal hallucinations soon took on a life of their own and detached themselves completely from the external world. They became language (i.e., inner voice, which we could externalize as outer voice in order to communicate with others), and dreams, which we enjoyed internally. All this inner activity, free from external necessity, is what constitutes the basis of culture and free will. Culture exists because it is an imitation, mediated by hallucinations, of how we process the external world, but which then separates itself from the external world and becomes its own world, of language and consciousness, and extremely receptive to any memes it encounters in the world of culture. Where animals are locked into the external world, humans are increasingly locked into the world of human culture. Look at the degree to which humans are glued to their smartphones, providing a constant stream of addictive memes (mostly incredibly mediocre, sadly). There is nothing miraculous about consciousness. It was born from an internal imitative process of how every animal processes the external world. The human brain – because of its size, structure, organization, and storage capacity – was able to start creating internal hallucinations of what it experienced from the external world. Unlike the external world, these internal hallucinations were subject to evolutionary forces and became better and better organized and more powerful until they occupied most of our mental bandwidth. Above all, they became language, and language is the basis of consciousness. Consciousness is our memetic capacity. It is an add-on to our genetic
capacity. Consciousness is the memetic colonization of the brain. Irregular auditory hallucinations were converted into a regular, ordered, incredibly useful system: language. With language – a system of order – humans were able to start exercising reason and logic. They were able to start using an even more powerful language, the most powerful language of all: mathematics. Mathematics is in fact the language of reality, so when humans started using mathematics, they were starting to become conscious, however dimly initially, of what reality actually is. The revolutionary subject of ontological mathematics furnishes the language of ultimate consciousness, consciousness of foundational existence … God consciousness. Human brains, which evolved under the evolutionary pressure of survival and reproduction (not the pursuit of Truth, knowledge and understanding!), were never going to arrive at the language of existence in any easy way. The only method they had for becoming intelligent was by switching from genes to memes, from external sensory processing to internal sensory processing (primarily auditory and visual hallucinations), to manmade verbal language (systematic auditory hallucinations, capable of external vocalization), and finally to reality’s numerical language of mathematics. The drive to produce consciousness is a teleological, evolutionary process. It’s not random, it’s not pointless. It’s the actual point of existence. Reality must become self-aware. It must understand itself. It must attain perfect consciousness. Hallucinations, which resulted from the response of the Collective Unconscious to the external sensory world, are the true source of consciousness. If humanity could not hallucinate, it would never have formed language, and without language it would never have become conscious, it could never have become memetic. Consciousness is how we escape our reliance on the physical body. It’s how we empower the mind. Humanity is the hallucinatory species. That’s why we differ so much from other animals on this planet. They do not engage in hallucination. Their brains aren’t complex enough.
SENSE CONSCIOUSNESS? ulian Jaynes said, “Consciousness is sometimes confused even with simple sense perception.” It’s unusual for consciousness not to be confused with simple sense perception. Empiricists always reduce everything to the senses. They just can’t get past the senses. Jaynes wrote, “Historically, we inferred and abstracted ideas of sense perception from a realization of our sense organs, and then, because of prior assumptions about mind and matter or soul and body, we believed these processes to be due to consciousness – which they are not.” How can people solve the problem of consciousness if they don’t know what it is, if they confuse it with something else? People imagine they are conscious of what their sense organs deliver to them. That’s not consciousness. That’s sentience. Every non-human animal engages in sense perception. None is conscious. Jaynes wrote, “If any of you still think that consciousness is a necessary part of sense perception, then I think you are forced to follow a path to a reductio ad absurdum: you would then have to say that since all animals have sense perception, all are conscious, and so on back through the evolutionary tree even to one-celled protozoa because they react to external stimuli, or one-celled plants like the alga chlamydomonas with its visual system analogous to ours, and thence to even amoeboid white cells of the blood since they sense bacteria and devour them. They too would be conscious. And to say that there are ten thousand conscious beings per cubic millimeter of blood whirling around in the roller-coaster of the vascular system in each of us here this afternoon is a position few would wish to defend.” Yet panpsychists claim exactly this. To equate consciousness to sentience is exactly how to not understand what consciousness is. Jaynes wrote, “What we have to explain is the contrast, so obvious to a child, between all the inner covert world of imaginings and memories and thoughts and the external public world around us.” That’s exactly right. Consciousness is not about observing the external
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world with our sense organs. It’s about how we create an inner world that is much richer than the external world, and has no necessary dependence on the senses at all. A person exercising their imagination in a sensory deprivation tank is very much conscious. Jaynes wrote, “…the helpless spectator theory of Huxley (1896), [states] that consciousness just watched behavior and could do nothing. But if that is true, why is it there at all?” Mind, in science, has no role to play. Science is all about matter and material interactions. Science has no requirement of mind. It’s wholly redundant. There is no symbol for mind in science. No scientific equation references mind. The whole of science takes place without mind. So, Jaynes’s question stands: why is mind there at all? Why did evolution produce something that does nothing? How does that fit in with “natural selection”? Natural selection chooses valuable traits. It doesn’t select pointless things that would not be missed if they weren’t there. If mind doesn’t feature at all in science, how does science propose to explain mind, free will, the unconscious, consciousness and subjectivity? It doesn’t and it can’t. Science cannot form any bridge from matter to mind because it doesn’t accept the real existence of mind. It consigns mind to the level of “helpless spectator”, epiphenomenon, illusion, something that is incapable of making anything happen in the material world. Jaynes wrote, “And so there followed emergent evolution, which was meant to save us from such a pessimistic view. It was most fully developed by Lloyd Morgan (1923), although the idea goes back to the 19th century. A simple example is water: If you take hydrogen and oxygen you can’t derive the wetness of water from either. Wetness is an emergent. Similarly, when in evolution there is a certain amount of brain tissue, then suddenly you get consciousness. Consciousness [in this view] is an emergent, underived from anything before. It is also having a renaissance in the writings of some neuroscientists today. On analysis, it generates no hypotheses and tells us nothing about any processes involved. Emergent evolution is a label that bandages our ignorance.” Emergentism isn’t “science”. There is no scientific mechanism to get from matter to mind. So, in the absence of any mechanism and any precedent in the supposed properties of matter, science claims that mind and consciousness simply “emerge”. This is like saying, “There are various things that science has no idea how to explain, and so, since we can’t explain them,
we’ll invent some word that makes it sound as though we’re saying something meaningful about them and know what we’re talking about. Let’s see now, how about ‘emergence’. Sweet!”? This is what science has become … word salad! Why doesn’t science say, “God emerges from the universe when the universe reaches a certain degree of complexity”? Isn’t that just as valid as everything else that “emerges”? Science cannot predict a single thing that will “emerge”. All it can do is retrospectively label something that exists but which it cannot explain as an “emergent property.” Since when did that constitute “science”? Jaynes wrote, “That consciousness is in everything we do is an illusion. Suppose you asked a flashlight in a completely dark room to turn itself on and to look around and see if there was any light – the flashlight as it looked around would of course see light everywhere and come to the conclusion that the room was brilliantly lit when in fact it was mostly just the opposite. So with consciousness. We have an illusion that it is all mentality. If you look back into the struggles with this problem in the nineteenth century and early twentieth century, this is indeed the error that trapped people into so much of the difficulty, and still does.” The unconscious does vastly more than consciousness. The unconscious handles all syntactic operations, everything required to accomplish bodily tasks. It controls the physical body’s deep processes, such as the beating of the heart and the breathing of the lungs. It’s what controls all muscle movements. It allows you to walk and talk. Consciousness is the semantic element of the psyche dealing with experience and assigning meaning to each experience, mostly depending on what feelings the experience generates. Meaning, for the average person, lies primarily in what feels good and what feels bad.
THE LOCATION OF CONSCIOUSNESS? Jaynes wrote, “Finally, in this list of misconceptions about J ulian consciousness, a word about its location. Most people … tend to think of their consciousness, much as Descartes, Locke, and Hume did, as a space usually located inside their heads. Particularly when we make eye-to-eye contact, we tend to – in a subliminal way – infer such space in others. There is of course no such space whatever. The space of consciousness, which I shall hereafter call mind-space, is a functional space that has no location except as we assign one to it. To think of our consciousness as inside our heads, as reflected in and learned from our words like introspection or internalization, is a very natural but arbitrary thing to do. I certainly do not mean to say that consciousness is separate from the brain; by the assumptions of natural science, it is not. But we use our brains in riding bicycles, and yet no one considers that the location of bicycle riding is inside our heads. The phenomenal location of consciousness is arbitrary.” The mind does not belong to the physical space. It’s not a physical entity. The reason why consciousness seems to be located in the brain is that the brain is where the sense organs, especially the eyes, send their data. The eyes, in order to allow us to navigate, have to establish a coordinate system based on where the eyes are located. We all imagine our consciousness standing just behind the eyes, able to see what the eyes are seeing. It’s doubtful that anyone imagines that consciousness is located in the eyeballs. That would sound silly to most people, so they move consciousness back slightly, to behind the eyes. But consciousness, since it is not physical, could be located anywhere. The senses seem to locate consciousness in a particular place (the head), but anyone who has ever had an out-of-body experience knows that someone’s body can be lying fast asleep on a bed while their consciousness is roaming the world. Their consciousness, released from the constraints of the body, could go anywhere in the universe.
Our mental representation of the external world takes place in the mind, but it needs to take place as if inside the brain in order to allow us to accurately direct the movements of our body in the spacetime world. Jaynes wrote, “We have shown that consciousness is not all mentality, not necessary for sensation or perception, that it is not a copy of experience, nor necessary for learning, nor even necessary for thinking and reasoning, and has only an arbitrary and functional location. … I wish you to consider that there could have been at one time human beings who did most of the things we do – speak, understand, perceive, solve problems – but who were without consciousness. I think this a very important possibility.” Sleepwalkers and sleeptalkers show exactly how this is possible. Sleepwalkers can carry out complex actions and sleeptalkers can say complex things, yet they are not conscious. Jaynes said, “Subjective conscious mind is an analog of what we call the real world. It is built up with a vocabulary or lexical field whose terms are all metaphors or analogs of behavior in the physical world.” This is a critical consideration. Consciousness is a language construct, modeled initially on the sensory world, but soon radically departing from it. No God is visible in the physical world, but God inhabits the mind-space of every religious and spiritual person. Even materialists, atheists, skeptics and nihilists are aware of the concept of God in their mind-space, although they are at pains to deny that God has any corresponding existence in the physical world. We can place anything we like in the mind-space. That’s where people fantasize. They can do anything there, if they have a concept for it. Jaynes said, “Consciousness allows us to short-cut behavioral processes and arrive at more adequate decisions. … it is an operator rather than a thing or a repository. And it is intimately bound with volition and decision.” Consciousness allows us to bypass instincts and archetypes. It gives us real freedom, real agency, real decision-making capacity. Consciousness is not a property that belongs to people. As Jaynes says, it’s an operator. It’s the decision-making executive operating on the unconscious and the body. Jaynes wrote, “This mind-space I regard as the primary feature of consciousness. It is the space which you preoptively are introspecting on at this very moment. But who does the ‘seeing?’ Who does the introspecting? … As the body with its sense organs (referred to as I) is to physical seeing, so there develops automatically an analog ‘I’ to relate to this mental kind of
‘seeing’ in mind-space. … As the bodily ‘I’ can move about in its environment looking at this or that, so the analog ‘I’ learns to ‘move about’ in mind-space concentrating on one thing or another.” The external world is not our construct. The internal world is. And it’s much vaster than the external world. Indeed, it’s infinitely expandable. We could fit a Multiverse in there! “I” is essential to consciousness and arises from the very grammar of language. Who is the subject of every action performed by you? It’s always “you”. You are the “I”. If you did not have language and grammar to create “I”, it would not exist. It does not exist for animals. For Jaynes, human beings were once upon a time not conscious. Why? Because they had a very poorly developed, or non-existent, “I”, and frequently believed they were under the external control of gods. They lacked agency. They needed others – cosmic superiors (divinities) – to tell them what to do. Jaynes wrote, “[Another] feature of consciousness is narratization, the analogic simulation of actual behavior. It is an obvious aspect of consciousness, which seems to have escaped previous synchronic discussions of consciousness. Consciousness is constantly fitting things into a story, putting a before and an after around any event. This feature is an analog of our physical selves moving about through a physical world with its spatial successiveness, which becomes the successiveness of time in mind-space. And this results in the conscious conception of time, which is a spatialized time in which we locate events and indeed our lives. It is impossible to be conscious of time in any other way than as a space.” According to Jaynes, humans once hallucinated the voices of gods to tell them what to do. These voices were intermittent, and were usually induced by stress. They were perceived as the voices of other beings. How did consciousness come about? It made these hallucinated voices into one continuous voice – an internal monologue – and took control of this voice so that it was no longer regarded as external to the person, but their own voice, that of their own thoughts. This was a narrative voice, i.e., it involved the person telling themselves the daily story of their life. People lost the gods, but found themselves. Control switched from external divinities to the people themselves. Why are we conscious and animals are not? Because we can tell the story of our lives and they cannot. We can say what “I” did. No animal is
concerned with autobiography. Most animals have no sense of self whatsoever. Dogs bark at themselves in mirrors and often attack their own reflection, imagining they are seeing a rival dog. Imagine if you looked in a mirror and believed your reflection was someone else. What would that say about you? Sigmund Freud once told a story of seeing a disagreeable old man coming towards him on a train, only to realize there was a full-length mirror at the other end of the train compartment. Dogs never reach the realization that they are seeing themselves in a mirror. They have no idea who or what they are. They don’t even know they are dogs. Nor do they know what humans are. As Descartes said, it’s easy to regard animals as biological machines, with no interiority whatsoever. They simply perform instinctual actions, supplemented by a tiny amount of conditioned learning and memory. Jaynes wrote, “When did all this ‘inner’ world begin? Here we arrive at the most important watershed in our discussion. Saying that consciousness is developed out of language means that everybody from Darwin on … was wrong in trying to trace out the origin of consciousness biologically or neurophysiologically. It means we have to look at human history after language has evolved and ask when in history did an analog ‘I’ narratizing in a mind-space begin. When did language evolve?” This is exactly why the language-based origin of consciousness is so critical. Once we have located consciousness in language, it becomes a cultural phenomenon, not biological. It hasn’t always belonged to humans. It is acquired. It has a history, a starting point, a cultural evolutionary trajectory. And it can be directed – towards optimal goals. We can change our destiny. We can change our nature. Memes can beat genes. Jaynes wrote, “But if you take the generally accepted oldest parts of Homer’s Iliad and ask, ‘Is there evidence of consciousness?’ the answer, I think, is no. People are not sitting down and making decisions. No one is. No one is introspecting. No one is even reminiscing. It is a very different kind of world. Then, who makes the decisions? Whenever a significant choice is to be made, a voice comes in telling people what to do. These voices are always and immediately obeyed. These voices are called gods. To me this is the origin of gods. I regard them as auditory hallucinations similar to, although not precisely the same as, the voices heard by Joan of Arc or William Blake. Or similar to the voices that modern schizophrenics hear.”
The voice of the gods is in fact the voice of the unconscious, channeling Archetypes. It is instinct given a numinous makeover, so that in times of stress people will obey the voice without question, in order to save their lives. This voice once constituted people’s decision-making faculty. It still serves that function, but now it is perceived as our own voice, not an alien voice.
The Voice of the Gods? “The preposterous hypothesis we have come to … is that at one time human nature was split in two, an executive part called a god, and a follower part called a man. Neither part was conscious. This is almost incomprehensible to us.” – Julian Jaynes ccording to Julian Jaynes, before humanity became conscious, the human psyche had a “bicameral” structure. The right hemisphere of the brain hallucinated a voice, which was experienced in the left hemisphere as the voice of another being – a god, or a tribal leader, or an ancestor – much as a schizophrenic hears voices that seem alien to them. For Jaynes, bicameralism was the necessary precursor of consciousness. Bicameralism broke down for various reasons (primarily because of social chaos and disintegration, and the invention of writing, which diminished the power of the spoken word), and consciousness then took over, and became the basis of the psyche we all have today. Consciousness triumphed because it was a more flexible, versatile, reliable and effective decision maker.
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The Two Minds essential to have two minds. There must be a mind that speaks and I t’sanother that hears and provides feedback to the first. We need a production mind and a consumption mind, a producer and a consumer. We need an actor and a director, a performer and a watcher, a writer and a critic, an
author and an editor, an actor and a reactor, a proactive mind and a reactive mind, a crowd and a gatekeeper, a mutator and a natural selector, a student and a teacher, a slave and a master, a worker and an executive, a soldier and an officer. We need a mind that makes and another mind that judges what has been made, which evaluates and supplies feedback in order to make the production mind better. We need a transmitter and a responder (which combined comprise a transponder ... a transponder is a device that receives a signal and automatically transmits a different signal in response. Wikipedia says, “In air navigation or radio frequency identification, a flight transponder is an automated transceiver in an aircraft that emits a coded identifying signal in response to an interrogating received signal. In a communications satellite, a satellite transponder receives signals over a range of uplink frequencies, usually from a satellite ground station. The transponder amplifies them, and re-transmits them on a different set of downlink frequencies to receivers on Earth, often without changing the content of the received signal or signals.” Merriam-Webster says, “A transponder is a radio or radar set that upon receiving a designated signal emits a radio signal of its own and that is used especially for the detection, identification, and location of objects and in satellites for relaying communications signals.” Where a transponder monitors incoming signals and emits a preprogrammed reply, a different device called a transceiver both transmits and receive signals independently. For example, it’s a combined radio transmitter and receiver. Wikipedia says, “In radio communication, a transceiver is a device that is able to both transmit and receive information through a transmission medium. It is a combination of a transmitter and a receiver, hence the name transceiver. Transmission is usually accomplished via radio waves, but communications satellites, wired connections, and optical fiber systems can also be used. “Radio frequency (RF) transceivers are widely used in wireless devices. For example, cell phones use them to connect to cellular networks. Other common examples include walkie-talkies and CB radios. By combining a receiver and transmitter in one consolidated device, a transceiver allows for greater flexibility than what either of these could provide individually. “Despite the widespread use of transceivers, one common system that
does not use them is FM radio. In FM radio, receiving and transmitting data are intentionally two separate jobs. Radio stations transmit music, news, and other data over analog radio wave signals (and, more recently, digital signals) and FM radios in homes and cars receive these signals for listeners to enjoy. This system restricts who is allowed to broadcast.” Consciousness is a transponder insofar as it receives signals from the production mind (the unconscious), consumes it and then immediately reacts to it (via feelings), sending a signal (suggestion) back to it to amend it. The two are in a constant feedback loop. The system of production mind and consumption mind constitutes a “reciprocal” transceiver. The production mind transmits a signal, the consumption mind receives it and reacts to it, and its reaction constitutes a suggestion, an instruction, a command to the production mind to transmit a new signal, and this goes on constantly during our waking hours. In dreams, the consumption mind becomes passive, and the production mind transmits signals without any directorial response. In lucid dreaming, the consumption mind regains its activity and starts to direct the production mind to create the desired dreams. The best lucid dreams generate a continuous narrative: they give us exactly what we want.
IN DREAMS ou can get a good understanding of the bicameral psyche by considering your consciousness while you’re dreaming. Your consciousness in that state is passive. It is aware of what is going on in the dream, but is also usually baffled by it and can exert no control over it. Now imagine that your dream generated voices that spoke to you and ordered you around in your dream, in such a way that your dream self had to do whatever the voices commanded. It would be fully aware of the orders, maybe even resent them, yet carry them out regardless. The passive consciousness cannot find any means to gain control in the dreamworld. It’s always being pushed along, driven by events. It’s totally reactive, never proactive. Another mode is available to dream consciousness: the lucid mode. The key to this mode is being aware that you are in fact dreaming, without waking yourself up. When you know you are dreaming, you can then start directing your production mind to serve up the dream content you want to consciously consume. Your consciousness takes control. It makes the “other mind” do its bidding. And so it goes in waking life too. Our waking consciousness is lucid. It’s in control. It’s making the second mind – the unconscious – follow its orders. Yet just as most people do not dream lucidly, most people are not lucid when awake either. They imagine they are, but they’re not. Those people with an inner voice should focus very intently on that voice and work out whose voice it actually is. Here’s the big question … do you produce the voice that carries your thoughts? Are you in control of the production of your thoughts? If you introspect carefully enough, you will reach a disturbing conclusion. You don’t make your thoughts. You direct them. So what is making your thoughts? It’s what has always done it – the production mind, the mind that was once “god” in bicameral times and gave all the orders. It gave the orders because it was the only one that could actually produce thoughts. The unconscious is our creative mind, the mind with all the energy.
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Without our unconscious, we could not function. Think of an AI. It can’t function without being programmed (by something else). Equally, we can’t function unless something else – our unconscious mind – does our thinking for us. We don’t think our thoughts. We never have. We consume our thoughts. To make this crystal clear, think of your dreams. What you know for a fact is that you have no clue how to make a dream. Your consciousness has nothing to do with the putting together of a dream. It doesn’t know the first thing about it. Your conscious mind consumes dreams. It doesn’t produce them. And that goes for everything else: your consciousness consumes whatever gets produced, but it isn’t their author. Your consciousness reacts to dreams. It experiences them. It is never, and never can be, their maker. Even if someone moves into lucid dreaming mode, they do not then take over the production of the dream. What they do is continually make suggestions to the production mind, and it then carries them out. Just as you literally don’t know how to produce a dream, you literally don’t know how to manufacture a thought. Think about it. How would you construct a thought? How would you assemble one? A thought has an ontology. It is made of something. Specifically, it is made of sinusoidal waves. Well, do you know how to combine sinusoidal waves in order to produce thoughts, to produce even just one of your thoughts? You don’t have the vaguest idea. Luckily, something associated with you knows exactly how to do it: your production mind, your unconscious. Your unconscious mind is the most extraordinary thing you will ever encounter. It is literally God. If you knew how to use it properly, you would have God at your disposal. Your consciousness, by contrast, isn’t God. It’s painfully small and weak and ignorant of what’s really going on. The most bizarre thing about humans is that the lower entity is in charge, not the higher entity. This is the key to consciousness. To answer why that should be is to explain what consciousness actually is. It also explains why we all have godlike potential. In bicameral times, the “god”, the higher entity, was in charge and the lower entity carried out its orders. This was the natural order. Why did consciousness flip it? It’s because “god” has the most extraordinary defect, and it’s this defect that consciousness “cures”. But the cure simply generates
a different set of problems, the problems all of humanity wrestles with every day. Humans were almost certainly much happier in bicameral times – because they were connected to divinity. However, this divinity could function only in a simple society. It couldn’t cope with complexity. That’s because of the “defect”. In order to understand the defect, it’s essential to study the work of Thomson Jay Hudson. Hudson said that everyone has two minds. He wrote, “Man has, or appears to have, two minds, each endowed with separate and distinct attributes and powers; each capable, under certain conditions, of independent action. … it is a matter of indifference whether we consider that man is endowed with two distinct minds, or that his one mind possesses certain attributes and powers under some conditions, and certain other attributes and powers under other conditions. It is sufficient to know that everything happens just as though he were endowed with a dual mental organization.” Hudson stated three laws: 1) Man has two minds: the objective mind (which is conscious) and the subjective mind (which is subconscious). 2) The subjective mind is constantly amenable to control by suggestion. 3) The subjective mind is incapable of inductive reasoning. The defect of the unconscious (the subjective mind), concerns the second law, namely that the unconscious is “constantly amenable to control by suggestion”. That means it is always looking for someone or something to give it suggestions. It’s helpless on its own. So, let’s have a look at the extraordinary world of suggestion.
SUGGESTION hat is the “world”? In some sense, it’s just a series of suggestions. Look at the animal world. Events happen in the world and animals instinctively react to them. The events are “suggestions” and the instinctual reactions are the programmed responses to these external suggestions. Animals have very little “interior” (mind-space) in which to think up any kind of response that is not instinctual. Think of the external world as a succession of suggestions for minds to process and react to. The unconscious mind responds archetypally, stereotypically, instinctively. That’s OK in archetypal, stereotypical situations. What happens in much more complex, fast-moving situations? Then, if you want to survive, you must be able to make decisions fast and flexibly. Consciousness evolved to accomplish exactly that. It allowed a person to escape mere instinct and do much more intelligent things. In the bicameral human, the key decision-making trigger was, according to Julian Jaynes, stress. In the animal world, most instinctual responses involve fight or flight, or reproduction. It was much the same in the bicameral world. In a stressful situation, the body naturally releases various stress chemicals as part of its instinctual response. When the mind detects high concentrations of these stress chemicals, it triggers, in the bicameral schema, the creation of a visual or auditory hallucination, which then orders the person what to do to relieve the stress. The more complex the situations became, the less good the hallucinated response was at giving timely, relevant, useful instructions. Those people – with proto-consciousness – who could make in real time their own decisions, appropriate to the circumstances, had a simply enormous advantage over their foes. Think of the Spanish Conquistadors versus their enemies in South and Central America. The Spanish plainly enjoyed some immense advantage given that so few men, so far from home, on the home territory of their enemies, conquered so much and so many. Their primary advantage was that their enemies didn’t seem able to read them at all, while the Spaniards knew
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exactly what had to be done to win. We can infer that the likes of the Aztecs and Incas had a psyche much closer to that of the ancient bicamerals. They needed to constantly consult their holy men and gods to decide what to do, whereas the Spaniards didn’t have to consult anyone. The Spaniards had incredibly resourceful, imaginative, bold and decisive leaders, such as Cortes and Pizarro. They were rapid decision makers, making life-or-death judgements on the hoof, and they were excellent at it. The more the stress increased, the better their decisionmaking, while the Aztecs and Incas were hopeless when the pressure got cranked up. The greater the stress, the worse their decision-making. Consciousness massively outperformed bicameralism, which is why people today are conscious rather than bicameral. That said, the continued prevalence of mainstream religion demonstrates that most conscious people are still in thrall to the bicameral voices of old. Prophets, gurus, holy books, sacred scriptures, fortune telling, Ouija boards and astrology charts are enormously more popular than reason and logic, knowledge and understanding. Why are dreams so disjointed, so confused? It’s all because the production mind is so suggestible and therefore unable to maintain a sustained narrative. Think of someone watching YouTube videos and also keeping an eye on the list of suggested videos that YouTube always offers. Each time the person sees a new suggestion, they immediately click on it and stop watching the current video. Now and again, they spend a bit more time watching the current video because the content is so emotionally powerful, whether sexually, violently, threateningly, or whatever. If you were looking over such a person’s shoulder, you would be totally baffled by what was going on because the person would be jumping all over the place, from one thing to the next with no apparent rhyme or reason. It would be exactly like watching someone’s dream. Why is a lucid dream so different from a normal dream? It’s because your conscious mind starts directing the dream. It keeps the production mind on track. It keeps delivering to the production mind a continuous suggestion to deliver a constant narrative, which the production mind duly obeys. It serves up the content you want as long as you keep willing it to do so. Why is the subjective dreamworld so different from the objective dreamworld (i.e., the real world?). It’s because only one mind is involved in the subjective dreamworld and that mind is constantly amenable to
suggestion. Even as the production mind shows one thing, that thing might serve as a new suggestion and the production mind will immediately jump away by mental hyperlink to show the new thing, and once it gets there a new thought (suggestion) may be generated and it will then jump somewhere else. It can never maintain focus and continuity. The real world doesn’t behave like that because all minds are involved in its construction and it would take a suggestion that all, or most, minds agreed to in order to effect any change. At this time in the universe’s mental evolution, minds never cooperate in the required way, so a default world is the result, constructed according to default mathematics, common to all minds. The reason why scientists don’t believe that we live in a mental universe is that they mistake default mathematical behavior (lowest common denominator, passive mathematics) for the behavior of mindless, lifeless “matter”. The production mind is brilliant, but wholly suggestible. It cannot maintain focus and that’s why its incredible power is never brought to bear. The consumption mind has none of the creative brilliance of the production mind – it can’t make dreams and thoughts – but it can do what the production mind can’t. It can maintain focus. It can exert control. Consciousness is the agent that instructs the unconscious. If consciousness loses this capacity – through mental illness or brain damage or dementia – a person goes insane or shuts down. They are non-functional. They cannot direct their behavior. They cannot interact meaningfully with their surroundings. It’s essential to understand that consciousness is the director of our activities. That is its defining function. It needs to be aware of the world in order to decide what to do in response to the world. Consciousness receives all of its signals from the unconscious. Some of these signals originated in the external world before being processed by the unconscious and then presented to the consumption mind (consciousness). The rest are internally generated by the unconscious itself. Think carefully about the process of thinking. What are you thinking about as you walk along a street? All manner of things, all kinds of different strands of thinking, are being generated by your production mind (unconscious). It establishes numerous different streams, not just one. You might be humming a tune, thinking of a vacation, pondering your career,
dreaming of sex, reflecting on a movie, worrying about an upcoming meeting with your manager, contemplating philosophy, planning your finances, and so on. These are all possible strands your unconscious could develop, but it doesn’t know how to concentrate on any one of them. It requires something else to make the decision. It requires your consciousness. Your consciousness understands all the different offers being made to it and then has to select one. Once consciousness has decided on a certain strand of thought, it suggests to the unconscious to keep developing that line of thought. It’s critical to grasp that the unconscious is actually doing the thinking, not “you”, not your consciousness. You do not produce your thoughts, you direct them. Your unconscious produces your thoughts but does not know how to direct them. It needs something else to direct them. It needs your suggestions. When it receives no external suggestions, it gives itself one suggestion after another in a chaotic stream, as in a dream. Lucid dreaming brings the unconscious under direction, thus producing coherent rather than chaotic dreaming. When we are awake, our unconscious continues to serve up dreamlike content. Sometimes, it does it via daydreams. More usually, it does it via the most special dream of all, a constant auditory dream: our “inner voice” (internal monologue). Our consciousness is not our inner voice. Our consciousness hears (consumes) our inner voice and directs it (gives it suggestions for what to think next). It’s the unconscious that is producing the inner voice and its thoughts. It’s consciousness that is hearing the voice and deciding what to do with it. Consciousness has no voice. It can’t create thought. Only the unconscious can do that. The unconscious, for everyone, knows how to do ontological mathematics. Consciousness, for almost everyone, does not. Consciousness is fluent in understanding manmade language, but not in understanding mathematics. Consciousness can consume thought and make decisions regarding it. It can direct the “voice”, but it is not the voice. In bicameral times, the voice (the “god”) commanded the “man” to do its bidding. Or, to be more accurate, it announced to the man what it was going to do, and the man had to go along with it (the man had no means to resist).
In the transitional period between bicameralism and consciousness, the “voice” was partly autonomous (bicameral) and partly dependent (under proto-conscious control). It had a hybrid structure. Homer’s Iliad reflected the beginning of the end for bicameralism. The Greek heroes of that tale could converse with each other and bemoan the decisions of the gods, but had very little capacity to introspect and were primarily reliant on the hallucinated voice of the gods for their big decisions. With consciousness, the hallucinated voices and images vanished. In the Odyssey, we see the hero (Odysseus) becoming less and less dependent on the gods, and much more reliant on his own guile and decision-making. Comparing the famous Greek tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides, Nietzsche saw a trend of the tragedies, in the hands of Euripides, becoming more and more rational and person-centered. Nietzsche wrote, “Sophocles said of Aeschylus that he did what was right, though he did it unconsciously. This was surely not how Euripides saw it. He might have said that Aeschylus, because he created unconsciously, did what was wrong. The divine Plato, too, almost always speaks only ironically of the creative faculty of the poet, insofar as it is not conscious insight, and places it on a par with the gift of the soothsayer and dream-interpreter: the poet is incapable of composing until he has become unconscious and bereft of understanding. ... it will suffice to say that the spectator was brought upon the stage by Euripides. He who has perceived the material of which the Promethean tragic writers prior to Euripides formed their heroes, and how remote from their purpose it was to bring the true mask of reality on the stage, will also know what to make of the wholly divergent tendency of Euripides. Through him the commonplace individual forced his way from the spectators’ benches to the stage itself; the mirror in which formerly only great and bold traits found expression now showed the painful exactness that conscientiously reproduces even the abortive lines of nature. … Even Euripides was, in a certain sense, only a mask: the deity that spoke through him was neither Dionysus nor Apollo, but an altogether new-born demon, called Socrates. This is the new antithesis: the Dionysian and the Socratic, and the art-work of Greek tragedy was wrecked on it.” In other words, Aeschylus and Sophocles still wrote of the gods, but Euripides started to write of man. Bicameralism was dying, and consciousness was becoming the main game. Is it possible for a mind to both produce thoughts and consume those thoughts? What this would mean is that a mind consciously knew how to
make thoughts from the mathematical basis sinusoids that underlie all thinking. The unconscious mind innately knows how to do this. Consciousness is separated from that process. It can evaluate the results of the process, but it cannot initiate the process. There is no one on earth who knows what sinusoids to combine to create any thought whatsoever. In order to intentionally construct a thought, you would already need to know what the thought was, i.e., you would already need to have formulated it; you would need to have already done what you were seeking to do! Does God have a mind that can both produce and consume thoughts? In fact, God is associated with zero entropy and at zero entropy the only thing that exists is the complete set of independent basis waves. At zero entropy, the production mind is associated with pure, eternal and necessary thought. The consumption mind at zero entropy contemplates the perfection of these basis thoughts: the core thoughts of God. These are the Platonist Forms, in some sense. The production mind, when it starts creating thoughts from basis thoughts, generates entropy, hence imperfection. The production mind produces temporal and contingent thoughts by trial and error, albeit more and more educated as time goes on. Otherwise, it would have to know what the thought was before it thought it, which is impossible. So, it generates thoughts and then a second mind experiences (consumes) them in order to judge them and their relative value. Reality is a dual-aspect monism comprising syntax (form; information carrier) and semantics (content; information carried). That immediately suggests the existence of two minds (or shall we say one dual-aspect mind): the formal mind of syntax, and the content mind of semantics. Think of the formal mind in terms of artificial intelligence. Imagine we programmed an A.I. to combine sine waves using the laws of sinusoidal wave mathematics. It could produce any number of such combinations, but to what end? It would simply be an abstract exercise, going nowhere, resulting in nothing. To get an A.I. to do anything useful, you need to give it an objective. You might program it to win a chess game, for example. But it takes no pleasure in winning the chess game. It simply executes its program to completion. A program won the game “Go”. Wikipedia says, “AlphaGo is a computer program that plays the board game Go. It was developed by DeepMind Technologies which was later acquired by Google. Subsequent versions of
AlphaGo became increasingly powerful, including a version that competed under the name ‘Master’. After retiring from competitive play, AlphaGo Master was succeeded by an even more powerful version known as AlphaGo Zero, which was completely self-taught without learning from human games. AlphaGo Zero was then generalized into a program known as AlphaZero, which played additional games, including chess and shogi. AlphaZero has in turn been succeeded by a program known as MuZero which learns without being taught the rules. “AlphaGo and its successors use a Monte Carlo tree search algorithm to find its moves based on knowledge previously acquired by machine learning, specifically by an artificial neural network (a deep learning method) by extensive training, both from human and computer play. A neural network is trained to identify the best moves and the winning percentages of these moves. This neural network improves the strength of the tree search, resulting in stronger move selection in the next iteration.” So, this “deep learning” is goal-oriented, and the whole environment and programming needs to be supplied in order for the program to do its thing. What would it do without all of that? It would do nothing. It’s not a living, purposeful thing. It does not innately strive for anything. In a living system, the machine-like, formal (production) mind is accompanied by the content (consumption) mind that experiences whatever the formal mind generates. A living mind that undergoes any experience whatsoever will, by the very nature of living experience, classify it as agreeable, disagreeable, or neutral. It will find it pleasurable, painful, or neutral. It will find it interesting, uninteresting, or neutral. It will find it positive, negative, or neutral. It will inherently want more of what it finds agreeable, pleasurable, interesting and positive and less of what it finds disagreeable, painful, uninteresting, or negative. It will endure the neutral to get to the positive. It avoids the negative. The dialectical world we live in constantly throws the thesis (positive) at us, as well as the antithesis (negative). The presence of the antithesis constantly changes us and causes us to seek the synthesis, a more nuanced but realistic option, better adapted to the world. In the end, we all achieve the ultimate outcome of the General Will, namely Absolute Synthesis, that which is experienced as positive by every mind. It is the nature of any experience to be judged by its experiencer as good, bad or indifferent. According to Nietzsche, the experiencer is a node of will
to power, and judges every experience according to whether it increases its power (good), decreases its power (bad), or leaves its power unchanged (a matter of indifference). Nietzsche said, “What is good? – All that heightens the feelings of power, the will to power, power itself in man. What is bad? – All that proceeds from weakness. What is happiness? – The feeling that power increases – that a resistance is overcome.” If every experiencer is a node of will to power, its essence is to be a judge of power. That is its nature. It cannot avoid passing judgment on every experience. It needs to in order to know where it stands in the power game, the power league. The consumption mind is what is empirically judging the increase or decrease of its power. The production mind produces the experiences that are then judged. It cannot judge them itself because it is not experiencing them. Imagine a factory producing video games. It’s not the production system that dictates the success of the video game, it’s the reaction of those that play the game, who experience it and decide whether that experience is positive or negative. In bicameralism, the consumption mind (the “man”) did not know how to generate a course of action. The man relied on the production mind (the “god”) to produce an instruction. The god wasn’t actually very godly. It wasn’t some agile, brilliant thinker. It was in essence the powerful, dominant voice of instinct, of archetypes, of basic strategies for increasing power. If you want to know what the “god’s” voice was like, just read the Bible, or the Iliad. With the dawn of consciousness, the consumption mind became the decision maker. It directed the production mind to generate various thoughts, and then it selected which of those thoughts it liked, those which it believed would most increase its power. That’s what consciousness is: the generation of multiple courses of possible action, followed by reflection on those possibilities, followed by selection of one of the possibilities, and then actually enacting it (i.e., exerting your will on it and causing your production mind to instruct your body to perform the action required). Active consciousness and free will are intimately connected. With passive consciousness, or pre-consciousness (as in bicameralism), the consumption mind is aware but has no free will. It has to obey the production mind without question. Abraham experienced his production mind – which
he knew as Yahweh, his God – ordering him to sacrifice his son, and he agreed without question. He had no free will. He couldn’t say no. That’s what happens when instincts, archetypes, and “gods” are in charge. Likewise, schizophrenics can’t disobey when “the voices” tell them what to do. The voices can be incredibly powerful, as Joan of Arc demonstrated. At zero entropy, in the condition of pure Being, the production mind has nothing to produce in time: it is associated with timeless perfection. It reflects the eternal and necessary basis waves: the eternal and necessary thoughts of existence. These thoughts are all perfect. They are experienced, consumed, as perfect: as perfect reason, perfect logic, perfect intuition, perfect perception, perfect emotion, perfect love, absolute knowledge, absolute understanding, absolute integration, absolute wholeness, absolute completion, absolute unity. Thought, in this situation, is thought in itself: pristine, pure, eternal, perfect. It is consumed for exactly what it is: perfection. This is heaven, bliss, nirvana, moksha, the Tao, and all the rest of it. At zero entropy, everything is perfect. It’s pure Being. Any deviation from zero entropy creates imperfection and gives rise to the domain of Becoming. Thought as Being is perfect. Thought as Becoming is imperfect. The very production of thought in the domain of Becoming is the source of imperfection, of entropy. The Big Bang was an explosion of imperfect thought, and of course it produced an imperfect world – the world of the Demiurge, the Devil … the entropic, material world of space and time. In the domain of Being, the consumption mind directly experiences the productions of eternity: the eternal and necessary basis thoughts. In the domain of Becoming, the consumption mind experiences the contingent productions of temporality: compound thoughts rather than simple thoughts. What is reality all about? It’s about unchanging basis (simple) thoughts providing eternal perfection, and it’s also about all possible compound thoughts, providing every possible experience (of imperfection). Is that not what God is? – that which has all possible experiences, that which generates all possible experiences. Existence delivers exactly that: the God Experience. What is the best of all possible worlds? It’s the world that gives God 100% of experiences, with not a single experience missed out. That’s what the tied domains of Being and Becoming deliver, across eternity. The production mind is all about form and syntax. The consumption mind
is all about content and semantics, about our lived experiences and the meaning we find in these experiences. Consciousness, in relation to Being, means being permanently aware of perfection. Consciousness, in this state, is not required to do anything. It just experiences the pure, immutable, perfect productions of eternity. If truth be told, this is the consciousness that meditators and the mindful are seeking. Consciousness, in relation to Being, involves no choice, no free will, no activity, no action. It is purely passive and contemplative. Consciousness – the consumption mind, the awareness mind, the experiential mind – simply consumes that which is eternally produced, which has no beginning and no end … basis thoughts, perfect thoughts, like the Forms of Plato’s perfect, immaterial domain outside space and time. The sinusoids – the basis forms of life and mind – are the perfect basis of existence. Nothing could be more perfect. The production mind, in the state of Being, does nothing but produce the basis waves. It has no other activity. Its operation is as simple as possible: points moving in analytic circles, generating sinusoidal waves, with this process happening outside time and space, in a purely mathematical space. Consciousness in relation to Becoming is drastically different. Now the production mind has to combine sinusoids to create complicated compound wavefunctions. It knows how to combine waves in formal, syntactic terms, but it does not know what their experiential, semantic content will be. The consumption mind handles that. It experiences the content. How it responds is vital. If it likes the thought, it suggests to the production mind to do more stuff like that; if it dislikes the thought, or is indifferent to it, it suggests to the production mind to do less of that. Bit by bit, the production mind is provided with a profile of what the consumption mind likes to consume, what keeps it engaged. Think about social media. Algorithms track all the things you like and then offer up similar content, already knowing you will like it. It has been said that social media algorithms know you better than you know yourself. The production mind has built up a vast database of the content that you love, or keeps you transfixed. People’s dreams are often highly sexual, because the production mind knows that the dreamer loves that content. They are also often disturbing and nightmarish – because the consumption mind is deeply engaged with and fascinated by such content. Think of how many people love reading crime novels, horror books, and thrillers, and watching
Netflix shows about these things. The consumption mind can’t get enough of threat, menace, danger, anxiety. It is profoundly drawn to “dark” material, perhaps to give it practice with such things to furnish it with a better survival chance if it encounters them in waking life. In any case, you can see how easily the production mind would come to know you (just like social media algorithms). Your dreams can be incredibly intense – because your production mind is giving you exactly what you want. But because your consumption mind is passive during sleep, your production mind often jumps around haphazardly until it finds content to which your body reacts strongly (you might become sexually aroused, or start sweating, or your heartbeat goes up). If you can transition to lucid dreaming, your consumption mind can then actively order the content it wants from the production mind, and the production mind duly complies. Everything that happens in your dreams is based on what your production mind has been habituated to expect your consumption mind will find engaging. It didn’t get its content from nowhere. It got it from you, from what fascinated you, from what you kept suggesting to it. If, for example, you dream of your teeth falling out, it means that at some point in the past – perhaps after breaking a tooth, or a tooth extraction, or a painful visit to the dentist, or concern about your smile, or catching sight of someone’s false teeth – your teeth were very much on your mind and when your production mind served up content about your teeth falling out, you reacted strongly. It remembered this reaction, and so it often serves up the same content. Every time it does, you get triggered and react strongly. You are just like one of Pavlov’s dogs. Often, dream content has no greater meaning than that you reacted to it strongly in the past, and continue to react strongly to it every time similar images and content are served to you. Your previous reactions are like suggestions to your production mind. The more strongly you reacted to anything, the more strongly it is taken as a suggestion by your production mind, and it will routinely serve it back to you. If you want to change your primary dream symbols, you need to give your production mind new suggestions, new fixations, but how do you get rid of all those pesky traumas that haunted you in your formative years? They are so deeply ingrained, so hard to budge!
SEPARATE MINDS? n bicameral times, the left hemisphere mind (the consumption mind) experienced the right hemisphere mind (the production mind) as a separate mind. It heard it, and it felt compelled to obey it without question, just as Abraham felt compelled to obey “God” without question. In Jaynes’s model, the production and consumption minds were both unconscious. The consumption mind could hear and obey the production mind. To be more accurate, the production mind not only generated the orders but also executed them too, which is why the “man” always felt so helpless, and unable to change anything. The left hemisphere wasn’t conscious. All it did was mindlessly stand by while the right hemisphere acted. The left hemisphere didn’t reflect, it didn’t question, it didn’t plan. It had no agency or initiative of its own. The consumption mind was like a hostage. The production mind was the executive that gave and executed the orders. The consumption mind was aware of what was happening, but no more able to exert control than the consumption mind can do during dreams. In modern consciousness, the right hemisphere’s hallucinated voice has, apparently, gone. Consciousness, it would seem, is – for most people at least – conveyed by an inner voice which is taken to be the voice of consciousness. This voice is both produced and consumed. A person hears this voice and acts on it. They assume it is their own voice, so they don’t feel as if they are obeying anyone else. They can reflect on what the voice says. They can change their mind, i.e., change what the voice says. They experience no sense that they are not the controlling agent, the agent with free will, entirely free to decide what to do. In effect, with modern consciousness, the production and consumption voices started to experience themselves as the same mind. One was not telling the other what to do. They had become an integrated team. Three situations regarding consciousness are possible:
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1)
We produce a voice and we hear it and act on it, or modify what it says, and this is what we regard as our consciousness. (This is very common.)
2)
Our primary experience is of producing our inner voice (with less emphasis on hearing it), and we take this voice to be our active consciousness. (This is very rare.)
3)
Our primary experience is of hearing our inner voice (with less emphasis on producing it), and we take listening to this voice to be our active consciousness. (This is also rare.)
In a normal person, there is no experience of the voice being alien, as it was in Julian Jaynes’s bicameral model. A schizophrenic, by contrast, does experience various voices in their heads as alien, while someone suffering from multiple personality syndrome can experience several different voices as their own. Some people don’t have an inner voice at all, so they cannot possibly regard an inner voice as the medium of consciousness. When people don’t have a voice to follow, they typically have a consciousness based on internal images or patterns. If they also suffer from the condition of aphantasia (absence of a mind’s eye) then their consciousness is not based on images or patterns either. It would seem that they experience consciousness as a kind of set of “downloads” or “outputs” or “info dumps”. They are much more attuned to feelings and actions than images and sounds. They live much more in the external world than the internal world. They are not reflective and introspective. Their consciousness is radically different from that of normal people. Their inner world is extremely “quiet”, while their external world is extremely noisy. They are like people designed to be totally outward-facing, with no interiority. Their opposites would be people designed to be totally inward-facing, with no exteriority (blind, deaf and dumb people, for example). In Jaynes’s model of the psyche, humans started to hallucinate voices, which gave them commands that could not be disobeyed (in fact the voices executed the commands as well as giving them). The production mind told the consumption mind what was going to be done. The latter mind complied, even if it didn’t like what was being ordered. Jaynes references Homer’s Iliad to illustrate his point: “When, toward the end of the war, Achilles reminds Agamemnon of how he robbed him of his mistress, the king of men declares, ‘Not I was the cause of this act, but Zeus … and the Erinyes who walk in darkness: they it was in the assembly put wild ate upon me on that day when I arbitrarily took Achilles’ prize from him, so what could I do? Gods always
have their way.’ And that this was no particular fiction of Agamemnon’s to evade responsibility is clear in that this explanation is fully accepted by Achilles, for Achilles also is obedient to his gods. Scholars who in commenting on this passage say that Agamemnon’s behavior has become ‘alien to his ego,’ do not go nearly far enough. For the question is indeed, what is the psychology of the Iliadic hero? And I am saying that he did not have any ego whatever.” Agamemnon openly denies responsibility for his own actions. He blames the gods. Yet in doing so, he makes it clear that he himself – and he obviously identifies himself with the consumption mind – does not approve of what the gods make him do … what they make him watch himself do (because he’s not really doing it; his production mind is doing it). The gods are the executive mind. They have full command and control. Their commands can be disliked but not disobeyed. They themselves execute the orders. The heroes of the Iliad had two minds (god and man), often antagonistic towards each other. This internal tension was clearly unhealthy. It could resolve itself in only one way: unicameralism instead of bicameralism. The consumption and production mind had to act as if they were one. So, in time, the voice of the gods vanished, or fell silent, or actually became the inner voice of the person. It could enter into a process of reflection and modification. It could be challenged, questioned, and changed by an introspective process. And isn’t that exactly what consciousness and free will are? They are the process by which we formulate possible actions and then consider the different possibilities before we finally choose one. In the bicameral system, the voice spoke and was obeyed, even its orders were disliked. The person, for example Agamemnon, was aware of the orders and of disliking them, but was not conscious in any modern sense. He was unable to negotiate with the voice and amend the orders. Consciousness involves seeing oneself as the decider and agent of one’s own actions. It is intimately connected to free will, to choice. You cannot be conscious if you feel yourself the helpless slave of a voice giving you orders. You cannot carry out the primary activities of consciousness: introspection, reflecting on what you might do, choosing, exercising free will, generating multiple options, pondering, deciding, experiencing yourself as responsible and accountable for your own actions. Agamemnon wasn’t conscious except in the most narrow of ways: being
aware of being given orders, and being aware of not liking those orders, but having no capacity to do anything about them. For Jaynes, it was more accurate to regard Agamemnon as unconscious. For Jaynes, a conscious person controls a “mind-space” in which they formulate their decisions. Agamemnon’s “mind-space”, such as it was, was entirely reactive, determined by the executive voice of the gods. It could never be proactive. It could never be decision-making. A person who could not take decisions could not, in Jaynes’s estimation, be conscious. Yet if Agamemnon could master the voice of the gods and take over that voice and its decisions then Agamemnon would consequently be conscious. And that’s what happened. The human mind shook off bicameralism and became, as far as consciousness was concerned, unicameral, i.e., the production and consumption minds acted in concert as if they were one thing. They could feedback to each other and modify each other – seamlessly, without ever being aware of any difference. What happened was that the god’s voice – perceived as belonging to another person, a god – morphed into the person’s own voice. It was no longer a spoken voice coming from someone else, heard as a physical voice, but the person’s own voice, heard as a mental voice (i.e., as non-physical). In bicameralism, the executive was the production mind, which used the consumption mind, or at any rate the body of which the consumption mind was acutely aware, to carry out its orders. Then the momentous switch to consciousness took place. Consciousness, the consumption mind, became the executive and harnessed the production mind. Consciousness, in effect, is that which can both produce and consume, through achieving dominance over the production mind and making it do its bidding, as in lucid dreaming. It’s exactly because it can produce (via instructing the production mind), and consume what it produces, and modify what it produces, that it can serve as the decision maker and no longer needs to hallucinate decisions (a highly inefficient and stereotypical process, lacking the speed, flexibility and range of conscious decision-making). Why do humans always outsmart animals? Because animals use instincts and humans use consciousness. Conscious humans outsmarted bicameral humans because the latter were instinctual, their instincts proceeding by way of hallucinated voices. When the Aztecs and the Incas met the Spanish Conquistadors, it was a war between the bicameral and the conscious. It was no contest. A few
hundred Spaniards conquered two whole empires.
The Voice of the Unconscious n bicameral times, the voice of the unconscious was the voice of the gods. In conscious times, the voice of the unconscious became our own voice. We mistook it for the actual voice of consciousness, but it remained the voice of the unconscious. The reason why the unconscious doesn’t have a message to give us is that it has no message to deliver. What the unconscious voice does is generate content, and then our consciousness listens to that content and asks the unconscious for more of the content it likes, and less of the content it doesn’t like. The unconscious has no desire to send any message, and no knowledge of how to do so. What the unconscious does is generate content, but it needs something else to tell it what content to create. If no one tells it, it just generates defaults, or all the weird and wonderful stuff that features in our dreams (based on our memory of our experiences). Dreams are where the unconscious mind is in charge, and the result is chaos. That’s why we need consciousness. But there is in fact a mode of the unconscious that can produce predictable results, namely the instinctual, archetypal mode. It was that mode that the bicameral gods used. Archetypes are themselves just suggestions produced by the evolutionary forces that have shaped the Collective Unconscious. The unconscious mind isn’t trapped in one hemisphere. The unconscious mind is everywhere. Our inner voice is the main expression of our unconscious. What we do with it, how we direct it, is consciousness. Consciousness does not have a voice, but it triggers the voice of the unconscious and by that means acquires, in effect, its own voice. If you think about – really think about it – you are not the person authoring what you say. What you are doing is summoning what you want to say. Your unconscious is what actually thinks up the stuff, and your consciousness OKs it, or modifies it (by asking the unconscious to try again). If you’re writing a book, you all too soon discover that you’re actually typing it. You’re not thinking up each word. You are writing down what your
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unconscious serves up. Later, you reflect on it, and edit it and polish it. Editing and polishing are as close as anyone gets to actually writing consciously. Why do some authors get writer’s block? It’s because they cease to be able to tell their unconscious what to produce. Usually, it’s because the writer is suffering from analysis paralysis. They have become so self-critical, so perfectionist, so haunted by the desire to write a masterpiece, that they are sending out a massive countersuggestion to the unconscious, telling it not to help them out with the book. They have self-sabotaged. A writer who is “in the zone” can write almost continuously, many thousands of words a day, and these words barely require any editing. That’s when writing is more liking typing. And what is being typed? – the thoughts of the unconscious. The unconscious is doing all the thinking. It’s producing all the thought. How many people have ever realized that consciousness doesn’t think? It’s the unconscious that thinks. Consciousness selects, edits, polishes, suggests and summons. You’re never in control of the generation of your thoughts. You’re in control of the suggestions you make to your unconscious. It’s in charge of your thought production. Isn’t that amazing?
UNIVERSAL HALLUCINATIONS Jaynes wrote, “Verbal hallucinations are common today, but in early J ulian civilization I suggest that they were universal.” Verbal hallucinations remain universal. What has changed is that the intermittent hallucination of an external voice or voices has been replaced by the constant hallucination, mediated by language, of a single voice: our own internal monologue. Your own inner voice is a hallucinated voice! It’s the production mind, the unconscious, that produces hallucinations, and it’s the consumption mind that experiences them. In the past, the production mind was universally in charge, meaning that human behavior was directed by “divine hallucination”, which is to say numinous archetypes of the Collective Unconscious. Nowadays, the production mind is under the control of consciousness, meaning that it delivers a single voice over which each conscious person imagines they have own ownership, i.e., they regard it as their own voice, their inner voice. It’s still all about the hearing of a voice. In bicameral times, no one had an inner voice. The voice they heard, sporadically, in times of stress, was that of the “god”. Now, nearly everyone has an inner voice and they hear it all the time. They regard it as their own consciousness. It’s the voice of the “man”, and it has replaced the voice of the “god”, which has now fallen silent. Bicameral humans received input from two sources: 1) the external physical world, and 2) the internal Collective Unconscious. They detected the external world via the senses, and the internal world via “divine” hallucinations. We are all subject to two evolutionary routes, which are connected: 1) Biological evolution (the physical path), and 2) Cultural evolution (the mental path). The latter is much more important. The former simply establishes the platform for the latter. We have no conscious control over the former, but we can consciously direct the latter and totally control and optimize our destiny, but only if we’re
wise enough. If we’re not, we will produce a totally destructive culture that torments the whole human race. That’s exactly what humanity has done. It has entrusted cultural evolution to the greedy, selfish, narcissistic and psychopathic, and these, the world controllers, have found it in their absolute interest to produce an Idiocracy, a viciously dumbed-down humanity that can’t think and can’t fight back. The central plank of the Idiocracy is extreme individualism and libertarianism. The more “freedom” you give average people, the more stupid they get, for the very simple reason that they have no idea how to live a wise life, a productive life, a meaningful life. The average person is a bread and circuses person, a smartphone (which is to say dumbphone) person. The average person is self-indulgent and seeks instant gratification, and constant distraction. They have no attention span worth mentioning. Hedonism rules the average person. The pleasure principle is their God. They therefore don’t want to do anything hard, demanding, difficult, challenging, and so they don’t. They always do the easy thing. They always follow the path of least resistance. They have impossible dreams of status, popularity, fame, wealth, and success. Of course, they don’t intend to do anything to accomplish them. Too much effort! Instead, they believe in the Law of Attraction – one of the most all-conquering ideas of the modern age – by which if you simply wish strongly enough for something it will then come to you. Your desires will exert a “gravitational” force and attract to you all the things you most desire. You don’t have to do any hard work, you just need to wish hard, you just need to have strong faith. The Law of Attraction sums up the average person. They have no intention of following the reality principle to achieve success. Instead, they follow an unreality principle, a fantasy principle, by which the universe will just give them what they want if they have faith and they engage in positive thinking. Of course, the world richly rewarded the people who thought up the Law of Attraction and sold it to the gullible, credulous masses, but, exactly as you would expect, it didn’t reward anyone who actually believed it and acted on it. These people, these suckers, wished their lives away. Real life went by while they dwelled on their fantasy life of getting everything they ever desired. John Lennon said, “Life is what happens to you while you are busy making other plans.” Average people spend their whole lives making plans based on the great day when the Law of Attraction delivers, but it never does, and real life passes, unlived. People are too busy with their fantasies to
actually live. Only wise people can be allowed to direct humanity, and their efforts must always be directed at the collective and the General Will. Thousands of years ago, Plato, in the Republic, provided the basic template. No one listened. No one is more despised than the wise. Nothing is more loathed than the truth. Plato said, “No one is more hated than he who speaks the truth.” Nietzsche said, “What has hitherto been forbidden on principle has never been anything but the truth.” People are constantly seduced by the Lie. They constantly avoid the Truth. It is of no interest to them. To “revalue all values” means to totally change what is regarded as truth. While humanity believes only in lies, how can we make progress? Human culture originated, somewhat chaotically, with the production mind and its hallucinations, channeling the Collective Unconscious. To generate culture proper, the production mind had to be displaced by the consumption mind to create consciousness. Once the consumption mind was in charge, it could direct the production mind, just as a lucid dreamer does in the dreamstate. Conscious waking is “lucid waking”. It is to waking what lucid dreaming is to dreaming. Julian Jaynes said, “Human mentality [in bicameral times] was in two parts, a decision-making part and a follower part, and neither part was conscious in the sense in which I have described consciousness. … human beings can speak and understand, learn, solve problems, and do much that we do but without being conscious. So could bicameral man. In his everyday life he was a creature of habit, but when some problem arose that needed a new decision or a more complicated solution than habit could provide, that decision stress was sufficient to instigate an auditory hallucination. Because such individuals had no mind-space in which to question or rebel, such voices had to be obeyed.” Abraham didn’t hear God’s voice and then decide to follow God’s command. Rather, hearing God’s command was the same as acting on the command, and Abraham simply watched himself carrying out the order. He had no choice, just as no creature carrying out an internal command (an instinctual response) has any choice. Abraham was neither a man of great faith, nor a monster. He was in fact a robot! Abraham was under the control of a hallucinated voice that he could not disobey. He believed the voice was
that of God. In fact, it was that of his own unconscious, his production mind. In all probability, Isaac was a rebellious boy, maybe even proto-conscious, and Abraham couldn’t cope with him. In a flash of rage one day, Abraham’s “voice” said, “Kill him!” Only at the last moment did the voice think better of it and desist. Jaynes referred to a “decision-making” part and a “follower” part. In the absence of consciousness, the “decision-making” was instinctual and archetypal. But the bicameral “god” (decision-maker) did not in fact make any real decisions. What it did was deliver the stereotypical, archetypal response to a particular situation. In bicameralism, the production mind (the unconscious), reacting to a “suggestion”, produced an archetypal reaction, which was taken by the follower (the consumption mind, the incipient consciousness) as an absolute command. Indeed, it was. It could not be disobeyed. The voice was describing what the body was doing. If the voice said, “Run!”, the body was already starting to run. The command and the action were the same thing. The switch to consciousness involved the consumption mind transitioning from passive to active. Instead of being the follower, and indeed the helpless spectator, it became the active decision-maker, able to make non-archetypal decisions, i.e., it was able to escape from the robotic, animal world of instincts and archetypes and respond flexibly to situations, with novel decisions, unprogrammed by archetypes, thus massively extending the range and power of the response. Moreover, it could learn from each decision, allowing it to make significantly better decisions in the future. Jaynes wrote, “But why is there such a mentality as a bicameral mind? The bicameral mentality … enabled a large group to carry around with them the directions of the chief or king as verbal hallucinations, instead of the chieftain having to be present at all times.” Of course, if each person hallucinated the voice of the chief or king, but each person thereby proceeded to give themselves wholly idiosyncratic commands, what would be the point? Bicameralism could make sense only if all the members of the tribe heard the chief or king’s hallucinated voice in a consistent way, i.e., the voice – across every member of the tribe – gave commands as if coming from just one, real person. It would be as if each member of the tribe was running the same simulation of the chief or king, and receiving consistent and complementary commands across the whole tribe. It would be absurd if one member of the tribe heard the “voice” commanding
the tribe to leave their homes and travel to a new, promised land, while another member of the tribe heard the “voice” saying they were already in the ideal land and now they must fortify it against its enemies. These contradictions would result in chaos. It would be essential for each member of the tribe to hear broadly the same message, even if they were all hallucinating individually. In fact, it would make more sense if they were actually having a collective hallucination – a group hallucination, a mass hallucination – hence they were engaged in telepathy. Their unconscious minds were actually linking up to produce a common hallucination, but only in times of extreme stress facing the whole community. The rest of the time, they went about their business just like animals. In relation to humans, animals are functionally equivalent to sleepwalkers. They can do complex tasks, even solve problems, but they are not conscious. Bicameral humans were the same: they were just one step up from animals. They were the missing link, the transitional phase, between animals and humans. In effect, “animal humans” became bicameral humans when humans acquired simplistic, spoken language (sophisticated grunting, we might say). Bicameral humans became conscious humans when they acquired complex language, owing to the invention of writing. Language changed everything. It changed the functioning and basic operations of the brain. If we kept exposing animals to language from the day they were born, using Pavlovian techniques, we could anticipate changes in their brain function as a direct consequence. Jaynes wrote, “Bicameral kingdoms were all hierarchical theocracies, with a god, often an idol, at their head from whom hallucinations seemed to come, or, more rarely, with a human being who was divine and whose actual voice was heard in hallucinations.” Humanity’s bicameral ancestry, coupled with its alpha-ape tendencies (i.e., tribes organize around the human equivalents of alpha apes) results in human society being, to this day, highly hierarchical, and highly prone to notions such as “God” (the cosmic alpha ape) and kings (earthly alpha apes acting on behalf of God). In nature, when the alpha ape dies, it is immediately replaced by a new alpha ape. But now think of a society in which every member of the tribe could hallucinate the living tribal chief, even when he was absent (on a
hunting trip for example), and could continue to hear his commands. If you could hallucinate him when he was alive but absent, what would prevent you from hallucinating him when he was dead and thus absent permanently? The tribe could go on hearing his voice and commands post mortem, which would of course convince them that the dead lived on in some other place and could go on communicating with the living. It would lead them to extreme reverence for the dead, and ancestor worship. They would imagine the ultimate ancestor and call it “God”, the Creator. In effect, according to Jaynes, this ability to “hear the dead” created religion and spirituality. It’s an extremely plausible hypothesis. Nietzsche wrote, “In the dream … we have the source of all metaphysic. Without the dream, men would never have been incited to an analysis of the world. Even the distinction between soul and body is wholly due to the primitive conception of the dream, as also the hypothesis of the embodied soul, whence the development of all superstition, and also, probably, the belief in god. ‘The dead still live: for they appear to the living in dreams.’ So reasoned mankind at one time, and through many thousands of years.” For Nietzsche, as for Jaynes, hallucination (dreaming) had the most profound impact on humanity. No apes, when the alpha-ape dies, imagine the alpha-ape having a post mortem existence. The apes rapidly, perhaps even instantly, cease to think about the alpha-ape at all, hence have no religious or spiritual sentiments. The new alpha-ape immediately takes over, and that’s that. Apes live in the moment. Humans do not. Apes are not religious. Humans are. Any attempt to live non-judgmentally in the moment is an attempt to become an animal, not a religious and spiritual person. As soon as you can reflect on the past, you make religion and spirituality possible because you can maintain a relationship with the dead, and can conceive of a whole world of the dead, of an entire reality invisible to this reality. That’s the religious and spiritual domain right there. Religion is inevitable once people can reflect on the past. After all, the most obvious question is: where do the dead go? Today, scientists say that the dead simply decompose. In the bicameral age, the people could literally hear the dead, so no one believed in the dead vanishing from existence. They went somewhere else to live, a different reality, to which we would all go in due course, when it was our own turn to die. To get to this other place, they needed some vehicle, and that vehicle was the soul, our non-physical component, not tied to this world.
A purely physical reality, where our mind is taken to be nothing but the activity of our physical brain, cannot sustain a religious worldview. When the brain dies, the mind dies and nothing is left to have any afterlife. A mental reality, however, based on non-physical minds (hence which do not, at bodily death, decompose in the physical world) easily supports a religious and spiritual worldview. If you are a materialist, then logically you are an atheist and nihilist who absolutely denies religion and spirituality. If you are an idealist, then logically you accept some version of the religious and spiritual worldview. In ontological mathematics, you accept a rational, logical, mathematical account of religion and spirituality, not anything based on faith, feelings or mysticism. Today, people are no longer bicameral, but some aren’t far off from having that form of psyche. If you look at Muslims, for example, they are highly bicameral. The Koran – the written “Word of God” – replaces the bicameral spoken voice of God, but Muslims internalize the Koran and then go around acting in accordance with it, just as if it were a voice in their head continuously telling them what to do and what not to do (halal and haram). Such people cannot be considered genuinely conscious. That also goes for Orthodox Jews, Christian Fundamentalists, Sikhs, Buddhists monks, and Hindu holy men. These people are all showing us humanity’s bicameral past, which humanity has not yet escaped. Jaynes wrote, “In Mesopotamia the head of state was a wooden statue – wooden so it could be carried about – with jewels in its eyes, perfumed, richly raimented, imbedded in ritual, seated behind a large table (perhaps the origin of our altars) in the gigunu, which was a large hall in the bottom of a ziggurat. What we might call the king was really the first steward of this statue god. Cuneiform texts literally describe how people came to the idolstatues, asked them questions, and received directions from them. Just why the minds (or brains) of bicameral people needed such external props as idols for their voices is a question difficult to answer, but I suspect it had to do with the necessary differentiation of one god from another.” Nowadays, Muslims consult the Koran, Christians the Bible, Jews the Torah, and Sikhs, Buddhists and Hindus their respective sacred writings. They read the word rather than hear the word, but the effect is the same (and, in many cases, they robotically recite their sacred texts out loud, over and over again). These people are under external control. They do not have their
own decision-making process, one that does not rely on some faith system (faith in an external super being of some kind, which they regard as the sole legitimate authority in the universe, the authority which they must always obey). In the USA, multitudes of effectively bicameral evangelical Christians reject “man’s laws” (those of the State) and worship “God’s laws” (those of evangelical Christianity). They pit religion against the State and hate the State and see it as Satanic. These people cannot think for themselves. They think Biblically, which is to say bicamerally. They are under the remote control of long-dead Biblical prophets, whose voices they practically still hear, via the written word. Donald Trump served as a bicameral voice for American evangelicals. That’s why they loved him so fanatically.
INDUCED SYNESTHESIA: THE BIRTH OF LANGUAGE did language get started? Here’s a little tale concerning the birth of H ow language. Once upon a time a dominant tribal leader (the alpha), led his tribe of submissives to the banks of a river. None of these people, including the chief, could speak. They had no language. They could grunt now and again, but that was about it. A big tree stood by the river, but of course no one had a word for a tree. One day, the tribal leader felt a huge surge of … well, he didn’t know what because he had no word for it. He felt a sudden, irresistible impulse to point at the tree and then he grunted “tree”. He had no idea why that sound came out of his mouth, but he kept pointing at the tree and kept saying “tree”. The people, all of whom routinely imitated their leader, all pointed too, and all of them started chanting the same word: “tree”. They stood there for half an hour, just pointing and grunting “tree”. Later, they all went back to the cave where they lived. Then something extraordinary happened. In the middle of the cave, the tribal leader suddenly grunted the word “tree” again. No tree was present, but the whole tribe started chanting “tree” again, and as they did so, they all saw in their minds the tree by the river, and they were all amazed. They thought it was magic. How could they see a tree when no tree was present? It was such a powerful effect that they wanted more and more of it. The tribal leader started pointing to things in the cave and grunting a different sound for each object. Each time, he got the people to chant along with him for half an hour, until they all learned the same sound (“spoken word”, as we would now say) for each object. Within a few days, the tribe had built up a vocabulary of sounds. The people found that they had acquired an amazing power. They could refer to things when those things were not present. They could “talk” about a tree or a cave when they were nowhere near a tree or a cave. Simply by saying the sound, they could all picture in their mind the object it had been associated
with. You see here the rudiments of the formation of language. A dominant figure gave a sound effect to a visual object and got everyone else to chant the same sound and repeat it and learn it. Everyone in the tribe agreed that such and such a sound went with such and such a visual object. This was nothing other than induced synesthesia. With innate synesthesia, the stimulation of one sensory or cognitive pathway leads to involuntary experiences in a second sensory or cognitive pathway. Language artificially creates such a connection. The use of the two words “red sheep” makes people see in their mind’s eye a sheep colored red. Via one sense (the auditory and speech system), we have triggered another sense (the visual system). Language – by linking sights and sounds – is actually a means to create a secondary sensory world, but one that is inner rather than outer. Language allows us to have an inner voice, making inner sounds (that no one else can hear), associated with inner images (that no one else can see). This inner world is, initially, just a copy of the external world. However, whereas the external world changes very slowly, the inner world, based on language, can change extremely rapidly. Via language, all sorts of new connections and associations can be created. With language, we can imagine totally modifying the external world, and because we can imagine it, we can then do it. Look around the world. Only one creature has modified it everywhere: the human. All non-human animals have established specific behavioral niches where they modify the world in a tiny way, by building a nest, a mound, a burrow, or whatever. No animal sits in its nest and plans how to change the world. Humans do. That’s because we have language, and no other animal does. We have a means to exist in a separate world from the given world, yet which can be used to reflect on the given world and conceive of amending it. This is the essence of consciousness. Consciousness is that which separates us from the given world, the animal world, and allows us to exist, mentally, somewhere else, in the constructed world of language, which can serve as a mirror of the given world, but also go infinitely beyond it. The language world, the conceptual world, is much vaster and grander than the given world. It facilitates much more rapid evolution: mental rather than physical evolution. With the language world, we don’t need to wait for genetic mutation and natural selection over countless years to allow us to do
new things. With language, a new idea can happen overnight and change everything. A sufficiently powerful idea could convert the whole of humanity in a day, and change all human behavior. Such a thing is impossible for biology, for genes. But language-based memes can change everything in a flash. Victor Hugo said, “There is nothing more powerful than an idea whose time has come!” Unless you have grasped that consciousness is not about sentience (subjective experience) but is in fact about the ability to create a second world (which is like the given world, but much more flexible, changeable, powerful and vast), you will never understand consciousness. Scientists, trying to work out what consciousness is, look at matter and its properties, and the organization of matter. Consciousness has nothing to do with that. It’s all about language and the construction of a language-mediated mind-space that allows us to reflect on the given world and surpass it. Since scientists are not studying language and its relationship with the physical brain and the non-physical mind, they don’t have a clue what consciousness is or how to explore it. They can’t even define the problem, let alone get to grips with it, and that’s so true of so much of science. When it comes to everything fundamental and foundational – life, mind, the unconscious, consciousness, free will, the source of all, etc. – science has nothing to say. It cannot define the issue, hence cannot study it. What about people with aphantasia and no internal monologue? These people have a highly externalized consciousness. They do not introspect, they do not reflect, they do not imagine other realities. They are firmly fixed in the world. They like to keep themselves very busy with external tasks, and they say that their minds “are very quiet”. There’s never any great activity in the inner world of these individuals. Many of these people come across as “normal” and likeable, yet they are really nothing like everyone else. In bicameral times, humans were not reflective. They had quiet minds and got on with tasks. When they needed to take a big decision, the stress of the situation triggered an auditory or visual hallucination and a “god” then spoke to them to tell them what to do. People with aphantasia and no inner voice do not get these hallucinations. What they get is a “download”, as they describe it. Imagine the unconscious communicating with you, but neither by voice nor image (because the brain circuitry doesn’t exist to support these functions in these people). You would get information presented to you, but not using any medium. It would just be “there”. This is a version of intuition:
extra-sensory communication, bypassing sensory circuits and simply giving you what you need. It’s your production mind producing what you need in the moment, but not delivering the information by any sensory route. It nevertheless gives you what you need to take your decision. One person described the process as something like being presented with an output from a computer. Imagine you gave a computer a task, and came back a little while later and the answer was waiting for you. You didn’t see it do any work, but nevertheless the answer has been calculated and presented. In the case of the people we are talking about, the answer is given to them, allowing them to take their decision. They are unaware of all the workings and processes. Some of us can spend hours, days, weeks, wrestling with problems, thinking about them over and over again, dwelling on them, obsessing over them. The “special” people, with aphantasia and no inner voice, do none of that. They cut out all of that. They ask the production mind for an answer, and they get it. These people do not have “problems” in the same sense as normal people. They do not have any “inner voice” issues – because they have no inner voice. They do not picture things in their imagination – because they have no inner images to conjure. They can still be upset, and so on, but not in the way that everyone else is. They are probably much happier than normal people since they bypass all of that negative thinking that haunts most people. Yet, without an inner voice and inner images, they are not going to be great philosophers, scientists, mathematicians, writers, artists, and so on. Their whole life is lived “out there”, not “in here”. In fact, they have a lot in common with bicameral people, who had little or no inner life either. These modern special people experience silent bicameralism, so to speak. On the other hand, it could be argued that these people may actually falsify some of Jaynes’s theory. They are conscious, yet have no interiority. Jaynes wrote, “The characters of the Iliad do not sit down and think out what to do. They have no conscious minds such as we say we have, and certainly no introspections. It is impossible for us with our subjectivity to appreciate what it was like.” People with aphantasia and no inner voice lack the means to introspect. They don’t wrestle with their thoughts. They don’t dwell on things, and grow bitter once again at things that happened to them long before. It’s impossible for us with our subjectivity to appreciate what it is like for them.
Jaynes wrote, “When Agamemnon, king of men, robs Achilles of his mistress, it is a god that grasps Achilles by his yellow hair and warns him not to strike Agamemnon. It is a god who then rises out of the gray sea and consoles him in his tears of wrath on the beach by his black ships, a god who whispers low to Helen to sweep her heart with homesick longing, a god who hides Paris in a mist in front of the attacking Menelaus, a god who tells Glaucus to take bronze for gold, a god who leads the armies into battle, who speaks to each soldier at the turning points, who debates and teaches Hector what he must do, who urges the soldiers on or defeats them by casting them in spells or drawing mists over their visual fields. It is the gods who start quarrels among men that really cause the war, and then plan its strategy. It is one god who makes Achilles promise not to go into battle, another who urges him to go, and another who then clothes him in a golden fire reaching up to heaven and screams through his throat across the bloodied trench at the Trojans, rousing in them ungovernable panic. In fact, the gods take the place of consciousness.” What would Jaynes have made of people with aphantasia and no inner voice? Where would they do their introspecting? What manner of mind-space would they have? What kind of hallucinations could they have? They have a radically different psyche from normal people and do not engage in many of the experiences that would be considered characteristic of conscious humans. Most people are preoccupied with their inner voice, their internal thoughts. That’s what they regard as their consciousness. The idea that some people do not have a mind’s eye and can’t internally visualize things (i.e., those that suffer from aphantasia) is extraordinary, but much more extraordinary is the idea that some people have no internal monologue. For those whose lives revolve around inner monologue, the idea of that monologue being absent is impossible to conceive. Yet the fact that this does indeed happen in some people means that consciousness does not come in just one way. For Jaynes, the mind-space was the key to consciousness. But people with no obvious mind-space (denoted by the lack of inner monologue and aphantasia) can be conscious too. Anyone without an inner voice has no filter, nowhere to rehearse what they are going to say before they say it, and censor it if necessary. People with no inner monologue tend to blurt out whatever’s on their mind, and to speak out loud to themselves. One person with no inner voice said her
internal thought process revolved around sporadic or random jot notes. So, it’s not that she had no mind-space at all, but that it was not mediated by a continuous voice. Rather, it was a set of fragments … like post-it notes left everywhere. That does not sound productive in terms of long, concentrated spells of thinking regarding a specific subject. It would seem that such a person would jump around a lot in their mind, just as dreams jump around chaotically. These people maintain their concentration on the outside rather than on the inside.
The Voice? the subject of inner monologue, some people say they hear an actual O nvoice – their own voice – just as if they were talking out loud. They hear it as their physical voice. That’s just weird! Isn’t that the same as schizophrenia, but with your own voice? Doesn’t inner monologue mean that you don’t have a physical voice in your head, but strictly a mental voice? If you’re listening to the TV, the person on the TV has a physical voice. Your inner voice isn’t like that. It’s “silent” (although you can of course internally hear it). If someone had an actual “physical” voice in their head, how would it not interfere with actual physical voices? How would you be able to concentrate on the voices on the TV while you were talking to yourself in a rival, internal physical voice? The trick is to have an inner voice that speaks without using any physical vocalization systems, and which you hear without any physicality, without any physical ears. You want a mental voice and corresponding mental hearing as opposed to a physical voice and physical hearing. A schizophrenic hears voices as though they were real, external voices, belonging to other people. The key quality of our inner voice ought to be that it is unlike any other voice. We hear it speaking, although we know for a fact that we are not physically speaking, and we hear it despite the fact that we know we are not using our ears to physically hear it. So, it has a unique quality: a voice that requires no vocalization; a voice that requires no ears to hear it; a voice that we assume belongs to us and not to any other being. Yet this voice remains incredibly mysterious because it’s not actually ours, assuming we identify with our consciousness. It’s actually the voice of our unconscious, our
subservient mind, waiting to be led. We do not produce the words we think. The words are presented to us. What we do is reflect on the words. That’s totally different from producing them. Who on earth would actually know how to construct sounds in their heads? It’s as impossible as knowing how to make your heart beat, your lungs breathe, your kidneys filter. It’s something else that does all this … your incredibly powerful and versatile unconscious mind. The You and Your Hormones site says, “A gland is an organ which produces and releases substances that perform a specific function in the body. There are two types of gland. Endocrine glands are ductless glands and release the substances that they make (hormones) directly into the bloodstream. These glands form part of the endocrine system … There is another type of gland called an exocrine gland (e.g., sweat glands, lymph nodes). These are not considered part of the endocrine system as they do not produce hormones and they release their product through a duct. … Endocrine glands, such as the pancreas and thyroid gland, use the bloodstream to monitor the body’s internal environment and to communicate with each other through substances called hormones, which are released into the bloodstream. The adrenal glands are small structures attached to the top of each kidney. The human body has two adrenal glands that release chemicals called hormones into the bloodstream. These hormones affect many parts of the human body.” We might regard the brain as a gland that excretes thoughts, which affect the whole body. Imagine the placebo effect as a means by which thoughts trigger the immune system to combat real diseases. We don’t need the medicine itself to be present because our immune system is mentally triggered to produce the same effect, thus curing us as effectively as the medicine.
The Spectrum such as aphantasia, no inner voice, schizophrenia (too many C onditions voices), dissociative identity disorder (too many identities), bipolar disorder (excessive mood swings), and severe autism (degraded theory of mind; repetitive behaviors; stilted speech; challenges with social skills; inability to read nonverbal communication; inability to grasp metaphor; over-
literal interpretation of language) all go to show that the spectrum of “consciousness” is incredibly wide. You cannot assume that your own subjective consciousness has any resemblance whatsoever to the subjective consciousness of other people. Even someone simply with a different personality type from you (e.g., ESFP versus INTJ) may be totally alien to you in terms of consciousness. There are people out there who would seem totally normal to us, but their subjective consciousness – if we could somehow access it – would be absolutely alien to us. Externally they might seem fully human; internally they wouldn’t seem human at all, from our internal understanding of what a human is. A person with aphantasia (“without imagination”), autism, and no inner voice would have a consciousness that seems nothing like that of normies. In fact, what even is a normie? It’s so hard to tell. Maybe there’s an incredibly wide range of inner monologues and phantasia (imagination). Maybe some people have the most vivid phantasia, while others have a much vaguer version. How would we ever know? We can only understand each other in terms of what each of us says and how each of us behaves: their “externality”. We have no clue at all about their internality. According to the school of Behaviorism, psychology is the science of behavior. It’s not the science of the inner mind, which it dismisses. It rejects introspective methods and seeks to understand behavior solely through observable stimuli (inputs) and consequent behaviors (outputs).
MOOD “In grammar, mood is used to refer to a verb category or form which indicates whether the verb expresses a fact (the indicative mood), a command (the imperative mood), a question (the interrogative mood), a condition (the conditional mood), or a wish or possibility (the subjunctive mood).” – Lexico people, bicameral people, were all about facts (the indicative A ncient mood) and commands (the imperative mood). Conscious people were additionally able to access the subjunctive mood, the conditional mood and the interrogative mood. These totally transformed the human psyche and allowed it to think in very different ways.
“Grammatical mood, also known as mode, refers to the quality or form of a verb in a sentence. More specifically, mood denotes the tone of a verb in a sentence, so the intention of the writer or speaker is clear. When considering mood in grammar, there are five basic types: conditional, imperative, indicative, interrogative, and subjunctive. For example, a sentence containing a request or a command (imperative) will carry a different mood than a sentence that’s expressing a wish, a doubt or a hypothetical (subjunctive).” – Your Dictionary
Consciousness Today humanity were much more literate, much more grammatical, much more I fcomfortable with the subjunctive mood, the conditional mood and the interrogative mood, it would be much more conscious. The world largely remains under the control of the imperative mood, just as it was in bicameral days. The super-rich are those that command, and everyone else obeys. The rich are the masters and everyone else is their slave. Scientists are those obsessed with the indicative mood, expressed through sensory “facts”. The scientific method applies the interrogative mood to the indicative mood (it asks why the sensory facts are what they are, and provides hypotheses, reflecting the conditional mood). Philosophers use the subjunctive mood, the conditional mood and the interrogative mood, and are much less interested in the indicative mood than scientists. Religion massively emphasizes the imperative mood, reflecting the commands, commandments and dogmas of religion. Spirituality is much more concerned with the subjunctive mood. Postmodernism is highly concerned with the subjunctive mood, the conditional mood and the interrogative mood. It hates the indicative and imperative moods. Isn’t it amazing that grammar is built into all human thinking? Mathematics, reality’s own language, dealing with eternal and necessary thinking, is not accommodated by the grammar of manmade languages.
The Subjunctive “A sentence with a subjunctive mood expresses a condition that is doubtful, hypothetical, wishful or not factual. The subjunctive verb in these sentences will show action, but it will be dependent upon some other action (indicative), which is where you’ll find the doubt or questioning. A great way to spot sentences written in the subjunctive mood is to note
clauses beginning with ‘if.’ Then, you’ll clearly notice that the verb tends to express a doubt, wish, request, demand, proposal, or hypothetical situation.” – Your Dictionary mind gave way to the conscious mind because people were T heablebicameral to ask “if” questions. Look at the tale of the Garden of Eden. Adam and Eve were originally subjected to the imperative mood – the commands of God. Adam and Eve were not to disobey God under any circumstances. The serpent (the Devil) then asked Adam and Eve what would happen if they ate the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge. The Devil introduced the subjunctive, and thus consciousness and free will. The Devil was a grammarian. He freed humanity with grammar. Thank God!
Active and Passive Voice two grammatical voices are active and passive. Active voice refers to a T hesentence which has a subject that acts upon its verb (i.e., that performs the verb’s action). Passive voice refers to a sentence in which a subject is a recipient of a verb’s action (the subject is acted on by the verb). Traditionally, active voice is regarded as strong and passive voice as weak. Sentences in the active voice are direct and clear. The subjects are taking action in sentences written in the active voice. Are you active in your life, or passive? Are you imposing yourself on the world, or is it imposing itself on you? In bicameral times, the “god” had the active voice and the “man” had a passive voice. When consciousness took over, the “god” became passive and the man became “active”. According to Julian Jaynes, man felt bereft without his god and immediately became obsessed with finding him again. Humanity was most active in the subject of religion – restoring the gods, hearing them once again.
Grammar
are complicated things. In English grammar, V erbs properties: voice, mood, tense, person, and number.
verbs have five
“Verb tense” concerns when the action occurred (e.g., past, present, or future). “Verb mood” refers to the “attitude” of the action. Is the verb actually happening, possibly happening, or being commanded to happen? Voice is active or passive. A verb agrees with its subject in number and person. There are three Persons (first, second and third) and two Numbers (singular and plural). In bicameralism, did the god think of himself and the man as “we” or was the god one thing (singular) and the man another singular thing?
Verb Mood hat is mood? It’s the form of the verb that shows the manner in which a thought is expressed. Where verb tenses indicate time (such as past, present, future), verb moods indicate states. The imperative mood, for example, indicates the state of commanding. English verbs have as many as six moods: indicative, imperative, subjunctive, conditional, interrogative, and infinitive. The Indicative Mood involves an assertion, denial, or question, e.g., Paris is the capital of France (assertion); Some birds cannot fly (denial). The Imperative Mood expresses command, e.g. Don’t smoke. “Imperative” derives from the Latin word imperare, meaning “to command.” The interrogative mood concerns questions, e.g. Have you finished your job? The Conditional Mood concerns the form of a verb which is used to make requests or expression of under what condition something would happen. It uses helping or auxiliary verbs such as, might, would, should and could, e.g. “If you were here, you could have done it.” The Subjunctive Mood expresses doubt, the hypothetical, or something contrary to fact, e.g. If I were you, I wouldn’t keep heading in that direction. It can be closely connected to the conditional mood. (The conditional concerns what would happen or what one would do in certain circumstances. The subjunctive concerns a situation that is uncertain, unreal, or just a wish. Also, the subjunctive mood talks about the urgency or importance of
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something.) The Infinitive Mood expresses an action or state without reference to any subject, e.g. To err is human; to forgive, divine. The Infinitive Mood consists of the base word of the verb plus TO, e.g., to eat, to go, to study, to sleep. What was the mood in bicameral times? The “god” always adopted the imperative mood, the mood of command. What is the primary mood of consciousness? It’s the subjunctive mood of possibility and the hypothetical. It’s all about plans, about “what ifs”, about “what might be”. It revolves around thought experiments.
Transitive and Intransitive is described as transitive or intransitive depending on whether it A verb requires an object to express a complete thought or not. A transitive verb transfers its action to something or someone (the object). Transitive means “to affect something else.” In the sentence “Please bring a beer”, the verb “bring” is transitive; its object is the beer, the thing being brought. Without an object, the verb cannot function. “Please bring” doesn’t make sense. Bring what? A transitive verb exerts its action on an object. An intransitive verb does not require an object to act upon. Examples are: “They danced”; “The rabbit ran”; “He sang”. Should we refer to transitive consciousness in relation to awareness of the external world, and intransitive consciousness in relation to inner awareness that requires no external world but does need internal objects? Imagine a world with no objects and just actions, a world of subjects and intransitive verbs alone.
WRITING anguage starts by associating sounds (vocalizations) with objects and actions. It’s a code. It allows us to refer to one thing in terms of another thing that does not suffer from the same constraints. So, our eyes are constrained by whatever’s in front of us. We can’t see round corners. We can’t see beyond the horizon. We can’t see through things. We can only see what is immediately present to us. But once we have encoded visual things as vocal things, we can go on referring to the visual things long after they have ceased to be present to us. We have thus invented a way for visual things to be present to us without even opening our eyes. We simply need to think of the vocalization and that summons the associated image. If we vocalize “red sheep”, we see a red sheep in our mind’s eye, even though there are no red sheep in real life. We can enhance the visual world … via sound! What about writing? Writing reverses the initial process. Having linked the visual to the auditory, we then link the auditory to the visual. The most obvious way to do this would be to create written symbols that look like the objects and actions we have vocalized. So, we could use a picture of a tree to correspond to tree. But drawing pictures is a highly constrained and inefficient way to produce a highly versatile writing system. The brilliant idea of an alphabet was invented to address this. Take a small set of symbols – the letters of the alphabet – and then construct all possible words from them. Give each letter a sound and then all words constructed from them have a sound too. So, for language, we have a small set of visual symbols, each paired with a sound or sounds (different sounds for different contexts, or depending on what other letters a particular letter is paired with). We thus have a way to represent any object or action in the given world with manmade symbols and sounds that have nothing to do with the given world. We can encode the world in terms of things that, in themselves, have no connection to the world … things we simply invented. With manmade language we can carry around an encoded version of reality at all times. When we are lying on a bed in pitch darkness, with our
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eyes closed, we can still think intensely about the world via our learned language, our encoded version of reality. No animal can do this. Humans rule the world because they can think about the given world even when the given world is absent. That’s what consciousness is: thinking about the world when the world is there, and also when it isn’t (because all sensory inputs have been shut off or suppressed, as in the middle of the night, for example). Animals “think” about the given world, and that’s all. They are “in the moment” and that’s all. Compared with human memory – with all the things humans can remember – animals have next to no memory. An elephant never forgets, they say. But what does it remember? Humans forget so much because they have so much to forget! Elephants don’t. Their world is very narrow and constrained. The few things that happen to them make a big impression. Memory is critical to consciousness. One of the primary ways we remember, easily the most important way, is by narratization, by creating a story, with us as the protagonist. We can remember almost nothing of our lives before we were five years old. Why not? Because our language development wasn’t good enough to sustain a complex narrative. What we remember is our story. Before we can tell a story, we have very little in the way of memory. A child is largely what a bicameral person was like as an adult. Consciousness has a prerequisite: sentience (subjectivity). All animals are sentient, but only humans are conscious. So, what is consciousness? Consciousness is the ability to think about the given world (sentient world) via a non-given world, a constructed world (the manmade world of language). A human who never learned a language would never be conscious. They would remain an animal. Consciousness is that which separates us from the given world while allowing us to reflect on the given world. Consciousness necessarily entails a secondary process for interacting with reality. That secondary process is the one furnished by language. Language allows us to narratize, and narratization allows us to have a story-based memory. We just need to track back in our story to remember something. And we can also project our story into the future. With language, we can think about the world in the present even when it’s not available to us because, for example, we’re in a sensory deprivation chamber. We can think
about the past via the story of our life, and the story of the world (history), and we can contemplate the future to come. No animal can do that. Language, which leads to memory, gives us the control of time. All animals are trapped in the present. Humans exist in the past, present and future. Another prerequisite for consciousness is to have an unconscious production mind that makes our mental content, including our thoughts, in combination with a consumption mind that is subjectively aware of what is produced. If this consumption mind is passive, as it was in one of Jaynes’s bicameral humans, then the person is not conscious. To be conscious, the consumption mind has to active, which is to say lucid and decision-making, hence able to exercise free will. It is language that allows us to have free will since language allows us to formulate many possible future actions. We can reflect on these, weigh them up, and then choose the one that will, we think, best serve our interests. Consciousness is above all about language, hence humanity was not conscious until it acquired language, meaning that consciousness has nothing to do with science but is all about culture, which is to say mental reality as opposed to mere physical biology. So, in short, consciousness is about: 1) a sentient mind, 2) a production mind, 3) a consumption mind (actually, this is the same as the sentient mind), and 4) language. Language gives us an active mind, a lucid mind. It gives us free will and it gives us memory. It gives us an understanding of time. Consciousness, since it is based on language, and language is an agreed group construct, belongs to the group, not the individual. This is another key reason why consciousness has nothing to do with science, and is all about culture, sociology, and collective psychology. Manmade language separates the given world from our representation of it, hence necessarily falsifies it, yet also makes it much more interesting. By contrast, reality’s language – ontological mathematics – is what everything is in fact made of. In this case, uniquely, language is reality. And this means that if we want optimal consciousness – God consciousness – giving us actual control of reality itself, this consciousness needs to be mathematical. A Godlike mind literally knows – consciously – how to produce whatever it likes by combining the basic letters of the cosmic language: sinusoidal waves. It knows both sides of the dual-aspect equation: syntax and semantics. It has become one with its thoughts. Its thoughts are instantly made real in the world. They are no longer mediated by artificial
language.
Universal Access anguage is how we access the universal. Manmade language gives us false access; mathematics gives us true access. Language allows us to switch from particulars – the private world of subjective experiences – to universals – the public world of objective experiences (objective in the sense that they can be communicated to others, without allowing the other person to have the same subjective experience). The production mind does not have agency. It is entirely suggestible. Even in bicameralism, where it seems to be the production mind that has agency, the production mind is in fact simply responding to the “suggestion” of archetypes to perform instinctual, stereotypical actions. The bicameral mind never gave anyone any complex instructions. The consumption mind acquired agency when it acquired complex language. During sleep, the consumption mind becomes passive again, as indicated by a steep decline in IQ. During dreams the consumption mind never engages in complex lines of thought. It doesn’t write much, if at all; it doesn’t read much, if at all; and it doesn’t solve complex mathematical, philosophical and scientific problems. Sentience is passive (animals are passive). Consciousness is active (humans are active).
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A SENTENCE “Sentences must always include both a subject and a predicate. The subject is the noun (a person, place, or thing) that performs, controls, or is responsible for the action of the verb. The predicate is, essentially, everything in the sentence that follows the subject. It is made up of at least one finite verb, the action of which is performed by the subject. In addition, the predicate may (but does not always) include: Participles, which are used to form the perfect and continuous tenses; Direct and indirect objects (if the verb is transitive); Other complements (which include object complements, adjective complements, and subject complements); and Modifiers (if they are not a part of the subject).” – the Free Dictionary he two most basic parts of a sentence are the subject and the predicate. The subject of a sentence is the person or thing performing the sentence’s action. It’s what or whom the sentence is about. The predicate of a sentence is the part that modifies the subject in some way. The predicate must contain a verb explaining what the subject does. It can contain modifying words, phrases, or clauses. The predicate is what is asserted; the subject is what the assertion is about. In bicameralism, who is the subject? Is it the “god” or the “man”? In consciousness, the “man” is the subject, or seems to be. The unconscious (formerly the god) has become silent, yet the unconscious is actually the production mind, the mind that generates thought, that conveys our inner voice. Our inner monologue is not our consciousness. Consciousness is what listens to the inner monologue and reacts to it and
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directs it. People without an inner voice are still conscious, proving that the inner voice cannot be the agent of consciousness. In that case, consciousness is aware of the productions of the unconscious by means different from those of voice. It may be images, patterns, “downloads”, flashes of intuition, feelings, or whatever the unconscious is able to generate for the conscious mind to be aware of, to consume, and upon which to decide what to do. Imagine you were designing the ideal language for a bicameral person. Would it be anything like English? Would it have a subject-predicate structure? It would be much more complicated than that due to having to find room for the “god” as well as the “man” in relation to what constituted the “subject”. How we use language actually determines our consciousness and even our understanding of reality. If everyone on earth could only use passive voice, people would thereby have a totally passive attitude to life. Imagine a world where only the imperative mood was possible. All human behavior would revolve around commands, and obeying commands, and that’s exactly what we see in the Torah, Bible and Koran. These are “imperative texts”. Postmodern texts are the opposite. They deconstruct the imperative mood, and all certainty. Descartes began the modern philosophical age with rationalist philosophy. Who were the people most opposed to his philosophy? – the empiricists. Empiricism is a different language from rationalism. Rationalists and empiricists think entirely differently. They do not have the same consciousness. Rationalists are much more concerned with the imperative mood and analytic certainty. Scientific empiricists are very much against the imperative mood. They subscribe to falsification and verification principles, which are opposed to absolute certainty. People of faith (who believe in an imperative God, and the imperatives of belief) have a completely different consciousness from both the rationalists and empiricists, and mystics have a different consciousness from those three (they believe in reaching “higher” states of feeling and subjective experience; everything is focused on the internal individual). Humanity is full of people who have drastically different modes of consciousness all imagining they are on the same page. They’re not. People who think differently from you are aliens. They might as well be from other planets. Why is there so much trouble in the world? It’s because people with different consciousnesses do not and cannot comprehend each other, and lack
of comprehension makes them feel deeply threatened by other people. They are right to be worried. People with a different consciousness can be seriously dangerous to your health.
Grammar, Syntax and Semantics “Colorless green ideas sleep furiously is a sentence composed by Noam Chomsky in his 1957 book ‘Syntactic Structures’ as an example of a sentence that is grammatically correct, but semantically nonsensical. The sentence was originally used in his 1955 thesis ‘The Logical Structure of Linguistic Theory’ and in his 1956 paper ‘Three Models for the Description of Language’. Although the sentence is grammatically correct, no obvious understandable meaning can be derived from it, and thus it demonstrates the distinction between syntax and semantics.” – Wikipedia is the rule of a language. Syntax is the rule governing word G rammar order. Grammar is the more general and prescriptive linguistic term. As Chomsky showed, it’s possible for a sentence to be valid grammatically and syntactically, but to be semantic gibberish (i.e., to have no meaning). But even stuff with apparent meaning can often actually be meaningless. Many grammatically, syntactically and semantically correct statements can be made about the Abrahamic God, but no such God exists, so how can these sentences have any authentic meaning? Many people believe in the reality of things for grammatical reasons. As Nietzsche said, “I am afraid we are not rid of God because we still have faith in grammar.” Simply because we can refer to something in language, many people believe that the thing then exists. After all, the sentence says so. But it doesn’t exist. Manmade language has no necessary connection to reality. Reality’s own language is ontological mathematics and only in the syntax and semantics of that language is anything actually true.
The Language Game passively process the given world. You open your eyes and there the P eople world is. That process is not consciousness. It’s sentience. Bizarrely, many people, especially scientists and philosophers, confuse this sentience with consciousness. Sentience can be called “given perception” (perception of the given world). Consciousness, therefore, is “induced perception”. What we perceive is not the given world but the world of language, of words, of concepts, which we continuously create. Julian Jaynes called this the “mind-space”. Jaynes wrote, “Consider the language we use to describe conscious processes. The most prominent group of words used to describe mental events are visual. We ‘see’ solutions to problems, the best of which may be ‘brilliant’, and the person ‘brighter’ and ‘clear-headed’ as opposed to ‘dull’, ‘fuzzy-minded’, or ‘obscure’ solutions. These words are all metaphors and the mind-space to which they apply is a metaphor of actual space. In it we can ‘approach’ a problem, perhaps from some ‘viewpoint’, and ‘grapple’ with its difficulties, or seize together or ‘comprehend’ parts of a problem, and so on, using metaphors of behavior to invent things to do in this metaphored mind-space.” Jaynes’s central idea was that consciousness is all about a second space, a mind-space, which is analogous to the given world. It’s a metaphor for it, but much richer, with many more connections, and the constant opportunity to create new connections. The given world is largely fixed. The mind-space is always changing. We are conscious by virtue of having this second space – a space made possible by language, by metaphor, by analogy – with which we can reflect on the given world and also imagine a totally different version of the given world. We can thereby escape from the given world. You cannot be conscious unless you can inhabit this other world, the language counterpart of the given world. No creature without language, without the ability to populate a mind-space, can be conscious. Babies – humans before they have acquired language – are not conscious. Humanity before it developed language was not conscious. Humans that cannot learn language are not conscious. Consciousness relies on sophisticated language. When language was
primitive, it wasn’t powerful enough to sustain a stable, productive, complex mind-space. Bicameralism was the type of psyche that existed prior to consciousness. We can imagine it as a limited mind-space that needed to be supplemented by stress-induced hallucinations (auditory and visual), involving “gods”. Another expression of the first glimmers of consciousness was the development of the language of art. To perform art, you need the idea that the world can be represented. No animals perform art. There are no lion paintings, or ape sculptures. There are no stand-up comedians in the animal world. How much do animals laugh? They seem to have a basic slapstick humor – chimpanzees would no doubt chuckle if a fellow chimp failed to grab a branch and fell in a heap on the ground right in front of them. What is comedy? It’s the deliberate use of language to direct us one way, and then, at the last moment, to show us, via the “punchline” that we had all been misdirected. It’s a version of magic and illusionism. You cannot have real comedy without language, and its inherent ambiguity. How many comedians can tell numerical rather than verbal jokes? Zero!
LANGUAGE AND FREE WILL ust as consciousness is impossible without language to create a space (the language space) separate from normal space (the given world), so free will is also impossible without language. Animals have no language hence their behavior is all about instinct. They have no freedom. Consciousness and free will are more or less synonymous. Both rely on language. It’s in the language space – not in the given world – that we formulate different possible courses of action, and it’s in the language space that we choose one of these options (i.e., we exercise free will), and then enact that choice in the physical world. Free will comes down to “collapsing” the language-space wavefunction and enacting it in the world. In the given world, we can only do one thing at a time. In the language space, we can imagine doing many possible different things in the next moment. The thing we actually do in the given world is our free selection of the various options we thought up in the language space. So, free will, like consciousness, has absolutely nothing to do with matter and the organization of matter. It is not a scientific problem. It’s cultural. Free will is located in the language space, not the given space. Free will is, in a very real sense, hallucinatory. We hallucinate different possibilities using language, and then we evaluate these possibilities and choose one of them to enact physically. We don’t wait for atomic determinism, or quantum indeterminism, to tell us what to do, as scientists (who reject free will) amusingly claim. Language allows us to create different possibilities and keep them all in a superposition of states. To exercise our free will, we simply choose one and then will it (i.e., instruct our production mind to execute it). The fascinating thing is how we convert language into physical action. If you say to yourself that you are going to raise your arm, what is it that actually raises your arm? It certainly isn’t “you”. You don’t know how to raise your arm, i.e., you don’t know all the necessary muscular movements to make to cause it to happen. Consciousness isn’t in control of any bodily functions whatsoever. It’s your unconscious production mind that knows exactly how the body operates,
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and also the production mind that generates all your thoughts. Your consciousness is the entity that gives suggestions (instructions; directions) to the production mind, and it then performs them. So, consciousness asks the production mind to generate possible courses of action, consciousness ponders them, and then consciousness selects the option that most serves its agenda. It OKs that option to the production mind (i.e., it “wills” it), and the production mind then carries out all the necessary, syntactic bodily actions to do what was willed. It’s the production mind that does everything … except choose. Consciousness chooses. That’s why it exists. Consciousness also does the suggesting to the unconscious to produce the various possibilities from which the choice will be made. Animals can’t do this. They’re not conscious. They operate instinctually, using the archetypal behavior of their species. The advent of language changed everything. It gave birth to consciousness and free will; you cannot have the one without the other. According to Julian Jaynes, bicameral humanity wasn’t conscious and didn’t have free will. When a bicameral person needed to take a decision, a voice manifested in their head and simply told them what to do. This was the default (i.e., instinctual, archetypal) offering of the production mind. No other possibilities were offered, so there was no free will, there was no conscious reflection and choice. While language remained simple, it could not produce consciousness. All it could do was facilitate basic commands: “do this”, “do that”. It was all about the imperative mood. Spoken language was the basis of bicameralism. It was the invention of written language that changed everything and made consciousness possible, even in a world where very few people could write. As writing evolved, it allowed language to become much more formalized and organized, to have a sophisticated grammar, with different moods, voices, tenses, and so on. It was this extra complexity that changed language from a simple command system to something much more elaborate. Even though most ancient people never learned to write, by imitating the spoken language of those that could write – who, thanks to writing and its extra complexity, developed much better and more powerful spoken language than everyone else – they too acquired much more advanced language skills. Spoken language became much more useful, much more advanced, because of written language.
That writing requires much more intelligence than speaking is proved by the number of people who can speak but not write. Writing is where all the intelligence of language is located. It was written language, and how it altered spoken language, that ultimately overthrew bicameralism and produced consciousness. Bicameralism was born of a simple command language with an extremely simple grammar. Consciousness was born of a complex, multipurpose language with extremely complex grammar. Most people have long forgotten what grammar actually is. They use it unconsciously. They couldn’t analyze the grammar of a complex sentence and describe all of its different aspects: mood, voice, person, tense, and so on. The more people use language, the more their production mind learns it, internalizes it and uses it. So, there came a time – probably in a highly stressful time of war or change – when people with better language skills found their production mind doing more than just uttering simple commands. It started offering choices, generated by more complex use of language, involving conditionality and possibility (the conditional and subjunctive moods) rather than just command (the imperative mood). However, the production mind only knows how to produce, not to choose. Once the production mind started generating conditions and possibilities as well as commands, it needed something else to do the choosing between the different conditions and possibilities. The only other mind available was the consumption mind, the awareness mind, the passive mind that all of us have in our dreams. The evolutionary pressure to make the passive mind choose soon enough rendered it active, which is to say lucid. Once it was lucid, executive command switched from the production mind (bicameralism) to the consumption mind (consciousness), and the rest is history. Consciousness was literally generated by the increasing complexity of language, and the ability of the production mind to start creating more than just commands. The game changer was when the production mind “learned” the grammatical conditional and subjunctive moods and started issuing questions, possibilities and uncertainties rather than just the definitive commands of the imperative mood. That’s consciousness right there – located in the transition from the imperative mood to the conditional and subjunctive moods – because that’s when the production mind needed to transfer decision-making from itself to the consumption (awareness) mind, the only mind capable of being aware of the different choices and then selecting one.
Sleepwalkers are bicameral. The sleepwalker’s consciousness is engaged in dreaming or sleeping. The sleepwalker is completely under the control of the production mind, giving one command after another to complete some task. A sleepwalker reflects the imperative grammatical mood. To be conscious, you must reflect, especially, the subjunctive grammatical mood, the domain of possibility, of choice, of free will, of lucid waking. The subjunctive mood requires awareness and lucidity. The imperative mood does not. So, consciousness is literally built into grammar! The breathtaking insight of Nietzsche’s famous statement “I am afraid we are not rid of God because we still have faith in grammar” becomes more and more apparent. God was created by language. God simply is the imperative mood in grammar. The bicameral “voice” was the imperative voice of grammar, telling people what to do. Most people are submissive. They long for a voice of command, for a dominant. God is the ultimate dominant, hence the ultimate wet-dream of submissives. God is located in the imperative mood. God is the imperative mood. The bicameral voice was numinous and regarded as God because it was the voice inside a person’s head telling them what to do. When that voice was lost – because the imperative mood (valuable in simple situations requiring straightforward orders) yielded to the much more useful, versatile, but also doubtful and uncertain, subjunctive mood – the person felt bereft. Their God – the voice of certainty – was gone, and what remained was free will, plagued by doubt and uncertainty, and all the pressure and responsibility of decisionmaking. Forget science. The birth of consciousness was grammatical, not material. We could rename Julian Jaynes’s The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind as The Origin of Consciousness in the Transition of the Grammatical Imperative Mood to the Subjunctive Mood. The bicameral mind was expressed through the imperative mood (the mood of certainty and command … of “god”), and replaced by the conscious mind, expressed, in particular, through the subjunctive mood (the mood of uncertainty, possibility, and choice … of a human with free will). This all happened because of the evolution of grammar, thanks to the invention of writing, which changed the nature of language by making it much more grammatically complex, and allowing for the creation of the subjunctive mood. Once the subjunctive mood existed, everything could then be
expressed in hypothetical terms, as possibilities, and once you have possibilities you are required to choose one, and that’s the exact function of consciousness. The “man” (the decision maker, choosing from amongst possibilities he himself generated) replaced the god (the decision maker of pure command, without possibilities). Julian Jaynes was absolutely right. The warriors of the Iliad were robots with no inner reflection. They all acted according to the imperative mood. They did not have access to the subjunctive mood of possibility, hence they could not actually think of possibilities, and that’s why the Trojan war dragged on for so long. People might say, “What about the Trojan Horse, a grand deception, requiring the subjunctive mood to formulate such an idea?” Actually, the Trojan Horse had nothing to do with the Iliad. Wikipedia says, “In the popularized, fictional work of the Aeneid by Virgil, after a fruitless 10-year siege, the Greeks at the behest of Odysseus constructed a huge wooden horse and hid a select force of men inside, including Odysseus himself. The Greeks pretended to sail away, and the Trojans pulled the horse into their city as a victory trophy. That night the Greek force crept out of the horse and opened the gates for the rest of the Greek army, which had sailed back under cover of night. The Greeks entered and destroyed the city of Troy, ending the war.” So, the tale of the Trojan Horse doesn’t belong to the Iliad but to the Aeneid, written in the conscious era. However, the tales of Odysseus in the Odyssey clearly show that the migration from the imperative to subjunctive mood was well underway. Odysseus, in the Iliad, is one of the cast of robots. In the Odyssey, he is a far more complex, nuanced, reflective character. In the Iliad, he is bicameral. In the Odyssey, he is conscious. Julian Jaynes wrote, “After the Iliad, the Odyssey. And anyone reading these poems freshly and consecutively sees what a gigantic vault in mentality it is! There are of course some scholars who still like to think of these two huge epics as being written down and even composed by one man named Homer, the first in his youth and the second in his maturity. The more reasonable view, I think, is that the Odyssey followed the Iliad by at least a century or more…” The bicameral mind broke down because it became grammatically much more complex and could sustain the much more complex thinking associated with the subjunctive mood as opposed to the imperative mood. The
subjunctive mood actually required the reorganization of the psyche to accommodate it and maximize its utility. Consciousness, the replacement for bicameralism, was the outcome. Bicameralism was the imperative mood, the mood of command. Consciousness is the subjunctive mood, the mood of possibility. Language colonized our minds and changed its functioning because it was able to give us the subjunctive mood, something unavailable to any animal. This mood is the essence of free will. It’s how we can perform thought experiments and imagine a different reality from the one confronting us. Hallucinations in the subjunctive mood are entirely different from hallucinations in the imperative mood. They have drastically different consequences for the nervous system. An imperative hallucination leads to an automatic physical response. A subjunctive hallucination does not. A decision has to be taken in response to it. Who or what takes the decision? Bicameralism was all about imperative hallucinations. Consciousness involves subjunctive hallucinations, but these are not regarded as hallucinations. They result from inner voice and associated phantasia.
LANGUAGE SYNESTHESIA magine that every time you saw the color red, you heard a specific sound in your head. Imagine that every time you saw the color blue, you heard a different specific sound. Imagine that every time you saw the color yellow, you heard a third specific sound. There are people who automatically have a multiple sensory response to a specific sensory stimulus. They have synesthesia (“together feeling”; the production of a sense impression relating to one sense by stimulation of another sense). What is spoken language? It can be thought of as a learned form of synesthesia, linking specific visual images with specific vocalized sounds. The same vocalized sound is always used for the same visual image. Every time you see an object with leaves, branches, and a trunk, you say “tree”. At first, a little human – an infant – does this process laboriously. However, once it has internalized the process through habituation, the process is rendered automatic (fully unconscious). If you want to learn a different language, you have to go back to the beginning and try to habituate that too. Hearing and speaking are of course extremely closely connected. If you speak the word “tree”, you hear the word “tree” too. Language is about artificially linking our visual and auditory cortices. Every human in a society is trained (educated) to link specific sounds to specific images, and this is the basis of their particular language. Every language starts out as spoken (using a vocalization to express an image). No human can subjectively see what another human is subjectively seeing, but every human can objectively hear what every other human objectively hears. How do you direct a person’s attention to something you believe is important? You can point of course. Pointing is a means to indicate to them to look at the same thing you are looking at. Pointing is a simple visual language: communicating to another person that they should look here rather than there. Instead of pointing at a nearby tree, a human might say, “Look at the tree
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directly in front of us. Look at what is carved on the bark.” So, pointing can indicate the tree that we want another person to look at, but will they look at the carving on the bark? Pointing is too general. We would need to indicate to the other person to follow us to the tree and then we would need to point specifically at the bark carving. And then what? With spoken language we can direct another person to the tree, to the carved bark, and then we can start discussing the significance and import of the tree carving. Is it art? A warning? A threat? A signal? An indicator of the presence of an enemy? Is it a benevolent carving, or something we need to worry about? Is it religious? Spoken language, unlike pointing, can allow us to assess all of this. We are the only creatures on earth that use a language which we have been deliberately trained (educated) to use in order to maximize our communication with each other. We can enormously extend the power and range of spoken language by using a written language. What is a written language? It’s where we create a visual signal for a vocalized sound. So, for the vocalization “tree”, we could of course draw a tree. This would be a very cumbersome language. Famously, the ancient Egyptians used a pictorial language called hieroglyphics. Wikipedia says, “A hieroglyph (Greek for ‘sacred carvings’) was a character of the ancient Egyptian writing system. Logographic scripts that are pictographic in form in a way reminiscent of ancient Egyptian are also sometimes called ‘hieroglyphs’. In Neoplatonism, especially during the Renaissance, a ‘hieroglyph’ was an artistic representation of an esoteric idea, which Neoplatonists believed actual Egyptian hieroglyphs to be. The word hieroglyphics refers to a hieroglyphic script.” Hieroglyphics were impossibly hard for modern people to understand. They cracked the code only when they found a translation of hieroglyphics into Greek (via the famous Rosetta Stone). Wikipedia says of hieroglyphics, “The Egyptians invented the pictorial script. The appearance of these distinctive figures in 3000 BCE marked the beginning of Egyptian civilization. Though based on images, Egyptian script was more than a sophisticated form of picture-writing. Each picture/glyph served one of three functions: (1) to represent the image of a thing or action, (2) to stand for a sound or the sounds of one to as many as three syllables, or (3) to clarify the precise meaning of adjoining glyphs. Writing hieroglyphs required some artistic skill, limiting the number chosen to learn it. Only those
privileged with an extensive education (i.e., the Pharaoh, nobility and priests) were able to read and write hieroglyphs; others used simpler ‘joined-up’ versions: demotic and hieratic script.” So, a vocalization maps to a visual image, and then, in turn, we use a visual symbol to represent the vocalization. The letters of the alphabet are a universal system for capturing vocalizations, for decrypting any vocalization into a consistent set of visualizations (i.e., the letters of the alphabet, arranged in words, sentences, and so on). The result of a spoken language is that the visual world can be reexpressed as a vocalized, auditory world. A blind person can get a very good understanding of the world without seeing it – because language has allowed it to be converted into auditory rather than visual signals. With written language, you do not even need anyone to do any speaking. A sighted person who cannot hear or speak can both see the world and see its re-expression via the written word. With the spoken word (before the dawn of modern technology), you needed to be present to hear the speaker. With the written word, the speaker’s presence is unnecessary. The same set of words could travel far and wide, and dominate the future as much as the present. The “Word” had been liberated. It no longer needed the physical human voice to express it. Written and spoken language are in many ways quite distinct. You use your ears for spoken language and your eyes for written language, hence they are activating different parts of the brain. Curiously, it’s very hard to “see” written language using inner vision. If you try to picture detailed text on a page, it’s practically impossible (unless you have a photographic memory or some types of autism, and such like conditions). Written material, in any detail, almost never features in dreams. People regularly speak in dreams, but how often do they write? Another curious fact is that we can “speak” silently. Our inner monologue is speech, even though nothing is said aloud. Just as bizarrely, we can hear this silent speech, although no sound is being made. So, inner speech and inner hearing both function extremely well in most people even though inner speech does not involve the production of audible speech and inner hearing does not involve the auditory reception of inner speech. Isn’t it extraordinary that, in terms of our inner world, we can see without eyes, hear
without ears, speak without a mouth, taste without a mouth, and smell without a nose? So, would any scientific materialist like to explain sightless vision, earless hearing and mouthless speech? How does “matter” explain inner speech, independent of physical speech organs? It’s self-evident that we can “mirror” externally generated signals with internally generated signals. The external signals proceed by way of the external sense organs, but the internal signals do not. It’s essential to understand that we do not truly “see” and “hear” the external world. Rather, we receive signals from the external world, which we internally process and internally experience. Since we can internally simulate or mirror these external signals – our unconscious mind can internally manufacture them – we can have a full range of internal, sensory experiences, even if all our external senses are shut down, suppressed or inhibited, as they are at night when we are asleep, or when we are in a sensory deprivation chamber. So, forget the idea that we “see” via physical eyes. All that physical eyes do is bring in the external visual signal, but the “seeing” is done in the visual cortex, not in the eyes. That’s why we can “see” in dreams even though our eyes are closed and we are receiving no external visual signals. All we need to do is give the visual cortex a valid signal – whether generated by the external world or the internal world – and “seeing” will automatically be done. The brain-mind complex, not the eyes, sees. It’s critical to understand this point in relation to phenomena such as out-of-body experiences, near-death experiences, and even simple dreaming and visualization via the “mind’s eye”. Scientists laugh at phenomena such as OBEs and NDEs, and almost entirely ignore dreams and inner vision. Not their thing, you see. They believe only in externality, in the external world, and the ability of the bodily senses to detect externality. The idea of the mind detaching from the body, and still being able to have sensory experiences, even objective experiences never mind subjective ones, makes no sense at all to them. It’s totally contrary to their paradigm. Indeed, it totally falsifies their paradigm. Consider the remarks of psychologist Julian Jaynes: “That there is no phenomenal necessity in locating consciousness in the brain is further reinforced by various abnormal instances in which consciousness seems to be outside the body. A friend who received a left frontal brain injury in the war regained consciousness in the corner of the ceiling of a hospital ward looking
down euphorically at himself on the cot swathed in bandages. Those who have taken lysergic acid diethylamide commonly report similar out-of-thebody or exosomatic experiences, as they are called. Such occurrences do not demonstrate anything metaphysical whatever; simply that locating consciousness can be an arbitrary matter.” For scientists, the idea that consciousness could be located outside the brain is ridiculous. Yet, if we accept the examples cited by Jaynes, we have to agree with him when he said, “For most of us the habit of locating consciousness in the head is so ingrained that it is difficult to think otherwise. But, actually, you could, as you remain where you are, just as well locate your consciousness around the corner in the next room against the wall near the floor, and do your thinking there as well as in your head. … [If we are talking to someone] we are always assuming a space behind our companion’s eyes into which we are talking, similar to the space we imagine inside our own heads where we are talking from. And this is the very heartbeat of the matter. For we know perfectly well that there is no such space in anyone’s head at all! There is nothing inside my head or yours except physiological tissue of one sort or another.” This is exactly right. There is no mind inside the brain. The brain is an entirely physical organ. The mind if somewhere else entirely. Imagine a drone that could communicate the voice of its pilot, located thousands of miles away. A naïve person talking to the drone might believe that the drone was generating speech, that speech was coming from the internal circuitry of the drone, rather than being transmitted to the drone from something (the pilot) very far way, and emphatically not inside the drone. Scientists are exactly such naïve people. They look inside the drone (the body) for the mind that controls it. As if a mind could be discovered in brain tissue, in mindless atoms! It’s a category error to look in the brain for the mind, yet science’s No.1 commandment is that the mind cannot be anything other than some output of the material brain. That’s why science is an atheistic subject. In science, there is nothing – no mind, no soul – that could enjoy an afterlife, and without an afterlife there can be no religion and no spirituality, only materialism and nihilism. Jaynes believed that consciousness took place in a “mind-space”, which doesn’t exist anywhere physical. We functionally locate the mind-space in the head for convenience, not because any such space actually exists there. It doesn’t exist anywhere physical, hence it’s entirely arbitrary where we
choose to locate it when we think about it. Of course, having a physical body, physical senses, and a physical brain, makes it seem as if the mind-space coincides with the brain space. Our unconscious, hence consciousness, is habitually trained by the physically located senses to give the mind-space an apparent locus behind the eyes. But what would happen if the mind was freed from its apparent connection to the body? What if a mind could enjoy any perspective and mathematically create any coordinate system centered on any possible location? This is exactly what can be done in a holographic system where both minds and the world are holographic. OBEs and NDEs are the absolute proof of the holographic mind and holographic universe. From the spacetime perspective, the physical body provides a habitual coordinate frame for “centering” our perceptions. But the mind isn’t in the body. It links to it, but its actual home is the immaterial Singularity (the Cosmic Mind) outside space and time. From the Singularity, the mind can see anything, anywhere in spacetime. What is “God”? It’s simply that which always has this perspective of being able to see anything anywhere in spacetime. The mind is inherently an out-of-body entity. However, the very fact of becoming embodied (via linking to a physical body in spacetime) causes a mind to grow habituated to a specific, localized spacetime coordinate frame and to imagine that it is restricted to that perspective. OBEs and NDEs definitively demonstrate that they are not.
Hallucinations can’t explain dreams. Dreams are entirely superfluous in a material S cience world. Equally, science can’t explain hallucinations. Dreams and hallucinations are dismissed as “screensaver operations” or “random firings”. Yes, it’s the good old “random” non-explanation! Science never tires of it. If you have no idea of how to explain something, just invoke randomness, or probability, or statistics, or uncertainty, or indeterminism, or acausation, or emergence, or the Multiverse. You know the drill! Never let anyone tell you that you are clueless. This is the No.1 rule of scientific non-explanation.
LANGUAGE AND THE BRAIN t’s essential to grasp that language can exist in the framework of the perceptual brain because it’s just a different way, an induced synesthesic way, of organizing perceptions, hence the brain’s perceptual apparatus already supports it. In the animal world, the animal’s senses show it the world, and it instinctively reacts to the world. The basic organization of the psyche of an animal is: “Sensory world produces instinctual response.” Spoken language offers a whole new means of organization: “Sensory world is translated into spoken language; spoken language allows debate, reflection, planning, reasoning and logic, and a language-based intelligent response can be offered rather than a mere instinctual response.” Spoken language began as a means of linking visual things in the given world to auditory things: deliberately connecting sights and sounds and thus creating something that the given world failed to offer. By doing this, language gave rise to a whole new world. It freed us from reliance on the given world. Simply by thinking of the sounds that comprised the language, we could conjure the corresponding images and actions in the given world, even though the actual images and actions weren’t present. Language had thus allowed us to create a new version of perception that we could carry around with us and utilize even if we were placed in a sensory-deprived environment where the given world was effectively absent (well, as a sensory experience). Language allowed us to create “inner perception”, which, as it turns out, is much more powerful and vast than outer perception. We can add incredible new things to the world via inner perception. Historically, most people chose to add “God”. God rules the language world, not the given world. No one actually encounters God in the given world, but hardly anyone doesn’t encounter God in the language world. Even atheists do. Written language changed things yet again because humanity then converted sounds, which it had invented to describe objects and actions in the given world, into invented visual symbols (letters of the alphabet, arranged into words, sentences, paragraphs, and so on). A book is not a “natural” object. You do not find this planet producing
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books amongst all the rocks, trees, beaches, mountains, rivers, and so on. A book is a sensory object that we ourselves create. It belongs to the sensory order – it’s an object in our visual field – yet it’s nothing like the natural visual order. It’s a code – a language – to allow us to see a new world (a world conjured by the book) in our minds. We have supplemented the given world via language, yet language is absolutely grounded in the senses. Although thinking in language might seem drastically different from simply perceiving the given world, it’s merely a different form of perception that we ourselves created, through the ingenious idea of linking sights to sounds (to produce spoken language), and then linking sounds to different sights (to produce written language). Language changed the sensory game by massively expanding its range. Language is induced synesthesia, linking sensory circuits that would not normally be linked. By becoming creatures of language, we all made ourselves artificial synesthetes, and it was this manufactured synesthesia that turned out to be the basis of consciousness and free will. Unlike natural synesthesia, we have to be trained to acquire this artificial synesthesia. However, once we have done so, this induced synesthesia totally colonizes and dominates our mind. It produces, for the vast majority of us, our inner vision (phantasia) and inner voice (internal monologue), and constitutes our experience of consciousness. However, just as you get blind people and deaf people, it should not really come as any surprise – although it certainly does! – that there are some people who have inner blindness (aphantasia) and inner deafness (they hear no inner voice). The consciousness of these people uses different brain circuitry from that of normal people and is much more focused on “extrospection” than introspection. When a person with aphantasia and no inner voice closes their eyes at night, they enter a profoundly different experience from the rest of us. It’s not disturbing to them because it’s what they have always experienced. To the rest of us, it would be like losing our vision and hearing. It would be nightmarish. Blind people who were once sighted have visual dreams, and love them (because they can see again). Similarly, people with aphantasia love being in the waking world where they can see. People with no inner voice relish the voices of other people and often speak out loud to themselves. Once you grasp that language is simply a new form of synesthesic perception that we have trained ourselves to have, by artificially coding
visual signals in terms of sound signals (spoken language), and then sound signals in terms of artificial visual signals (written language), you can appreciate it that there is nothing mysterious about it. It always was a potentiality of mind. Animals could do it too if given suitable training! We can “do language” with different combinations of the senses. Blind people can learn language by touch (via Braille). Deaf people can learn sign language. We could also create synesthesic acquired languages based on smell or touch! Whatever the case, we can translate the sensory world into a language world detached from the sensory world, and that is the entire basis of consciousness. It’s simply astounding that consciousness – for all its daunting reputation – is nothing but acquired (induced) synesthesia, allowing us to code one thing in terms of another, and thus freeing us from the given world where the world has to be present to us in order for us to think about it. Induced synesthesia produces phantasia and inner voice, and what could be more important than that? Inner voice, for almost all of us, is our conscious internal monologue where we narrate our life to ourselves. We would have no such inner voice without induced synesthesia. The rare people without an inner voice still have an outer voice, so are still subject to induced synesthesia. In inner terms, their consciousness is conveyed, in the absence of a voice, by an emotional language, or a visual language, or a mystical language. They are conscious, but differently from everyone else. It’s impossible to tell if animals are dreaming (they can’t tell us). If they are, their dreaming must be based on phantasia. Any creature with a memory must be able to conjure sights and sounds in their inner sensorium and these, linked to their feelings, would constitute their dream content. How do people with aphantasia dream? It seems that they dream in terms of feelings, voices and intuitions. People with no inner voice would dream in terms of feelings, sights and intuitions. People with both aphantasia and no inner voice would dream in terms of feelings and intuitions. People who have been deaf all their lives cannot have a sound-based inner voice, but they may still have a voice of some kind. A deaf person said, “I have a ‘voice’ in my head, but it is not sound-based. I am a visual being, so in my head, I either see ASL [American Sign Language] signs, or pictures, or sometimes printed words.” Julian Jaynes wrote, “Hallucinations must have some innate structure in the nervous system underlying them. We can see this clearly by studying the
matter in those who have been profoundly deaf since birth or very early childhood. For even they can – somehow – experience auditory hallucinations. This is commonly seen in deaf schizophrenics. In one study, 16 out of 22 hallucinating, profoundly deaf schizophrenics insisted they had heard some kind of communication. One thirty-two-year-old woman, born deaf, who was full of self-recrimination about a therapeutic abortion, claimed she heard accusations from God. Another, a fifty-year-old congenitally deaf woman, heard supernatural voices which proclaimed her to have occult powers.” A deaf person reported, “I was born deaf. I did have speech therapy at an early age, and growing up, my inner voice is figuratively speaking to me and I hear it as well as lipread it. This is the same voice that I imagine people have when they read blocks of text and hear in their head. I don’t exactly see some creepy ‘Voldemort’ face in my head, but I always have some image of lips moving along with a voice that I hear. At the same time, I do have memories of when I was little and didn’t speak at all, and all my memories were heavily visual and olfactory. I would always remember specific images of locations and could describe them to my parents in vivid detail trying to figure out what I was remembering. Before speech therapy, my inner voice was highly visual. Now, as I’m learning/studying sign language in my free time, I’m finding that my inner voice has grown hands as well and I sometimes read things and hear a voice, lip read, and see signs all at the same time. I would expect that a similar experience happens with those who are bilingual/ multilingual and sometimes hear all languages at once when reading a text, or perhaps sometimes it switches languages in their heads (although it is a little different because they would hear in whatever language they’re reading in for example).” Hallucinations are critical in all of this, as Julian Jaynes realized, marking him out as a true genius. Hallucinations are in fact the basis of our inner senses, our inner sensorium. A person who, via their external senses, is blind and deaf still possesses internal hallucinatory circuitry, so could potentially see and hear in their internal sensorium. A person with aphantasia, no inner voice, blindness and deafness would be in an extremely strange state, defined by touch, feelings and intuitions. Dreams are simply sequential hallucinations. How did artificial (induced) synesthesia get going, leading to the creation of language? It almost certainly arose from auditory hallucinations prompted
by the teleological Collective Unconscious. The desire to match a sound, a vocalization, to a visual object probably first manifested itself when a tribal chief experienced an auditory hallucination when standing in front of, say, a tree. He grunted something, then kept grunting the same thing, and every member of the tribe started grunting that same thing, that same sound. Very quickly, everyone in the tribe grasped that the particular grunted sound denoted the tree. When they were absent from the tree and someone grunted the sound, they all pictured the tree via their inner sensory circuitry. It proved so useful to be able to refer to things in their absence that language spread like a virus. It soon colonized all humans. James Clear, in a summary of The Tell-Tale Brain by V.S. Ramachandran wrote, “Synesthesia occurs when someone experiences the combining of senses. For example, the number 7 might seem red or chicken might taste ‘pointy.’ ... One fascinating explanation of synesthesia is that two adjacent areas of the brain are crosswired which leads to increased crosstalk between, say, colors and numbers. ... Interesting theory: a high percentage of artists and creators have been reported to have synesthesia. It’s quite possible that the cross linkage between neurons that leads to synesthesia also enables artists to create metaphors and connections between ideas in an easier fashion than most people. … It is very possible that the crosswiring of adjacent areas of the brain was selected for by evolution because it enabled those people to be more creative (and thus increase the odds of survival) with the unharmful side effect that some people would experience synesthesia.” Dr. Hugo Heyrman wrote, “My starting point is the hypothesis that ‘synesthesia-phenomena’ are at the roots of all artistic practice.” Ramachandran said, “Synesthesia is seven times more common among artists, novelists and poets, and creative people in general. Artists often have the ability to link unconnected domains, have the power of metaphor and the capability of blending realities.” According to Ramachandran, synesthesia is seminal in relation to creativity and metaphorical thinking. Rather than studying consciousness from the impossible materialist perspective, scientists ought to be studying synesthesia, hallucinations, aphantasia, no internal monologue, autism, and so on. Induced, learned synesthesia is at the root of our humanity. It underlies creativity, language, consciousness and free will. The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy says, “Like synesthesia, creativity seems to consist in, ‘linking two seemingly unrelated realms in
order to highlight a hidden deep similarity’ (Ramachandran and Hubbard). Ramachandran and Hubbard conjecture that greater connectivity (or perhaps the absence of inhibitory processes) between functionally discrete brain regions might facilitate creative mappings between concepts, experiences, and behaviors in both artists and synesthetes.” Once the brain gets big and complex enough, it creates the scope for an explosion of synesthesia, linking all sorts of discrete brain regions and massively extending the range and power of the brain, sufficient to generate language and consequently consciousness and free will. Brain complexity frees us from instinct and animalism. Ramachandran and Hubbard proposed that synesthesia results from “an excess of neural connections between associated modalities, possibly due to decreased neural pruning between (typically adjacent) regions that are interconnected in the fetus.” Jacquelyn Cafasso said, “Synaptic pruning is a natural process that occurs in the brain between early childhood and adulthood. During synaptic pruning, the brain eliminates extra synapses. Synapses are brain structures that allow the neurons to transmit an electrical or chemical signal to another neuron.” The human brain is incredibly plastic in its formative years. To change the human race once and for all, we have to direct syntactic pruning to produce optimized brains, and thus optimize what the mind can express via the brain. As it is, babies are subjected to the insane and horrifying beliefs of their parents, community and society. They are rapidly indoctrinated into crazy religions and then consumer capitalism, social media, “smartphones”, and any amount of lowest-common-denominator garbage. Humanity doesn’t optimize babies’ brains. It destroys them. It turns them to mush. It gets them addicted to nonsense. It creates an Idiocracy, a GIGO world – Garbage In, Garbage Out.
The Root of Consciousness is all about language. Humans are conscious and animals C onsciousness aren’t because humans have language and animals do not. It really is as simple as that. Consciousness is about having a secondary means (language as opposed to mere perception)) to interact with the given world. Consciousness transcends empiricism! It supports rationalism. It supports
reason and logic. It supports judging rather than mere perceiving. Meditators and the “mindful” hate judging, hate language, hate consciousness, and want to live wordlessly, non-judgmentally in the perceptual moment. They believe they are therefore “closer to nature”, to “bare awareness”, to “core reality”. What’s for sure is that they are as far as they can be from knowledge, which depends on language, consciousness, and judgment! Subjective experience gives you an immediate awareness of the given world. It does not give you the capacity to distance yourself from it and reflect on it and have knowledge of it. In fact, it’s the absolute opposite. Subjective experience puts you wholly in the moment, experiencing the thing directly. Consciousness is exactly not that. Consciousness is about being one step removed from the direct experience, hence is inherently indirect. Consciousness is absolutely linked to the awareness of tensed time – past, present, future – and is profoundly connected to memory, which is the basis of our personal identity (which relies on our autobiographical memory). Consciousness is most decidedly not subjective experience. It is precisely that which allows us to step back from subjective experience and reflect on subjective experience. It is mediate, not immediate. Subjective experience is one thing; reflecting on subjective experience is another thing. They have two different explanations. Subjectivity is explained by the fact that we are minds, made of sinusoidal waves that uniquely comprise us, and their very nature is to be subjectively experienced by the mind they constitute. Sinusoids, ontologically, are thoughts. They are both information carriers and the information carried. The information carried furnishes their empirical, subjective content; that which we experientially encounter. We do not encounter the sinusoids as syntax, as form, as information carrier. So, subjectivity is built into monadic minds. There is no impossible contradiction to explain, namely how objects can become subjects. Minds are objects that have subjectivity inherently built into them by the very nature of what they are. Scientific atoms by their very nature are not mental, are not alive, and have no subjectivity, hence how are we supposed to extract mind, life and subjectivity from them? By contrast, monadic minds made of sinusoids (basis thoughts) are inherently mental, alive, and are entities that innately and automatically have subjective experiences, so they are not confronted by any of the problems that afflict science. On the contrary, the “hard problem” becomes that of explaining matter (rather than mind). Even
that is not in fact difficult, as we have detailed in our many books on exactly this subject. Consciousness resides in the fact that we can create a secondary world – via language – that allows us to be separate from the given world, while also modeling it, reflecting on it, creating an analogy for it, a metaphor for it. It is the separation of the language space from the given space that creates consciousness. Animals do not have this distance – they are stuck in the moment, with what they are given – hence they are not conscious, and cannot plan, and cannot change the environment, as humans do. When humans plan a change to the given world, they ponder the change in their mind, in their language space, beforehand. They plan in the mindspace and then execute in the real space. Animals are only ever in the real space. They have no secondary space to go to in which to plan anything. They are always stuck with what is given. Language, hence consciousness, allows us to create a new space, like the real space and based on it, yet drastically different from it, because it’s made of language concepts and not of material percepts. We can’t massively change the physical world, except over a long period of time. We can instantly change the conceptual world of mind, of language. A new idea can totally transform our mind-space and understanding of reality. No animal can ever look at the given world and be transformed. There are never any species-transforming ideas in the animal world.
THE MUTE TRIBE magine a mute tribe standing on the bank of a river. The river belongs to the “given world” – the immediate physical world. While they are standing by the river, the tribe can interact with the river. But what happens when the tribe retreat to the large cave they all live in, far from the river? The river is now no longer present to them. They cannot refer to it. They have no means to do so. This allows us to make a fundamental distinction regarding consciousness, showing how different it is from sentience. With sentience, you are immediately aware of something. It is directly present to you. When the tribe are standing beside the river, they are sentient of the river. When they are in their cave and can’t see the river, they are not sentient of the river. It’s no longer part of their given world at that moment. Sentience is all about the given, sensory world. Consciousness isn’t. To understand why, let’s imagine the tribe as no longer mute. Imagine that every member of the tribe has language. They all know the word “river”. They can all vocalize that word, and understand when they hear it what it means, what it refers to. When they all go back to their cave, they can go on referring to the river and making plans and decisions regarding the river even though they now have no sentience of the river because they are nowhere near the river and can’t see it. Consciousness is the ability to go on referring to something when it is no longer present to you in the given world. If you are nowhere near the river, your sentience of it has gone, but not your consciousness of it. You can lie in your bed with your eyes closed and think about the river. That is what consciousness concerns – the ability to think about something even when it is not present to sentience. All non-human animals are sentient. None is conscious. Not one nonhuman animal can lie down with its eyes closed and reflect on something, whether a river or anything else. Animals are prisoners of the moment. They cannot escape from it. It has been disastrous for the intellectual development of the human race
I
that, thanks to science in particular (with its psychotic hatred of mind), sentience has been constantly conflated with consciousness even though they have practically nothing in common. Sentience, to be fair, is a necessary condition of consciousness (consciousness is built on top of it), but it is definitely not sufficient for it. Consciousness uses the foundations of sentience, but constructs a radically different type of building, one that relies on intelligent language rather than mere instinct. Sentience requires that which you are sentient of – a specific thing in the given world – to be present to your sensorium. Consciousness has no such requirement. You do not need to be sentient of a river (i.e., be beside a river) to be conscious of a river. You could be anywhere – in the middle of a desert or at the top of a mountain or even on the moon – and have consciousness of a river if that was what you were consciously thinking about. This definitive fact about consciousness is entirely lost on scientists and also most philosophers. They have become preoccupied with “qualia”. Wikipedia says, “In philosophy and certain models of psychology, qualia are defined as individual instances of subjective, conscious experience. The term qualia derives from the Latin neuter plural form (qualia) of the Latin adjective quālis meaning ‘of what sort’ or ‘of what kind’ in a specific instance, such as ‘what it is like to taste a specific apple, this particular apple now’.” Do you see how this is all about the immediate sensory experience, the immediate subjective experience, i.e., it’s all about sentience, yet this is regarded as consciousness. It isn’t. The problem of subjective experience is one thing, and the problem of consciousness is an entirely different thing. The intellectual establishment has disastrously conflated them. The reason why this is so critical is that sentience, according to science, is built into our material, biological nature, i.e., 100% of animals are sentient. All animals have a subjective sensory experience of the given world. To conflate sentience and consciousness is therefore to make the absurd claim that all animals are conscious. Moreover, the conflation of sentience and consciousness means that the secret of consciousness would, according to this worldview, be rooted in biology, in genes, or the type of matter involved in an animal brain, or the organization of matter in an animal brain, i.e., consciousness seems to become amenable to scientific materialist analysis. Even though science has made no progress at all in defining or understanding consciousness, 100% of scientists are nevertheless sure that
consciousness is a scientific problem, which will be answered by biology, chemistry, or physics. They believe that humanity has always been conscious (since consciousness, to their way of thinking, is built into the human body, hence, once the first human body appeared, so did consciousness). However, the idea that consciousness, in fact, has nothing to do with the biological body is itself a very ancient one. From Pythagoras onwards, consciousness was located in mind, not in body. Mind, unlike in science, was regarded as a substantive thing in its own right, independent of matter and bodies. When Descartes said, “I think, therefore I am”, he understood consciousness to be exclusively located in dimensionless mind (unextended, immaterial mind). Descartes regarded all non-human animals as biological automata, completely lacking consciousness. Descartes, in effect, did not even confer sentience (subjective experience) on animals. He regarded them as what would now be called “philosophical zombies”: creatures that do not have conscious experience, qualia, or sentience (even if they might seem as if they do). Yet to make consciousness a permanent feature of mind is of no more use than making it a permanent feature of the body. Making that assumption, we have still made no progress in understanding what consciousness actually is. What defines it? To say that it is located in mind is not to explain what it is, any more than saying it is located in the body or the brain explains it. There’s no point in saying where it is. We need to know what it is. The sine qua non of consciousness is language. The likes of Leibniz, Hegel and Nietzsche all linked language to consciousness. However, the person who really made language the absolute core of consciousness and totally focused on the relationship of language to consciousness, and provided a detailed analysis of its development, was Julian Jaynes. He should be the one granted the laurels for making the most of this decisive insight. The reason it is so critical is that it means that there was a time when human beings were not conscious, then a time when they were developing the systems that would make them conscious, and then the time when they were actually conscious. So, to solve the problem of consciousness, we are not facing a scientific problem (the scientific problem of consciousness requires humanity to have always been conscious and for consciousness to be a property of matter), but a cultural problem concerning the evolution of language. We can trace how consciousness developed, and thus understand what it is, simply by studying
everything language-based produced by ancient humanity. That was the exercise Jaynes himself conducted and he reached the astounding conclusion that consciousness is only around three thousand years old. Long before that, humanity wasn’t conscious at all, and immediately prior to it, humanity had a type of psyche that Jaynes called “bicameral” – a hallucinatory psyche where people didn’t “think” per se, but, rather, hallucinated voices that told them what to do (i.e., the voices did their thinking for them). If Jaynes is right, everything science has to say about consciousness is worthless. In fact, science doesn’t have anything to say about consciousness, but it thinks it does because it thinks everything is about matter, hence is scientific. Science can’t define the problem of consciousness, hence can’t say what it is. It has no understanding at all of consciousness. Consciousness is a cultural problem – concerning how humanity developed language – not a scientific problem concerning the organization and properties of matter. Animals lack consciousness because they do not have language. A human that never acquired language would never be conscious. Language, hence consciousness, is social. Language, hence consciousness, is not individual. There is no private language and no private consciousness. Consciousness is about the group. The Abrahamic God, if such a being existed (it obviously never did), would never have been conscious, hence could not have consciously designed the world and consciously designed human beings. Consciousness, mediated by constructed language (as opposed to reality’s ontological language of mathematics), is always evolutionary. It is not an inherent property of anything. It is born in time and develops and advances in time, and will also end in time (when the universe ends its current lifecycle). Thanks to this fact, humanity can become radically more conscious than it currently is. We can, eventually, have the consciousness of gods, but we must do so as a community (the community of gods, the society of the divine). We all become God together. It is a collective undertaking, not individual, which is why we must collaborate and cooperate with each other. Nietzsche had incredible insights into the relationship between consciousness and language, but this subject was never his focus. He mentioned it more or less in passing. He said, “The Genius of the Species. The problem of consciousness (or more correctly: of becoming conscious of oneself) meets us only when we begin to perceive in what measure we could
dispense with it: and it is at the beginning of this perception that we are now placed by physiology and zoology (which have thus required two centuries to overtake the hint thrown out in advance by Leibniz). For we could in fact think, feel, will, and recollect, we could likewise ‘act’ in every sense of the term, and nevertheless nothing of it all would require to ‘come into consciousness’ (as one says metaphorically). The whole of life would be possible without its seeing itself as it were in a mirror: as in fact even at present the far greater part of our life still goes on without this mirroring, and even our thinking, feeling, volitional life as well, however painful this statement may sound to an older philosopher. What then is the purpose of consciousness generally, when it is in the main superfluous? Now it seems to me, if you will hear my answer and its perhaps extravagant supposition, that the subtlety and strength of consciousness are always in proportion to the capacity for communication of a man (or an animal), the capacity for communication in its turn being in proportion to the necessity for communication: the latter not to be understood as if precisely the individual himself who is master in the art of communicating and making known his necessities would at the same time have to be most dependent upon others for his necessities. It seems to me, however, to be so in relation to whole races and successions of generations: where necessity and need have long compelled men to communicate with their fellows and understand one another rapidly and subtly, a surplus of the power and art of communication is at last acquired, as if it were a fortune which had gradually accumulated, and now waited for an heir to squander it prodigally (the so-called artists are these heirs, in like manner the orators, preachers, and authors: all of them men who come at the end of a long succession, ‘late-born’ always, in the best sense of the word, and as has been said, squanderers by their very nature). Granted that this observation is correct, I may proceed further to the conjecture that consciousness generally has only been developed under the pressure of the necessity for communication, that from the first it has been necessary and useful only between man and man (especially between those commanding and those obeying), and has only developed in proportion to its utility. Consciousness is properly only a connecting network between man and man, it is only as such that it has had to develop; the recluse and wildbeast species of men would not have needed it. The very fact that our actions, thoughts, feelings and motions come within the range of our consciousness – at least a part of them – is the result of a terrible, prolonged ‘must’ ruling
man’s destiny: as the most endangered animal he needed help and protection; he needed his fellows, he was obliged to express his distress, he had to know how to make himself understood – and for all this he needed ‘consciousness’ first of all, consequently, to ‘know’ himself what he lacked, to ‘know’ how he felt and to ‘know’ what he thought.” Consciousness, we see, is all about knowing, about knowledge, but how is knowledge possible at all? According to the absurd doctrine of empiricism, knowledge is sensory. Actually, knowledge has nothing to do with sentience. Knowledge is about consciousness, and consciousness is about language. Knowledge is language. There is no knowledge without language. Look at science. Science believes that its power flows from sensory experiments (from empiricism and materialism). In fact its power flows from mathematics (from rationalism and idealism), from language. But science believes that all language is unreal, abstract and manmade (which, if true, would actually mean that all human knowledge is unreal, abstract and manmade, exactly as postmodernists and Discordians contend). Existence is intelligible, existence is knowable, because existence is made of analytic language (ontological mathematics). If existence weren’t mathematical (this is a formal impossibility), existence would be unintelligible and unknowable, a permanent, impenetrable mystery, just as Kant argued, and bear in mind that most philosophers regard Kant as the greatest philosopher of them all. For Kant, no language could penetrate ultimate reality. In fact, ultimate reality is made of the ultimate language (ontological mathematics), and that’s exactly why it is completely knowable, as opposed to unknowable. Kant was a Christian fanatic who literally claimed that we could never know what existence is, and never have true knowledge, only fake knowledge. He said, “I had to deny knowledge in order to make room for faith.” Such a person shouldn’t be regarded as a philosopher at all, but as a theologian. Philosophy, true philosophy, is about eliminating faith and all forces of anti-knowledge, including scientific empiricism and materialism. Philosophy, true philosophy, is about knowledge, true knowledge, and knowledge is entirely about language. To gain absolute knowledge, it is necessary to gain absolute knowledge of reality’s language, hence philosophy must be replaced by ontological mathematics. Nietzsche wrote, “For, to repeat it once more, man, like every living creature, thinks unceasingly, but does not know it; the thinking which is
becoming conscious of itself is only the smallest part thereof, we may say, the most superficial part, the worst part: for this conscious thinking alone is done in words, that is to say, in the symbols for communication, by means of which the origin of consciousness is revealed. In short, the development of speech and the development of consciousness (not of reason, but of reason becoming self-conscious) go hand in hand. Let it be further accepted that it is not only speech that serves as a bridge between man and man, but also the looks, the pressure and the gestures; our becoming conscious of our sense impressions, our power of being able to fix them, and as it were to locate them outside of ourselves, has increased in proportion as the necessity has increased for communicating them to others by means of signs. The sign-inventing man is at the same time the man who is always more acutely self-conscious; it is only as a social animal that man has learned to become conscious of himself, he is doing so still, and doing so more and more. As is obvious, my idea is that consciousness does not properly belong to the individual existence of man, but rather to the social and gregarious nature in him; that, as follows therefrom, it is only in relation to communal and gregarious utility that it is finely developed; and that consequently each of us, in spite of the best intention of understanding himself as individually as possible, and of ‘knowing himself,’ will always just call into consciousness the nonindividual in him, namely, his ‘averageness’; that our thought itself is continuously as it were outvoted by the character of consciousness – by the imperious ‘genius of the species’ therein – and is translated back into the perspective of the herd.” Nietzsche here demonstrates his sheer genius. He reveals consciousness to be social, and superimposed over the individual in order to make them part of the collective. A “lone wolf” human has no need of consciousness. Extreme libertarian individualists are animals, not humans. They are enemies of the human race. Consciousness is the universal applied to the particular. It is how we convert the particular, given world of sensory, perceptual things, into a conceptual world of knowledge, populated by universals. These universals are the “coins” of knowledge. We cannot take the particular, perceptual world with us, but we can take the universal, conceptual world wherever we go. Knowledge is portable. Perception of particulars isn’t. We can only see them while they are present to us.
The Absent Presence is all about the “absent presence”. The given world of C onsciousness percepts can be completely absent to consciousness, and yet also fully present to consciousness via the language space, the mind-space, by which a system of universals (language), a system of concepts, can be used to model any possible world for which we have concepts. If consciousness is exclusively about language, as it is, then any attempt to understand consciousness that is not about the social group, the collective, and the language the members of the group use to communicate with each other, is pointless and futile. Science, with its focus on the individual, has literally no understanding of what consciousness is. Science seeks to understand consciousness in terms of how the matter in the brain of the individual supposedly produces subjective experience. It therefore isn’t even in the same ball park as the real problem of consciousness. The same goes for academic philosophy, which is also totally clueless about what consciousness is. The horrifying thing is that the likes of Leibniz, Hegel, Nietzsche and Jaynes have already linked consciousness to language, and been completely ignored! The academic community is a brainwashed clique that refuses to depart from its Mandarin groupthink based on scientism. These people are ferocious anti-intellectuals, actively opposing humanity’s acquisition of the most foundational knowledge of existence – all because they believe in sentience rather than consciousness, in empiricism rather than rationalism, in percepts rather than concepts, in matter (nonlanguage) rather than language.
THE SURGICAL REMOVAL OF THE UNCONSCIOUS? his bicameral schema, Julian Jaynes located the “god” in the right I nhemisphere of the brain and the “man” in the left hemisphere. The left hemisphere evolved into the seat of consciousness, while the right evolved into the seat of the unconscious. But what would happen if you performed a hemispherectomy and removed the right hemisphere? Could you remove the unconscious mind? Of course not! The unconscious mind is present in the entire brain, and so is consciousness. They are not hemispherically-rooted, even though it is very attractive to imagine they are. Jaynes, an undoubted genius, did not quite get his scheme right. His basic idea was this: the right hemisphere hallucinated a voice (the “god”), which was taken to be an external voice, of the kind a schizophrenic hears. This voice, heard in the left hemisphere by the person (the “man”), was taken to be that of an authoritative God who could not be disobeyed. Eventually, the god’s voice vanished and was replaced, in the new conscious psyche, by our own inner voice, a voice that none of us associates with any external being, especially not a god, and which has none of the “real” qualities that a schizophrenic hears when a voice inside their head speaks to them. To put it another way, bicameralism was a system where a voice perceived as alien (belonging to another being, with the quality of a real, external voice) was the controlling, executive voice of a bicameral human. With consciousness, this voice vanished and was replaced by a new voice – the internal monologue – that was perceived as belonging to us and was, qualitatively, entirely different from a “real” voice. A person’s inner voice is unique. It is nothing like an externally heard voice. We hear it, but as an inner process, not as something we could hear with our physical ears if the inner voice were somehow placed in the external world. This voice is not the voice of our consciousness, even though it seems to
be. Like the voice of the bicameral god, it is actually the voice of the production mind, of the unconscious. The difference is that, in bicameral times, this voice of our own unconscious was perceived as alien to us and controlling us (it was a god). Consciousness converted this same voice into something that we perceived as our own and removed the “real” quality it possessed (i.e., the quality that made it seem like the external voice of an alien being). Unlike the bicameral voice of the god, which we could not control or challenge (Abraham felt he had no option but to sacrifice his son), the new voice was one we could control. We could challenge and change it as much as we liked, in real time. In other words, the switch to consciousness was all about assuming control of the voice of the unconscious, which had once seemed like an alien god to us. Schizophrenics are those who fall back into the old, bicameral mode of hearing the unconscious as alien. Consciousness allows us to hear the voice of the unconscious as our own and to change it when needed, via our internal thought processes of introspection, reflection and decision making. The advent of consciousness made us “lucid wakers”, whereas, under bicameralism, we had been passive wakers: awake and aware, but with no control. In bicameral times, we were just like normal dreamers, prior to upgrading to lucid dreamers. Consciousness provided the upgrade and made all of us lucid wakers in the real, objective world. Since we have all achieved lucid waking, it’s fascinating to contemplate why we have not all routinely achieved lucid dreaming. Why isn’t lucid dreaming part of our standard operating system? It’s for the simple and stark reason that we would then be unable to distinguish between waking and dreaming. They would be equally real, and the dreamworld would in fact be much more seductive. In fact, it’s highly probable that in bicameral times we were configured the other way around: we were lucid dreamers, but non-lucid in the waking state, meaning that we were much more aligned with the unconscious mind. We had incredibly vivid, lifelike dreams, which we actually accepted as reality (they were more real than our waking life). This is why humans were forever experiencing angels and demons, gods and devils, and so on. These were all extremely powerful hallucinations: dreams that seemed real. The humans of the past were highly religious – much more inherently and
authentically religious than people today – not because they were stupid, gullible and credulous in comparison with modern humans, but because their lived experiences, dominated by the personal and collective unconscious, were much more numinous. People thought the gods walked amongst them. They truly believed it – because their minds were configured that way. They were hallucinatory minds in the most extravagant and vibrant way. Imagine human beings with “DMT minds”, constantly having natural DMT trips. Their reality would be nothing like that of ours today. If you put LSD in the water everyone on earth drinks, humanity would become entirely different. What a trip! Bicameral humanity was effectively a species ruled by hallucinations. It had a hallucinogenic biochemistry. Psychonauts are in a sense those who want to go back to being bicameral, except they want to be spoken to by “machine elves” rather than “gods”! None of these people ever places any trust in consciousness, in knowledge, in reason and logic. They think chemicals and bizarre hallucinations reveal the secrets of reality. Sorry, they don’t. The optimization of consciousness (knowledge, language, reason and logic) is the name of the game. Consciousness is fundamentally conceptual, not perceptual. The whole point of it is to escape from the prison of the senses, of empiricism. Yet the academic community is almost 100% empiricist!
NARCOLEPSY: THE SLEEPING SICKNESS Jaynes thought that schizophrenia gave us a hint of what bicameral J ulian people were like. Another condition that may be highly relevant is narcolepsy, a chronic sleep disorder characterized by sudden attacks of sleep or overwhelming drowsiness during the day. Narcoleptics are unable to stay awake for long periods of time, seriously disrupting their daily routine. Narcolepsy can be accompanied by cataplexy (characterized by a trance or seizure, with a loss of sensation and consciousness, accompanied by rigidity of the body). People with narcolepsy fall asleep without warning, anywhere, anytime. They also often suffer from sleep paralysis. This phenomenon involves the temporary inability to move or speak while in the process of falling asleep, or in the process of waking up, and can be tremendously frightening. Sleep paralysis mimics the temporary paralysis that occurs during rapid eye movement (REM) sleep (to prevent your body from acting out dream activity). People with narcolepsy are able to enter REM sleep (associated with dreaming) much more rapidly than normal people, often within minutes of falling asleep. Narcoleptics frequently suffer from lurid hallucinations. Hypnagogic hallucinations are associated with falling asleep and hypnopompic hallucinations with waking up. An example of such a hallucination is feeling as if there is a stranger in your bedroom. These hallucinations are often particularly vivid and frightening because the person may not be fully asleep when they begin dreaming, hence they experience their hallucination as reality. Narcoleptics are people who, because of their condition, experience a much closer link between dreams and waking than normal people. They have to work hard to separate the two. It may be the case that bicameral humans were on the narcoleptic
spectrum. Keeping dreaming and waking separate was probably one of the most fundamental challenges facing humans in their evolution once they acquired brains complex enough to support hallucinations. We all have two minds: the production mind (the unconscious) and the consumption mind (consciousness), which is aware of what the production mind produces. During sleep, our unconscious mind is dominant. During waking, the consumption mind is dominant. This is a highly sensible arrangement. If we were all lucid dreamers, having lucid dreams every night as a matter of course, it would be incredibly difficult to keep track of what was real and what was dream. We might even prefer the “reality” of our lucid dreams. In bicameral humans, the unconscious mind (production mind) was in control during waking, meaning that the consumption mind, to compensate, was probably much more active in dreams than it is in today’s conscious people. Imagine that switching from unconscious dominance to conscious dominance involved changing the balance between waking and dreaming. The unconscious is a much more dreamlike psyche. Consciousness is much more attuned to waking. Bicameral humans were much more involved with dreams than people are today. Conscious humans are much more involved with waking than bicameral people were. Narcolepsy is a condition where the balance between dreaming and waking is incredibly finely poised. If you went one way (much more waking than dreaming), you would become “normal”. If you went the other way (much more dreaming than waking), you would become “bicameral”. Bicamerals were those who had powerful hallucinations on a daily basis. They were much more under the power of the unconscious mind. It’s as if they were on a constant DMT trip. Everyone who takes DMT talks of how numinous the experience is. It’s even possible that DMT was the chemical that drove bicameralism, and then its concentration was driven down to such low levels that dreaming and hallucinations became much less common and were replaced by waking consciousness, free of old-style hallucinations, and also free of all their numinous power. That’s why a not-insignificant number of people are atheists or agnostics now. In bicameral times, no one was. It was unthinkable. Everyone knew the gods existed. They heard from them every day. Bicamerals were born religious, not atheistic!
If humanity were constantly taking high doses of DMT, we would see the gods all the time too. Or, more likely, “machine elves”. Once the gods departed from the human arena (because consciousness had replaced bicameralism), humans became desperate to find them again. One route to the gods was drugs. The Odyssey by Homer contains many references to drugs, e.g., nepenthe, a medicine for sorrow, a “drug of forgetfulness”, originating in Egypt. Wikipedia says, “In the Odyssey, nepenthes pharmakon (i.e., an anti-sorrow drug) is a magical potion given to Helen [of Troy] by Polydamna the wife of the noble Egyptian Thon; it quells all sorrows with forgetfulness.” Nepenthe is “that which chases away sorrow”. It is the “anti-sorrow” drug (ne- = “not” + penthos = “grief, sorrow, or mourning”). Nepenthe has been equated with opium. In Sparta, Helen put it in wine to give to her guests, and to also help herself forget. The witch-goddess Circe used drugged cheese and wine to turn half of Odysseus’s men into swine. It has been suggested that the drug she used was LSD and her victims were having hallucinations that they had been turned into pigs. One of Circe’s Homeric epithets was polypharmakos: “knowing many drugs or charms”. Hermes warned Odysseus about Circe and gave him a herb called moly to make him resistant to Circe’s magic. It was black at the root, but the flower was like milk. It was notoriously difficult for mortal men to dig up. Thanks to moly, Odysseus was able to force Circe to change his men back to their human form (via an LSD antidote?). Odysseus visited the land of the lotus-eaters. His men were given a fruit that caused them to forget their desire to return home. Odysseus had to drag them back to the ship. Some commentators have called the fruit “cannabislike”. Odysseus went on a trip to the Underworld, a trip which seemed entirely hallucinatory in nature. In the religion of Islam, the prophet Mohammed went on a “night journey” from Arabia to Jerusalem where he then ascended to heaven and met Allah. That was definitely a drug trip! Saul of Tarsus, hater of Christians, had a drug drip, or an epileptic fit, or a severe hallucination, on the road to Damascus and turned into Saint Paul, arch Christian. Saint Paul was in fact arguably the true founder of Christianity. Christianity was born of a drug trip or a psychotic breakdown! Well, that would certainly explain why
Christians are so insane. The ancients believed that there were places where the barrier between life and death was very thin. They believed it was possible to reach the land of the dead itself. It was thought that near the entrance to Hades many poisonous plants could be found. After all, what other kind of plant would grow near the gateway to the Underworld? Not plants of life, that’s for sure. According to Ovid, aconite (wolfsbane) was a deadly plant that grew in the Underworld itself. It was said to sprout where the spittle of the hell hound Cerberus fell to the ground. This purple flower was called “the queen of all poisons.” Psychonauts, like Terence McKenna, want to find the gods via DMT. The believe DMT tears back the veil, and put us in contact with the controllers of the universe, who perhaps resemble mechanical elves. Why not machine dwarves? It’s all a conspiracy against the dwarves!
THE UR LANGUAGE ow is language possible at all? It’s impossible to have language in a foundationally languageless universe, such as the material universe proposed by science. How could you ever get from non-language to language? How could you ever get from non-syntax to syntax? This is a classic Cartesian substance dualism. There is no way for a syntax-less universe to coexist with, and interact with, a universe with syntax. Syntax corresponds to mind in Cartesian substance dualism, with the syntax-less “stuff” corresponding to matter. Scientists, as empiricists, are perfectly happy to believe in a world of matter – a world without language. As enemies of rationalism, they are repelled by the idea of a world made of language. Yet a world of matter is unintelligible. Matter is inherently unintelligible. Scientists can do nothing with matter unless they add something else. That something else is the language of mathematics. Mathematics is what makes science intelligible, yet scientists deny the reality of mathematics. They regard mathematics as pure abstract syntax, meaning that they must believe that material reality lacks any syntax, meaning that they consider syntax intrinsically unreal. It is, after all, a defining characteristic of language, which materialists always consider a manmade abstraction. Scientists, if you follow through their crazy claims, believe in real but unintelligible matter, rendered intelligible by unreal mathematical language. They believe in real, syntax-less matter, given syntax by unreal mathematics. This is of course logically impossible. If matter doesn’t inherently have a syntax then you can’t claim that something unreal confers a syntax on it. But never expect science to state coherent positions. It never does. In rationalist terms, you could scarcely get anything less coherent than science. Any coherence it accidentally has comes entirely from its use of mathematics, which it has no right to use given that it rejects the reality of mathematics while claiming that science is all about reality. Science mocks the unreality of religion, while being total dependent on mathematics, which it says is, er,
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unreal! Science is just another religion, predicated, by its own account, on unreality, on fantasy. Anything with a syntax is a language and is thereby intelligible and definable. If matter had a syntax and was intelligible, it would have no requirement for mathematics. But matter, according to scientists, doesn’t have a syntax and isn’t intelligible, hence the need for science to use mathematics. For scientists, matter is empirical, sensible, observable. How can science ever arrive at an intelligible answer to existence if science believes existence is inherently unintelligible (by virtue of being material)? Logic isn’t science’s thing. Scientists aren’t rationalists. They’re empiricists. Reality does not comprise real, unintelligible matter and unreal, intelligible mathematics, as science claims. It comprises mathematics alone, and “matter” is entirely mathematical. Ontological mathematics has both a syntax and a semantics. The thing that science most refuses to accept is the intelligibility of reality. Reality is intelligible because it’s a language and all languages are intelligible. Reality is made of the most intelligible language of them all, the quintessence of intelligibility: ontological mathematics. Because reality is a language, it’s mental. Languages entail mind. That’s why scientists refuse to accept that reality is mathematical. It automatically means that reality is immaterial (mental), contrary to the materialist faith that all scientists share. We live in a mental reality, a language reality, a reality knowable via pure reason and logic, but emphatically not knowable by the senses, as science claims. The senses cannot define matter and cannot render it intelligible, hence cannot render it knowable and understandable. Scientists have never been able to grasp that observing something doesn’t make it knowable. It’s defining it via reason and logic that makes it intelligible. Science has to use mathematics to make any sense. But mathematics directly contradicts empiricism and materialism. Mathematics reflects rationalism and idealism, the opposite paradigm! So, it’s because reality is made of language that language is essential to consciousness and evolution. All manmade languages are ultimately reducible to the ur language of ontological mathematics. That’s from where they derive their core syntax and semantics. Language was an evolutionary inevitability because reality itself is a language. There is no alternative
rational explanation. Random mutations of non-language do not and cannot produce language.
Dog World are creatures of the eyes. Dogs are creatures of the nose. Dogs H umans have up to 300 million olfactory receptors in their noses. Humans only have 6 million. The part of a dog’s brain that is devoted to analyzing smells is around 40 times larger than that of a human. Dogs manifest smell neophilia: they are incredibly attracted to new and interesting odors. A dog’s sense of smell is many times more sensitive than that of even the most advanced manmade instrument. Dog world is a landscape of smells rather than sights. The sentience of a dog is dominated by smell. Can you imagine a human having a “smell consciousness”? There probably are humans somewhere who have massively enhanced smell circuitry and understand and interact with smell in a different way from everyone one. They might even have smell-enriched dreams.
Control homson Jay Hudson wrote, “The objective mind, or, let us say, man in his normal condition, is not controllable, against reason, positive knowledge, or the evidence of his senses, by the suggestions of another. The subjective mind, or man in the hypnotic state, is unqualifiedly and constantly amenable to the power of suggestion.” In fact, consciousness is almost as suggestible as the unconscious. Most people are submissives, looking for dominants to tell them what to do. The human world is primarily a tale of very strong dominants with immensely powerful, vivid, seductive ideas, attracting legions of submissives looking to be led, looking to be told the meaning and purpose of life. Look at the QAnon conspiracy theory. A dominant used a conspiracy theory to radicalize millions of Americans. Look at Trumpism. An outspoken dominant became a Messiah to seventy-four million Americans. The world is all about the dynamic between dominants and submissives.
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The dominants provide “suggestions” and the submissive masses follow them.
Suggestible Consciousness is the primary source of our suggestions to the unconscious. C onsciousness Yet consciousness is itself subject to suggestion by the unconscious, and by the external universe, both physically and culturally. The sensory world is always making suggestions to consciousness. Sensing types are completely controlled by it. Culture is full of suggestions. We are constantly exposed to advertising, consumer capitalism, social media, social proof, trending lists, political and religious radicalization, fashion, peer pressure, groupthink, other-direction, and so on. Most people are so suggestible that their consciousness is scarcely any different from their unconscious mind. They are puppets. They are easily controlled by dominant people and institutions.
Night he coming of the night is a suggestion to go to sleep. The coming of the dawn is a suggestion to wake up. Nodding off is a suggestion to daydream. Being exposed to a sickness is a suggestion to become ill. It’s always about suggestion!
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Intuition is defined in terms of insight, direct or immediate cognition, and I ntuition spiritual perception, i.e., intuition comes in several different forms. If sensing is everything that is processed via the senses, and intuition is its opposite, this leads to different possible definitions of intuition: 1)
If sensing involves the external senses, intuition is therefore
concerned with the internal senses. Everything that we internally generate without external input falls into this category. So, when we picture something in our mind’s eye, that’s intuition. Our dreams are the products of intuition. Our inner voice is produced by intuition. People with aphantasia and no inner monologue are radically lacking in intuition. Yet everyone needs inner mental activity and all such activity is intuitive if it is not directly connected to sensory input. 2)
The senses are directed at the spacetime world of matter. Intuition, therefore, is directed at the non-spacetime world of mind – at the Singularity.
3)
The senses are about parts: this thing, that thing, and so on. Intuition, by contrast, is holistic. It’s about the whole, and flashes of the whole. It’s all about interconnection, completeness, unity.
4)
If the senses address the normal, intuition addresses the paranormal, i.e., everything unreachable by the senses.
5)
If the senses are embodied, intuition is disembodied. It allows us to have out-of-body experiences and near-death experiences.
6)
Feeling is the opposite of thinking. When sensing is combined with thinking, it produces science. When sensing is combined with feeling, it produces religious faith, based on sensory places of worship (such as churches), and sensory rituals (involving prayer, hymn, the Mass, and so on). When intuition is combined with feeling, it produces religious mysticism. It revolves around mindfulness and meditation, or psychedelic drugs. People of this type long to be enlightened, to experience the bliss of Oneness, togetherness, interconnectedness, wholeness. When intuition is combined with thinking, it produces the highest intellectual output, namely, that of mathematics, philosophy, metaphysics, epistemology, and ontology.
So, intuition isn’t anything simple. It is multi-dimensional, and much more complex than sensing. Science hates intuition and more or less denies its existence since it undermines sensory empiricism so much.
Two Voices?
if we had two voices in our heads: one for consciousness and one I magine for the unconscious. We would all be insane. We can have only one voice. It’s not our own voice. The voice is generated by the production mind, the unconscious. What we do is experience, evaluate, judge, control and direct this voice, and in doing so we imagine ourselves its owner. We imagine that it is our voice. It seems to convey our thoughts. In fact, in itself, it conveys the undirected thoughts of our unconscious, and we then direct them. By directing them, they seem to become our thoughts. It’s the cleverest illusion there is. Consciousness is silent. It’s the unconscious that speaks! Consciousness is the Watcher, and the Evaluator. Consciousness judges. Perceiving types hate consciousness. They are much more at home with sentience.
HYPNOTISM hat is hypnotism all about? Hypnotism requires two things to happen: 1) the subject must voluntarily switch from active consciousness to passive consciousness, and 2) the hypnotist must replace the subject’s consciousness as the agent that gives orders (instructions, suggestions) to the subject’s production mind. The hypnotist is a person who can convince another person to allow them (the hypnotist) to take over as their controlling mind. The subject’s own controlling mind does not go away. Instead, it turns into a “hidden observer”. Julian Jaynes wrote, “A hypnotized subject, after the suggestion that he will feel nothing when keeping his hand in a bucket of ice-cold water for a minute (a really painful, but benign experience!), may show no discomfort and say he felt nothing; but if it has previously been suggested that when and only when the operator touches his shoulder, he will say in another voice exactly what he really felt, that is what happens. At such a touch, the subject, often in a low guttural voice, may give full expression to his discomfiture, yet return immediately to his ordinary voice and to the anesthetized state when the operator’s hand is lifted.” So, it’s the production mind that is impervious to the cold (the production mind doesn’t feel anything at all … it does not have experiences). However, the consumption mind, the experiential mind, is fully aware of the cold. When given the chance to comment on it, it does. It’s a hidden observer. It hasn’t been switched off. It still knows what’s going on, but like the old bicameral “man”, it has become helpless, a puppet of controlling voices (in this case that of the hypnotist). Note that this “hidden observer” bears a striking resemblance to the personalities that appear in multiple personality syndrome. These too can suppress themselves while other personalities are active. Some of them are fully aware of what is going on when other personalities are in charge. They don’t “blank out”. Hypnotism can only be explained in relation to a psyche based on two minds. One mind can be inhibited, allowing another mind (that of the
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hypnotist) to take control. You cannot inhibit both minds (the production mind and the consumption mind). It would be impossible for hypnotism to work if there were not a production mind – in many ways an autonomous mind – that can be controlled by a mind that gives suggestions to it, which it eagerly obeys. The hypnotist can give any instruction to the production mind of a subject, and it will try its best to comply. The production mind doesn’t care which mind controls it. It will respond to any strong suggestion, whether from the external or internal environment. Habitually, it takes its suggestions from the external world of “matter”, or from the internal consumption mind (consciousness) to which it is linked. If the conscious mind is suppressed and is unable to gives suggestions, to exert control, then the production mind will take its orders from an alternative controlling mind, supplied, for example, by the hypnotist’s suggestions. The body can do remarkable things under hypnotic suggestion. Of course, it could do exactly the same under normal control by our normal ego. The trouble is that the production mind is so suggestible that it is highly susceptible to negative suggestion (countersuggestion) as well as to positive suggestion. If the ego (awareness mind, consumption mind, free mind, consciousness) commands the production mind (unconscious) to do something, but does not itself believe what it is commanding, the production mind immediately detects the countersuggestion and cannot perform the task, thus confirming the original disbelief. Why are scientists unable to manifest or observe paranormal phenomena? It’s because they totally disbelieve in such phenomena, so they send out an incredibly strong countersuggestion, which causes the production mind to comply, and thus to do nothing paranormal. The paranormal can happen only with those who accept its existence. One Nobel laureate to whom bizarre things did happen was Wolfgang Pauli. Wikipedia says, “The Pauli effect … is the supposed tendency of technical equipment to encounter critical failure in the presence of certain people. The term was coined after mysterious anecdotal stories involving Austrian theoretical physicist Wolfgang Pauli, describing numerous instances in which demonstrations involving equipment suffered technical problems only when he was present. … Pauli himself was convinced that the effect named after him was real. Pauli corresponded with Hans Bender and Carl Jung and saw the effect as an example of the concept of synchronicity.”
So, these things happened because Pauli believed they would happen, and expected them to happen, so they did. He was sending out an incredibly strong suggestion to make accidents happen to confirm his belief, and his production mind duly complied. The Pauli effect is nothing other than a particular manifestation of the poltergeist phenomenon. The production mind is telekinetic. It can move objects at a distance, as poltergeists do. In fact, the production mind is the poltergeist (“noisy ghost”). Pauli’s own unconscious (production mind) sabotaged nearby equipment via telekinesis. He believed it would happen, and it did. If he did not believe it (countersuggestion), it would not have happened. Your negativity suppresses the abilities of your production mind. If you believe its properties are very limited, it will manifest very limited properties. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. This is why scientific materialism is so incredibly dangerous. By assuming that our mind is nothing but matter, it believes that the mind can do nothing at all that is incompatible with lifeless, mindless matter. But the mind is in fact fantastically powerful, infinitely more powerful than “matter”, which is in fact one of its own default productions. Every time we dream, our production mind makes any amount of “matter”, or what we accept as “matter”, just as we accept it when we are awake. Science limits the mind because of its limited understanding of the mind. Its understanding (which is to say misunderstanding) is disastrous and actively obstructing human evolution. Science sends out a worldwide countersuggestion about the true powers of the mind. Without that countersuggestion, the most amazing properties of the mind could be released: all those things associated with the paranormal. The placebo effect shows the incredible power of the mind. Placebos are medications or procedures that appear to be actual medical treatments but are not. The production mind, however, accepts the suggestion that they are real, and then acts as if they were real, and produces a real, medical response. Even though you may have taken nothing but a sugar pill, your mind can cure you of a serious medical problem as if you had been given a real, expensive drug designed specifically for the condition. Why does faith healing work? It’s because of the placebo effect. The production mind accepts the suggestion and effects a cure. Why can’t people grow back amputated limbs? Well, an enormously strong mind could! After
all, simpler creatures can regenerate lost limbs. Harry Lye, wrote, “A relative of the salamander but even more skilled at regenerating is the axolotl. This animal can regenerate not just its tail but also limbs, skin and almost any other body part. Researchers found that each time a limb was removed, it regrew almost perfectly. The pale pink creature has since become the focus of research into human limb regeneration.” But the limb amputation of a human sends out such a powerful countersuggestion that the average production mind simply can’t do anything about it. The opposite of the placebo effect is the nocebo effect. You take nothing but a sugar pill but then feel seriously ill, if it had been suggested to you beforehand that what you were taking could have serious side effects for you. There is growing evidence that useful drugs called statins cause adverse reactions in many people exactly because of the nocebo effect. They expect statins – real statins, not sugar pills – to be bad for them, and they start manifesting all the symptoms associated with the possible bad side effects of statins. The same symptoms manifest when you give patients sugar pills and tell them they are real statins. In other words, negative suggestion concerned with a medicine can cause it to manifest harmfully in many people. People who believe conspiracy theories regarding 5G technology become ill near 5G towers, and then cite their illness as proof of how dangerous 5G is. In fact, they are becoming ill because they expect to become ill, thus triggering the nocebo effect (negative suggestion). Conspiracy theories can seriously damage your health! When people start believing conspiracy theories, they start seeing “evidence” for them everywhere. They never see counterevidence. They are blind to that. They are now operating under a permanent suggestion, a permanent confirmation bias. Nothing is more powerful than the power of suggestion. Why are religions believed? Because they are incredibly powerful suggestions for weak, impressionable minds. Even science is a vehicle of suggestion. Scientific materialism functions as a nocebo effect, a drastic counter suggestion, with regard to religion. The more you succumb to scientific materialism, the more you accept the suggestion of atheism, skepticism and nihilism, and the more hostile you become to the concept of real, substantive mind. Scientists even end up denying that they have free will. They are happy to regard themselves as biological robots – all thanks to the suggestion made to them by their extreme
faith in materialism (which necessitates the non-existence of mind). Politics, towards which people used to be somewhat indifferent, has recently been radicalized and rendered an extension of religion, thus inheriting all of the extreme suggestions, and extreme faith and behavior, of religious fanaticism. The storming of the Capitol was the consequence of thousands of people being radicalized by Donald Trump’s nationalist, supremacist, America First incendiary rhetoric; the QAnon conspiracy theory claiming that enemies of Donald Trump were Satanic pedophiles; evangelical Christianity, claiming that some people are the Elect, the Saved, and all others are the damned; and the conversion of the Republican Party into a religious cult and personality cult. The people who rampaged through the Capitol were all acting under the power of tremendously strong suggestion of a highly dangerous and destructive kind, the kind of suggestion that religious extremism and mania generates. Consider Jerusalem Syndrome. Katarzyna Prochwicz and Artur Sobczyk wrote, “The Jerusalem syndrome is an acute psychotic state observed in tourists and pilgrims who visit Jerusalem. The main symptom of this disorder is identification with a character from the Bible and exhibiting behaviors which seems to be typical for this character.” Jerusalem Syndrome is the product of extreme suggestion. When you reach Jerusalem, the epicenter of Abrahamism, then, if you are at all religiously minded, you may succumb to the syndrome. Authentic disbelievers, atheists and such like, never suffer from this condition. However, some atheists with a lingering faith may well find this faith suddenly reignited and they may fall victim to the syndrome in an extreme way. People that engage in meditation and mindfulness often operate according to the suggestion that they will break through to “enlightenment”, and so they do, or at least to whatever state will convince them that they are enlightened. This invariably corresponds to an extreme feeling, a delirious, dizzying high, which they believe is the proof that they have reached a higher state. They haven’t. Their production mind is simply giving them what they want. Psychonauts believe that when they take DMT, they will break through to some incredibly revelatory, higher state. In fact, the drug simply serves as a suggestion for the production mind to generate weird and wonderful images,
sounds, OBEs, and so on, and so it does. The whole of reality is basically an expression of suggestion. The default laws of mathematics are a suggestion to obey the default laws of mathematics (!), but consciousness gives us the chance to express free will, which means that we do not default to the lowest common denominator behavior, but can instead “do our own thing”. We are of course still using the inviolable laws of mathematics, but we are using them individually rather than collectively, to satisfy our own free choice. Archetypes (instincts) are suggestions. These are the default suggestions of the basic operating system of our psyche. They will prove useful in many circumstances. However, as the complexity of the situation rises, archetypes prove less and less useful. Bicameral man was highly archetypal. The “gods” were simply the archetypes vocalizing whatever instinctual reaction was required of the person. Bicameralism broke down as human society and relations grew too complex. The birth of consciousness was the evolutionary response. Evolution offers new suggestions, which may prove better than the old, existing suggestions. Desperation can trigger non-archetypal responses from animals. If you google “squirrel pleading for water” you will find an amazing video of a squirrel, clearly extremely dehydrated, getting humans to give it water. The squirrel knows it has to get the attention of the humans, so it stands up on its hind legs so that it resembles a standing human, and then it gestures with its paws towards the bottle of water a person is carrying, just like a person pleading for a drink. The person with the bottle then does an excellent job of letting the squirrel drink the water in the bottle. Satisfied, the squirrel runs off. It has saved itself. This incident raises all sorts of questions. How was the squirrel able to exhibit such exceptional behavior? It understood the concept of a plastic bottle as a mobile container of water; it understood that humans weren’t predators; it understood the need to get the humans’ attention in a human-like way; it understood gesturing its needs to the humans. But how did it know all this and how to do all this? Had a human given it water out of a bottle before, in which case it already knew this game. It was thus a learned behavior. Had it often observed humans drinking from bottles and worked out that they were drinking water? Again, this would constitute a learned behavior.
Or did the stress of the situation – a life or death event – trigger the squirrel to act in an unprecedented way? What’s for sure was the squirrel wasn’t acting in an archetypal squirrel way. All animals that spend a lot of time in human environments, whether as pets, or as creatures that inhabit the human space, must be affected by that interaction and changed by it. Their archetypes are more flexible, more capable of adjustment, than those of other creatures that rarely or never encounter people. Human behavior acts as a suggestion for animals in the human space to behave differently. How does a human personality type develop? Think of all the different currents of thought that are in your mind, in your consciousness, at any one time. All of these streams are competing for your attention. A person becomes what they are, they develop their particular personality, through what they habitually select from all the competing streams in their mind, and what they habitually reject. An INTJ person habitually chooses everything that would be rejected by an ESFP, and vice versa. Your habitual choices become a constant suggestion to your production mind to serve up certain types of content. It’s quite likely that an INTJ would find the mind of an ESFP the most alien and disturbing place imaginable, a kind of hell, and vice versa. This has dramatic consequences for our sleeping reality, our dream experiences. In our dreams, our conscious mind is passive. It lacks agency, hence the production mind is no longer subject to constant suggestion to provide, for example, only INTJ-style content. Given Jung’s theory of compensation, the unconscious is all set to explore the opposite orientation. Jung wrote, “The activity of consciousness is selective. Selection demands direction. But direction requires the exclusion of everything irrelevant. This is bound to make the conscious orientation one-sided. The contents that are excluded and inhibited by the chosen direction sink into the unconscious, where they form a counterweight to the conscious orientation. The strengthening of this counterposition keeps pace with the increase of conscious one-sidedness until finally … the repressed unconscious contents break through in the form of dreams and spontaneous images.” We might say that the repressed content is consciously subjected to a suggestion to not be presented to active consciousness. When consciousness becomes passive during sleep, the removal of the suggestion to the
unconscious to not present certain content amounts to a suggestion to now start presenting that content, which the unconscious (production mind) promptly does. Compensation is a natural process of the psyche aimed at establishing or maintaining balance within the psyche. The psyche is self-regulating. An INTJ person who loves studying in his conscious orientation doesn’t study at all in his dreams. Or an INTJ person who is very successful at studying in his conscious orientation, becomes incredibly bad at studying in his dreams. He experiences something approaching an inversion of his normal mode when he is in his dream mode. Dreams, for most people, are weird and disturbing because the dreamer’s consumption mind is being exposed to content created by the production mind that it doesn’t normally consume, that it normally suppresses and represses. Because it has gone into passive mode and can no longer exert control, consciousness has to consume highly distasteful content, which often turns into nightmares. Achieving lucidity allows the consumption mind to have incredibly enjoyable and ecstatic dreams because it can now direct the production mind to produce the best “movie” ever. Social proof is a strong form of suggestion. Wikipedia says, “Social proof is a psychological and social phenomenon wherein people copy the actions of others in an attempt to undertake behavior in a given situation.” The group provides a suggestion as to what to do, and people then follow it. Scientific peer review is a very strong suggestion to toe the party line of scientism. Any “adventurous” paper would be rejected by peer review. Groupthink is all about making the individual accept the group suggestions. In religion, people are subjected to a powerful group suggestion to obey the Orthodoxy. The Inquisition is an extra incentive not to transgress the group suggestions. Infidels, blasphemers, apostates, heretics, and freethinkers are all those that refuse to go along with the groupthink. The least suggestible people are geniuses. A genius – since he is producing brand new thinking – is clearly not influenced by anyone else, and is clearly not taking suggestions from anyone else since no one else knows what to suggest to a genius.
HABITUATION he most powerful force affecting the lives of humans is habituation. In his book Outliers: The Story of Success, Malcolm Gladwell cited the “10,000-Hour Rule”. The idea is that if you devote 10,000 hours to a skill, you will become an expert at it. You may not achieve world-class expertise, but you’ll certainly have a shot at it. After all, how many other people have put in the time? Of course, some people are naturally better configured for some activities than others and if you lack the basic prerequisites for a skill, an infinite number of hours may not assist you. For example, a very short person will never be the world’s best basketball player, no matter how hard they try. But, if you have the right qualities to excel at something and you put in the hours, you will likely achieve much more than someone else with the right qualities who just can’t be bothered to put in the effort. Doing something over and over again, habituates you to it. It trains your unconscious how to do it, and eventually your unconscious can handle the skill without you having to think about it. Most people in the world are failures because they are habituated to failure. Instead of putting in 10,000 hours to master a productive skill, they put their 10,000 hours – and much more – into being lazy, trivial, unproductively socializing all the time, and wasting their time on any old nonsense they can find. Nearly everyone in the world has become an expert at being useless, at having no particular skills. They put the hours into being unskillful, and they succeeded wonderfully. They are experts at wasting their time! The people who move the human race forward are those who are experts at using their time productively. It’s an extraordinary fact that thinking itself is habitual. This means that thinking badly is habitual. The more you think badly, the more you habituate yourself to bad thinking. By contrast, the more you think rationally and logically, the more you habituate yourself to rational and logical thinking, and the better and better you get at it. That’s why it’s essential to give humans the best, most productive habits from the get go. Instead, countless
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humans are given the worst habits as soon as they are born. Billions are taught insane faith from infancy, and thus are immediately given the habit of thinking in a manner contrary to reason and logic. There’s no mystery about why humanity is so irrational and illogical. People are literally trained from birth to oppose reason and logic. Martin Luther, the first Protestant, said that everyone was “justified” by their faith. He infamously said, “Reason is the Devil’s whore.” And all Protestants followed his irrationalist example. They accepted his suggestion. The negative-liberty world we all live in allows mediocre, failed parents to infect their children with mediocrity and failure. They thus become habituated to mediocrity and failure from their earliest years. Children born into elite families are trained from their earliest years to feel entitled and superior, and to expect the finest things and get the best outcomes. And so they do. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. We need a society ruled by intelligent, creative people who ensure that every child gets the maximum exposure to intelligent, creative habits. All we have to do is give humanity the right habits and we will produce the optimal human race. As it is, humans are indoctrinated with the worst habits, concerning religious irrationalism and slavish acceptance of predatory capitalism, “democracy”, negative liberty, inheritance, privilege, nepotism, cronyism, tribalism, and so on. The most astonishing product of habituation is none other than consciousness. Consciousness is not something we are born with. Consciousness is something we acquire through habituation. The specific habit that produces consciousness is the trained use of language. We become conscious because we are all taught to learn and use language. If we weren’t, we wouldn’t be conscious. Any human being who lived alone on a desert island his entire life would never become conscious. Consciousness is not a natural, inherent property of a person. It is a cultural acquisition. This is absolutely critical because it means that it is absurd to look for the birth of consciousness in scientific terms, in genetic terms, in materialist terms. Human culture reveals the “archeology” or “genealogy” of consciousness. And this also means that if we can enormously improve human culture, we can thereby enormously improve human consciousness and untap much higher powers. We are not limited by our physical bodies. Our consciousness can evolve
simply through better human culture. It can, by the same logic, also devolve, via bad human culture. Consciousness, and its quality, are all to play for. Humanity could easily regress. We need to fight to make humanity more conscious. We need to create higher and higher culture if we wish to produce higher and higher consciousness. Another astonishing fact is that since language is used habitually, it becomes internalized and thus completely unconscious. All of your thinking is conducted by your unconscious, not by your consciousness. Your consciousness is a high-level executive that makes decisions by evaluating the thinking presented to it by the unconscious.
Hormones and Neurotransmitters ormones and neurotransmitters are two types of chemical signaling molecules. Hormones are produced in endocrine glands and are released into the bloodstream. They find their targets of action at some distance from where the hormones originated. As for neurotransmitters, Wikipedia says, “Neurotransmitters are chemical messengers that transmit a signal from a neuron across the synapse to a target cell, which can be a different neuron, myocyte, or gland cell. Neurotransmitters are chemical substances made by the neuron specifically to transmit a message.” Neurotransmitters therefore find their targets of action in their immediate vicinity. Thoughts – “secretions” of the production mind (the unconscious), which may or may not be under conscious direction – can be considered a messaging system for the entire body. The placebo effect is proof of how positive thoughts (beliefs) can literally cure our bodies of diseases. Equally, the nocebo effect demonstrates that negative thoughts (beliefs) can harm our bodies. Humanity has barely even scratched the surface of the power of thought. Thought can go anywhere in the body and modify it. Thinking, it must always be stressed, is produced by the unconscious mind, but consciousness can tell it what to produce. Dreams may be regarded as a secretion of the unconscious. Dreams are typically responses to frustrations, anxieties, fears, hopes, wishes, and so on, that the conscious mind has been reflecting on in the prior period. These
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constitute suggestions for the unconscious to act upon. Content you have come across on TV, at the cinema, on the internet, and so on, can also prompt consequent dream material when you go to sleep. If you are woken up by a radio alarm tuned to a news channel, and then continue to drift in and out of sleep while the radio is playing, you will notice that many of your dreams are directly responding to whatever is on the news. The news items are suggesting to your production mind what to dream about. All sorts of things act as suggestions for our dreams, which is why it’s incredibly difficult to interpret dreams. It’s impossible to disentangle suggestions from the external environment from suggests from our consciousness (the internal environment). The unconscious mind doesn’t care where it gets suggestions from, and it responds to them all, no matter their origin. That’s why it’s so easy for a hypnotist to take over executive control of a person and give them silly suggestions for their unconscious to perform.
Foolish Errors “The fact that an opinion has been widely held is no evidence whatever that it is not utterly absurd; indeed in view of the silliness of the majority of mankind, a widespread belief is more likely to be foolish than sensible.” – Bertrand Russell fact that an opinion has been widely held by “experts” is no evidence T hewhatsoever that it is not utterly absurd; indeed in view of the silliness and groupthink of the majority of academics, a widespread academic belief is more likely to be foolish than intelligible. For example, the academic world is based on materialism, but there is no such thing as “matter” in the scientific sense, as real philosophy (as opposed to today’s academic, Mandarin philosophy) definitively proved long ago! It’s time for the rebirth of Grand Philosophy, via Ontological Mathematics. Science is the great enemy of Grand Philosophy. Ontological Mathematics is its great friend, its only friend.
Dreams cannot explain how and why lifeless, mindless atoms of S cience purposeless matter generate thought, subjectivity and consciousness. Perhaps even more difficult for science to explain is dreaming. Dreaming is what you get when the unconscious is left to its own devices, undirected by consciousness. If science has nothing to say about consciousness, it has even less to say about the unconscious. If you don’t know what consciousness is, you certainly can’t know what the unconscious is. Psychology has shone much more light on the unconscious than science ever has. More or less by definition, materialists will never be able to say anything of value about what mind actually is and how it functions. A system predicated on lifeless, mindless matter will never elucidate life or mind. Scientists are too stupid to figure that out.
Day and Night unconscious and conscious minds are not located in separate T hehemispheres, as once seemed the likeliest configuration. Rather, the unconscious and conscious minds are both present everywhere, fully intertwined. During the waking hours, consciousness is dominant and instructs the unconscious what to do. During the sleeping hours, the unconscious is dominant. There are two types of sleep: rapid eye movement (REM) sleep and nonREM sleep (which has three different stages, known as N1, N2, and N3). A person cycles through all stages of non-REM and REM sleep several times during a typical night. REM sleep starts to dominate before a person wakes in the morning. During deep sleep our consciousness seems to be heavily suppressed. During dreaming, our conscious is switched on, but passive. During waking, our consciousness is switched on and active.
CONSCIOUSNESS AND FIRST, SECOND, AND THIRD PERSON he first, second, and third person are different ways of describing the particular point of view or perspective from which something is regarded. First person describes the “I/we” perspective. Second person describes the “you” perspective. Third person describes the he/she/it/they perspective. It’s useful to think of these perspectives in terms of camera positions in a movie. If the camera is tracking the main actor, showing the audience everything he does, then it has taken a third person perspective. The thirdperson perspective is the most common in cinema. The camera is on the outside looking in, watching the story unfold. No one acknowledges its presence in the world of the movie. It’s as if it’s not there at all. If the camera is instead positioned where the main actor’s head would be expected to be and shows everything except the actor then the camera has taken the first-person point of view and is revealing their personal perspective. With this first-person “POV”, we see everything subjectively from a character’s perspective. It gives the audience the sense of what it’s like to see what that character sees. It places them directly in the main character’s shoes. The other characters look directly into the camera as they talk to the main character. This can enhance the viewing experience and make us feel as if we are a part of the story. However, it also forces a limited scope on the world. You only get one perspective and can’t cut away to another. Also, it makes it difficult to make an emotional connection to the main character if you can’t actually see them. Few movies are shot entirely from a first-person perspective, although quite a few dip into it on occasion. How would a camera show a second-person perspective? The “you” in this case is in fact the audience itself. We are shown the world from the audience’s perspective. And the characters talk directly to the camera, as if
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talking to the audience. The second-person shot is therefore known as the “fourth-wall break” (the fourth wall refers to the space separating a performer or performance from an audience; it’s the conceptual barrier between any fictional work and its viewers or readers; an invisible, imagined wall separating actors, writers or performers from the audience). One of the most telling facts is that, in dreams, we can switch from thirdperson POV to first-person POV, and back, over and over again. We can see ourselves as a character in our dream, just like any other character in a dream. But what mind is doing the looking when they are looking at us? It’s the production mind that creates an avatar of us in our dreams, and it’s our consumption mind (awareness mind) that watches (from a firstperson perspective) our third-person avatar. It’s also the production mind that reframes everything to get rid of our avatar and instead put the “camera” directly inside our first-person viewpoint, where we don’t see ourselves, unless we are in front of a mirror. The production mind handles our reflection too. It’s a mathematical genius that can instantly switch the mathematical frame, whether showing us as a third-person avatar, or as a first-person mind without any visible avatar. You would never consciously be able to make these calculations. The production mind creates a dreamworld and populates it with all sorts of characters, including, routinely, an avatar representing ourself. But the production mind is so ingenious that it can mathematically calculate the firstperson viewpoint too, and allow us to inhabit that POV, a much more emotional viewpoint. The fact that we can have two different perspectives in our dreams proves that we have two different minds, doing different things. How could science ever explain POV switching in a dream? It doesn’t have a clue! The second-person viewpoint is impossible in a dream. There can be no fourth-wall audience in a subjective dream. Perhaps a severely mentally ill person could manage it, a paranoid schizophrenic or the like, but certainly no normal person. In fact, the second-person POV, if it did occur, would surely be clear evidence of mental illness. In a narrative in the first-person point of view, you are placed inside the protagonist’s head, and watch the story unfold through that character’s eyes. It’s an involving and immediate viewpoint, but it forces everything to be viewed from a highly restricted viewpoint. Also, the first-person viewpoint may be that of an “unreliable narrator”, telling you untrue things.
In a narrative in the second-person point of view, it’s the audience or some special character that is addressed by the narrator telling the story. It’s incredibly difficult for a novelist or moviemaker to do this well. In a narrative in the third-person point of view, the viewpoint is that of the person or people being talked about by the narrator, or shown by the moviemaker. Most stories are written from this perspective. A disembodied narrator describes, by word or image and dialogue, what the characters do and what happens to them. You don’t see directly through a character’s eyes as you do in a first-person narrative. However, the narrator describes the main character’s thoughts and feelings about what’s happening in the story. The “third-person limited” point of view adheres closely to one character’s perspective, usually that of the protagonist. The “third-person omniscient” point of view gives the narrator access to the thoughts and feelings of all of the characters in the story. This is a godlike point of view. It’s incredibly interesting to watch a movie and consider what point-ofview is being adopted in each shot, and why. Some classic movies would have been ruined by different POV shots, while some mediocre or bad movies might have been saved had they used more effective, more involving POVs.
TOURETTE’S SYNDROME sufferer from Tourette’s syndrome makes involuntary sounds and movements called “tics”. What’s going on? A normal person controls their production mind by means of their consumption mind (awareness mind = consciousness). The latter both directs and censors what the production mind generates. For all of us, the obscenest thoughts and insults may be going through our heads in our interactions with others, but we of course keep them to ourselves. Tourette’s sufferers do not. Without any intent, they just blurt them out, to the horror of their audience, and, even more so, of themselves. They are not in conscious control of these outbursts. Their production mind has acquired direct, uncensored access to the world. It is bypassing consciousness. It’s clearly reacting to any environmental “suggestion” or prompt. A Tourette’s sufferer was told he was going to Germany and, in response, immediately developed a Nazi tic, yelling, “I Love Hitler”, “Sieg Heil”, “Heil Hitler”. Another sufferer, a white person, saw a black family and immediately felt prompted to use the “N word”. A sufferer’s parents were worried about going through a security check at an airport because they feared the boy would lose control and shout, “I’ve got a bomb”, or “Allahu Akbar”. In any socially intense situation, the production mind of any person is prompted to generate the most offensive insults, just in case. In a normal person, these constitute the things that a person is aware they must absolutely not say, unless intensely provoked. A Tourette’s sufferer, on the other hand, immediately says them. They do not consciously mean these things, of course. They are not deliberately insulting people. People’s minds are full of bizarre content, but consciousness, most especially via its public mask – the Persona – is what renders it less bizarre, i.e., “normal”. In the case of Tourette’s syndrome, it’s as if the sufferers have a separate circuit for “things that must never be said”, and enjoy no conscious control over this circuit. Instead of being filtered by consciousness, this rogue
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circuit competes with consciousness. In times of stress, the insults are spat out in the most embarrassing way, completely bypassing consciousness. Imagine the bicameral voice of old – the voice of the “gods” – being vocalized, except all it did now was spew out the worst obscenities imaginable. That’s Tourette’s. Where schizophrenics hear persecutory voices in their own heads, without any intention to create these voices, Tourette’s sufferers say negative and persecutory things out loud in their own voice, but don’t mean to. Tourette’s is probably a species of schizophrenia. The person is not in control of this obscene “voice”. Tourette’s Syndrome must have a relationship with another bizarre syndrome, namely Alien Hand Syndrome. Wikipedia says, “Alien hand syndrome (AHS) or Dr. Strangelove syndrome is a category of conditions in which a person experiences their limbs acting seemingly on their own, without conscious control over the actions. There are a variety of clinical conditions that fall under this category, which most commonly affects the left hand. … The afflicted person may sometimes reach for objects and manipulate them without wanting to do so, even to the point of having to use the controllable hand to restrain the alien hand. While under normal circumstances, thought, as intent, and action can be assumed to be deeply mutually entangled, the occurrence of alien hand syndrome can be usefully conceptualized as a phenomenon reflecting a functional ‘disentanglement’ between thought and action.” Alien Hand Syndrome is Tourette’s Syndrome for the left hand. The hand obviously doesn’t say uncontrolled things. Instead, it moves in uncontrolled ways. The production mind has bypassed consciousness and gained its own outlet to the world. It can grab whatever it wants.
Repetition ave you noticed the extraordinary fact that you actually repeat in your own head whatever you hear someone else saying? You only notice this when they say something you don’t understand. “Not understanding” means that you are unable to summon a matching word for the word they just said. You heard it, but you couldn’t repeat it to yourself precisely because you did not have a word match. In these circumstances, you immediately scan for context the words that you did hear. If you simply misheard the vital
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word then you try various word substitutions that would fit the context and sound similar to whatever sound came out of the person’s mouth. If you heard right, but didn’t “get” the word, you again rely on context to furnish the supposed intended meaning. Isn’t it the most amazing thing that we are all inside our heads constantly repeating, parroting, what others say? We don’t directly take in what another person says. We take it in indirectly, via our automatic repetition. It’s our repetition that makes sense to us. When someone speaks to us in a foreign language, we don’t understand them because we are unable to repeat back to ourselves what they said. We lack the necessary words and grammar. We hear sounds, but we can’t understand them because we don’t know how to echo them. We can’t repeat the words to ourselves. What about someone with no inner voice? How do they hear and understand what someone else is saying if they cannot repeat it to themselves in their inner voice? They must hear it in a different way, involving different brain circuitry. The brain is highly plastic. Compensatory neural pathways form in the brain if some problem has occurred, some deviation from the normal. With conditions such as no inner monologue and aphantasia, different parts of the brain than the expected ones must be used to perform the same or similar functions as those of normal individuals. So, the functions of “internal monologue”, for example, are done in a different way, using different brain circuitry. The person is conscious, but their consciousness has a different quality from that of normal individuals, who overwhelmingly use the medium of language to convey consciousness.
Radicalization involves training the unconscious, conditioning the R adicalization unconscious, programming the unconscious. The radicalization message is always exactly the same in character. It emphasizes how special a person is as a member of the in-group, and how much they are threatened by members of the out-group. The in-group is good, the out-group is evil. The in-group is saved, the out-group damned. The in-group is Godly, the outgroup Satanic. Once a person has fully internalized these basic binaries, they feel an enormous positive feeling (elation) regarding anything that supports
the in-group, and enormous negative feeling (disgust, hate, fury) regarding anything that threatens or challenges the in-group, anything that in any way favors the out-group. George Orwell wrote, “A nationalist is one who thinks solely, or mainly, in terms of competitive prestige. He may be a positive or a negative nationalist – that is, he may use his mental energy either in boosting or in denigrating – but at any rate his thoughts always turn on victories, defeats, triumphs and humiliations. He sees history, especially contemporary history, as the endless rise and decline of great power units, and every event that happens seems to him a demonstration that his own side is on the upgrade and some hated rival is on the downgrade. But finally, it is important not to confuse nationalism with mere worship of success. The nationalist does not go on the principle of simply ganging up with the strongest side. On the contrary, having picked his side, he persuades himself that it is the strongest, and is able to stick to his belief even when the facts are overwhelmingly against him. Nationalism is power hunger tempered by self-deception. Every nationalist is capable of the most flagrant dishonesty, but he is also – since he is conscious of serving something bigger than himself – unshakably certain of being in the right. … As nearly as possible, no nationalist ever thinks, talks, or writes about anything except the superiority of his own power unit. It is difficult if not impossible for any nationalist to conceal his allegiance. The smallest slur upon his own unit, or any implied praise of a rival organization, fills him with uneasiness which he can only relieve by making some sharp retort. If the chosen unit is an actual country, such as Ireland or India, he will generally claim superiority for it not only in military power and political virtue, but in art, literature, sport, structure of the language, the physical beauty of the inhabitants, and perhaps even in climate, scenery and cooking. He will show great sensitiveness about such things as the correct display of flags, relative size of headlines and the order in which different countries are named.” Nationalism, patriotism, racism, supremacism and religious fanaticism are the primary vectors of radicalization and are now being deployed everywhere, as we especially see in the USA, where the center-right Republican Party has morphed into a far-right, populist cult exactly based on nationalism, patriotism, racism, supremacism and religious fanaticism.
Death to God! is no need to kill religion and spirituality and become atheistic and T here nihilistic. However, there is an absolute need to kill mainstream religion and spirituality and create a brand new religious and spiritual paradigm, based on reason and logic, knowledge and understanding. We need new religions based not on faith and mysticism but on rationalism (in order to metaphysically, mathematically, epistemologically and ontologically ground religion and spirituality) and on psychology (in order to use religion and spirituality practically, to optimize the consciousness, powers and well-being of every person). It is catastrophic to believe in external gods. God is simply all of us. There is nothing external to us. We, collectively, are God, and the universe is what we collectively created. We did so unconsciously, mathematically, and it’s exactly because we have such a poor relationship with our unconscious and its powers that we have such difficulties understanding reality. Jung said “Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.” In fact, the unconscious is what the ignorant call GOD and which they imagine is external to them. The unconscious is the most mysterious thing there is, exactly because it is unconscious. But the whole point of rationalism and psychology is to bring it into the light, into consciousness. The more conscious a people becomes, the more powerful it becomes. China is powerful because it is atheistic. It would be much more powerful if it were panentheistic. Atheism doesn’t reflect reality. Atheism goes hand in hand with materialism, empiricism and nihilism, but reality actually reflects idealism, rationalism and teleology (i.e., panentheism). It is critical to be aligned with reality. Anything that puts you in opposition to reality, whether materialism, atheism, nihilism or mainstream religion, will doom you. China changed itself utterly in a couple of generations, but it will start to experience problems exactly because it does not have the Truth to give to its people. It only has Chinese nationalism. Imagine a system that actually gives everyone the Truth. That’s exactly what Illuminism (ontological mathematics and meritocracy) delivers.
Illuminism is the light of reason, yet it recognizes the therapeutic function of darkness. It’s Apollo, but compensated by Dionysus. It’s Logos, but which finds a place for Mythos.
The Sleepwalker r Guy Leschziner wrote, “Why do some of us do bizarre things in our sleep? Like riding a motorbike, using a shoe to phone for a pizza or even having sex while sleeping? These are complex behaviors and yet sleepwalkers aren’t aware of what they’re doing and often have no memory of their strange night-time activities. These sleep disorders are known as nonREM parasomnias and include conditions like night terrors and sleep eating. So why does it happen? Sleepwalking usually occurs during deep sleep, when something triggers the brain to wake – but not completely. So the areas that control walking and other movement wake up, yet other parts, involved in awareness and rational thinking, remain asleep. What’s confusing is that sleepwalkers look awake – their eyes are open – but they’re really not awake. They’re not really asleep either. The brain is awake and asleep at the same time. We have known this happens in some animals, who can sleep with half of their brain at a time. But recently, we have learnt that similar things can happen in the human brain.” Amongst those that attended Leschziner’s sleep clinic, one patient, referenced above, rode her motorbike for twenty minutes whilst sleeping (!). She did it not just once but three times, on successive nights. Her keys had to be hidden from her to stop her. Sleep motorbiking is quite the thing. Imagine riding a motorbike while having no conscious awareness of what you are doing, yet doing it expertly, and returning home safely. And then doing it two more times on subsequent nights. Those who suffer from the condition of narcolepsy are basically in a permanent state of mixed waking and sleeping. They are a species of sleepwalker. A bicameral individual is a species of sleepwalker too, with a hallucinated voice that tells them what to do. Sleepwalkers manifest automatism, i.e., they operate like an automaton. They lack free will (voluntariness). They are autopilot people. They have no conscious intent. They can form no memories during sleepwalking, so they
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can never remember what they did. They engage in no rational thinking. In Jaynes’s terms, they have no mind-space. They can’t plan, but they can execute tasks, complex tasks, without any conscious awareness. Julian Jaynes wrote, “Iliadic [bicameral] man did not have subjectivity as do we; he had no awareness of his awareness of the world, no internal mindspace to introspect upon. In distinction to our own subjective conscious minds, we can call the mentality of the Myceneans a bicameral mind. Volition, planning, initiative is organized with no consciousness whatever and then ‘told’ to the individual in his familiar language, sometimes with the visual aura of a familiar friend or authority figure or ‘god’, or sometimes as a voice alone. The individual obeyed these hallucinated voices because he could not ‘see’ what to do by himself. … The Iliad really is about Achilles’ acts and their consequences, not about his mind. And as for the gods, the Iliadic authors and the Iliadic characters all agree in the acceptance of this divinely managed world.” Sleepwalkers carry out acts, but they don’t plan anything and they have no subjectivity and no capacity to reason or question. What would they do if they encountered some problem that required a decision? According to Jaynes, they would hallucinate the voice of a god to tell them what action to perform next. At no point did they require consciousness. Let’s imagine a world of sleepwalkers. They may be good at performing specific tasks, but how good are they at continually reacting to a fastchanging world with all manner of threats and challenges? A hallucinated voice would be a decidedly inefficient decision-making mechanism.
The Lost Voice Jaynes said, “The language of men was involved with only one J ulian hemisphere in order to leave the other free for the language of the gods.” According to Jaynes, when the voice of the gods fell silent, humanity was bereft, lost. It did everything to try to recover the gods. Finding the gods again became humanity’s overriding task. Jaynes believed that the gods were simply a function of the brain, a hallucinatory function. Once upon a time, most or all humans could hallucinate gods. This was the bicameral golden age. As time went on, the bicameral mind started to disappear due to selection pressures. As the world
became more complex, dangerous and chaotic, more rapid decision-making was required. The hallucinatory bicameral mind ended up in direct competition with the mind in which consciousness was being born. In effect, given Jaynes’s scheme, an unconscious that spoke and provided the decision-making for bicameral humans became silent and decisionmaking instead transferred to what was turning into the conscious mind. People consciously took decisions rather than waiting on hallucinated decision makers. Jaynes said, “…the presence of voices which had to be obeyed were the absolute prerequisite to the conscious stage of mind in which it is the self that is responsible and can debate within itself, can order and direct, and that the creation of such a self is the product of culture. In a sense, we have become our own gods.” Consciousness – effective decision-making capacity for every situation – makes gods of us. To see how divine we are, just look at how far ahead we are of all animals on earth. Are we not gods in relation to them? Look at how we have shaped the earth in our own image. Only gods can do that. We have landed men on the moon, sent probes into outer space, and landed vehicles on Mars. Only gods can do that. And as we increase our consciousness we shall access ever greater, ever more divine powers.
The Science Game cience is a metaphor. Its central metaphor is that existence is a dead thing, not a living organism. This metaphor is totally false and ineptly chosen, like saying of a coward, “He was a lion”. Yet because existence, in its default mathematical mode, acts in a machine-like, syntactic, production manner, in a multitude of ways it can be accurately modeled as a dead thing, a mere mechanism with no mind, no life and no purpose, which is precisely why scientific materialism has proved so successful. Where science fails disastrously is in its inability to explain life, mind, the unconscious, consciousness, free will, subjectivity, language, the purpose of existence, the ground of existence, and the source of the universe, i.e., it fails with 100% of the Big Questions … everything that counts. Only a very peculiar type of person – with a horrific, zombie-like consciousness, more attuned to machines than life – finds science persuasive.
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Physicist Per Bak said, “I don’t understand what meaning is. In science there is no meaning to anything. It just observes and describes. It doesn’t ask the atom why it’s going left when it’s subjected to a magnetic field.” This is the classic stance of nihilistic, zombie followers of the cult of atheism and scientism. They desire a world without meaning and purpose. They are repulsed by meaning and purpose. They can’t wait to deny that they have a mind, subjectivity, consciousness, free will. They are not humans. They are machines. They are Cartesian brutes. Science is simply a modeling system using a subset of mathematics that accommodates the manmade ideology of empiricism and materialism. Science believes, wrongly, that reality is observable (even though invisible “dark energy” and “dark matter” account for 96% of the universe, according to science itself!). It will be fascinating to see how science engages with a reality that science can’t observe, even though its entire method is based on observation. Science used to claim that 100% of what exists is, in theory at least, observable, hence accessible to the scientific method. What it now claims is that the vast majority of reality is unobservable, but it can be inferred from what is observable. Eventually, it will grasp that reality, in its foundational zero-entropy state, isn’t observable at all, and no amount of science will reveal its secrets. But reason and logic, which play no formal part in science’s observational, empirical method, tell us everything we need to know. Reason and logic are not scientific; they are anti-scientific. Reason and logic are mathematical. They belong to rationalism, not its philosophical opposite (empiricism).
The Sleepwalker leepwalkers aren’t under conscious control. What has happened is that their sleeping body has ceased to be paralyzed (as it is during REM sleep). While the conscious mind is engaged in dreaming or deep sleeping, the production mind can then make the body do physical things in the real world, even as complex as riding a motorbike at night. The production mind is of course what normally handles motorbike riding, but your consciousness is usually present too in order to provide superior control, responsiveness and
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decision-making. Imagine a 24-hour motorbike race between sleepwalking motorbikers and conscious motorbikers. Who would win? The sleepwalkers have certain advantages: they don’t get tired, they don’t get scared, they don’t get bored or distracted. They would act like self-driving cars, and would get the job done. But they wouldn’t take risks, they wouldn’t do anything interesting or make unexpected maneuvers, they wouldn’t change speed in anything but a robotic way. We would imagine that the winners of the race would be the conscious riders every time, unless they had accidents. This race is somewhat like the race between bicameral humans and conscious humans. In an unchanging environment, the bicameral humans would do fine. It’s in a chaotic situation where very rapid and responsive decision-making is required that they would suffer an enormous competitive disadvantage.
Strength hy do tasks requiring strength seem so difficult? It’s because they’re tiring and painful, but what if you couldn’t feel much pain and you never got tired? In bicameral times, when consciousness did not exist, and the production mind – which doesn’t feel pain and doesn’t get tired – was in charge, people could do things we couldn’t imagine now. The ancient Egyptians built the pyramids with barely any technology. They didn’t need it. Humans back then were much harder, tougher and stronger than they are now. They weren’t daunted by things consciousness finds daunting. If we “scientifically” hypnotized people, we could test the abilities of humans properly, without any interference from conscious weakness and fear.
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The Right Word you “misspeak” it’s because your production mind has supplied you W hen with the wrong word. You hear yourself delivering the wrong word and that prompts your consumption mind to instruct your production mind to
try again and give you the right word, which it then does. Ever found yourself trying to remember a word, a name, a movie title, or whatever? What you do is prompt your production mind to offer suggestions on the general theme of whatever you have forgotten. It will keep peppering the target, and your consumption mind will keep reacting to each one and feeding back, until, hallelujah, the production mind finally furnishes the right word, and you immediately feel elated, allowing the production mind to move on to something else.
Tourette’s and Intrusive Thoughts “Intrusive thoughts are thoughts that seem to become stuck in your mind. They can cause distress, since the nature of the thought might be upsetting. They may also reoccur frequently, which can make the concern worse. Intrusive thoughts may be violent or disturbing. They may be thoughts of a sexual nature, including fantasies. They can also be about behaviors you find unacceptable and abhorrent.” – Healthline ntrusive thoughts are a silent version of Tourette’s syndrome. Where the latter concerns obscenities that must never be uttered, the former concerns terrible ideas that must never be thought. With Tourette’s, the obscenities are uttered; with intrusive thoughts, the terrible ideas are thought. It’s as if we have specific taboo zones that we try extremely hard to repress, but they have their own energy and drive and come to the surface anyway.
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ZEN BULLSHITISM nonymous said, “I truly appreciate your profound insight into the nature of the Logical Mind. It’s truly stimulating. However, I am not 100% convinced of your ‘mathematical’ certitude.” No? Do you deny that 1 + 1 = 2? Do you deny that the circumference of a circle is 2πr? Do you deny that these are absolutely certain? There is no conceivable world or reality or existence where these are not true. How do you explain that if you deny mathematical certainty? If reality is not mathematical, then why is there no possible reality that does not contain countless mathematical certainties, such as 1 + 1 = 2? How can a nonmathematical reality contain infinite mathematical certainties? It’s impossible, it’s a category error. Therefore, there are no non-mathematical realities, and reality is 100% mathematically certain. Anonymous said, “Your Mathematical Certitude does not explain or account for HUMAN CONSCIOUSNESS, itself.” Yes it does. It explains and accounts for it 100%. Nothing else can. Nonmathematical uncertainty certainly isn’t the basis of any explanation of anything, and cannot account for anything whatsoever. Anonymous said, “That is to say that your Mathematical Certitude, as brilliant as it is, does not account for the origin, and existence of our Human Consciousness.” What do you think this book is about? Duh! You are not making any arguments. You are simply stating your personal beliefs, which have no basis in reason and logic. You seem to believe that the words “human” and “consciousness” have no connection to mathematics. Our whole point is that existence is mathematical and therefore there is nothing at all that isn’t mathematical, and that includes humanity and “human consciousness”. We’ve proved our point across hundreds of books (including this one), none of which you have ever read, so while we are arguing from a position of total knowledge, you are arguing from a position of total ignorance. How is that going to work out for you? The fact that you have no knowledge of something does not mean that other people do not. Intelligent people have
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access to knowledge of which stupid people have literally no conception. Anonymous said, “It is this very Human Consciousness that you are using to conceive of, and create, your Mathematical Certitude.” It is literally mathematics that stands behind both humans and their consciousness and it would be literally impossible for humans to be able to consciously reflect on mathematics if they were not in fact mathematical beings with mathematical consciousness. Your self-serving use of the words “human” and “consciousness” does not render these non-mathematical, as you apparently believe. Your inability to conceive of humans and consciousness as mathematical is your problem, not reality’s problem. Mathematical reality doesn’t care what you believe. Anonymous said, “Or you may prefer to say that Mathematical Certitude preexists our Human Consciousness, and creates it.” Exactly so. Mathematics always comes first. Anonymous said, “Regardless, in either case, you have not and cannot KNOW what Human Consciousness is, MATHEMATICALLY, by trying to USE HUMAN CONSCIOUSNESS to reduce itself to a Mathematical Formula.” This is total nonsense. If existence is reducible to a mathematical source formula – as indeed it is – then why would existence be unable to generate creatures that can exercise reason and logic to work out what the Source Formula is? It can and it has. The fact that you are not sufficiently intellectually advanced to work out reality is a failing on your part, not that of intelligent people. Reality isn’t something baffling and inexplicable. By the Principle of Sufficient Reason (PSR), it has an exact reason – which any rational person can work out – and by Occam’s Razor its explanation is the simplest possible, hence any rational and logical person can work it out. Anonymous, like so many people baffled by reality, makes arguments based not on reason and logic, rationalism and simplicity, but on his personal, irrational and illogical incredulity. He actually imagines he is being profound when he annunciates his own ignorance. Anonymous said, “This would be a paradox.” No it wouldn’t. You are literally saying that in an intelligent monistic system – a mathematical system – that system is incapable of understanding itself. The paradox, where we are taking your use of the term “paradox” to denote something that combines contradictory features or qualities, is entirely yours. You are claiming, in effect, that a system can only be understood by
something different from it, something outside it. This is a classic fallacy. You are a substance dualist. You believe that reality comprises at least two different substances and that you can only understand one thing by escaping from it to a perspective outside it. Substance dualism is one of the most refuted positions in all of philosophy. Reality is a monism. There is nowhere outside the system. There is no other, external perspective. A system with an answer requires the property that it be able to work itself out, i.e., establish its answer (after all, there would be no point in a system having an answer if it could never be calculated). An ontological mathematical system – based on the PSR – has exactly that self-answering property. It’s the only one that does. The PSR explains everything, including itself. The purpose of existence defined by the PSR is to consciously know the PSR. Only then has the PSR optimized itself. Existence is the PSR. In the domain of Being, it’s always self-aware, in the manner of Aristotle’s God, or Hegel’s Absolute Idea. In the domain of Becoming, its goal is to become self-aware, in the manner of the Hegelian Absolute Spirit. No greater state can be attained than Absolute Knowing, ultimate self-awareness. The state required is that of zero entropy, which is of course the perfect state of Being (the Source of Becoming). Anonymous said, “It is the uroboros, whose fate is to disappear down its own throat.” You have a catastrophic problem with the coherence, completeness and consistency of circularity. If you knew anything about ontological mathematics, you would know that it is predicated on 100% mathematical tautology. The very thing you claim refutes our system is the very thing our system relies on to prove its truth beyond any conceivable doubt. The Euler unit circle is the basis of ontological mathematics, and is the perfect mathematical uroboros! You couldn’t have chosen a better symbol to vindicate our system, contrary to your intent. You really should study a subject before you attack it. Anonymous said, “Or the Zen koan of the sound of one hand clapping.” One hand doesn’t clap. By definition. You see, that’s your whole problem right there. You reveal yourself to be a believer in Zen Buddhism, one of the most incoherent systems of thought, or should we say anti-thought, ever devised, a system of the purest mystical anti-knowledge. Anonymous said, “Indeed, can a fingertip touch itself?” There you go again. Why would a fingertip need to touch itself, why would eyes need to see themselves, why would ears need to hear themselves,
why would noses need to smell themselves, and why would tongues need to taste themselves? The function of the senses is to collect data about the external world, not about themselves. They would be useless as senses if they were self-directed rather than other-directed. You literally seem unable to understand the basic function and purpose of the senses. Reason and logic, by contrast, since they are based on analytic tautology and circularity, on nothing being external to the system, correspond exactly to a self-accessing, self-revealing system. That’s precisely why they deliver 100% certainty. Anonymous said, “Explain this problem with Mathematical Certainty. Please.” We just have! You are wholly unable to grasp that reason and logic serve totally different functions from the senses, yet you use sensory metaphors to try to attack reason and logic. You have literally committed a category error. It’s amazing how many mystics use incredibly bad and confused analogies to try to make points about subjects that have no connection at all to the proposed analogy. There is simply no analogy here! You cannot discuss rationalism in terms of empiricism, logic in terms of illogic, reason in terms of unreason, mathematics in terms of anti-mathematics. Anonymous said, “In short, Human Consciousness is a ‘blind spot’ that our Human Minds cannot ‘know’ RATIONALLY with any certitude.” In short, your argument, such as it is, is 100% fallacious. We can rationally know with absolute certainty the ground of existence. Consciousness is the exact means the mathematical evolutionary universe provides to bring us to absolute self-consciousness and godhood. There is no other way. Mathematics, not meditation, not Zen Buddhism, brings us to core reality, Source reality. It’s the only thing that can … because this is a strictly mathematical universe. It has no non-mathematical features at all. Everything you believe is non-mathematical is in fact mathematical. It’s your inability to have an ontological rather than abstract understanding of mathematics that is your defining problem. Anonymous said, “Human Consciousness is the ‘weak premise’, that you totally ignore, intentionally, or unintentionally.” Says the person who has never read any of the millions of words we have written about consciousness and its mathematical basis. Remember, your ignorance of a system is your problem, not the system’s problem. You have
no idea what we say about consciousness. You have never studied a word of it. Ignorance is not an argument. It’s just ignorance. Anonymous said, “As long as that blind spot remains beyond the analysis of our Rational Mind, it will not be subjected to RATIONAL MATHEMATICAL CERTITUDE.” You know what’s funny? It’s that you have a total blind spot regarding mathematics and rationalism. It’s your own blind spot that you are projecting. There is no such thing, in a mathematical system, of anything beyond the analysis of the rational mind. The rational mind is able to establish the existence of a rational dual-aspect monism, by which all information carriers are accompanied by information carried. The information carrier – the syntax, the form, the signifier, the map – is fully rationally and logically knowable. The information carried is the empirical layer – the layer of semantics, meaning, content, the signified, the territory – that we experience. This is not some infinitely mysterious layer. We know as a 100% fact that its flipside is the rational side of absolute rational and logical knowledge. All mystics and all critics of ontological mathematics succumb to the disastrous fallacy that the empirical layer has no connection to the rational layer. They make crazy claims such as the rational layer being an illusion, or unknowable, or an unreal abstraction, or containing fatal paradoxes (antinomies). In fact, it’s their empiricist claims that are totally detached from reality and are unreal abstractions. Anonymous said, “In closing, I would say that God does exist.” God certainly does exist, but the real God has no resemblance at all to any God you believe in. Anonymous said, “He lives in the dark recesses of the blind spot of Human Consciousness, that cannot be mathematically formulated.” Thus spaketh the ignoramus, the mystic, the Zen Buddhist, the despiser of knowledge and understanding, the rejector of the Principle of Sufficient Reason and Occam’s Razor. There are no “blind spots” in a 100% mathematical monism. There is no “God of the gaps.” Anonymous said, “Or, at least, it has not been done, to date. Good luck with that. Peace.” Bad luck with your hatred of reason and logic. War! These love and light mystics are so incredibly tiresome. Anonymous said, “P.S.: Suggested viewing, the movie ‘Pi’.” Our suggested viewing for all people like Anonymous: The Matrix. Focus
on why The Matrix is incompatible with Baudrillard’s philosophy, despite the fact that it literally references one of Baudrillard’s most influential books. The makers of the movie thought they were creating a Baudrillardian movie. In fact, they demonstrated that they didn’t understand Baudrillard at all. Great movie, though! Just not in relation to Baudrillardian philosophy. Just as the makers of The Matrix thought they understood Baudrillard, but didn’t – he went way over their heads – our critics think they understand ontological mathematics. They don’t have a clue. They never grasp why we call our system “ontological” mathematics. They have no comprehension at all of what “ontological” means and how it totally transforms the nature of mathematics. By the way, it turned out that Anonymous was a fanatical Muslim. That’s even worse than being a Zen Buddhist! All Abrahamists, and Zen Buddhists for that matter, follow Kant’s example. Kant said, “I had to deny knowledge in order to make room for faith.” All believers, all mystics, are extremely motivated to deny reason and logic, knowledge, understanding and mathematics, in order to carve out a space – a “blind spot” that no one can look into – where they can hide God, where they can justify to themselves their absurd faith positions, and mystical notions. It’s our mission to shine the strongest light on this “blind spot”, making it fully visible, and removing the last hope of all the irrationalists, clinging to their bizarre paradoxes and fallacies with which they seek to cloak themselves in order to go on believing in ancient garbage and superstition. There’s nowhere left to hide. We’re coming for you. The light of reason shall set you free!
METAPHOR metaphor refers to one thing by mentioning another. The sentence “He was a lion”, used in reference to a man, wants us to understand that the man was brave, a fighter, a great power. The idea is to get us to transfer all the properties we associate with a lion to the man. To call a man a lion is of course profoundly odd. Why would you refer to a person in terms of something they definitely aren’t (a creature of another species)? Yet the human mind is fantastically well-suited to metaphor and embraces it with incredible enthusiasm. Julian Jaynes believed that metaphor was an essential aspect of language. He wrote, “The most fascinating property of language is its capacity to make metaphors. But what an understatement! For metaphor is not a mere extra trick of language, as it is so often slighted in the old schoolbooks on composition; it is the very constitutive ground of language. … It is by metaphor that language grows. The common reply to the question ‘what is it?’ is, when the reply is difficult or the experience unique, ‘well, it is like —.’ … This is the major way in which the vocabulary of language is formed. The grand and vigorous function of metaphor is the generation of new language as it is needed, as human culture becomes more and more complex.” In this view, we understand things by comparing them to other things. We understand a wolf and a sheep. If we want to tell someone that such and such a person is a predatory individual, we say, “He’s a wolf.” Similarly, if we want to convey that someone is harmless, submissive and easily led, we say, “He’s a sheep.” The basic idea is that we transfer the associations we make with one thing to another thing in order to better understand the other thing. (However, ironically, that is also the means by which we totally falsify things, the means by which we turn celebrities into “stars” and gods. We transfer all positive associations to them, and all negative associations to the non-celebrities, the people.) How would you explain the color red to a child? You might point to a
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tomato or a red apple or a red car. Now explain “red” to a blind person. You can’t. You can’t create an association that would make any sense to them. You would have to use a synesthesic approach. You might say that red is the warmth of the setting sun, while yellow is the warmth of the noonday sun. You have now associated color with something else: the heat the blind person feels from the sun. Wikipedia says, “[Metaphor] may provide (or obscure) clarity or identify hidden similarities between two different ideas. … some recent linguistic theories view all language in essence as metaphorical. The word metaphor itself is a metaphor, coming from a Greek term meaning to ‘transfer’ or ‘carry across.’ Metaphors ‘carry’ meaning from one word, image, idea, or situation to another, linking them and creating a metaphor. … The Philosophy of Rhetoric (1937) by rhetorician I. A. Richards describes a metaphor as having two parts: the tenor and the vehicle. The tenor is the subject to which attributes are ascribed. The vehicle is the object whose attributes are borrowed. … Other writers employ the general terms ‘ground’ and ‘figure’ to denote the tenor and the vehicle. [Figure–ground organization is a type of perceptual grouping that is a vital necessity for recognizing objects through vision. In Gestalt psychology it is known as identifying a figure from the background. For example, black words on a printed paper are seen as the ‘figure,’ and the white sheet as the ‘background’.] Cognitive linguistics uses the terms ‘target’ and ‘source’, respectively.” We can think of syntax and semantics in these terms. The rational syntax is the source, the figure, the map, the vehicle, the information carrier. The empirical semantics is the target, the ground, the territory, the tenor, the information carried. It’s the meaning of the signal, the experience of the signal. The empirical universe is a metaphor. It’s the information carried by the rational universe, transferred by the rational universe. The empirical is a metaphor for the rational. It is interpreted by the senses, feelings and intuition rather than by reason and logic (by thinking). Reality is a dual-aspect metaphor. When we experience anything, we are encountering its empirical description as opposed to its underlying rational, synaptic description. We experience its content, not its form. Ontological mathematics is about reverse engineering all phenomena and showing how they can be depicted instead in terms of analytic sinusoidal waves and wavefunctions – these are the unseen and unseeable noumena that
structure the world and serve as the carriers of all the empirical information that we encounter in the experiential world. In relation to metaphors, Julian Jaynes coined the terms “metaphrand” and “metaphier”. “Metaphrand” corresponds to “tenor”, “target”, and “ground”. “Metaphier” corresponds to “vehicle”, “figure”, and “source”. Jaynes then expanded this discussion by adding two new concepts: “paraphrand” and “paraphier”. Jaynes wrote, “If we look more carefully at the nature of metaphor we find that it is composed of more than a metaphier and a metaphrand. There are also at the bottom of most complex metaphors various associations or attributes of the metaphier which I am going to call paraphiers. And these paraphiers project back into the metaphrand as what I shall call the paraphrands of the metaphrand.” Wikipedia says, “A metaphier might have associated attributes or nuances – its paraphiers – that enrich the metaphor because they ‘project back’ to the metaphrand, potentially creating new ideas – the paraphrands – associated thereafter with the metaphrand or even leading to a new metaphor. For example, in the metaphor ‘Pat is a tornado’, the metaphrand is ‘Pat’, the metaphier is ‘tornado’. As metaphier, ‘tornado’ carries paraphiers such as power, storm and wind, counterclockwise motion, and danger, threat, destruction, etc. The metaphoric meaning of ‘tornado’ is inexact: one might understand that ‘Pat is powerfully destructive’ through the paraphrand of physical and emotional destruction; another person might understand the metaphor as ‘Pat can spin out of control’. In the latter case, the paraphier of ‘spinning motion’ has become the paraphrand ‘psychological spin’, suggesting an entirely new metaphor for emotional unpredictability, a possibly apt description for a human being hardly applicable to a tornado. Based on his analysis, Jaynes claims that metaphors not only enhance description, but ‘increase enormously our powers of perception... and our understanding of [the world], and literally create new objects.’” What is celebrity advertising all about? The notion is that the celebrities’ qualities somehow rub off on you if you buy whatever products they are endorsing. If a beautiful model tells you to buy a face cream, you will become beautiful too. Well, that’s what they expect you to believe, and, bizarrely, most people do. That’s how suggestible they are! If a sports winner tells you to buy a shaving kit, you too will be a winner if you get that kit. Dream on! Celebrity advertising is inherently metaphorical. The desirable qualities
of the stars – whether beauty, strength, speed, bravery, humor, the winning habit – are transferred to you if you buy the same products. If a winner does something, you too will be a winner if you do the same thing. Humans use metaphor, association, and imitation, all the time. Very few people ever do anything new, ever think anything new, ever have any conception of what new is. Humans simply copy. That’s the basic mode of human action. Human is the Imitation Species playing the Imitation Game, and who they want to imitate are the “alpha apes”, the “top dogs”, the “head honchos”.
LOVE AND LIGHT H said, “Blah blah blah logic is everything blah blah. There’s so much I respect about this but the ‘logic is superior’ aspect must be put to rest.” You mean you don’t respect logic at all. If you did, you would appreciate that it is absolutely superior. It’s the “logic is inferior” mantra that must be put to rest. SH said, “We can’t be human if we act like emotion and intuition are nothing.” It’s not a question of emotion and intuition being nothing. It’s a question of these things constituting “non-overlapping magisteria”. Emotion and mystical intuition give us zero knowledge of reality. Reason and logic give us all of our real knowledge. The catastrophe of the love and light ideology is that it claims that feelings and mystical intuitions provide the highest knowledge and understanding of reality when in fact they provide no knowledge and no understanding at all. Reality is not mystical. It’s the total opposite. It has a 100% rational and logical syntax. It’s wholly mathematical. Reality is not made of love, or any other emotion. It is not directed by love or any other emotion. It is directed by rational and logical syntactic operations driven by the laws of mathematics. Emotions and mystical intuitions are the biggest possible sources of lies and self-delusion about the nature of reality. They are experiential, not knowledge-based. You experience feelings. They don’t tell you anything at all about the syntax of reality. They provide no knowledge. Logic is infinitely superior to feelings in the magisterium of knowledge. If you don’t get that, it’s precisely because you are totally irrational and illogical, exactly because you privilege your feelings and mystical intuitions over reason and logic, which is why you post ridiculous drivel on social media, where you relentlessly prove how alienated you are from knowledge. SH said, “Of course logic plays an important role but it is part of a triad with emotion and intuition meaning ALL should be applied with equal intensity.”
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There you have it. You have just destroyed the whole point of logic. You cannot apply emotion and intuition with equal intensity to the magisterium concerned with logic. All you would do is produce total illogic, and that, of course, is exactly what you are continuously doing, since logic plays no part in your thinking. You are entirely driven by feelings and intuitions, which is why you were triggered to defend them against the superiority of logic. The point is very simple. Reason and logic, not feelings and mystical intuitions (i.e., religion and spirituality), are the path to knowledge. You can apply feelings and mystical intuitions with as much intensity as you like, but not in the arena of knowledge, where they have no validity at all. You are totally unable to grasp that these things have wholly different magisteria that do not overlap, and it is disastrous to make them overlap, as you do when you claim that feelings and mystical intuitions are as important in the field of knowledge as reason and logic. Given that fallacious belief, you will never come anywhere near knowledge and the understanding of reality. Even more worryingly, you will believe yourself much smarter and wiser than intelligent people who know exactly how to separate magisteria and not get them confused. You appear never to have heard of the old saying “horses for courses”. When it comes to acquiring real knowledge of reality, the only horses in the race are reason and logic. These are of course entirely absent if the race is about exploring human emotionalism with maximum intensity, or human mysticism with maximum intensity. SH said, “Emotion IS the universal human language and it isn’t always innately irrational.” If it’s innately irrational then it is always irrational, by definition. You would know that if you were logical, but plainly you’re not, and you’ve just proved how easily you slip into illogic. Emotion, far from being the “universal human language”, is technically not a language at all. It’s a semantic experience, entirely dependent on the true universal language – mathematics. All emotional information is conveyed by mathematical syntax. You could not have emotion, or mystical intuitions, without rational and logical mathematics to underpin them. SH said, “For every action a reaction.” That’s a law of physics, not of emotion and mysticism. SH said, “Are we learning nothing in terms of how hierarchy means absolutely nothing?”
Hierarchy means everything. If you do not place reason and logic at the apex of the hierarchy when it comes to the magisterium of knowledge and understanding then you will never acquire any true knowledge and understanding. Clearly, you haven’t. You are an entirely emotional irrationalist. Your very response to our work is emotional and irrational. You seek to privilege your feelings and mystical intuitions, with which you are very comfortable, over reason and logic, from which you are completely alienated. You intensely dislike them and seek to be free of them so that you can wallow in your feelings and mystical beliefs. SH said, “Why should hierarchy apply at all in the spirit world?” On the contrary, why should it not be the entire basis of the spirit world? How are you rationally and logically defining “spirit world”? Or is all that matters your personal, subjective feelings and mystical intuitions? Must we all bow down to your feelings, now that you have placed them at the top of the hierarchy, in total contradiction of your claim that you don’t believe in hierarchy? You would notice things like that if you were logical, which you aren’t. Bye!
The Emotional Psychopaths! said, “People be careful! It’s a psychopathic movement! Logic and N Ereason is a domain of psychopaths who can’t understand human emotions but they can fake it. Their doctrine doesn’t accept anything else – that’s another signal of psychopathic behavior!!! Also, these people are typical narcissists!!!” Let’s just turn this around … “People be careful! It’s a psychopathic movement! Emotionalism is a domain of psychopaths who can’t understand reason and logic. Their doctrine doesn’t accept anything else other than what emotionally appeals to them – that’s another signal of psychopathic behavior!!! Also, these people are typical narcissists!!!” Isn’t it hilarious that feeling types regard thinking types as psychopaths? The movie Divergent was all about thinking types being monsters, and the non-thinking types saints. Can you imagine how far from reason and logic a person who believes that reason and logic are psychopathic is? We can be 100% rationally and
logically certain that these people will have a 100% irrational and illogical worldview, and that makes them incredibly dangerous psychopaths!
No Value “I can do no wrong, for I do not know what it is. Never mind them. People are of no value. We could make more sometime, if we need them. Life itself is only a vision, a dream. Nothing exists save empty space and you. And you are but a thought.” – Mark Twain (as Satan) ll that exists is thought, and all thought has a net value of zero, meaning that all of reality is net nothing. Isn’t it remarkable? There is no physical universe. It’s all in the mind, and the mind is net nothing. The world isn’t made out of nothing. It is nothing.
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Given given world is written in a code, a language – that of the sinusoidal T hewaves of ontological mathematics. We don’t “see” this language. We see its sensory effects. Yet, precisely because we live in a language-based reality, we were destined to create languages with which to consciously explore the hidden world. That process was guaranteed to result in our discovery of reality’s own language – Ontological Mathematics. Everything is made of mathematics. Everything is made of language. Everything is made of mind. Everything is made of thought. This is not a material reality of non-language, it’s a mental reality of language. It has a syntax and a semantics, and that’s exactly why we can understand reality and know its deepest secrets and its explanation. Reality is the product of the PSR, the source principle of mathematics, hence language. To say that everything has a sufficient reason is to say that everything is mental, that everything is mathematical, that reasons for
everything are built into everything, via mathematics.
The Idiots astern mystics ludicrously believe that the material universe is conscious, and consciousness is the key to everything. When you understand that consciousness, of the kind humans have, is language and has to be acquired via evolution, via socialization, then the absurdity of Eastern mysticism and New Ageism, its modern derivative, is fully apparent. Eastern mystics and New Agers detest language, which means they detest their own consciousness.
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The Language Transformation onsciousness is language. Language provides a secondary, manmade version of the world of perception, of the given world. Animals see and hear the world and respond instinctively to it. Humans invented language by linking sights and sounds via spoken and also written language. Accordingly, language is just an organized extension of the world of perception. It’s a new way of perceiving, based on how we connect sights and sounds. It’s a way of coding the world in a way that is potentially even more powerful than the world itself. It’s thanks to language that we have changed the world so much to accommodate us. With language, we can detach ourselves from the perception of the given world and start perceiving an inner world – the amazing world of language itself. This inner world of language perception creates any number of possibilities totally absent from the direct presentation of the given world. Language is humanity’s extension of the perceptual world, allowing us to perceive internally and imagine hypothetical worlds and outcomes. Above all, we can imagine altering the given world, and, uniquely amongst all animals on earth, that’s exactly what we have done. We have shaped the whole world in our own image, to serve our needs, and all thanks to our invention of language. It was possible to invent manmade language only because reality is itself
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a language, the language of mathematics. Everything is made of language. Everything is made of mathematics.
Temple of Disunity Unity said, “We exist on 12 dimensions.” T empleWeofdon’t. We exist in 0 dimensions (the Zeroth Dimension). Isn’t it hilarious the way people just make assertions, without any attempt at all to rationally and justify them? By the way, if you want to understand why existence is all about the Zeroth Dimension, you will need to immerse yourself in the revolutionary subject of ontological mathematics.
GOD eibniz in his published writings said that God created the best of all possible worlds. Having created it, he then absented himself entirely from it. This is pure deism. Leibniz ridiculed Newton’s God. Leibniz wrote, “Natural religion itself, seems to decay [in England] very much. Many will have human souls to be material: others make God himself a corporeal being. … Mr. forLocke, and his followers, are uncertain at least, whether the soul be not material, and naturally perishable. … Sir Isaac Newton says that space is an organ, which God makes use of to perceive things by. But if God stands in need of any organ to perceive things by, it will follow, that they do not depend altogether upon him, nor were produced by him. … Sir Isaac Newton, and his followers, have also a very odd opinion concerning the work of God. According to their doctrine, God Almighty wants to wind up his watch from time to time: otherwise it would cease to move. He had not, it seems, sufficient foresight to make it a perpetual motion. Nay, the machine of God’s making, is so imperfect, according to these gentlemen; that he is obliged to clean it now and then by an extraordinary concourse, and even to mend it, as a clockmaker mends his work; who must consequently be so much the more unskillful a workman, as he is often obliged to mend his work and to set it right. According to my opinion, the same force and vigor remains always in the world, and only passes from one part of matter to another, agreeably to the Laws of Nature, and the beautiful pre-established order.” Carolyn Merchant wrote, “Did God continually repair his machine or oil his clock to prevent it from breaking down? Was that clock like a real-world pendulum clock that slowed down owing to the friction of its point of contact or was it an ideal pendulum ticking away forever in an ideal, frictionless world? One’s answer to these fundamental questions depended on one’s vision of God and nature. ... [According to the Newtonians] God Almighty is both the creator and sustainer of all motions and maintains them throughout time.” The Newtonian view was ultimate theism: God not only makes the world,
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but continuously makes it. He is involved with it at all times and is indispensable to its operations. He doesn’t design it (perfectly) and then step back (as in Leibnizian deism), but designs it and then operates it and is personally essential to its continued functions. Newtonian gravity for example – involving instantaneous effects across empty space between objects, such as planets and suns, that have no contact with each other – is mediated by God, hence God is holding the universe together via his own intervention. He also prevents friction bringing everything to a halt. Leibniz placed Newtonian gravity in the realm of the occult. He said, “If the [Newtonians] mean that the thing [gravity] is performed without any mechanism by a simple primitive quality, or by a law of God, who produces that effect without using any intelligible means, it is an unreasonable occult quality.” For Leibniz, if Newton was unable to give an explanation for the cause of gravity, he had to be treating it as an occult quality. Newton – because he knew he could never justify his system except by relying on occult action at a distance – shrewdly removed himself from the debate. He said, “I have not been able to discover the cause of those properties of gravity form phenomena, and I feign no hypotheses; for whatever is not deduced from the phenomena is to be called a hypothesis; and hypotheses, whether metaphysical or physical, whether of occult qualities or mechanical, have no place in experimental philosophy. In this philosophy particular propositions are inferred from the phenomena, and afterwards rendered general by induction.” Scientists have pursued this strategy ever since: never engage with philosophers (especially not philosophical, mathematical and logical geniuses like Leibniz!) in relation to the coherence and validity of what you are saying. Just match observations to mathematics, and then avoid making any attempt to actually explain what is going on. Most importantly of all, never explain what mathematics is and why it plays the decisive role in science. In effect, Newton’s occult operations were built into the particular mathematics he was using. To “not feign hypotheses” amounts to attempting no explanation of why mathematics is present in science, why it is so successful and indispensable, and why it is able to produce all the correct answers. Mathematics is the biggest problem science has to address and it doesn’t even realize it. If science cannot explain mathematics, it cannot explain
anything else because mathematics is what gives science all of its power. Remove mathematics, and you remove all the worth, use and value of science. Science is mathematics that doesn’t know it is mathematics. That is its essential problem. Ontological mathematics is the cure. It wholly replaces science. It confers reality on mathematics rather than on undefined “matter.” That’s the ultimate paradigm shift right there. By the way, the “ideal pendulum ticking away forever in an ideal, frictionless world” is what you would get in the zero-entropy Singularity where there is no matter, no space, no time, no gravity, no temperature, no friction, and no entropy, hence nothing to interfere with the ideal mathematical operations of the PSR. But the “pendulum” is not a pendulum: it’s basis sinusoidal waves. Science utterly denies, as a matter of religious faith in empiricism and materialism, the existence of any ideal domain.
HEGEL AND LANGUAGE egel wrote, “…we see language as the real existence of Mind/Spirit. Language is self-consciousness existing for others, self-consciousness which as such is immediately present, and as this self-consciousness is universal. It is the self that separates itself from itself, which as pure ‘I’ = ‘I’ becomes objective to itself, which in this objectivity equally preserves itself as this self, just as it coalesces directly with other selves and is their selfconsciousness. It perceives itself just as it is perceived by others, and the perceiving is just existence which has become a self.” Hegel saw language as the precise means for minds to enter into a direct communion of consciousness. He said of language that it was “an outer reality that is also immediately self-conscious existence. Just as the individual self-consciousness is immediately present in language, so it is also immediately present as a universal infection; the complete separation into individual selves is at the same time the fluidity and the universally communicated unity of the many selves; language is the soul existing as soul.” For Hegel, philosophy was the highest form of Spirit (the highest mode of the Absolute Spirit knowing itself). Philosophy is of course preeminently conducted via language. The Encyclopedia Britannica says, “Spirit, including the Infinite Spirit, knows itself as spirit only by contrast with nature. Hegel’s system is monistic in having a single theme: what makes the universe intelligible is to see it as the eternal cyclical process whereby Absolute Spirit comes to knowledge of itself as spirit (1) through its own thinking [the science of logic; the science of science; thinking of thinking], (2) through nature [the science of nature; the science of matter], and (3) through finite spirits and their self-expression in history and their self-discovery – in art, in religion, and in philosophy – as one with Absolute Spirit itself [the science of the humanities].” Hegel insisted that self-consciousness exists in language, as opposed to being present in individual bodies, i.e., consciousness is social and cultural, not biological. Consciousness, mediated by language, is the means by which
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we come to understand Nature, including our own Nature. As above, so below. For Hegel, the Absolute is known, by humans, via the Word. It is known by itself through logic. It also knows itself via its creation: material nature. Hegel wrote: “Only what is completely determined is at once exoteric, comprehensible, and capable of being learned and appropriated by all.” Language is both external (via the outer voice) and internal (via the inner voice). Only language is intelligible. Only language furnishes knowledge. Consider the scientific method. Its defining step is observation, which is done via sensory experiments. This, for science, is where knowledge is located. In fact, it’s the subsequent steps of science – posing questions and formulating hypotheses – where knowledge begins to be formed. The subsequent steps are where language is applied to Nature, and, above all, the language of mathematics. Without mathematics (a language), science – a subject that denies the reality of language – would be entirely useless, exactly as it was before it embraced mathematics. Science is absolutely dependent on language, despite its dismissal of the ontology of language. Language is science’s nemesis. Language, not matter, is reality. Reality is mental, not physical. Only minds deal in language. As soon as you know that reality is made of language, you know that idealism is true and materialism is false, that rationalism is true and empiricism false. Science is fighting a bizarre war against language, and especially the language of mathematics, in which all of science’s laws are framed (!).
THE ABSOLUTE IN ONTOLOGICAL MATHEMATICS n Ontological Mathematics, reality in itself is the “Source” or the “Absolute”, existing at exactly zero entropy and a temperature of absolute zero. It is a friction-free, perfectly superconductive environment that can never degrade or run down. It is the perfect system of perpetual motion, entirely under the control of the Principle of Sufficient Reason in its most pristine form, meaning that it is 100% explicable via pure mathematics, and requires no scientific input whatsoever. This is the ontological equivalent of Hegel’s Absolute, considered from the point of view of Hegel’s Logic. Wikipedia says, “Science of Logic … is the work in which Hegel outlined his vision of logic. Hegel’s logic is a system of dialectics, i.e., a dialectical metaphysics: it is a development of the principle that thought and being constitute a single and active unity. Science of Logic also incorporates the traditional Aristotelian syllogism: It is conceived as a phase of the ‘original unity of thought and being’ rather than as a detached, formal instrument of inference. “For Hegel, the most important achievement of German idealism, starting with Immanuel Kant and culminating in his own philosophy, was the argument that reality (being) is shaped through and through by thought and is, in a strong sense, identical to thought. Thus ultimately the structures of thought and being, subject and object, are identical. Since for Hegel the underlying structure of all of reality is ultimately rational, logic is not merely about reasoning or argument but rather is also the rational, structural core of all of reality and every dimension of it. Thus Hegel’s Science of Logic includes among other things analyses of being, nothingness, becoming, existence, reality, essence, reflection, concept, and method. As developed, it included the fullest description of his dialectic.” To understand ontological mathematics, it is imperative to understand
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that thought and being are the same, and they are none other than pure mathematical sinusoids, furnishing the eternal and necessary mathematical alphabet of reality. These are the basis thoughts of existence. They constitute pure Being. So, thought, being, and mathematics all constitute a single unity. Thought is ontology, and thought is mathematics. Sinusoids are thought and Being, from which all things are made, in particular everything to do with Becoming, the material aspect of which is studied by science. The decisive step is to equate sinusoids with basis thoughts and to define these as the foundational entities of existence (organized in terms of individual monadic minds). Thus, thought = being = mathematics. With this equation, and only this equation, the whole of reality can be understood. No other system can bring thought and being together and render them entirely rational and logical, via mathematics. Hegel linked thought, being and dialectical logic, but that’s no good for doing science. When mathematics is used instead of dialectical logic, a subject is furnished that can serve as the true basis of science, hence science can be fully brought into the system (unlike in Hegel’s system). Hegel understood that the structures of thought and being, subject and object, are identical. He pondered this issue in terms of dialectical logic (ontological logic, so to speak). Idealism requires thought and being to be the same. Materialism requires thought and being to be different. According to materialism, being is material and thought is something somehow derived from matter and its organization, although science has never explained how (and never will since this is a logical impossibility). Mathematics fits idealism perfectly, and is also perfect for explaining how mind produces matter. Ontological Fourier mathematics concerns how frequency functions (mental functions) produce spacetime functions (material functions), and allows their constant interaction. Fourier made one of the greatest discoveries of all time. He would have been arguably the greatest genius of them all if he had grasped that the sinusoids used in Fourier mathematics are the building blocks of existence – basis thoughts, no less – and that everything is made from them. All “wavefunctions” are in fact thoughtfunctions … creations of mind. Mind creates matter, matter doesn’t create mind, and therefore scientific materialism is foundationally false.
Scientific materialism is a means for modeling the material world of spacetime. Reality is actually about the immaterial mind, outside space and time, hence is external to the entire scientific materialist paradigm and can never be accessed by science. The Truth exists beyond science. The Truth resides in mathematics, the true foundation of science. The Ontological Mathematical Absolute (the zero-entropy Singularity) creates the entropic universe (the material universe of space and time). This is where science becomes relevant. Science may be loosely defined as the mathematics of entropy, temperature, matter, gravity, space and time. This is enormously more complex than the mathematics of immaterial, zero-entropy frequency, with no temperature, and outside space and time. The frequency Singularity is where the pristine, simple PSR applies. The spacetime universe is where the “complex” PSR applies, i.e., we depart from the “easy” rational and logical considerations of the eternal and necessary, to the much more complicated rational and logical considerations of the temporal and contingent. The analytic a priori becomes entangled with the synthetic a posteriori; mathematics becomes entangled with science (i.e., applied mathematics; temporal and spatial mathematics). We can work out what the mental Absolute is in itself via pure reason and logic, and also by means of what it creates (the material universe), i.e., through its works we shall know it. If we apply reason and logic to the material universe, we soon enough understand that science cannot explain the material universe because science, as it is defined by scientists, is missing all rational and logical foundations (science is based on empiricism, not rationalism; on the temporal and contingent human senses, not on eternal and necessary reason and logic). The truly intelligent people soon enough realize that the whole of science is determined by the state that precedes, causes and explains the creation of the scientific (Big Bang) universe, i.e., by the state that contains the sufficient reason for the material universe. This state is the zero-entropy Singularity of Mind – the Absolute, aka pure mathematical Being, prior to producing mathematical Becoming. Science, an irrationalist subject contrary to logic, literally says that existence jumps out of non-existence, for no reason, via no mechanism, to no purpose. All of these are category errors, contradictions in terms, and logical impossibilities. Yet science has nowhere else to go. The cause of science,
since it must exist outside space, time, matter, gravity, entropy and temperature (for otherwise it would be rendered scientific, which involves all of these), cannot belong to the scientific paradigm. But it’s not thereby anything mysterious, magical, or mystical. It’s the exact opposite: pure reason and logic, i.e., pure mathematics, the most rational and logical explanation you can conceivably get. Mathematics is the ground and cause of science, but science irrationally refuses to accept this. Science believes that mathematics is an unreal, manmade abstraction, a mere tool available to science, which, for totally unknown reasons (which scientists never address under any circumstances) happens to be perfect for making sense of the universe. Any rational and logical person would grasp instantly that mathematics is perfect for the job because existence is mathematical. But scientists, being empiricists and materialists, are not able to reach rational and ideal conclusions. These are excluded from their paradigm, from their religious faith in matter. Scientists aren’t real atheists. They believe in the strangest God of all – magical matter that is not alive, has no mind and no purposes, and can miraculously summon itself into existence out of nothing at all, for no reason. This is literally the worst God of all, the worst religious “explanation” ever provided – and all because scientists dogmatically and ideologically refuse to accept the ontology of mathematics, and the incontestable fact that mathematics underlies everything, including space, time, matter, gravity, entropy and temperature. A real atheist would be a total nihilist who doesn’t even believe in matter, or someone who endorses Chaos alone. Can the humanities ever arrive at the truth? Hegel believed that the Absolute could also be apprehended by art, religion and philosophy, with art furnishing the least adequate understanding and philosophy the peak understanding. These last considerations didn’t constitute Hegel’s finest hour. Philosophy could arguably do the job, but art and religion? Come off it. These could never penetrate the Absolute. Art can superficially represent it, but not know it and define it. It can’t get inside it. It can create a sensory and emotional link to it, and there it stops. Religion, including spirituality, can’t do it either. It provides an emotional and mystical link to it, but can go no further. It’s all “picture thinking”, but reality in itself is nothing to do with pictures. It cannot be
pictured, it cannot be represented. It is pure noumenon. Art, religion and spirituality, by contrast, are all about phenomena. Most people “understand” reality via religion (including spirituality) and have thereby actually arrived at anti-understanding – at a set of totally false and practically deranged beliefs and opinions, with no bearing on reality whatsoever. Art, by its very nature, is aesthetic and provides no conceptual understanding of anything at all. Philosophy, when detached from science and mathematics, reason and logic, is just pointless human speculation. Today’s academic philosophy is almost wholly useless and should actually be killed off. Overall, then, we can understand the true nature of existence via three paths: 1)
The mathematical approach: Understanding the Absolute via pure mathematics; understanding reality in itself, via exactly what it is made of.
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The scientific approach: Understanding the Absolute via science; understanding reality by what it creates rather than what it is; working one’s back to what it is via what it has produced (meaning that scientists must, finally, accept that mathematics grounds science).
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The Hegelian humanities approach: Understanding the Absolute via art, religion, spirituality and philosophy. This is the route almost all of humanity has chosen, and it is in fact totally wrong. This constitutes the via negativa (“negative way” or “by way of denial”) route to the Truth. Any honest person who delves into art, religion, spirituality and philosophy will soon enough realize that these are all telling us what the Truth isn’t! They are all about manmade fallacies and delusions. When these are cleared out of the way, we can then understand what reality is: mathematics (not art; not religion; not spirituality; not philosophy; and not science).
So, the Absolute can be perfectly understood but only by the very thing of which the Absolute is made: mathematics. Anything else leads to falsehood and no understanding of reality, and no relationship with the Truth. Hegel’s philosophy in and of itself is not true (or, we should properly say it is inconsistent and incomplete), but, along with Leibniz’s Monadology, it is as close to the Truth as you can get without the formal use of mathematics.
The Truth is the Monadology of Leibniz and the dialectical, ontological logic of Hegel mathematicised, via Euler’s Formula and ontological Fourier mathematics, all framed by the PSR and Occam’s Razor. The PSR is the rational basis of all explanation, and Occam’s Razor demands that this rational explanation be the simplest possible.
CREATING “CONSCIOUSNESS” who play tennis over and over again get better and better at tennis. P eople People who do math over and over again get better and better at math. Anything you do over and over again, you will get better and better at. This is the basis of the “10,000 hours” claim. This is the number of hours of practice supposedly required to make someone an expert or master performer in a given field. All of that practice constitutes the training of your unconscious (production mind) to better and better produce the results you want. You internalize the activity and it becomes second nature to you. Your consciousness, not your unconscious, is what decides if the production mind is getting it right. Eventually, your consciousness can leave the unconscious alone and it will deliver near-perfect results – just look at a five-sets tennis final between Federer and Nadal, for example. There is something close to 100% of us do over and over again: we think in language! We are therefore all experts at thinking in language, although, of course, some people are more expert than others. A human baby has no language. It doesn’t “think” in the same way it will think when it becomes an adult. It’s not conscious. It has to be trained in the use of language, to internalize the use of language, to make it something the unconscious (the production mind) can do effortlessly. By the time we reach adulthood, nearly all of us have an inner voice – a voice produced by the unconscious (the production mind) – which is constantly saying things to us (to our consciousness). You can’t shut it up. It has become an expert in saying things. Most people mistake this inner voice for their consciousness. It’s not. It’s your unconscious talking. You have trained it to talk over many years of intense practice, repetition and habituation. Your consciousness is actually what is listening to the voice and deciding if it likes what it is hearing, or not, as the case may be. Just as a budding tennis player knows what constitutes a good shot and what constitutes a bad shot and trains the unconscious to do
much more of the former and much less of the latter, the conscious mind knows what it likes and what it doesn’t, and it encourages the unconscious to do more of the former and less of the latter. What this means is that, over time, you produce a narrow range of thinking, and your unconscious knows how to exclude everything else. This narrow range is what constitutes your personality type. This is actually profoundly disturbing because it means that an INTJ personality type, for example, has trained their unconscious to think in one way, and the ESFP personality type, the opposite type, has trained their unconscious to think in the opposite way. An INTJ would be utterly appalled by what goes on in an ESFP’s mind, and vice versa. The different types have trained their unconscious to do completely different things. These aren’t two tennis players competing in the same game over the same net. These people are playing entirely different games and are actually incomprehensible to each other. They are effectively in different worlds. At birth, both types were very similar: blank canvases. However, by the time they reached adulthood, they barely belonged to the same species. They had trained themselves, via culture, via language, via personal taste, to inhabit different worlds. They had overridden biology. They had created a new reality, liberated from the given world. Why is there so much trouble in the world? It’s because people have trained their unconscious minds in such different ways that they now constitute different, rival species, with radically conflicting interests and goals. They are the same biological species, but no longer belong to the same mental species. They have turned into rival species, engaged in an incredibly disturbing struggle that frequently ends in misunderstanding, hatred, discrimination, violence and war – all because of the way they respectively trained their unconscious mind. Liberal progressives have trained their unconscious in a totally different way from conservative regressives. The result? – the Woke versus the Trumpists, and practically a civil war in the USA. Language allows us to override biology. It allows us to create new species based on personality type. Each of us creates an expert in a particular personality type. We are all experts at being examples of our personality type. Each personality type has its own strengths and weaknesses, capable of developing expertise in drastically different areas. If you are an ESFP, you are never going to be an
expert mathematician, philosopher or scientist. Maybe you will be highly religious, or a social worker, or a physical therapist, or some such. You, or whatever system raised you (parents, society, school, church) has precluded you from being a mathematician, philosopher or scientist. Your unconscious has not been trained to do these things. It has been trained to do other things. And now your fate is decided. By the time each of us is an adult, countless doors have slammed in our faces, and only a few are left open to us. Make the most of them! We could have a completely different humanity if we trained everyone from their earliest years to favor, for example, reason and logic, clear and critical thinking, in preference to faith and feelings, mysticism and superstition. We get the humanity we have because of the way the prevailing culture encourages some things (like having faith) and discourages other things (like using reason and logic). The unconscious of most people is trained to reflect the culture in which they are raised. Everyone raised in an Islamic nation, for example, has an unconscious heavily trained in the Islamic worldview. The same considerations apply to Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism, Buddhism, New Ageism, Atheism, and so on. A culture with stupid values and beliefs will produce stupid people. Their unconscious is trained to be stupid. If you want smart people, you need a culture that values intelligence. No such culture exists on earth. Plato furnished the blueprint for such a society, but he was completely ignored. We can entirely change humanity’s fate via culture, via proper education, via teaching every child how to think productively and not accept and glorify nonsense (such as religious faith). Humanity is not dependent on biology, on genetics. We could change the whole of humanity in one generation, simply by changing the culture, by transforming the education system. Unfortunately, that is as difficult as changing human biology given that so many people are so deeply brainwashed right to the very core of their unconscious – by religion, politics, materialism, consumerism, or whatever – that they will violently resist any attempt to change what their unconscious mind has been indoctrinated to believe is good, valuable, positive and worthwhile. To most of the world, Donald Trump was the worst American president ever – a person totally contrary to everything they believed a president should be – but to his fanatical supporters, he was the best American president ever.
Everyone that voted for Trump was either an evangelical Christian or someone raised in a strict Christian household (meaning that even if some of these people believed they had moved on from Christianity, they were in fact continuing to carry around a Christian worldview, ingrained in their unconscious). Trump, mostly unconsciously, but even consciously to some degree, stood as a president for Christian America, with the opposition being portrayed as godless communists, Marxists, socialists or atheists, or even as outright Satanists. In other words, Trump was no kind of politician, but a religious fanatic stoking the fires of religious extremism. Thanks to Trump, Christianity has been exposed as just as bad as Islam, with Trump’s supporters being psychologically no different from the Taliban or the followers of the Islamic State. When they stormed the Capitol, they showed that they were just as prone to terrorism. Most people’s “expertise” – what they have trained their unconscious mind to do – is none-too-inspiring. Most people are experts at distracting themselves, entertaining themselves, having “fun”, partying, socializing. They are “bread and circuses” people. Their primary goal in life is to be entertained and distracted. If they need some kind of deeper “meaning” in their life, they turn to their feelings, faith or mystical intuition. But these never seriously get in the way of their relentless pursuit of enjoyment. Hard work is not for them. Hard work isn’t their thing. It’s too much like, er, hard work! People want an easy life. They want to follow the path of least resistance. They want to find easy distractions and enjoyment, and, surprise, surprise, that’s exactly what the consumer capitalist societies we live in are designed to deliver. They are definitely not designed to create intelligent, creative, resourceful, hard-working populations. God forbid! The truth is that some personality types are vastly superior to others, but these personality types (such as INTJ, the “mastermind”) tend to be very rare in the general population. The most useless personality types – those most susceptible to religious faith, mysticism and superstition, and consumer capitalist hedonism – are overwhelmingly dominant, and shape society and culture. If we wish to have a Higher Humanity, we literally have to totally alter society, culture and education in order to create far more of the productive personality types and far fewer or the waste-of-space personality types (those, sadly, of most people in the world – the legions of the mediocre, the failures,
the weak, those whose primary interesting is doing nothing of note with their time … the bread and circuses gang). It’s an astoundingly difficult challenge since the waste-of-space types – via the Dunning-Kruger effect and such like – think they are the best types and have zero desire to change. They believe they define the best of humanity. They in fact define the worst. Humanity has it within its power to be absolutely glorious – we could make a divine humanity – but we never will if we remain prisoners of the disastrous dominant cultures that revolve around religious faith, “spirituality” (mysticism), empiricism, sensing, capitalist consumerism, hedonism, materialism, and the worship of wealth and celebrity. Our fate is within our own hands. It’s not biology we need to overcome, but cultural brainwashing. We are much more affected by cultural evolution than biological evolution. The latter effectively ended many thousands of years ago and has been wholly replaced by cultural evolution. Nietzsche’s rallying cry of “Revalue all values” equates to completely changing the culture and thus the default values and beliefs trained into the unconscious mind, which affect every aspect of its operations. “God is dead,” Nietzsche said. We need to kill the prevailing culture, which is humanity’s true God, and has corrupted every part of the human psyche. But one fact that never changes is that all it takes is one generation, brought up in a culture of excellence, to change everything.
EXPERIENCE VERSUS KNOWLEDGE like Kant, rejected the extremist empiricist view that knowledge is H egel, limited to immediate experience. In fact, knowledge is conceptual, not perceptual. Experience gives you experience. Knowledge gives you knowledge. Perception is the basis of experience. Conception is the basis of knowledge. Biology is concerned with the senses and the given world. Culture is concerned with language, concepts and knowledge. Animals have constant immediate experiences. They have no knowledge. They don’t know anything. They look at the moon and have no idea what it is or where it is. Animals respond instinctually to events. They have no knowledge of what they are doing. They don’t need any. Animals are the definitive proof that sensory experience has nothing whatsoever to do with knowledge, and hence that empiricism (the guiding ideology of science) is totally wrong. We must look elsewhere for knowledge. An A.I. can execute very complex tasks (programmed into it, of course). It has no knowledge of what it is doing, but it can do these tasks nevertheless. IBM’s supercomputer Deep Blue beat chess world champion Garry Kasparov at chess, but it had no clue what chess was and no knowledge that it was even playing chess. It was simply executing commands programmed into it, like the production mind executing suggestions given to it. It doesn’t know what it’s doing and it doesn’t care. The part of us that knows and cares is consciousness. If you do not have a consciousness then you do not know and you do not care. No animal knows and no animal cares. That’s why humans rule the world and animals don’t. Animals are like New Age and Eastern meditators practicing mindfulness. They exist non-judgmentally in the moment, in a state of pure experience. They have no time awareness and no knowledge. Knowledge is exactly what the mindful meditators seek to abolish. They have no interest in it. They don’t care. They just want immediate experience, unmediated by consciousness. Hegel argued that knowledge cannot be immediate but can only be
mediate. That’s exactly right. There is no such thing as particular knowledge, private knowledge. All real knowledge is universal and it needs to be communicated via language, which concerns universals. When you say “tree”, you are referring to a universal tree, not a particular tree. To refer to a particular tree, you take the universal tree and then particularize it via extra description or location. The universal always comes first. Consider science. Science makes particular observations but these are useless until universalized via a mathematical formula. It’s not the observations that are knowledge, it’s the formula that organizes them, that finds the underlying pattern, and which can be used to predict future patterns. Animals make endless observations, but none of these is knowledge. Knowledge is what you get when you universalize particulars, when you find the root that produces each particular pattern. Scientists don’t even know what knowledge is. Only language – that which is conceptual and universal – concerns knowledge. Perceptions are not, and never will be, knowledge. Human languages give us human knowledge, but not real knowledge. To get real knowledge – knowledge of reality – we need to access reality’s own language. That language is ontological mathematics. If you pick the wrong language, you get the wrong knowledge. There is only one right language, one right answer and one right knowledge. Animals are amoral: they don’t know the difference between good and evil. Animals are agnostic: they don’t know what knowledge is. They don’t need knowledge. They just need instinct in order to know how to react to observables, to events. Knowledge is irrelevant to them. Now look at humanity. Knowledge is irrelevant to most people. They are much more interested in fun, in entertainment, in reacting instinctually to the world. If you asked a person to write a ten-page manifesto concerning their understanding of reality, most would be unable to do it. The few that could would simply recycle, badly, the half-baked fragments of religion, science, and New Age “wisdom” they have picked up over the years. Knowledge isn’t for them. They are not interested in it. They don’t care. If people cared, they would all be mathematicians, philosophers, and scientists. They’re not. They detest these subjects. Most humans are amoral and agnostic. They are just glorified animals. Their priorities are the same as those of animals.
So, knowledge of reality is all about universals. Therefore, to fully understand reality, all you need to do is identify the most universal language possible. That is ontological mathematics, the language of nothing but sinusoidal waves. That’s all you require to explain everything. The letters of the English alphabet are all you need to write everything that appears in the English language. English is a manmade language. It has nothing to do with reality. The “letters” of reality’s language are all you need to “write” everything that appears in reality. Ontological mathematics is reality’s language. It is the language of perfect mathematical waves. Everything is made of them. Sinusoidal waves are everything to do with reality. They are reality. Understanding reality turns out to be the simplest task of all. All you have to do is identify the simplest, most rational, most logical, most stable, most universal language. That’s it. That’s the whole shooting match. The answer is ontological mathematics. There is no other answer. Ontological mathematics is the absolute, incontestable truth of reality. We do not arrive at it via perception, observation, empiricism, experiments, science, religion, philosophy, faith, feelings, mystical intuition, meditation, mindfulness, or anything else. All we need to do is use reason, which of course fully embraces logic. If you argue against us, you are irrational and illogical, and you are wrong. Whatever you believe about reality is false. And if, once you have heard about ontological mathematics and thus have come into contact with the Truth, you then go on telling people things opposed to ontological mathematics, you are a dangerous and malicious liar, deliberately deceiving the world. There is only one Absolute, one Absolute Truth – that of ontological mathematics. End of story. It’s not up for debate any more than 1 + 1 = 2 is up for debate. Reality is a monism. You must explain everything using just one thing. It’s not matter, it’s not love, it’s not God, it’s not cosmic consciousness, it’s not randomness. It’s the sinusoidal wave. Absolute knowing is absolute universalism. Absolute unknowing is absolute particularism. Imagine trying to understand reality by going through every particular in the universe one by one. It’s literally impossible. The game is to use your intelligence to work out what ultimate universal must underpin every particular. It’s to see what everything must have in common. And what they must have in common is that they must be made of sinusoids,
the letters of the cosmic code, the basis units of the universal language, from which all things are made.
Language and the Universal regarded language as universal. As such, it cannot name particulars. H egel By “particulars” is meant some private experience that only the experiencer can have. This is a foreshadowing of Wittgenstein’s argument against private language. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy says, “The idea of a private language was made famous in philosophy by Ludwig Wittgenstein, who in §243 of his book Philosophical Investigations explained it thus: ‘The words of this language are to refer to what only the speaker can know – to his immediate private sensations. So another person cannot understand the language.’ This is not intended to cover (easily imaginable) cases of recording one’s experiences in a personal code, for such a code, however obscure in fact, could in principle be deciphered. What Wittgenstein had in mind is a language conceived as necessarily comprehensible only to its single originator because the things which define its vocabulary are necessarily inaccessible to others. Immediately after introducing the idea, Wittgenstein goes on to argue that there cannot be such a language.” To put it another way, there is no such thing as a particular language, a language purely for each individual. All languages are general, collective, social and universal. They are necessarily group constructs. Hegel said, “Now language is the work of thought: and hence all that is expressed in language must be universal.” The basis language of reality, the ur language, is not the work of thought (hence manmade) but, rather, is thought itself. It’s ontological mathematics, comprising eternal and necessary sinusoidal waves (basis thoughts … the foundational thoughts of existence from which everything is objectively made). Carl Mickelsen wrote, “For Hegel, reality is a totalizing circle which presupposes its end as its purpose, and thus has its end for its beginning. Hegel’s language, too, is such a circle in that each concept implicates the rest and may itself be viewed from the standpoint of any of the other concepts or the totality at varying stages of their respective developments. Thus, a single
concept may encompass several meanings and a single meaning may be expressed by several concepts. Moreover, from a dialectical perspective, concepts in isolation from the process of which they are a part are abstractions and are, accordingly, inherently limited and one-sided, i.e., false. The value and accuracy of the definitions presented, then, are circumscribed by these structural considerations.” Ontological mathematics is the supreme system of circular, universal, analytic tautology, meaning that it is complete, consistent, holistic and holographic. Every part of ontological mathematics can be reached from every other part, meaning that the truth is the whole, and the whole is in every part.
Animal Language umanity should be fully embarked on the project to try to train animals – from birth – to have language. Communicating with other species would be humanity’s greatest triumph. If we could make animals speak, or at least communicate with us via some means, we would be as gods, creating others in our own image.
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ORGAN FOR TRUTH “Indeed, we have not any organ at all for knowing or for ‘truth’; we ‘know’ (or believe, or fancy) just as much as may be of use in the interest of the human herd, the species; and even what is here called ‘usefulness’ is ultimately only a belief, a fancy, and perhaps precisely the most fatal stupidity by which we shall one day be ruined.” – Nietzsche course we have an organ for truth – it’s our reason, embracing logic. O fNietzsche, sadly, was an irrationalist. He would never have accepted the ontology of mathematics, which refutes everything of a metaphysical nature that he ever said.
Two, Not One sn’t it extraordinary that people don’t understand that they have two minds? How can you possibly grasp what consciousness is if you don’t even know that you have two minds? According to science, you don’t even have one mind. There is no real, substantive mind in science. There is only matter. Science has to do the impossible: to explain the unconscious, consciousness, free will, subjectivity, qualia, judgment, dreams, religion, and so on, using nothing but lifeless, mindless matter and its organization. Good luck with that! Naturally, science has made zero progress in explaining consciousness. It will never make any progress. Consciousness, and everything to do with the substantive mind, stands outside the paradigm of scientific materialism.
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The Mind Director is the language-mediated, non-instinctual capacity to direct C onsciousness and determine your own actions (to engage in self-direction). What is it you direct? You direct your unconscious mind, your production mind. Consciousness needs the separation of map and territory. We can regard the unconscious as the territory and consciousness as the explorer with a map of the territory. The problem, of course, is that most of the territory is unmapped, hence unknown. Human consciousness is conveyed via manmade language, a language that in relation to reality, is inherently false. Reality’s language is mathematics and only via mathematics can you be aligned with reality. With ontological mathematics, map (syntax) and territory (semantics) become one, part of the same dual-aspect monistic system.
The Power of the incredible power and creativity of your mind resides in your A llproduction mind, the unconscious, the mind that understands syntax. Your conscious mind doesn’t know how to do anything. You could never consciously work out how to do something as simple as raising your arm. You have to give an instruction to your production mind to do it for you. You couldn’t dream of actually making one of the dreams you have each night. Even if you become a lucid dreamer, you are never making the dream. Rather, you are directing it. As ever, you are giving suggestions to your production mind, and it executes them. Your conscious mind is your semantic mind, the mind concerned with meaning and experience. The mind that actually performs everything you do is the syntactic mind. This mind doesn’t feel anything, doesn’t care about anything, and has no meaning. How can a hypnotist stop you from feeling pain? The hypnotist “switches off” your conscious mind – the actual entity that experiences pain – and communicates instead with your unconscious, which doesn’t feel pain at all. All of the remarkable things that the hypnotist can make a hypnotized person do – seemingly defying belief – all flow from the fact that the unconscious
mind is nothing like consciousness. It doesn’t feel anything, it doesn’t worry, it’s not anxious or scared, and it has absolutely immense creative power, which humanity has come nowhere near understanding. When the hypnotist switches off your consciousness, your consciousness doesn’t vanish. It becomes the “hidden observer”. It is still fully aware of what is going on and feeling pain – if pain is being inflicted – but it has no means to express this, because it has become totally passive, as in dreams. It has lost its agency, which has been transferred to the production mind. There is remarkable corollary to this. Before the rise of consciousness, in the time when the production mind of the unconscious was in charge (the age of bicameralism), humans were much stronger, were much more painresistant, and didn’t get tired and bored nearly as easy as conscious humans do. When speculating about how the pyramids were made, for example, imagine how different all the calculations would be if each worker was many times stronger than the conscious person of today. Feats that appear impossible to us weren’t impossible to them.
Animals nimals are amoral. They do what they have to do. Morality cannot exist until the concepts of good and evil – and thus the requirement to choose between them – exist. Morality resides in the choice. Without the choice, there is no morality. Animals are agnostic. They can acquire neither true knowledge nor false knowledge. As soon as you enter the arena of knowledge, you enter the possibility of acquiring true or false knowledge. Humanity has become expert at choosing false knowledge. It privileges faith, feelings, mystical intuitions, and perceptions over reason and logic (the tools of true knowledge). It privileges manmade language over reality’s language. Only with reality’s true language can you acquire true knowledge.
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SENSE-CERTAINTY egel described the most immediate form of experience, the experiential given, as “sense-certainty”, whereby the mind passively receives raw sensory information about the external world and does not add any additional processing to it. It is directly exposed to the external world. Hegel said there was no knowledge in sense-certainty at all. All knowledge, of whatever form, is given only mediately and never immediately. It’s absolutely critical to understand this. You don’t learn anything at all by being “in the moment”, non-judgmentally, immediately and directly present to experience, as the mindful meditators claim. That, in fact, is how to cut yourself off from knowledge, not embrace it. All knowledge is conceptually mediated. What a thing is is not revealed to us by its appearance, contrary to the claims of empiricism. It’s revealed to us by its non-appearance, by its concept, and that is something we arrive at in mediated fashion, via reason and logic. No scientist can understand this. As empiricists, they believe that everything is about immediate appearance, about that which can be observed. In fact, that’s exactly what it’s not about. It’s truly about the thing in itself, stripped of all appearance, rendered totally unobservable, leaving only the pure concept behind. This is what we analyze with reason and logic, and all we find is mathematics. There is nothing else to be discovered. A sinusoid is, in terms of its syntax, pure concept. This is the knowable, intelligible, understandable aspect of reality. This is the explicable aspect of reality. This is the sinusoid as information carrier. But a sinusoid is ontological, so it is also “concrete”, experiential. It is not just the information carrier, but also the information carried. The information carried is the “mystical” aspect of reality, the ineffable component. It’s not intelligible, it’s not understandable, it’s not conceptually knowable … because it’s not concept, it’s percept. Reality is a dual-aspect monism. The information carrier, the syntax of reality, is 100% knowable, and 0% experiential. The information carried, the semantics of reality, is 100% experiential and 0% knowable.
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The experience of the color red is not knowledge of the color red. Knowledge of the color red is provided by the syntax of the carrier wave of redness. Knowledge and experience are totally different things. Knowledge is about syntax (form); experience is about semantics (content). Many animals can experience the color red. Not one has any knowledge of the color red. They have no concept of it. It is simply something they perceive. How would you explain redness to a blind person? You could give them knowledge of it, via the frequency range for redness, but you could not give them the experience of it. Sadly, many people mistake the experience of something for knowledge of that thing. That’s the central fallacy of empiricism, which dominates the academic world. Experience concerns perceiving. Knowledge concerns conceiving. It’s the opposite activity. We all experience life. How many people can define life? How many can show their knowledge of what it is? Living life isn’t the same as knowing what life is. How many people could answer the question: What is the ontology of life? When science says E = mc2, that’s a scientific syntactic statement, but it tells us zero about what energy actually is, what mass is and what light is, and it gives us zero information about how any of these things are actually experienced. There is a total disconnect – which not one scientist who has ever lived has ever tried to address – between what is empirically observed (which science regards as “reality” – the appearance of the thing) and the fact that all scientific “knowledge” is not contained in any observations or experimental data, but in the mathematical formulae, such as E = mc2 (which has no appearance and is purely conceptual), used to account for the experimental data. According to scientists, mathematics is a manmade, unreal abstraction, so they are using something with no appearance and no reality to “explain” things deemed real, which have an appearance. That is of course a category error. You cannot use that which you call unreal to explain that which you call real. Is E = mc2 an eternal and necessary law of nature, or is it temporal and contingent, in which case it could be different tomorrow? Where was E = mc2 prior to the Big Bang? Presuming it to be an immutable law that has always been true, where do immaterial, eternal and necessary laws locate themselves prior to the existence of the reality (the Big Bang universe) to which they apply? Scientists say that only space, time and matter exist, so how can the
laws of space, time and matter exist prior to the creation of space, time and matter? Where do they exist in the absence of space, how do they exist if they are not material, and how can they have a relationship to time if there is no time? These are additional category errors. But these laws have to exist prior to the creation of space, time and matter in order to bring about the creation of space, time and matter. Space, time and matter can’t create themselves out of non-existence, on the hoof, as they’re going along, and then also create laws such as E = mc2 as they’re doing it. Scientists ignore all such issues. They have no interest at all in the coherence of their claims about reality. All they care about is the practical success of whatever formulae they have produced to account for the experimental data. Hegel said, concerning sense-certainty, that we cannot say what we mean or mean what we say. The problem is very straightforward. The experience we are having is a pure, particular experience. How do you describe the particular using the non-particular (the universal)? That’s a category error. Peter Singer wrote, “Hegel starts with the most primitive form of consciousness, which he calls ‘certainty at the level of sense-experience’, or, more briefly, ‘sense-certainty’. He has in mind a form of consciousness which does nothing but grasp what is in front of it at any given moment. [JT: This is actually just sentience, not consciousness.] Sense-certainty simply records the data received by our senses. It is knowledge of the particular thing present to our senses. [JT: It’s not knowledge!] Sense-certainty makes no attempt to order or classify the raw information obtained by the senses. Thus when this form of consciousness has in front of it what we would describe as a ripe tomato, it cannot describe its experience as a tomato, for that would be to classify what it sees. It cannot even describe the experience as one of seeing something round and red, for these terms too presuppose some form of classification. Sense-certainty is aware only of what is now present to it; as Hegel puts it, it is the certainty of the ‘this’, or of the ‘here’ and ‘now’. Sense-certainty seems to have a strong claim to being genuine knowledge, for it is directly aware of the ‘this’, without imposing on it the distorting filters of a conceptual scheme involving space, time, or any other categories. Sense-certainty is simple awareness of the object exactly as it is. Yet, as Hegel shows, the claim that sense-certainty is knowledge does not stand up to further investigation. As soon as sense-certainty attempts to utter
its knowledge, it becomes incoherent. What is the ‘this’? … How then can the knowledge of self-certainty be expressed? Hegel’s point is that it cannot be expressed in language at all, because sense-certainty is knowledge of the pure particular, while language always involves bringing something under some more general or universal label. ‘Tomato’ is a universal term that picks out a whole class of objects, not a single particular object and the same is true of every other term. … Thus sense-certainty, in seeking to express its knowledge of the pure particular, has got sucked into the necessity of the universal term. Hegel believes that he has established the impossibility of knowledge without universal concepts.” If we pursue this line of thinking to its logical conclusion, we can gain no true knowledge whatsoever until we have established what the ultimate universal concepts are, and they plainly cannot be manmade letters or words. They are in fact mathematical sinusoids, and all absolute truths are exclusively conveyed by them. Rationalism, concerning everything that is intelligible, picks out everything on the universal level. Empiricism, concerning everything that is sensible, picks out everything on the particular level. Rationalism and empiricism are doing opposite things. Rationalism gives us understanding. Empiricism does not. It gives us a private, particular experience which in and of itself is incommunicable to others. Only by using a language – a vehicle of the universal – can we communicate our meaning to others, but by definition we have lost the particularity of the experience. Imagine that Person 1 sees a sunset in Australia, and Person 2 sees a sunset in the Arctic. They are both describing a sunset and both understand the concept of sunset, but is there any similarity whatsoever between their actual respective particular experiences? Neither person can in any way communicate to the other what they actually experienced. They haven’t captured the particular in any way and the simple fact is that the particular can never be intelligible and can never be communicated. It will always remain a strictly private experience. No one’s subjective experience is ever available to anyone else. Nietzsche said, “Fundamentally our actions are in an incomparable manner altogether personal, unique and absolutely individual – there is no doubt about it; but as soon as we translate them into consciousness, they do not appear so any longer... This is the proper phenomenalism and perspectivism as I understand it: the nature of animal consciousness involves
the notion that the world of which we can become conscious is only a superficial and symbolic world, a generalized and vulgarized world; that everything which becomes conscious becomes just thereby shallow, meagre, relatively stupid: a generalization, a symbol, a characteristic of the herd; that with the evolving of consciousness there is always combined a great, radical perversion, falsification, superficialization, and generalization.” We use language – the vehicle of the universal – to pretend to each other than we understand each other when in fact our reality is one incommunicable particular experience after another. Hegel totally rejected the empiricists’ view that immediate (sensory) “knowledge” is the “richest” and “truest” kind of knowledge. The exact opposite is the case. Hegel said “This certainty proves itself to be the most abstract and poorest truth.” It’s not knowledge at all! Eastern mystics and New Agers dream of achieving “bare awareness”, which they regard as “pure consciousness”. In fact, it’s pure sense-certainty and it is totally unintelligible. Sense-certainty can tell us only that something exists, but not what it is. Science says that something called matter exists – something detected by the senses – but it has no idea what it actually is. It cannot define it. And this is exactly science’s foundational problem. In order to define anything, to render it intelligible, you need to use a language, conveying universality. Yet universality is exactly what science regards as unreal and abstract. It believes only in the particular. That’s why science is, in the absence of mathematics (which, by its own empiricist paradigm, it has no right to use), utterly unintelligible. “Matter”, as put forward by scientists, is unintelligible. It is the opposite of language. Where language is all about the universal, matter is all about the particular. It conveys the particular and in doing so is regarded as real. Language conveys the universal, so science regards it as unreal. Mathematics – essential to the success of science – is the most universal language of all, and therefore, for science, the most unreal thing you can get. That’s why so many scientists detest ontological mathematics. When mathematics has an ontology, it means that the universal, the eternal and necessary, has an ontology, and that’s the end of science right there. Science is all about temporal and contingent particulars conveyed by “matter”. What’s truly sad is that no scientist on earth would be able to understand
what we are saying here and why it is so critical. Once the ontology of the eternal and necessary order is granted, the scientific paradigm is immediately falsified. Eternal and necessary things exist wholly outside science. Eternal and necessary things are accessible only to reason and logic. They are analytic and a priori. No temporal and contingent experiment can ever detect the eternal and necessary fabric of existence since, by definition, the eternal and necessary order does not exist within the temporal and contingent order. It precedes it and causes it, and always remains outside it. Hegel said of sense-certainty, “All that it says about what it knows is just that it is.” That’s materialism in a nutshell. Materialism is 100% useless without mathematics, which 100% contradicts scientific materialism! For scientists to imagine they are saying anything coherent and true is comical. The very thing upon which their whole system is based – “matter” – is literally the most unreal abstraction of them all. There is no such thing as matter in the sense believed in by science. Pure particularity cannot exist. The only things that can truly exist are eternal and necessary things, and they are inherently immaterial (mental) and have a net result of zero, placing them outside space, time, matter, entropy, friction, gravity and temperature.
The Tao of Nonsense said, “There seems to be something that you are missing. In a computer J Tgame the code and the images, sounds, etc., are quite different. But the code utilizes and manipulates light, sound, etc. It is not it. I mean to say that the code by itself can never become our experience of light, sound, etc. We can discover frequencies, etc. occurring at the same time and in the same place as what we experience as light and sound but it would be a mistake to say one is the other. It would be more correct to say they are two ways of experiencing the same ‘thing’. Perhaps the concept of Tao helps us here: this ‘Tao’ cannot be seen, felt, thought, etc... Yet we intimate this All-One-All as being the ultimate truth of maths, light, sound, emotion, etc. since we are a part of this unity.” You are missing the entire reason why we use the word “ontological”,
i.e., you haven’t even grasped what our basic point is. You literally haven’t reached step one in understanding what we are saying. The computer code analogy is exactly that: an analogy. Self-evidently, the computer code that controls a video game is not also the physical console and screen, and so on. In ontological mathematics, by contrast, the game code not only controls the game but also is the game. The code is all that exists. Everything is made of the code. If we were to extend the original analogy, the game code of a video game would actually be able to generate all the physical aspects of the game (all the hardware as well as software), so they too would be the code. The cosmic game code makes the whole world and all the sensory objects in it. It also constitutes our senses and our sensory response to the objects, and all our thoughts about those objects. It is literally everything. That’s what a monism is all about. You are a New Age mystic irrationalist, as your comments regarding the Tao exemplify. The concept of “Tao” doesn’t help with anything at all. The “Tao” that cannot be “seen, felt, thought, etc.” is simply your very bad way of referring to “non-existence”. We need not detain ourselves with nonexistence for the simplest of reasons: it does not exist. Taoism is totally meaningless. We intimate the “All-One-All” as being the ultimate truth: ontological mathematics, the basis of all: of light, sound, emotion, etc. We are all part of the mathematical unity. Basically, you are someone extremely susceptible to mystical mumbo jumbo, and extremely resistant to reason, logic and mathematics. Instead of reading nonsense about nonsense ideas such as the Tao, you should read our hundreds of our books. Of course, we know you won’t. Hard work, hard study, and hard rational and logical arguments are not to your taste. By their works shall ye know them, and your works are those of emotionalism, mysticism, faith and irrationalism. You literally cannot escape. That’s the kind of person you are, and you incapable of changing yourself. People are faced with a very simple choice when they encounter our work: to be extremely disturbed by it and immediately try to dismiss it, or to be intrigued by it and start researching it. Stupid people make the first choice, and intelligent people the second. JT belongs to the former group. Most people do.
SYNTAX AND SEMANTICS eality is about syntax and semantics. So is the mind. The syntactic mind is the rational mind of form and production. The semantic mind is the empirical mind of content and consumption. Both are essential. The production mind does what the consumption mind cannot: it can mathematically combine sinusoidal waves using the laws of sinusoidal mathematics. Equally, the consumption mind does what the production mind cannot: it experiences what the production mind makes. Consciousness comes in two flavors: passive and active. With passive consciousness, you are aware of what’s going on, but can’t influence it. In terms of bicameralism, it’s common to think of the “god” giving orders to the “man” to carry out (that’s the model Julian Jaynes uses). In fact, the “god” is actually the entity executing the instructions – it’s the production, syntactic agent directing the body – and the hallucinated voice is something that accompanies the physical actions the production mind carries out to inform the consumption mind in language terms what is happening. Think of the Biblical tale of Abraham and Isaac. Let’s reinterpret the story. What actually happened was that Isaac, as a rebellious child, disrespected Abraham. Abraham – a paranoid schizophrenic – was seized by an explosive fury. As he attacked his son, intent on killing him, a voice in his head, to justify his actions, said, “Sacrifice this child to the lord thy God.” As Abraham was about to slay his own son, as he saw the terror in his son’s eyes and realized the horror of what he was about to do, his rage abated and a voice in his head said, “You have proved yourself. The boy has learned his lesson. There is no need to go any further.” There wasn’t any “God” involved in Abraham’s actions. It was all about Abraham and his own mental processes. There was no test of faith, no test of obedience to God. It was the tale of a father going berserk and then calming down before he went too far. The semantic mind has no executive capacity because it is not in control of syntax. The production mind is. What the semantic mind can do though is give an instruction to the production mind to carry out its will. It’s always the
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production mind that actually makes the action happen. Only it has the capacity to do so. The unconscious – the production mind – is the agent of action. It’s the only mind that truly has base agency: direct power to alter the world. Consciousness – the consumption mind – is the agent of experience, of will, of decision. The greater our understanding of, and integration with, the unconscious mind, the better able we are to harness and exploit its godlike powers. As dreams show, the unconscious can create whole worlds; it can simulate people; it can give whole casts of characters actions to perform and things to say. Every dream is a blockbuster Hollywood production where our unconscious mind is the producer, director, all the actors, the screenplay writers, the set and costume designers, the lighting expert, the cinematographer, and every other role required by a movie. Your mind can do the most extraordinary things, but, in your waking hours, you have to will it to do so. It won’t do it accidentally. You need to give it direction. You need to give it suggestions. It always looks to the consumption mind for its lead. Animals are aware. They are sentient. But they are not conscious. Consciousness involves being able to operate non-instinctually. To do that, you need to be able to live separately from the “given” world, the sensory world. Animals spend close to 100% of their lives simply reacting to the given world. Humans spend a vast amount of time thinking about the past and contemplating the future. No animals do that. Animals are almost exclusively in the moment. Humans are mostly absent from the moment. Their thoughts are elsewhere. The given world is the moment-by-moment world. Most humans don’t live there. They live in their mind-space, a separate world from the given world. Many people are tormented by consciousness, by living in the mindspace rather than the given world. They are haunted by their thoughts. Why do so many people want to “live in the moment, without judgment”, i.e., why are they so drawn to meditation and mindfulness? It’s because they don’t want to be conscious. They want to be animals. Animals never judge. They are totally reactive and instinctive. Every human that hates judgment is showing how distressed they are by consciousness. Consciousness is synonymous with judgment and decision-making. That’s why so many
people despise it and want to be free of it.
AI and Consciousness f language is consciousness, why can’t AIs – reflecting the languages coded into them – be conscious? Consciousness needs to operate on top of both sentience and will (will to exist, will to power). AIs have neither sentience nor will hence can never be conscious. All they can ever do is simulate consciousness in narrow fields. An AI skillfully enough contrived could pass the famous Turing test for, say, half an hour (i.e., be mistaken for a human for that period), but it could never pass the Turing test over any long period. The simulation of consciousness is not consciousness.
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Two Minds are Better than One race has never come to terms with the most extraordinary fact: T heeachhuman of us has two minds, not one. Your second mind is your unconscious, and you don’t notice it because, well, it’s unconscious. All of your attention concerns your conscious mind. Most people imagine they have only one mind: their conscious mind. To the extent that they acknowledge the unconscious, they imagine it as totally subordinate to consciousness. They do not regard it as a radically different mind doing radically different things. We encounter the unconscious mind most vividly when we go to sleep and dream. That’s when we cede control to the unconscious and are subjected to its creations … the strange content it serves up every night in dreams. Dreams are notoriously difficult to interpret. But why should that be? If the unconscious mind belongs to us, why doesn’t it make its meaning clear? Why doesn’t it simply tell us, clearly, what is on its mind? What, exactly, is the problem? Why is there such a difference between the conscious and unconscious minds, and why are they so ill-suited to communicating with each other in a way we can consciously understand? What could be more important than carrying out an “archaeology” of dreams? Archaeology concerns the study of ancient things. In human terms,
what is more ancient than the dream? This is the story of dreams. And through dreams we can understand the birth of something even more special: consciousness itself. For simplicity, we are going to consider human beings with only two senses: they can see and they can hear (which also gives them the ability to speak, i.e., to generate hearable sounds). Most people imagine they are seeing the outside world. They imagine vision as a process similar to a camera taking a picture, or a video camera taking moving pictures. The Invisible Gorilla test by Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons shows how wrong this simple assumption is. The researchers wrote, “Imagine you are asked to watch a short video in which six people – three in white shirts and three in black shirts – pass basketballs around. While you watch, you must keep a silent count of the number of passes made by the people in white shirts. At some point, a gorilla strolls into the middle of the action, faces the camera and thumps its chest, and then leaves, spending nine seconds on screen. Would you see the gorilla? “Almost everyone has the intuition that the answer is ‘yes, of course I would.’ How could something so obvious go completely unnoticed? But when we did this experiment at Harvard University several years ago, we found that half of the people who watched the video and counted the passes missed the gorilla. It was as though the gorilla was invisible. “This experiment reveals two things: that we are missing a lot of what goes on around us, and that we have no idea that we are missing so much. … And it got us thinking that many other intuitive beliefs that we have about our own minds might be just as wrong.” So, the image that is constructed in people’s minds of the outside world has no necessary correspondence to what is actually there. We can omit things that are there (e.g., the gorilla) and insert things that are not there (e.g., what we see in the space actually occupied by the gorilla; what we see instead of the gorilla, which turns out to be “fill-in”, based on our expectation of what ought to be there). You are never seeing what is actually there. You are always seeing what you think is there, or what your brain-mind complex interprets is there. The accuracy of this interpretation is impossible to determine. We obviously can only “know” the external world as well as our internal interpretation permits, and we have no means to go outside this internal interpretation to determine its objective correspondence to external reality. We have no idea, and never
can have, of how much subjective internal processing we superimpose over the external signal, even assuming we have perfect vision. What if we don’t have perfect vision? In that case, the signal is being distorted by our eyes even before we start interpreting it, or rather misinterpreting it. In the case of a totally blind person, the visual signal is entirely lost. Once we have constructed an internal representation of what the external world is presenting to us, this representation is then available to our memory. We can remember it, we can store it, we can retrieve it. The more we look at the world, the more we create a repository of internally constructed images. This repository is available to our mind. While we are awake, our eyes are open. We are interpreting the signals coming to us from the external world through our eyes. But when we are asleep, we have closed our eyes and we are no longer taking in any external visual data. You might imagine that sleep would involve necessary darkness, blindness. But, of course, that’s not the case. We see in our dreams. We see so well, in fact, that we can’t distinguish a dreamworld from the real world. While we are in a dream, we accept it as every bit as real as the “normal” world. So, the question is – what are we seeing in dreams, and how can we see at all given that our eyes are closed? Here’s the most bizarre idea. We don’t actually see with our eyes! Our eyes are just signal gatherers. Actual “seeing” is done by our brain-mind complex. Seeing is done internally. You don’t need your eyes to see because your eyes don’t do the seeing. They provide the data which is “seen”. But, in the absence of data supplied by the eyes, the brain-mind complex isn’t left blind. For one thing, it can retrieve images it created earlier and stored in memory and view these much as it did when it first generated them. But it can also do something even more remarkable. It can and does learn from how it constructs images using the data supplied by the eyes. If it can generate similar data internally, and it most certainly can, then it can see internal images that have nothing to do with the external world. All it has to do is reverse engineer the images it has stored in memory, and it can do this easily. Technically, it’s all about ontological Fourier mathematics, which can interconvert spacetime and frequency signals. The mind converts a spacetime signal – the spacetime image experienced by the mind – into a frequency signal to store it with maximum data compression, and then converts it from frequency back into spacetime when it needs to “see” it. By making simple or
indeed complex adjustments to either the spacetime image, or the corresponding frequency function, the mind can make any representation, any image, it likes, which will then be available to be seen. And this is, of course, the entire basis of dreams. When the external world no longer supplies visual images (because we are asleep, with our eyes closed), the internal unconscious mind then takes over and supplies the images instead, using its own resources. Of course, there has to be some entity that sees the images, whether those supplied by the external world or by the internal unconscious. Let’s call this entity the Watcher. It’s the center of awareness. Yet the unconscious mind must be responsive to the awareness mind in order to create dreams in the first place. It clearly serves up content that has some significance and meaning for the awareness mind, even if the significance and meaning is typically obscure. We might use the work of a novelist as an analogy for how the mind works. A writer has to write a novel, and he obviously has to be aware of what he is writing if he wishes to write something significant and meaningful. Once he has written the novel, he can switch to being a reader of the novel. He can switch from producer to consumer. Now imagine the unconscious as the writer, and the “awareness mind” as the reader. The “awareness mind” consumes the content produced by the “writer”, but it has no idea what the novel is about and why it was written. It nevertheless finds the content incredibly compelling, generating extremely high emotion and even terror (in the case of a nightmare). The unconscious mind knows its audience – the awareness mind – and gives it what fascinates it. Animals, like humans, must have a production mind and consumption (awareness) mind. The consumption mind is the subject, the experiencer, the sentient mind. In a human, we would call this mind the conscious mind. So, what’s the difference between the sentient mind of an animal and the conscious mind of a human? Before we get to that, we have to stress how critical it is to grasp that the mind is inherently two things: a producer of content, and a consumer of that content. The mind is creative. It’s not some passive entity, like a camera, simply recording the external world. A key problem is that the production mind and the consumption mind don’t have a healthy relationship since the consumption mind doesn’t know why the production mind produced what it did. The production mind’s
motivations are not known to the consumption mind. The consumption mind consumes without knowing why the particular material was generated. The consumption mind “consumes” all the data coming into mind. There needs to be a locus, a place, a focus where all the signals are experienced. You can’t have experiences distributed here, there and everywhere … disconnected, separate. You can only have a unitary subject, not a disunitary subject. Imagine that your mind “saw” things over here, “heard” them over there, tasted them somewhere else, smelled them elsewhere, and touched them somewhere else entirely, i.e., imagine you did not feel as if you were one mind, subjectively experiencing all sensory input in one place (the sensorium, the subject, the consumer of all incoming signals). That would be no good. It would be chaos. So, this consumption mind reacts to and collates all the input it receives in a unified fashion. The production mind receives all the original data and processes it, before issuing it to the consumption mind. However, given that it actually produces the material consumed by the consumption mind, it is, of necessity, aware in some sense of all the material received by the consumption mind. Yet the production mind is exactly what the consumption mind isn’t: it’s a distributed, disunitary mind. All incoming sensory data signals are processed in separate places, such as the visual, auditory, gustatory and olfactory cortices of the brain. These signals all then have to be integrated to create a unitary subjective response, i.e., they have to brought together as a unitary feed for the consumer mind. This produces a dilemma. Which mind should have agency: the production mind or the consumption mind? The production mind is the working mind, while the consumption mind gets the “high-level executive summary”, so to speak, hence is in a better position to make decisions. Just think of a corporation. Tens of thousands of workers may be doing all of the corporation’s activities, but the corporation’s strategy and decisionmaking is carried out by the chief executive and the board. They get all the reports from all the different departments, just as the consumption mind gets all the different inputs from the production mind. However, this consumption mind would need to be able to do work in order to function as an executive mind, hence it would need to take on production capacities, or at least be able to direct all the productions of the unconscious mind. We now have a basic model, and basic analogies, for explaining the difference between the unconscious mind and the conscious mind.
To return to the earlier question of the difference between the sentient mind of an animal and the conscious mind of a human, the answer is that the human has acquired language, and the animal hasn’t. Language changes everything. To have language is to have the means to have an explosion of intelligence. Intelligence, in its truest sense, is wholly mediated by language. Animals have animal intelligence, which is overwhelmingly instinctual. It is nothing like human intelligence. It applies only to the very narrow domain of the animal and has no other application. Why can’t the unconscious mind communicate effectively with consciousness? It’s because they do drastically different things. The unconscious is all about syntax. Consciousness is all about semantics. They are the flip-side of each other. They’re not on the same page.
Freudian Slips slips constitute micro-Tourette’s syndrome. The person’s F reudian production mind, when it’s about to say something, also knows what it must not say. But, sometimes, it’s exactly this that slips out. It’s not so much betraying a truth about a person, as betraying the fact that they were aware that they had to be careful about what they were saying. Imagine you were with a person of another race and were suddenly highly aware of making sure you didn’t say anything racist. In a racist culture, it’s very easy to say racist things, whether you mean to or not. Racism is built into racist culture. Your production mind would start generating all the things you mustn’t say, so that you’re aware of them and don’t say them. But the very fact that your mind is now full of these prohibitions means that one of them might slip out in an unguarded moment. Your companion could then imagine that you have revealed yourself as a secret racist, when, in fact, you have been at pains to avoid being in any way racist. Your very anxiety over the issue made you come across as the very thing you were so anxious to avoid. So often, that’s how it goes.
Outer and Inner Vision
vision is about processing signals from the external world. Inner O uter vision is about processing signals from the internal world. The internal signals are generated by the personal unconscious. The external signals are in fact generated by the collective unconscious, by the collection of all unconscious minds, operating together rather than separately. Aphantasia is an astonishing condition. People born with this condition have no “mind’s eye”. They cannot form mental images. A young woman suffered a stroke and went from being normal to having aphantasia. She went from being able to visualize things to not being able to visualize things. Yet her physical vision remained 20/20. What does this tell us? External vision must have a separate brain circuit from internal vision. A blind person – with a defective circuit for processing external visual signals – can dream as normal, i.e., their internal vision is unaffected. They can “see”, but only internally, with content generated by their own mind. An internally blind person (with aphantasia) has a defective circuit for processing internal visual signals. It makes sense for these two circuits (external and internal imaging) to be very closely connected. The internal circuit piggybacks on the main image system (that of external processing). It evolved from it, as an offshoot designed to allow hallucinations. Hallucinations were a decisive evolutionary stage, critical in the development of language, the most powerful force in the universe. (In fact, via ontological mathematics, the very basis of the universe.) So, most people have outer and inner vision. People who have gone blind have lost their outer vision but not their inner vision. People with aphantasia were born with a defective inner vision circuit. Those who acquire aphantasia have suffered damage to their inner vision circuit and lost the capacity to visualize internally. They are “inner blind”. People who are born blind – i.e., with an inherently defective outer vision circuit – end up with an atrophied inner vision circuit. The inner vision fails to be “trained” by the outer vision, meaning that inner vision fails to develop, or it produces its own images, completely unlike outer vision (since the person never experienced outer vision). On the other hand, it might be capable of generating archetypal images of the Collective Unconscious. What is an out-of-body experience? It’s when a sleeping person, who would normally activate their inner vision system, instead manages to activate their outer vision system and see the external world, but from a
perspective outside the body. Their outer vision is activated, but not their internal vision. A near-death-experience is an out-of-body experience triggered by some near-fatal episode. A sleepwalker is someone whose outer vision and inner vision are both activated, but their consciousness is directed at the internal world rather than the external world, hence they seem unconscious relative to the external world, but conscious relative to the internal world. Another extraordinary fact about sleepwalkers is that, in some cases, they don’t have their eyes open, yet can still navigate as if they do, implying that they are utilizing some sort of out-of-body vision. A normal, awake person has their outer vision activated, but not their inner vision, although, if they fall into a daydream, their inner vision is then activated. Also, if they exercise their imagination, that invokes inner vision. Can a mind “see” without any link to a physical brain at all? Yes, it can, but it’s not the kind of vision associated with physicality. Let’s call it “holographic vision”. You can see everything (the “whole”) at once – which obviously isn’t physical vision but something radically different. You can then use the whole to switch to any part-view you like, but again, this is nothing like physical vision and it’s hard to compare brain-based vision (where a mind is linked to a brain) with mind-based vision (where the mind stands alone).
Outer and Inner Hearing the same considerations that apply to vision also apply to hearing. E xactly External hearing involves sound signals coming from the external world while internal hearing involves internally generated sound signals. No one needs eyes for internal seeing, and no one needs ears for internal hearing. A person who becomes deaf (no external hearing) generally has unaffected internal hearing.
CAPITALISM AND THE MIND? apitalism began as production capitalism: making useful, practical things. Similarly, the Big Bang universe was originally under the control of the production (syntactic) mind, operating according to default mathematics. This looked very much like a “scientific” universe made of “matter”. There was no hint of consciousness, of mind. Capitalism came into its own when it morphed from production capitalism – where people bought practical stuff they needed and didn’t replace it until it wore out – to consumption capitalism. This is true capitalism, where people buy stuff they don’t need, and get rid of it fast in order to buy new stuff which they don’t need, thus making the capitalist ownership class rich beyond the imagining. The fundamental task of consumer capitalism is to create psychological needs in you that only buying stuff will satisfy … temporarily. You very quickly need your next fix. Consumer capitalism is economics designed on the model of drug addiction. William Burroughs wrote, “I have seen the exact manner in which the junk virus operates through fifteen years of addiction. The pyramid of junk, one level eating the level below (it is no accident that junk higher-ups are always fat and the addict in the street is always thin) right up to the top or tops since there are many junk pyramids feeding on peoples of the world all built on basic principles of monopoly:
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1) “Never give anything away for nothing. 2)
“Never give more than you have to give (always catch the buyer hungry and always make him wait).
3) “Always take everything back if you possibly can. “The Pusher always gets it back. The addict needs more and more junk to maintain a human form … buy off the Monkey. … “Junk is the ideal product … the ultimate merchandise. No sales talk necessary. The client will crawl through a sewer and beg to buy. … The junk
merchant does not sell his product to the consumer, he sells the consumer to his product. He does not improve and simplify his merchandise. He degrades and simplifies the client. He pays his staff in junk.” Capitalism is simply a different kind of religion. Religion appeals to spiritual addiction (the transcendent), capitalism to physical addiction (the immanent). Capitalism is actually much more powerful, which is why we live in a capitalist world rather than a spiritual world. America is a highly Christian country, yet Christianity is not the real American religion. The American Dream is about becoming obscenely wealthy, not becoming supremely virtuous, holy and spiritual. It’s very telling how the American Dream is the opposite of Christianity, yet no one ever talks about this. No one wants to spell out the hypocrisy and contradiction of the entire American way of life. No one in America wants to be virtuous and poor. No one dreams of that. Ain’t nobody interested in that! Burroughs wrote, “Junk yields a basic formula of ‘evil’ virus: The Algebra of Need. The face of ‘evil’ is always the face of total need. A dope fiend is a man in total need of dope. Beyond a certain frequency need knows absolutely no limit or control. In the words of total need: ‘Wouldn’t you?’ Yes you would. You would lie, cheat, inform on your friends, steal, do anything to satisfy total need. Because you would be in a state of total sickness, total possession, and not in a position to act in any other way. Dope fiends are sick people who cannot act other than they do. A rabid dog cannot choose but bite. Assuming a self-righteous position is nothing to the purpose unless your purpose be to keep the junk virus in operation. And junk is a big industry. … Well, by the ‘algebra of need’ I meant that, given certain known factors in an equation and the equation comprising a situation of absolute need – any form of need – you can predict the results. Leave a sick junkie in the back room of a drugstore and only one result is possible. The same is true of anyone in a state of absolute hunger, absolute fear, etc. The more absolute the need, the more predictable the behavior becomes until it is mathematically certain.” Junk = heroin, but it could just as easily apply to consumer capitalist junk. Put a depressed person in a shop and they will buy. It is mathematically certain. And that’s the exact state consumer capitalism wants everyone in. Spend, spend, spend. Buy all the junk you can find. Where production capitalism was about the production line, i.e., manufacture, consumer capitalism is all about manufacturing psychological
needs. In production capitalism, a woman buys a pair of shoes, then buys a new pair when the old pair runs out. In consumer capitalism, a woman has hundreds of pairs of shoes, of every color and design, a pair for every mood. Most of the shoes never get worn. Once the psychological need is established, once the addiction is created, people will buy for the sake of buying, buy to satisfy the need, the craving. Consumer capitalism is true capitalism, capitalism as a form of tyranny that presents itself as the absolute freedom to buy whatever you want. In terms of the universe, production mind (concerned with default syntax) eventually gives way to consumption mind (concerned with semantics, meaning, experience … consciousness). Consciousness is the highest mode of the consumption mind, the consumption mind as decision maker, judge, free agent. It directs syntax. It directs the production mind. Science cannot deal with anything other than objective production. Subjective consumption forms no part of its paradigm. “Matter” goes hand in hand with production. “Mind” goes hand in hand with consumption. Science is unable to manage the transition. It’s a primitive and crude system of thinking, which is which it rejects philosophy, psychology and ontological mathematics.
OUTER AND INNER SPEECH t’s impossible to consider outer and inner hearing without equally considering outer and inner speech. A person delivers sound (speech) to the outside world. This is external speech. But they can also deliver speech in the inside world. This is internal speech. It seems that almost all people have an “internal monologue” (inner speech). Yet some people do not. We must conclude that these exceptions were born without the inner speech system, or suffered damage to it at some point. There are examples of people who had inner monologue and then lost it, following a stroke or head injury, for example. Consider the personal testimony of Allison Jonergin. She wrote, “Lately the internet has been abuzz about the discovery that some people lack an internal monologue. This means that they don’t hear their thoughts being said aloud inside their heads, as many of us do. A common reaction people have shared is that they’d be lost without the ability to hear their thoughts in audible sentences. … I hit a deer while driving home from work late one night. I thought I’d escaped with only some neck and back pain. But gradually over the next few days and weeks, I began experiencing symptoms of a traumatic brain injury, including a worsening headache, light, noise and motion sensitivity, nausea, dizziness, loss of coordination and confusion. I had blurred vision and ringing in the ears, and had difficulty with memory and concentration. I felt like I was operating in slow motion. I was exhausted, but no amount of sleep brought relief. I’d sleep for 24 straight hours if I didn’t set an alarm. I felt depressed, irritable, anxious and more emotional overall. I was later diagnosed with post-concussion syndrome, wherein the symptoms of a traumatic brain injury persist for months or years. But one of the most distressing symptoms I experienced was the loss of my internal monologue. For over six months, I didn’t hear a word inside my head. I tried as hard as I could to think aloud, but nothing. … My thoughts consisted of feelings, mostly. Suddenly my emotions were alerting me to everything around me, but I didn’t understand their cues. Everything was happening so
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quickly that I felt like I was constantly playing a losing game of catch up. During that time, it was extremely difficult to stay engaged. I’d frequently zone out without meaning to. My brain was so tired. I felt overstimulated and overwhelmed. I had trouble staying on task and remembering what I was doing. The real torment was caused by my inability to keep myself company. The silence was unbearable. I couldn’t force myself to produce thoughts to engage my mind or to distract myself. If I wanted to think, I had to talk to someone. It was the same with reading. I had to speak the words aloud as I read, with great difficulty. It would take several attempts to read a single sentence. Finally, I began to hear random words in my head, but still I had no control. These early thoughts were distracting, sometimes repeating a word like ‘corner,’ over and over again if there was a cobweb in the corner of the ceiling. Slowly, with time and diligent practice, I began to think in phrases, like how a toddler might speak, and eventually came sentences. … While I’m thankful I was able to recreate my own inner voice, those were the darkest (and quietest) days of my life.” Few people seem to have realized that all of our external senses have internal counterparts, and these are the ones that we use during dreaming. This raises an astounding point. Why do we have inner senses at all? We could imagine human beings with external senses only, with no capacity to dream, no inner imagining, no internal monologue. If scientists were creating an A.I. to simulate a human, they would no doubt give it external senses. But would they give it internal senses? Would you give an android the capacity to dream, to have a mind’s eye, to have an internal android monologue? No scientist would regard it as necessary. But nature clearly saw it as necessary since that’s why humans have inner senses. This situation brings to mind the issue of the philosophical zombie. Wikipedia says, “A philosophical zombie or p-zombie is a hypothetical being that is physically identical to and indistinguishable from a normal person but does not have conscious experience, qualia, or sentience. For example, if a philosophical zombie were poked with a sharp object it would not inwardly feel any pain, yet it would outwardly behave exactly as if it did feel pain. “Relatedly, a zombie world is a hypothetical world indistinguishable from our world but in which all beings lack conscious experience.” Why hasn’t materialism delivered exactly such a world, a zombie world? This was exactly how Descartes envisaged the world of animals. They were mere biological automata. Scientists regard humans, which of course includes
themselves, in exactly this same way. They are people who believe themselves machines. That’s a psychiatric problem. Materialism is a form or psychosis, flowing from a person’s over-identification with their senses, making them believe only in the reality of external “things”, and characterizing themselves in the same way. They deny that they have any interiority, any “inside”. There is no one at home. Scientists are people who believe they have passed the Turing test, i.e., passed themselves off as humans despite being machines. Wikipedia says, “The notion of philosophical zombies features in some thought experiments in philosophy of mind and philosophy of perception. Philosophical zombie arguments are used in support of mind-body dualism against forms of physicalism such as materialism, behaviorism and functionalism. These arguments aim to refute the possibility of any physicalist solution to the ‘hard problem of consciousness’ (the problem of accounting for subjective, intrinsic, first-person, what-it’s-like-ness). Proponents of philosophical zombie arguments, such as the philosopher David Chalmers, argue that since a philosophical zombie is by definition physically identical to a conscious person, even its logical possibility would refute physicalism, because it would establish the existence of conscious experience as a further fact.” Consciousness is a further fact, over and above mere sentience. Consciousness does not belong to the individual. It is added to the individual by the group, via the teaching of language, the means for individuals to communicate with each other in complex ways. Language is how humans introduce the world of universals, of concepts, of classification, to the world of particulars, and that’s what makes people conscious. They can consider particulars from an astonishing new viewpoint, that of universals. This is the viewpoint of knowledge. Simple sentience, the world of sense-certainty, is, by contrast, the viewpoint of experience. Bizarrely, many people, including scientists, believe that particulars constitute knowledge. They don’t. Science becomes real science only when it universalizes the particulars via mathematical formulae. Empiricism is not knowledge. It is a precursor of knowledge, and is only made into knowledge when universals are applied to empirical particulars. These particulars are raw material for knowledge. They are not knowledge themselves. Science has never grasped this simple fact. Alchemists collected vast amounts of data, but failed to produce scientific knowledge. The
important part of science is not the collection of data via experiments, but the universalization of this data via mathematics. It’s when rational universalization is applied to empirical particularization that scientific knowledge is produced. Ultimate knowledge dispenses with the empirical particulars and uses reason and logic alone to explore the world of pure mathematical universals. All empiricists are horrified by such a notion, since it has no need whatsoever for the senses and sensory empiricism, the very things that empiricists believe is foundational to knowledge. Science can never reach ultimate knowledge because ultimate knowledge is universal, but scientists base everything on particulars. They haven’t understood that knowledge comes from two sources: the application of universals to particulars, and the application of universals to universals. The latter is the domain of pure reason and logic, pure rationalism. It emphasizes form and syntax as opposed to content and semantics. What is subjectivity? It’s an inner experience of the outer world, and it’s also the exploration of inner perception, inner feeling, inner sensation. If, as scientists claim, mind isn’t real, why does subjectivity exist at all? In a material reality, subjectivity is logically impossible. And totally superfluous. Materialism has no need of subjectivity, hence cannot conceivably explain subjectivity. Subjectivity is external to the materialist paradigm. Subjectivity exists because mind is real. Mind is inherently subjective, whereas matter is inherently objective. “Mind” made of matter would be purely objective since subjectivity simply does not exist in the material world. Subjectivity is not in any way a property of matter. The reason why we have inner senses, subjectivity, dreams, free will, and so on, is because mind needs subjectivity in order to be mind! It’s not enough for the mind to react robotically, like a mere zombie, to externality. It must explore itself internally. This is how it evolves. This is how it generates and develops free will, consciousness, knowledge and intelligence, and there is no evolutionary force more powerful than intelligence. Our modern world is entirely the product of a tiny number of super-intelligent human beings. Most humans contribute nothing to human intellectual evolution. Jungian sensing types are people who are highly attuned to their external senses. Jungian intuitives are those who are highly attuned to their internal senses. The sensing types always take in signals from the external sensory
environment, the “parts” environment of spacetime. The intuitives take in signals from the external mental environment, the holistic environment of the Singularity (the immaterial domain of Source Mind, outside spacetime), and then these signals are often converted into inner vision. Most of the paranormal occurs by this route. Consider remote viewing. Wikipedia says, “Remote viewing (RV) is the practice of seeking impressions about a distant or unseen target, purportedly ‘sensing’ with the mind. … Typically a remote viewer is expected to give information about an object, event, person or location that is hidden from physical view and separated at some distance. ... In early occult and spiritualist literature, remote viewing was known as telesthesia and travelling clairvoyance. Rosemary Guiley described it as ‘seeing remote or hidden objects clairvoyantly with the inner eye, or in alleged out-of-body travel.’” There are two ways to bring about remote viewing: 1) the viewer, with his mind, holographically connects to the target (via the mental Singularity) then converts the signals into “inner vision”; 2) the viewer induces an out-ofbody experience and mentally travels to the target and activates his “outer vision” circuits to see the target. The first route is driven by the mind going into itself, and converting remote data into inner vision. The second route is driven by the mind going outside the body, and then processing the data via its objective outer vision circuits. ✽
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What is the basis of inner speech and inner vision, and indeed all inner senses? It’s hallucination. Science is hopeless at understanding dreams and hallucinations. Since consciousness is born from hallucination, science will never understand consciousness.
False Beliefs hat is a false belief? It’s a belief a person holds about the world that is very different from the reality of the world. At what point in a person’s development do they understand that false beliefs exist? The “Sally Anne test” was devised to investigate this. Pete Etchells wrote, “In the experiment, children were presented with two
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dolls, Sally (who has a basket) and Anne (who has a box). Sally puts a marble in her basket, and leaves the room. While Sally is away, Anne takes the marble from the basket, and hides it in her box. Finally, Sally returns to the room, and the child is asked three questions: 1) Where will Sally look for her marble? (The ‘belief’ question); 2) Where is the marble really? (The ‘reality’ question); 3) Where was the marble at the beginning? (The ‘memory’ question). The critical question is the belief question – if children answer this by pointing to the basket, then they have shown an appreciation that Sally’s understanding of the world doesn’t reflect the actual state of affairs. If they instead point to the box, then they fail the task, arguably because they haven’t taken into account that they possess knowledge that Sally doesn’t have access to. The reality and memory questions essentially serve as control conditions; if either of these are answered incorrectly, then it might suggest that the child didn’t quite understand what was going on.” Children aged around four overwhelmingly point to the basket (the right answer). Children with autism overwhelmingly point to the box (the wrong answer). This means that autistics struggle to understand “theory of mind”, which concerns our capacity to grasp that other people can have different thoughts, beliefs and knowledge from ourselves, and which may be in conflict with reality. An autistic believes, so to speak, in “universal facts”, known to all, as opposed to “particular beliefs”, held by an individual, with no necessary connection to reality. The actual location of the marble is a universal fact (objective reality) while the imagined location of the marble is a particular belief (subjective reality, which is in fact a false reality). It’s impossible to tell lies if you don’t know that false beliefs exist, if you believe that all “facts” are necessarily universal, and none can be particular and false. A lie is a false belief that someone deliberately tries to insert in someone’s else’s mind so that they believe wrong things about the world. Any autistic person who can’t pass the Sally Anne test can’t tell lies. They don’t understand the concept. Equally, an enormous amount of human communication relies on making assumptions about the subjective beliefs of others. A great deal of assumed content (forming the subtext) can be left out of a conversation because it doesn’t need to be spelled out. But all of this subtext is entirely unavailable to anyone who can’t pass the Sally Anne test, hence they have tremendous difficulties communicating with others.
Imagine “theory of mind” as a sense. Each of us externally encounters the physical bodies of other people in the external world. We don’t encounter their mind, except through the actions of their body … except through what they physically say and how they physically behave. Theory of mind gives us the capacity to create an inner sense of the mind that controls each body we encounter. We can run a simulation of what is going on in their minds, and it will usually be highly accurate, especially with those who are nearest and dearest to us. The less someone resembles us, the less we are able to accurately predict what goes on in their mind. Opposite personality types cannot read each other well. They rapidly jump to opposite conclusions. Just as some people lack inner vision and some lack inner monologue, so some people – especially autistics – lack inner mind-reading (theory of mind), hence find it incredibly difficult to read people. Instead, they have to painstakingly build up learned response routines, i.e., they carefully watch how people behave in certain situations and then they copy that behavior when they encounter that situation. The key point is that they do not know why this is the behavior required, only that they should perform this behavior if they want to pass as “normal”. They are simulating normal responses rather than responding normally. They are trying to pass the Turing test. If there are some people – severe autistics – that cannot “sense” another person’s mind, it’s inevitable that there are other people so attuned to “other minds” that they can read them easily, and even create them at will. Consider Dissociative Identity Disorder (Multiple Personality Disorder). A person switches from personality to personality, each with its own identity, thoughts, and voice. Consider schizophrenia. A sufferer sees things that others don’t see, or hears things that no one else hears, or smell things that no one else smells. They are subject to all manner of delusions, often full of paranoia. With Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID), one person dons different personas. Each one is “them”. With schizophrenia, one person imagines completely alien minds interacting with them. None of them is “them”. A severe autistic can’t imagine other minds with their own thoughts, while a severe schizophrenic can imagine countless other minds with their own thoughts. Is there a brain circuit in which autism and schizophrenia are the opposite poles? If you damage it one way, autism is the result. If you damage it in the opposite way, schizophrenia is the result. What’s the opposite of Dissociative Identity Disorder? It’s Associative Identity Order. We create one stable identity rather than a chaotic multiplicity
of fractured identities.
THE BIG PROBLEM reams are mysterious. But why? Why can’t the unconscious simply communicate with our consciousness? In the past, it seemed that the most likely answer was that the unconscious didn’t have access to language. It couldn’t speak to the conscious mind because it didn’t know how to, so it had to communicate via a symbolic language of images, which verbal, languagebased consciousness could not understand. So, in these terms, the problem revolved around two incompatible languages, the visual language of the unconscious and the verbal language of consciousness. However, that all changes if the unconscious is in fact our voice. It knows language perfectly well, so why can’t it simply speak to consciousness? The actual problem preventing easy communication between the unconscious and conscious minds is that the unconscious is a production mind but it has no agenda. It’s not trying to achieve anything. All it does is produce, and it produces on the basis of what is suggested to it. It is totally suggestible, and it craves suggestion. Consciousness is the primary agent for making suggestions to the unconscious. In many ways, the unconscious is the mirror of consciousness. Its productions mirror what consciousness wants it to produce, or what consciousness doesn’t want it to produce (in the case of repression). Consciousness sets the agenda. Do you see how this all works? The unconscious has nothing of its own to say. It’s a production mind. It knows how to make things. What it makes depends on what is suggested to it. It is not seeking to accomplish anything. Yet, underlying all unconscious minds, all production minds, is a mathematical imperative, the ultimate mathematical suggestion: to reach zero entropy. All unconscious minds are, at the deepest level, cooperating with each other to abolish space, time, matter, gravity, temperature and entropy. But that’s a cosmic agenda that takes the lifetime of the universe to complete. It’s irrelevant in terms of the day to day lives of human beings. The unconscious in these terms can be considered to have no agenda at all. It is not trying to communicate any message whatsoever. It wouldn’t know how,
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and it doesn’t care. The thing that cares, that has an agenda, is consciousness. Dreams are not trying to tell us anything. They are simply mirrors of consciousness. They reflect at one level the deep cravings of consciousness, in which case they are about wish fulfillment. At another level, they concern all the content we have repressed and chosen to exclude from consciousness. They are the “return of the repressed” and the “revenge of the repressed”. At this level, it’s very hard to understand many dreams because they concern the subjects we don’t want to think about. On the other hand, many of the subjects we don’t want to think about it are obvious and common to everyone: death, failure, humiliation, pain, distress, anxiety, frustration, disintegration, loss of hope, worries, concerns, burdens, debts, a grim future, abandonment, injury, disappointment, lost love, lost opportunity, bad choices, bad jobs, bad careers, dead ends, closed doors, unfulfilled ambitions, and so on. People imagine being chased. They imagine being prey for predators. They imagine sinister forces oppressing them. They imagine falling apart. The unconscious – the production mind – finds all sorts of ways to communicate these themes. People imagine that a particular dream has a particular message. It doesn’t. All dreams are just reflecting our current moods. If you are anxious, you will have anxiety dreams, and they will be experienced even more anxiously since, given Jung’s compensatory mechanism, they will be delivered in the mode (the opposite of your normal personality) that by itself makes you very anxious. Dreams are massively overinterpreted. Once you realize that the dream mind doesn’t actually ever have its own message to deliver but is only ever reacting to whatever is going on in your conscious life, you will see that you are better off consciously introspecting on what is going on in your life. Your dream mind is simply echoing that. Your consciousness is the key to your life. Your unconscious is the servant of your consciousness. The most fascinating aspect of the unconscious is that it has much greater power than consciousness suspects. The unconscious has all the powers associated with the paranormal, all the powers that allow us to hack spacetime and matter. (The unconscious is much more attuned with the frequency domain.) The game is to use your consciousness to rationally and logically work
out what powers the unconscious must have. The more you understand those powers and capacities, the more you can harness them. Thomson Jay Hudson wrote, “The subjective mind, or man in the hypnotic state, is unqualifiedly and constantly amenable to the power of suggestion. That is to say, the subjective mind accepts, without hesitation or doubt, every statement that is made to it, no matter how absurd or incongruous or contrary to the objective experience of the individual. If a subject is told that he is a dog, he will instantly accept the suggestion, and, to the limit of physical possibility, act the part suggested. If he is told that he is the President of the United States, he will act the part with wonderful fidelity to life. If he is told that he is in the presence of angels, he will be profoundly moved to acts of devotion. If the presence of devils is suggested, his terror will be instant, and painful to behold. He may be thrown into a state of intoxication by being caused to drink a glass of water under the impression that it is brandy; or he may be restored to sobriety by the administration of brandy, under the guise of an antidote to drunkenness. If told that he is in a high fever, his pulse will become rapid, his face flushed, and his temperature increased. In short, he may be made to see, hear, feel, smell, or taste anything, in obedience to suggestion. He may be raised to the highest degree of mental or physical exaltation by the same power, or be plunged by it into the lethargic or cataleptic condition, simulating death. ... The subjective mind takes cognizance of its environment by means independent of the physical senses. It perceives by intuition. It is the seat of the emotions, and the storehouse of memory. It performs its highest functions when the objective senses are in abeyance. In a word, it is that intelligence which makes itself manifest in a hypnotic subject when he is in a state of somnambulism.” We might think of a dual-aspect reality revolving around suggestion. There are things that suggest, and there are things that respond to suggestion, and these things are actually the same ... they belong to a monism. The production mind gives suggestions, via its productions themselves, to the consumption mind, and the consumption mind reciprocates. Overall, it’s the consumption mind that controls suggestion. The production mind makes suggestions in response to prior suggestions by the consumption mind. Think of the unconscious mind. It is always prompting consciousness. All those many streams of thoughts that are in your consciousness at any one time are suggestions to your consciousness as to what to focus on. Your consciousness reflects on all these suggestions, and then chooses one to focus
on for a period of a time. It needs to concentrate hard to maintain that focus because the unconscious doesn’t let up making suggestions – distracting, alternative suggestions (which is why consciousness can so easily find itself leaping to some other topic entirely). It’s always making suggestions to consciousness. It’s the production mind, after all. Producing stuff is what it does. It produces suggestions, i.e., mental content. So, the unconscious makes suggestions to the conscious mind, which then makes a selection. But that selection is itself a suggestion to the unconscious. When the conscious mind selects a topic to focus on, it’s telling the unconscious to serve up more content of that kind. When you’re writing a book, you are continuously suggesting to your unconscious to furnish relevant material, and it does! You can wake up in the middle of the night with a relevant thought. The unconscious never sleeps. The unconscious continuously works on the topic, even when you are doing other things. As soon as it has something, it “taps you on the shoulder” so to speak, and then you pay attention to it and make a note of it. It’s no surprise that some people make incredible breakthroughs in dreams or daydreams. All that’s happening is that the unconscious continues to work the problem even when consciousness has stopped, and it alerts consciousness as soon as it finds anything important. Alternatively, we might say that low level consciousness is always aware of what the unconscious is doing and always monitoring it. This low-level consciousness is below the threshold of what we regard as normal consciousness, but is the actual agent that tells high-level consciousness that the unconscious has made a breakthrough. Think of the situation in terms of brain waves. High-level, active consciousness requires high-frequency brain waves (beta waves). As brain waves drop down to lower frequencies, such as alpha waves and theta waves, consciousness continues to be aware, but loses agency and control and becomes increasingly passive. A hypnotist cannot hypnotize anyone who remains in beta-wave mode. The subject has to allow himself to drop down to alpha or theta to be hypnotized, i.e., the subject has to surrender agency and control to the hypnotist. In very deep sleep, consciousness becomes so passive and of such low, degraded quality that even awareness has become too low to actually register. It might be contended that spacetime consciousness effectively vanishes
when brain-wave activity involves very low frequencies. It may be the case that this corresponds to the mind itself, outside space and time, reaching highly active levels of consciousness. This is one of the great problems that needs to be resolved. There may be a direct tradeoff between spacetime consciousness and non-spacetime consciousness. People who have a short nap of about twenty minutes go into non-rapid eye movement (NREM) sleep, also known as “quiet sleep”. Nappers normally don’t reach the dreaming state. In effect, they functionally lose awareness. They have no means to account for where the time went during their nap. They have no memory of it, no awareness of it, yet they can wake up easily from a nap, as if they are not too disconnected from their surroundings. What is the relationship between awareness and memory? Image that you are fully aware in the moment, but then, later, have no memory of that moment. So, were you aware or not? It’s impossible to tell because you have no memory of having been aware, even if you were. Awareness with memory is radically different from awareness without memory. Awareness with memory can be reflected upon. It continues to impact the present awareness. Awareness without memory is redundant as soon as it is over. It can influence nothing else. Animals have a very poor connection between awareness and memory. They lack the capacity to reflect on the past. All animals live in the moment, where they don’t need memory, or only the most rudimentary trained (conditioned) memories. Thomson Jay Hudson wrote, “[In the state when the objective senses are in abeyance] many of the most wonderful feats of the subjective mind are performed. It sees without the use of the natural organs of vision; and in this, as in many other grades, or degrees, of the hypnotic state, it can be made, apparently, to leave the body, and travel to distant lands and bring back intelligence, oftentimes of the most exact and truthful character. It also has the power to read the thoughts of others, even to the minutest details; to read the contents of sealed envelopes and of closed books. In short, it is the subjective mind that possesses what is popularly designated as clairvoyant power, and the ability to apprehend the thoughts of others without the aid of the ordinary, objective means of communication.” If you want to explore your internal mind to the maximum, make sure you minimize your sensory contact with the external world. Put the objective senses in abeyance, via, for example, a sensory deprivation tank.
To maximize human potential, we need to access the full powers of the unconscious. We never will while we are subject to mainstream religion and scientism.
INDUCTION homson Jay Hudson said, “The objective mind is capable of reasoning by all methods, inductive and deductive, analytic and synthetic. The subjective mind is incapable of inductive reasoning. Let it here be understood that this proposition refers to the powers and functions of the purely subjective mind, as exhibited in the mental operations of persons in a state of profound hypnotism, or trance. The prodigious intellectual feats of persons in that condition have been a source of amazement in all the ages; but the striking peculiarity noted above appears to have been lost sight of in admiration of the other qualities exhibited. In other words, it has never been noted that their reasoning is always deductive, or syllogistic. The subjective mind never classifies a series of known facts, and reasons from them up to general principles; but, given a general principle to start with, it will reason deductively from that down to all legitimate inferences, with a marvelous cogency and power. Place a man of intelligence and cultivation in the hypnotic state, and give him a premise, say in the form of a statement of a general principle of philosophy, and no matter what may have been his opinions in his normal condition, he will unhesitatingly, in obedience to the power of suggestion, assume the correctness of the proposition; and if given an opportunity to discuss the question, will proceed to deduce therefrom the details of a whole system of philosophy. Every conclusion will be so clearly and logically deducible from the major premise, and withal so plausible and consistent, that the listener will almost forget that the premise was assumed.” Why is the subjective mind deductive rather than inductive? The subjective mind is the production mind, not the consumption mind, not the awareness mind. To perform induction, you need to be aware, you need to keep track, you need to keep observing. The production mind doesn’t do that. It’s the syntactic, rational mind concerned with logic and form. It’s not the semantic, empirical mind concerned with content. It’s a mathematical mind, not scientific. The unconscious mind can do intuition and thinking. It uses reason and logic. It’s consciousness that concentrates on feelings and sensory perception. You can’t do induction without sensory perception. There is no
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induction in the Source since there are no material, spacetime observables to be monitored.
Privilege people play the game of life on the easiest difficulty setting. P rivileged They sail through it effortlessly. Most people experience the game of life at a level of intermediate difficulty. Some people are forced, from birth, to play the game at the highest difficulty setting. Where do you stand in the great game of life? You almost certainly don’t belong to the privileged elite.
THE CONSCIOUSNESS GAME onsciousness is cultural, not biological. There is no gene you could modify, or switch on, to make a creature suddenly conscious. A hypothetical human being existing in total hermetically sealed isolation, never once encountering other human beings, hence never encountering human culture and language, could never be conscious. Consciousness is not internal to the human body. It is something external, added to humans by culture. Without culture, humans would be as lacking in consciousness as all other animals. We might even think of consciousness as how general intelligence is added to people. General intelligence is made possible by language, which conveys universals and all their interconnections. No animal has general intelligence. Some animals are highly intelligent, but in very specific niches. It’s impossible for an animal to have general intelligence since that requires a conceptual language. Even most humans struggle with general intelligence. Their intelligence, such as it is, mostly revolves around the basic functions of life, holding down a basic job and basic relationships, and bread and circuses. Extremely few humans are mathematicians, philosophers and scientists. They don’t engage in metaphysics. Reason and logic are not for them. They use language to support empiricism, emotionalism and mysticism rather than advanced thinking. Only a handful of humans can think analytically. Scientists can’t. The hard problem of consciousness is the impossible problem of consciousness if anyone is looking to matter, atoms, and genes to explain consciousness. The real hard problem of consciousness is how humans, unlike any other animals, produced culture. Julian Jaynes was fascinated by this subject. No scientist is. Scientists actively ignore geniuses such as Jaynes. They have no interest in their work. According to Jaynes, hallucinations were, in effect, the origin of human culture. Culture was born with bicameralism. As the culture became highly complex, the intermittent hallucinations of bicameralism were replaced by the constant hallucination of consciousness, of the type we all now enjoy.
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Consciousness, it can’t be stressed enough, is a hallucination: a sustained and structured hallucination, mediated by language. Consciousness is selfnarration, and that story we all tell ourselves is hallucinatory. Conscious people are extremely unreliable narrators. So, where did hallucinations come from? Every creature has an unconscious. On earth, all animals are controlled by their unconscious, by archetypes and instincts. The brain and body of all creatures except humans are not sufficiently complex to sustain anything other than default unconscious control. The unconscious mind, however, is entirely teleological. It is therefore seeking to generate consciousness since consciousness is the optimal means by which we can intelligently and purposefully direct our lives. According to scientific materialists, random, purposeless genetic mutations subjected to selection forces in nature are responsible for all biological change. In fact, it is the unconscious mind – the production mind – that causes teleological genetic change, with the aim of leading to more advanced brains and bodies, better able to serve as a platform for complex behavior. “Matter” doesn’t change randomly, for no reason. Matter changes in response to innovative productions brought about by the production mind (the unconscious). The production mind knows how to change genes (it’s all a question of mathematical syntax), but it does not know how to change a gene to achieve a specific goal. What it does is accept the existing genetic structure and then make small, probing changes. This is what Darwinism calls “random mutation”. In fact, it’s unconscious modification by a teleological mind, and it only seems random because the unconscious mind is, by definition, lacking the consciousness that would allow it to make accurately designed changes to genes. Consciousness is the exact outcome the unconscious is trying to achieve. It cannot do anything by precise design until it is conscious, which is exactly why it wants to attain consciousness. George Orwell said, “Until they become conscious they will never rebel, and until after they have rebelled they cannot become conscious.” In the terms of our present discussion, we would say, “Until the unconscious becomes conscious it will never do anything by deliberate design, and until it can do things by deliberate design, it will have a long and painful struggle to become conscious.” That’s exactly what “evolution” is – the long and painful struggle of the unconscious to produce consciousness.
The mind needs consciousness to do anything by design, and so, until it achieves consciousness, it has to use probing, experimentation, trial and error, heuristics, intuition, and so on, in order to achieve its goals. These teleological methods, exactly because they do not benefit from conscious design, can look to the uninformed observer (the Darwinist) as purposeless, random action. They are in fact anything but random and purposeless. There is a reason behind every genetic mutation, but the mind that produces the change is unconscious rather than conscious, hence the change does not look like the product of any precise purpose, and indeed it isn’t. Much of what the unconscious mind does looks like random activity exactly because obvious design is absent from it. Remember, the unconscious mind operates via suggestion. The environment itself serves as a suggestion. The body is a suggestion. The brain is a suggestion. The existing genetic profile is a suggestion. The production mind makes new suggestions, closely modeled on the existing suggestions. It doesn’t do unprecedented things. There would be no suggestion for that. By and large, the unconscious behaves in a default mode, operating according to changes made in terms of a natural distribution curve – which constitutes a whole mathematical set of possibilities grouped around the mode (the mode is the value that appears most often in a set of data values.) All that the unconscious mind ever does, in the absence of design, is carry out changes compatible with a normal distribution curve, which Darwinism grotesquely misinterprets as “random mutation”. Science, of course, can never agree that teleological mind, operating according to mathematical distribution methods, is behind all genetic change. Because then reality would be a living, purposeful organism, not a bizarre random machine doing things for no reason. To be crystal clear, Darwinism is false and there is no such thing as random mutation. There is teleological mutation carried out by mathematical minds according to normal distribution curves: an incredibly simple way for the unconscious mind to carry out reasonable experiments in the absence of specific design. All of us are on many distribution curves, concerning height, weight, beauty, intelligence, wealth, and so on. So, after a long period, evolution finally produces the complex brains and bodies of humans and consciousness becomes possible. If we think of the senses as external organs that bring signals into the brain for the unconscious mind to interpret and present to the consumption mind (awareness, sentience) then these sensory signals serve as suggestions
to the unconscious mind to produce similar signals internally. The unconscious creates its own internal version of the external sense organs, which is precisely why we can see in our dreams without having any physical eyes – a phenomenon 100% unexplained by scientific materialism. What is a dream? In its most basic form, it’s what the unconscious mind produces in response to the suggestions made by the external environment. The unconscious mind creates its own inner world, based on the outer world, but each new image in the dream serves as a suggestion for a new dream image in a kind of hyperlinked style, which is why dreams flit all over the place. There is no lucid mind to direct the dream, so it jumps from one thing to another. Dreams are hallucinations. The hallucinatory mind of bicameralism is simply the dream mind, which is why so many ancient people looked to dreams for guidance and advice about the future. Imagine that your dreams actually spoke to you in an authoritative, numinous voice, in the imperative mood, giving you orders. You wouldn’t disagree with the dream commands, would you? Abraham felt compelled to obey the voice even when it told him to murder his own son. What is schizophrenia? It’s the hallucinatory dream mind intervening in the normal world. If you think about it, schizophrenia is not all that different from Tourette’s syndrome where people blurt out the most outrageous things. It’s not the conscious person doing this (the blurting), it’s the voice of the unconscious, bypassing the conscious filters and externalizing itself. In the case of the schizophrenic, the unconscious manifests itself in one or more internal voices speaking in a dominant way to the conscious mind, which collapses under the stress. Schizophrenia is an internal Tourette’s, where consciousness is unable to control the production mind, which just erupts, by way of voices saying horrible things. Hallucinations are exactly what you get when the unconscious mind is in control, as it was in bicameral times. It was these hallucinations that began culture, by giving rise to language. A tribal leader had a repeating auditory hallucination when he saw a tree. Like one of Pavlov’s dogs being conditioned (ringing a bell, for example, would cause a dog to salivate if, every time previously, the ringing of the bell had preceded the delivery of food), he found himself conditioned (selfconditioned). When he heard this same sound in the absence of the tree, he nevertheless thought of the tree. This was the first time that anyone had
thought of something in the absence of something (thinking of the tree when there was no tree there), and it all came about by encoding the visual signal (the tree) in terms of the auditory signal (the sound), which could be produced independently of the actual tree and its visual signature. The tribal leader realized how useful this was – thinking about things in their physical absence – and taught his whole tribe to associate sounds with things and actions in the physical environment, thus producing spoken language. The key consideration about language is that the same sound is used for countless different instances of the thing being vocalized. So, in the case of a tree, we use the same word for every tree we ever encounter. Language would be next to useless if we used a different word for every different tree in the world. You would never be able to think of trees in general, but only highly specific, particular trees. What language did was astonishing: it allowed humans to apply universals to particulars. The word “tree” accommodated all trees, not a particular tree only. Thus language allowed us to start classifying everything in the world. We could see something and immediately classify it as a tree, dog, stone, river, or whatever. In this way we could create a “universal world” – a world of universals – which resembled the particular world but could be changed at will just by thinking about it. The universal world, unlike the particular world we actually encounter, is infinitely malleable. It forms our mind-space – like the physical world but so much more powerful, versatile and changeable. We can perform all sorts of experiments in the mind-space, and make all sorts of plans, and then implement them in the real world. Bertrand Russell said, “But mathematics takes us still further from what is human, into the region of absolute necessity, to which not only the actual world, but every possible world, must conform.” This is a key point. Once we have universalized the world – via language – all possible worlds must conform to it. A speaker of English, who has universalized the world in terms of the English language, cannot create anything in his mind-space for which he doesn’t have an English word. In terms of reality, any possible world must be mathematical since mathematics is the language of reality. It’s impossible to think of a world with nonmathematical elements. Such things, such worlds, do not exist. Language revolutionized human reality because it allowed us, uniquely
amongst earth’s animals, to escape from the particular world of the moment to the universal mind-space that could support past, present and future, and allowed us to develop a sophisticated self-narration and memory. Language changed everything. It proved how much more powerful the universal is than the particular. The universal concerns knowledge. The particular concerns experience. They are totally different things. Science ought to emulate mathematics and be preoccupied with universals. Instead, it obsesses over particular observables, which then have to be universalized (made intelligible) via mathematics, which, like all universals, science regards as unreal, manmade abstractions, with no reality. Plato, by contrast, thought that only universals – eternal, perfect, immutable, intelligible Forms – were absolutely real, while the sensible world of particulars (each of which was an inferior copy of a Form) was much less real. Plato was the opposite of a scientific materialist. Had he converted his metaphysical Forms into mathematical Forms, he would have been an even more dazzling genius than he actually was. Ontological mathematics takes exactly that step. Everything reduces to universal, perfect, immutable, eternal and necessary sinusoidal waves (basis Forms), which are immaterial and outside space and time. They exist in a dimensionless Singularity of pure frequency, pure mind, pure mathematics. The war of Plato versus science is a very long war, known through the debate concerning “universals and nominals”. Wikipedia says, “In metaphysics, nominalism is a philosophical view which denies the existence of universals and abstract objects, but affirms the existence of general or abstract terms and predicates. There are at least two main versions of nominalism. One version denies the existence of universals – things that can be instantiated or exemplified by many particular things (e.g., strength, humanity). The other version specifically denies the existence of abstract objects – objects that do not exist in space and time. “Most nominalists have held that only physical particulars in space and time are real, and that universals exist only post res, that is, subsequent to particular things. However, some versions of nominalism hold that some particulars are abstract entities (e.g., numbers), while others are concrete entities – entities that do exist in space and time (e.g., pillars, snakes, bananas). “Nominalism is primarily a position on the problem of universals, which dates back at least to Plato, and is opposed to realist philosophies, such as
Platonic realism, which assert that universals do exist over and above particulars. However, the name ‘nominalism’ emerged from debates in medieval philosophy with Roscellinus. The term ‘nominalism’ stems from the Latin nomen, ‘name’. John Stuart Mill summarized nominalism in the apothegm ‘there is nothing general except names’.” It’s amazing how this debate has never gone away, but only a tiny number of humans are capable of engaging with it. Scientists lack the intelligence for the task.
The Archetypes Stevens said, “Jung made a clear distinction between what he A nthony termed the archetype-as-such and the archetypal images, ideas and behaviors that the archetype-as-such gives rise to. It is the predisposition to have certain experiences that is archetypal and inherited, not the experience itself.” An archetype is a mental frequency function. Think of the Archetype of the Wise Old Man. In the West, someone such as Gandalf or Merlin would come to mind. But, in the East, the Wise Old Man would be some Eastern counterpart. The signal gets modified by each different culture, but its function always remains the same. We all experience the same archetype in term of its functional form (syntax), but we all assign a different appearance to the archetype, based on our culture and individual experiences. This is the semantic expression of the archetype. Universals cannot exist in particulars. They can exist only in universal hosts and the only universal hosts are monadic minds. Each monadic mind is literally comprised of a complete set of the foundational universals: sinusoidal basis waves. No basis wave can exist in spacetime. Basis waves are in fact the source of spacetime, via ontological Fourier mathematics, connecting the frequency domain to the spacetime domain. What about the English language? It contains language universals such as “tree”. “Tree” denotes all possible trees. It’s not a particular tree. The concept of tree, the tree universal, does not exist anywhere in spacetime. It exists in the mind. It doesn’t exist in the brain. In fact, nothing mental exists in the brain. All mental things exist in the mind. The brain is simply a biological system for performing ontological Fourier mathematics. It enacts mental
instructions in the physical world, and it sends back spacetime data to the mind for it to consider. Wikipedia says, “Holonomic brain theory, also known as The Holographic Brain, is a branch of neuroscience investigating the idea that human consciousness is formed by quantum effects in or between brain cells. This is opposed by traditional neuroscience, which investigates the brain’s behavior by looking at patterns of neurons and the surrounding chemistry, and which assumes that any quantum effects will not be significant at this scale. … This specific theory of quantum consciousness was developed by neuroscientist Karl Pribram initially in collaboration with physicist David Bohm building on the initial theories of holograms originally formulated by Dennis Gabor. It describes human cognition by modeling the brain as a holographic storage network. Pribram suggests these processes involve electric oscillations in the brain’s fine-fibered dendritic webs, which are different from the more commonly known action potentials involving axons and synapses. These oscillations are waves and create wave interference patterns in which memory is encoded naturally, and the wave function may be analyzed by a Fourier transform. Gabor, Pribram and others noted the similarities between these brain processes and the storage of information in a hologram, which can also be analyzed with a Fourier transform. In a hologram, any part of the hologram with sufficient size contains the whole of the stored information. In this theory, a piece of a long-term memory is similarly distributed over a dendritic arbor so that each part of the dendritic network contains all the information stored over the entire network. This model allows for important aspects of human consciousness, including the fast associative memory that allows for connections between different pieces of stored information and the non-locality of memory storage (a specific memory is not stored in a specific location, i.e., a certain cluster of neurons).” This kind of theory is definitely the way to go, but it needs to be extended to embrace monadic minds and a reality literally made of sinusoidal waves, forming a natural quantum system, which is equivalent to a natural Fourier system. Abstract thought – the contemplation of universals – is immaterial by its nature, and therefore cannot be generated by the material brain, which is all about particulars. In fact, the very process of forming an image of the external world does not conclude with some image of the world located inside your brain. The image is produced in your mind. The brain takes
spacetime signals and coverts them into frequency signals for the mind to receive, and the mind sends frequency signals to the brain, which it then has to convert into spacetime signals to carry out specific mental instructions in the physical world, such as moving muscles and limbs, making the heart beat and the lungs breathe, and so on. It’s when these processes finally break down that a person dies.
Social Consciousness exists collectively, not individually. Consciousness is a C onsciousness social phenomenon. Consciousness is cultural. Consciousness depends on language, which is collective, social, general and universal. There is no such thing as a private language, hence there is no such thing as private consciousness. You are conscious because you are part of a conscious society. You would not be conscious if you had never encountered another human being, hence were not part of a social group, hence had not learned a language. Since consciousness is located in the group and not in the individual, it’s pointless to look for consciousness in the individual. We understand each other not because we are all conscious individuals, but because we belong to a conscious group. If you brought together two humans who had been raised alone, in hermetically sealed environments, they would be unable to communicate with each other. They would be sentient, not conscious. The sine qua non of consciousness is language, hence socialization. It’s not subjective experience that consciousness revolves around, it’s language. Manmade language is not something built into people, it’s something they acquire. So, the fact that consciousness is something added to humans, as opposed to being built into their basic operating system, means that we can radically alter humanity and give human beings enormously enhanced consciousness. For example, we could design special left hemisphere languages, special right hemisphere languages, and special dualhemispheric languages. We could design special corpus callosum languages. We could design brain-stem languages, limbic system languages, and neocortex languages. Consciousness is the most powerful force on earth. It transformed humanity, and humanity transformed the earth. Consciousness will in due
course transform the universe. Consciousness marks the transition of animals from creatures of perception (experience) to creatures of conception (knowledge), from empiricists (particularists) to potential rationalists (universalists). This is the greatest change a species can undergo. It removes them from the animal world and launches them on the path to divinity.
The Language Turn about language. I t’s allAnimals are concerned with experience (plus instinct). Once animals learn a language then, like humans, they will enter the domain of knowledge. Knowledge is power. Knowledge transforms everything. Knowledge and consciousness go together. What is the real tale of the Tree of Knowledge? It’s that humans learned language, became conscious, acquired knowledge, then worked out how to transform themselves into gods. The fruit of the Tree of Knowledge was language, leading to consciousness and thus knowledge. The transition from the senses to language is the most decisive transition of which reality is capable. It allows animals to cease being animals and become higher beings. The purpose of the universe is to bring about exactly this transition. The universe is a god factory. The world of the senses (empiricism) is the animal world. Everything changes when humans acquire language and start discovering knowledge. They have gained access to reason and logic (rationalism). Why has science failed to explain reality? Because it is based on the senses, and not on reason and logic. It is based on experience, not knowledge. It is empiricist, not rationalist. Ontological mathematics constitutes the ultimate paradigm shift because it escapes from the senses and is all about language, consciousness, knowledge, and universalism. Science, by contrast, is animalistic. It rejects mind. It rejects free will, the unconscious and consciousness. It rejects subjectivity. It denies that reality is made of language. It considers universals unreal and believes only in particulars. Science is supposed to be all about knowledge, but, in fact, it is antiknowledge. The reason why science works is that it uses – without any
explanation or justification – the language of mathematics, even though it regards all languages as unreal, manmade abstractions with no connection to reality. Science hates the idea of reality being made of language because that would mean that it definitely isn’t made of sensory matter, and thus materialism and empiricism is falsified. A language-based reality is a mental reality, a reality that can be fully known by identifying reality’s language. That language is ontological mathematics, the true basis of science.
The Essentials for Consciousness – sensory subjectivity – is a prerequisite of consciousness. A S entience creature cannot have sensory subjectivity if it is made of lifeless, mindless, objective atoms. Science bizarrely and illogically claims it can. It’s a category error to claim that life comes from non-life, mind from nonmind, and subjectivity from non-subjectivity (exclusively from objects). Sentience is possible only in a world of mind, comprising entities (monads) which are both objects and subjects. They are objects to everything external to them. They are subjects to themselves. They experience their own content, and they experience the content they receive from the external world. A scientific atom is an object to itself and to everything else. It has no subjective capacity, so where can subjectivity come from? A mathematical monad, by total contrast, is inherently a mind, and minds are inherently objects from the outside and subjects from the inside. They have interiority. Atoms don’t. A mind subjectively experiences its own thoughts. That is its essential activity. A monadic mind is made of basis thoughts (a complete set of sinusoidal waves) and it inherently experiences these thoughts, and their thoughtfunctions (combinations of basis thoughts to create compound thoughts of any complexity). Each monadic mind is surrounded by countless other monadic minds, each with its own basis thoughts. Each mind experiences its own thoughts, and also the interaction (via sinusoidal wave mathematics) of its own thoughts with the thoughts of other minds. So a monad’s internal inbuilt thoughts are one thing (they are the source of its inherent subjective experiences: it and only it can ever experience its
own basis thoughts and their combinations), and the internal, inbuilt thoughts of another monad are something else. The internal thoughts of one monad are experienced by a different monad as external (every sinusoid that does not internally belong to you belongs, from your perspective, to an objective external world). Everyone who is not a solipsist (solipsism is the belief that the self is all that can be known to exist) accepts that an objective external reality exists. The sinusoidal waves of all the other monads constitute this external reality. In the normal course of events, we experience the sinusoids of other monads in terms of an external physical world and external bodies. When we encounter another monadic mind, it is almost always through the intermediary of two physical bodies – theirs and ours – which are external objects in the external world. Another mind expresses its internality to us via how it communicates with us, via its behavior towards us, but that all involves external events in the external world. We can communicate paranormally with other minds, but that’s extremely rare in comparison with a normal encounter via the physical world. In science, all you have are objects interacting with each other, so subjectivity is impossible. In ontological mathematics, you have monadic minds – as objects – interacting with each other, and it’s in this objective regard that ontological mathematical produces what scientists interpret as the scientific world. But whereas science cannot produce any subjects in its system, ontological mathematics is predicated on a system in which every objective monad is also – to itself – a subjective monad, i.e., each monad has a unique experience with respect to itself that no other monad could ever have. This aspect of existence is entirely absent from scientific materialism. There is nothing in science that internally experiences itself in a unique way. Nothing has any internal experiences at all in scientific materialism. Such experiences are utterly superfluous. Imagine that every atom had an interior, its own agency, free will, consciousness. Then the scientific materialist account of reality would be falsified. Science cannot explain reality exactly because it refuses to accept the existence of an interior world of mind, subjectivity, free will, and individual agency. Panpsychist philosophers try to add subjectivity to science via, in effect, adding mind to matter, to atoms. What they should be doing is moving to an idealist, mind-based reality that can generate matter rather than adding on a
superfluous fragment of mind to a scientific materialist world. The idea that a hydrogen atom, for example, has subjectivity, mind, free will, agency and even consciousness is comically absurd. No serious person could accept such a notion. It’s self-evidently false. But an eternal and necessary mind, made of a complete set of basis thoughts, is something entirely different. This is the only possible way in which we can get authentic subjectivity, free will, and agency. An immaterial monadic mind outside space and time is something drastically different from a material hydrogen atom in space and time with its own mind. There are endless problems trying to construct any coherent reality that embraces mind from a reality that is inherently about space, time and matter. Panpsychism is what you get when a materialist doesn’t find materialism explanatory enough, but refuses to migrate to idealism. So, these people just feebly add on mind to matter rather than doing away with matter, or making matter exclusively the product of the operations of mind. Panpsychism is a perfectly respectable theory when coupled with idealism. It is absurd when coupled with materialism. Sadly, 100% of academic panpsychist philosophers are materialist panpsychists who accept all of the claims of scientism, except in relation to subjective experience.
False Consciousness hat manner of kind, loving God would exterminate the firstborn of Egypt, as we read in the Bible? Let’s see what OJJ has to say: “This guy is so misleading. No context at all. He didn’t mention that Moses warned Pharaoh that if he didn’t let the children of Israel (God’s children) out of captivity, God will cause 10 plagues on the people of Egypt. Pharaoh refused, and he paid the price. That’s how far God will go for his children.” So, there you have it. Only the Jews are “God’s children”, implying that everyone else is of the Devil, and certainly not of God, hence they “deserve” death. This OJJ person claims that if a Pharaoh ignores a “warning” from some bloke, it’s entirely justified for the Jewish God to murder every firstborn of Egypt. What moral universe does OJJ inhabit? Of course, he isn’t moral at all. He believes in a universe where, if a father warns his children
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not to disobey him and they then do, he is entitled to murder them. Let’s hope OJJ isn’t a parent. In the real world, as opposed to OJJ’s bizarre world, a father who murdered his children would be condemned as a monster and jailed until his dying breath, and all decent people would cheer. But OJJ believes in a God who, when he murders his own children, is worshiped even more vehemently. The baby killer is cheered to the rafters. In a moral universe, this “God” would be convicted of genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity, and executed. Justice would be done against him. But OJJ isn’t moral, and neither is his God. They are supremely wicked and evil. OJJ doesn’t worship God, he worships the Devil. It’s selfevident. What is the Devil’s “moral” code? Anyone who disobeys me dies. That’s exactly the same mantra as the Abrahamic God worshiped by OJJ. 1 + 1 = 2. OJJ worships power, not goodness. OJJ says, “It’s funny how this guy intentional doesn’t give context.” Everyone knows the context of the extermination of the firstborn of Egypt. There are no circumstances, no context, in which an all-powerful, supposedly moral God is entitled to murder his own children, his own creations, for whom he himself is 100% responsible and accountable since he, by his own act, brought them into being. If you don’t see that, you yourself have no moral compass and you are evil beyond any hope of redemption, as OJJ is. OJJ says, “Always intentionally misleading people.” It’s you who intentionally misleads people, in the hope of getting them to join you in your worship of a cosmic murderer, a child killer, the ultimate psychopath. OJJ says, “Why did he not tell us the full story, why?!!!” More or less 100% of people raised in Christian countries know the story of Exodus. It was forced down their throats. We’ve all seen Hollywood movies about it. It’s not as if anyone is being denied knowledge of what is claimed to have happened. The question is – knowing every detail of this story, exactly as it is described in the Bible – why would you accept as moral the actions of a Being, the cosmic Herod, who massacred innocent babies!? What justifies baby killing? How does a “warning” from some person (Moses) to some other person (Pharaoh) consequently justify the murder of Egyptian babies? How screwed in the head would you have to be to see justice, morality and righteousness in the murder of hundreds of thousands of men, women,
children and babies because of what one person said to another person? OJJ says, “The Devil has an agenda to break the relationship between the creator and his most valuable creation (humans).” Is it humans – including the firstborn babies of Egypt (who were, as we know, murdered by their “Creator”) – who are valuable to God, or only Jews (the Chosen People), and everyone non-Jewish can be exterminated without any criminality? That of course was the exact belief system of the Nazis, except they believed themselves the Master Race, and considered that the Jews had no rights at all, not even the right to life. Did not Hitler warn the Jews to get out of Europe? Therefore, by OJJ’s “logic”, Hitler was fully justified in exterminating the European Jews. Right, OJJ? They got their warning, they refused to act on it, and so they got their just deserts. That’s the “moral” framework OJJ brings to the world. OJJ says, “Don’t take my word for it. Read Exodus 9:1-10.” We don’t take your word for it. We have all read Exodus. And that’s exactly why we say again, “What moral person, what person in their right mind, could stand in defense of the irredeemably evil actions of the Biblical God?” OJJ says, “Let’s put the Devil to shame!!! You liar!!!” OJJ, you are irredeemably of the Devil, you worship the Devil, and you are the liar. Shame on you. You lack any moral compass whatsoever. May your rotten, black soul burn in hell! OJJ, your Devil has instilled a wholly false consciousness in you, and made you a severe danger to other human beings. The Bible has made you into a psychopath who believes that your God can murder babies without being condemned as the Devil. That’s exactly why you yourself are of the Devil, doing the Devil’s work. How many people are you infecting with your evil lies, immorality and psychopathy? May the Truth out you and destroy you! You are a Satanist, promoting the Devil’s Book of lies and evil. Incidentally, we’ve noticed a bizarre trait concerning people who believe in the Abrahamic God. They appear to be incapable of understanding that people who don’t believe in the Abrahamic God can nevertheless refer to the Abrahamic God (which is to say they can refer to the fantasy being believed in by Abrahamists). So, for example, if a non-Abrahamist writes, “The Abrahamic God does not exist” (in which case they are referring to the ontology of the proposed God), and later writes “The Abrahamic God is the Devil” (in which case they are referring to the Abrahamic Mythos of the
Creator God and pointing out that this Mythos has much more in common with the Mythos of the Devil, a supposed being of pure evil, than a God, a supposed being of infinite benevolence), the Abrahamist replies with, “You make no sense. First you say God doesn’t exist, then you say God is the Devil. You are contradicting itself. You are a liar.” Are these people being serious? If they are, they are deeply on the autistic spectrum and believe in God purely in literal terms. They are completely unable to understand God as a metaphor, a story, an opinion, a belief, a fantasy, i.e., anything other than literally true. “God” can be spoken about in many, many different ways and any intelligent person can understand the relevant context. Morons cannot comprehend this. Abrahamists appear to understand “God” only in terms of a literal being, the being they worship. If that’s the case then they are extreme autistics or are actually retarded, which of course would fully explain why they believe in the Abrahamic God!
The Sick God Abrahamic “God” exterminated all of the firstborn of Egypt because T hePharaoh, supposedly, rejected a warning. The implication is that the Pharaoh “owns” the firstborn of Egypt and they therefore deserve to be punished because their owner has transgressed. This idea of ownership is central to the diseased Abrahamic psyche. If the Pharaoh does not own the people of Egypt – and of course he doesn’t – then it is utterly immoral to punish others (bystanders) for someone else’s alleged crime. When the Nazis carried out mass reprisals against civilian populations for actions done by “terrorists”, Abrahamic judges at the Nuremberg Trials then held the Nazis responsible for war crimes and crimes against humanity. Yet reprisals are exactly what the Abrahamic God specializes in. The Pharaoh defies him, so the whole of Egypt – millions of innocent adults, children, babies and even animals – get punished in reprisal. The defense of the Nazis at Nuremberg should simply have been that they were following the exact “morality” of the Abrahamic God, and so no one who believed in the Abrahamic God could possibly find them guilty of any crime whatsoever, or they would then have to find their own God guilty of the same crimes, and that would mean recognizing their own God as a war
criminal and in fact as the Devil (!). The tale of Adam and Eve is an even more infamous “ownership” story. God is deemed to be the owners of Adam and Eve, and, by extension, the owner of the whole of humanity. So when Adam and Eve allegedly disobeyed God – an act which in moral terms only they could be held accountable for – God, according to Christian Abrahamists, is morally justified in taking reprisals against the whole human race in perpetuity … against all the unborn, innocent babies. How sick can you get? The real “Original Sin” is the grotesque sin of the Christian God! God literally sentenced all of humanity – his own creations, his own children – to hell, a place of infinite and eternal horror, because Adam and Eve ate from a tree he placed right in front of them. Put candy in front of a baby, tell them not to eat it, and see how you get on! Is that how a father is supposed to treat his disobedient children – sending them to hell to punish them forever? Only the worst father in the universe would behave like that. Isn’t God supposed to be the best father?! So, any Abrahamist who believes that God “owns” the human race and has the absolute right, like the Nazis, to take reprisals against all humans if any human offends him sees nothing wrong with the Abrahamic God punishing all Egyptians if the leader of Egypt disobeys him. Ownership is the basic concept at work here, and the right to punish all of the property of the owner. Humans have no individual rights. The whole of history has been about trying to overthrow the Abrahamic mentality, based on property and ownership, and give people genuine rights and genuine freedom. The entire psyche of Abrahamists is diseased. Once you have accepted one sick and evil conclusion, you accept all the rest because they all reflect the same immoral belief system. In any genuine moral system, no one is owned by anyone else, no one is accountable for any actions other than their own, and anyone who carries out reprisals against the innocent is a war criminal. The Christian God is guilty on all counts. He is guilty of claiming ownership of humanity, he is guilty of holding people accountable for the actions of others, and he is guilty of the most grotesque war crimes and crimes against humanity. He even carried out mass extermination and genocide against the whole human race by flooding the earth and drowning everyone bar Noah and his family.
Anyone who cannot see that the Abrahamic God is in fact the Devil has no moral compass at all. They are irrevocably evil.
PERFECT CONSCIOUSNESS he zero-entropy domain of Being is a domain of perfect consciousness, but it’s a very different consciousness from what any human experiences. There is no temporal and contingent production mind since the zeroentropy state is eternal and necessary and has no temporal and contingent aspects. The perfect production mind produces only eternal and necessary perfection, and this perfection is perfectly consumed by the perfect consumption mind (perfect awareness; perfect consciousness). This is the God State, the Absolute. Consciousness requires a production mind (a mind that makes) and a consumption mind (a mind that reacts to what has been made). The production mind cannot react to itself. If it could, it would be changing what it was making while it was making it, and that would become an incredibly inefficient process. Imagine a writer who, instead of writing a first draft and then editing it across subsequent drafts, spent all their time deciding which word to write in the first place, continually redrafting each word. It would become impossible to decide which word to use. Which word preceded it? Was that the right word? Which word comes next? Will that be the right word? The writer would become utterly stuck. They would suffer from infinite writer’s block. What actual writers do is let their unconscious write the first draft (they type rather than write), then consciously look at what they have written and start editing and polishing it. For consciousness, it’s essential to have an unmediated production mind, subsequently acted upon by a mediated consumption mind. Think of dreaming. Your production mind generates the dreams and the consumption mind then consumes them. Even when you are lucidly dreaming, you are not making the dream; rather, you are directing what the production mind makes. You literally have no clue how to make a dream image. Most people who watch movies have no idea how to make a movie. Most people who read novels have no idea how to write a novel. Even a moviemaker has no idea how to make film equipment. How do you make a camera?
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How do you make a control chip for a camera? Do you see how complicated the process really is? Yet your production mind can make some of the best, most dramatic and vivid movies ever, specially tailored for YOU! It’s a division of labor. You need the maker and you need the appreciator of what is made, who can feedback to the maker to make even better things. That’s how you make progress. That’s evolution. It’s not about random mutations and natural selection. It’s about teleology. As ever, materialism gets it horrifically wrong. Science is antievolutionary. By failing to understand the true nature of reality, it is getting in the way of reality’s evolutionary operations. It’s a force of resistance to human evolution. Evolution, nowadays, concerns the mind and culture, not the physical body.
Memory do you remember things? Imagine you have forgotten something H ow clever that you thought of just a few minutes earlier. One way to remember something is to think about the same subjects you were thinking about minutes earlier and your production mind will again generate the thought you forgot about. It’s not that you have “remembered” the thing. Rather, you have made the production mind repeat what it did before, and then you recognize its repetition … that’s you “remembering”, i.e., being aware of repetition. What is déjà vu? Your mind produces a thought, but it doesn’t properly register it. You then keep thinking about similar things and the production mind repeats the earlier thought. Now, however, you recognize that you have thought this before, and this creates that curious frisson of feeling as though you have been through all of this before. You have!
Animals and Humans are to humans as normal dreamers are to lucid dreamers. In the A nimals waking world, animals lack lucid waking. They are passively awake, controlled by instinct. Humans became lucidly awake thanks to the
acquisition of language, an acquisition dependent on the collective, not on the individual. Manmade language is conferred on us. We are not born with it. Manmade language belongs to culture, not biology. Reality’s own language of ontological mathematics is innately given to us, but it operates at the level of the unconscious and it takes both manmade language and abstract mathematics for humans to start becoming conscious of ontological mathematics, the ur language, the language of existence. Ontological mathematics furnishes ultimate lucidity: God consciousness. This is where being and thought are one, where object and subject are one. Every monad is both an object and a subject. It is a subject to itself, and an object to everything else. In science, there are no subjects. They don’t exist in the scientific paradigm. That’s why science can never explain subjectivity.
THE COMMUNITY anguage is the medium of human community. You cannot have a community without some form of communication or mutually desirable behaviors between different individuals. Lone wolves do not, by definition, engage in community. Psychopaths pretend to, but don’t. Psychopaths always privilege individualism over the collective. Since this is exactly what all anti-State right-wingers do too, we can conclude that all such people are on the psychopathic spectrum, which explains, of course, how greedy and selfish they are, and how much they despise the Other. Hegel said, “[Language] is the existence of the self, as self; in language, self-consciousness, qua independent separate individuality, comes as such into existence, so that it exists for others.” So, here’s the question. Is a hermetically sealed human being who has never met another human being the most individualistic human possible, or not human at all? Isn’t such an individual actually an animal, and not a human? To put it another way, do we only become human insofar as we engage in community, in which case all anti-communitarian right-wingers are animals?! Language is how we communicate with others and in attaining language we can also communicate with ourselves. For most of us, we are defined by our inner voice, and that would not be there if we did not exist as part of a community that trained us to use language. For Hegel, self-consciousness exists only in relation to others. You can’t be aware of self if you are not aware of not-self, of others like you who are not you. For Hegel, self-consciousness exists “for others”, in the sense that you could never actually be self-conscious in the absence of others. Imagine a group of humans without any language, without any “inner voice”. To what extent would these be “individuals”? They would probably be like sheep, all reacting together. Imagine if every member of a flock of sheep had language, with an inner voice. Sheep would no longer be sheep. They would be individuals. They would have self-consciousness. They would act independently. So, language,
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which is all about the community, the collective, is in fact also all about the individual. The individual comes into view only when they can be differentiated from the group. It’s language – the product of the social group – that enables this to happen. Language not only allows us to communicate with others, it allows us to communicate with ourselves. It gives us our own voice within a community of other people, who also have their own voices. Language unites and also differentiates (individualizes). The two go together, i.e., the group and the individual. You cannot have a meaningful individual if they are not part of the group. The people who promote extreme individualism never understand this. They don’t understand that they have an inner voice and consciousness purely because the community supplied them. Without the community, there is no individual. For Hegel, discussing the master-slave dialectic, work is how the slave exteriorizes himself. The fruits of his labor mark his presence in the world, beyond his mere physical existence, his mere animal presence. His work is what makes him human, and not animal. Language performs the same role for the individual as work does for the slave. It exteriorizes them. It allows them to be heard. It allows them to express themselves, to make themselves understood. Other means of selfexpression are not nearly as powerful and comprehensive. Hegel said, “Language contains the self in its purity – it alone expresses the I, the I itself.” In speech, the self acquires objectivity, just as the slave does through work. People are horrified by being denied a voice, by being “just a number”. That’s why they prize “free speech” so much. Yet just as the slave has to keep working to maintain relevance, the user of language has to keep speaking. A person who never speaks vanishes from the world. If you don’t communicate with the world, it won’t communicate with you. Speech is how you make the world perceive you and make space for you. Hegel said that spiritual substance needs two distinct self-conscious beings for it to enter into existence. Two hermetically sealed human beings, each entirely on their own, do not constitute a manifestation of Spirit. They have to come together, to interact, to communicate, in order for Spirit to come into existence. Isn’t it funny the way New Age people, who invariably imagine they are highly spiritual, seek to spend as much time as possible on their own, in a
state of meditation, practising “mindfulness”? In Hegel’s terms, these people are mindless. They are vanishing from reality. They are exiting from the Spiritual community, not helping to grow it. In Hegelian terms, New Agers and Eastern mystics are the enemies of spirituality. They are opposing the dialectic and the unfolding of the Absolute. They are standing in the way of the universe coming to self-consciousness. They are preventing it from achieving all-knowing. For Hegel, self-consciousness does not happen simply because we have a brain. It requires the presence of another person. Hegel wrote, “A selfconsciousness exists for a self-consciousness. Only so is it in fact selfconsciousness; for only in this way does the unity of itself in its otherness become explicit for it.” If language = consciousness then consciousness is not something private, something enclosed by the experiences of the individual. Science and academic philosophy think of “consciousness” in terms of the properties of an individual. In fact, consciousness exists in the relations between members of a community, relations established by language, the medium of communication. Consciousness does not exist in hermeticallysealed individuals. Sentience exists in such creatures, but not consciousness. Consciousness is born when we can reach beyond the individual to make contact with the group. That’s what language achieves better than anything else. Chimpanzees can groom each other, showing their membership of the group, but grooming is far too basic a behavior to support consciousness. Hegel argued that in language not only does “I = I” but also “I = Other.” He wrote, “Here again, then, we see language as the existence of Spirit. Language is self-consciousness existing for others, self-consciousness which as such is immediately present, and as this self-consciousness is universal. It is the self that separates itself from itself, which as pure ‘I’ = ‘I’ becomes objective to itself, which in this objectivity equally preserves itself as this self, just as it coalesces directly with other selves and is their selfconsciousness. It perceives itself just as it is perceived by others, and the perceiving is just existence which has become a self.” In effect, Hegel is arguing that a unitary Spirit can break into countless separate parts via language, each becoming a self. In ontological mathematics, in the zero-entropy domain of Being, all monadic minds are united. In the entropic environment of the spacetime universe of matter, they all become individuals (selves), and they are selves
because of mathematical language, which both individualizes them, and makes them part of a collective. All monads are objects to each other (“I = Other”, we might say), yet each monad is a subject to itself (“I = I”). No monadic mind can experience the subjective experiences of another monadic mind, yet every monad is like every other monad because they all have the same foundational definition. They differ not with respect to their definition, but in terms of two other considerations: 1) Their ontology is unique. Each monad has a full set of basis thoughts (sinusoids) which belong exclusively to it – eternally and necessarily; 2) Each monad has a different absolute location in the collection of all monadic minds. Loosely speaking, each monad has unique coordinates, and thus every monad is different from every other monad environmentally (each has a different position on the “grid”) as opposed to intrinsic definition (each has exactly the same core formula). Language facilitates the greatest range of art: hymn, oracle, poem, short story, novella, novel, epic, tragedy, comedy, and so on. Language reflects virtually all aspects of human existence. Even music is a language. Philosophy, which is language-mediated, is, for Hegel, the highest art of all, the subject that fully reveals the Absolute. In actual fact, it is the language of ontological mathematics that constitutes the Absolute itself, and only by understanding its own language can we truly understand the Absolute. Philosophy is mired in manmade language hence can never reach the Absolute. Philosophy does not partake of the Absolute’s own language (ontological mathematics). Hegel insisted that self-consciousness exists in language, as opposed to individual bodies. The self knows itself in the same way as it knows another, via language. Each of us, bar a few extraordinary exceptions, has an inner voice and an outer voice. The inner voice is our Ego voice. The outer voice is our Persona voice. It’s how we present ourselves to the world. Mathematics is the voice of our core Self … the monadic mind as it is in itself. Ego and Self are separate because the Ego uses manmade language while the Self uses reality’s own language of mathematics. The Self is True, the Ego is false. Yet we cannot reach the Self without first going through the Ego stage. It’s essential to our evolution into higher beings, and must not be negated, as New Age and Eastern Ego-haters advocate. For Hegel, one self requires another: the self exists only in its relation to another self. The Hegelian self is not something self-contained. It is
absolutely mired in the Other, making it incredibly strange. We seem to know nothing more intimately, yet there can be nothing as strange, so mired in the Other. We are both ourselves and totally alienated from ourselves. That’s the story of our life. The Hegelian self is at once self-same and self-different. It belongs to itself, yet transcends itself. Reality would be entirely different if private languages existed. Then people could have a self-contained consciousness. But private languages don’t exist. They are impossible. Here’s the essential mystery of the human condition. Your internal experiences are uniquely yours, but you cannot communicate these to anyone else. To communicate with others, you have to use language – a system of universals rather than particulars. As soon as you use language, the particularity of your experience is immediately lost. Two people could use identical language to describe their respective subjective experiences, but those experiences, as they were actually experienced by each person, might bear no resemblance to one another. Language, by its nature, simply cannot capture the essential nuance and particularity of a subjective experience. That isn’t its function. You have privileged access to your own experiences, but you cannot express these to anyone else except in the “degraded” medium of public language. Poets are so admired because their use of language is so powerful that they seem to get closer to the particular essence of the experience than any other language user. When a stupid person describes an experience as “painful”, what are they telling us? The mansions of pain have infinite different rooms, and the stupid person has not entered even one of them. They have stood outside the mansion and, as far as communicating with others goes, found themselves unable to go in. The self can be truly conscious only if it exists in perfect isolation, with a private language and private meanings. As it is, it can only come to consciousness through public language and public meanings, which cannot capture the private experience. The self is not solipsistic. Why? Because no private language exists. Language refutes solipsism. It requires the existence of the Other. It’s about communicating with the Other. The self is held in bondage by the public sphere, which, as it turns out, is also the Liberator, because it enables the self to be conscious, and without consciousness you
cannot exercise authentic free will. Freedom is born in the collective, not in the individual.
The Personalizing Universe Teilhard de Chardin wrote, “Far from being mutually exclusive, the P ierre Universal and Personal (that is to say, the ‘centered’) grow in the same direction and culminate simultaneously in each other. It is therefore a mistake to look for the extension of our being or of the noosphere in the Impersonal. The Future-Universal could not be anything else but the HyperPersonal – at the Omega Point. ... The only universe capable of containing the human person is an irreversibly ‘personalizing’ universe. ... The conclusion is inevitable that the concentration of a conscious universe would be unthinkable if it did not reassemble in itself all consciousnesses as well as all the conscious; each particular consciousness remaining conscious of itself at the end of the operation, and even (this must absolutely be understood) each particular consciousness becoming still more itself and thus more clearly distinct from others the closer it gets to them in Omega. “The exaltation, not merely the conservation, of elements by convergence: what, after all, could be more simple, and more thoroughly in keeping with all we know? “In any domain – whether it be cells of a body, the members of a society or the elements of a spiritual synthesis – union differentiates. In every organized whole, the parts perfect themselves and fulfil themselves. Through neglect of this universal rule many a system of pantheism has led us astray to the cult of a great All in which individuals were supposed to be merged like a drop in the ocean or like a dissolving grain of salt. Applied to the case of the summation of consciousness, the law of union rids us of this perilous and recurrent illusion. No, following the confluent orbits of their centers, the grains of consciousness do not tend to lose their outlines and blend, but, on the contrary, to accentuate the depth and incommunicability of their egos. The more ‘other’ they become in conjunction, the more they find themselves as ‘self’. “How could it be otherwise since they are steeped in Omega? Could a center dissolve? Or rather, would not its particular way of dissolving be to supercentralize itself?”
So, according to Teilhard, the more we unite, the more we become ourselves: “union differentiates”. Hegel wrote, “It is the nature of humanity to press onward to agreement with others; human nature only really exists in an achieved community of minds.” The human is archetypally a social creature. The human does not make sense on its own, as a lone-wolf individual. All those who oppose the collective in fact oppose the individual!
Truth? Sagan said, “If it can be destroyed by the truth, it deserves to be C arl destroyed by the truth.” What truth, Carl? Empirical, rational, emotional, mystical, or intuitive? The truth of coherence, correspondence, or pragmatism? Philosophical truth, scientific truth, or mathematical truth? You ought to define your terms, Carl. Hey, Carl, weren’t you one of the popes of scientism? Do you agree that if scientism can be destroyed by the truth, it deserves to be? Well, you said so, didn’t you? So, here’s the thing, Carl. You spent your whole life promoting a lie. There is no such thing as scientific matter. If you knew anything about the truth, as opposed to your subjective version of the truth, you would have known that. One of the most annoying things in the world is the claim of scientists to be on the side of reason and logic when they explicitly reject rationalism and gamble everything on the power of the unreliable, limited, fallible, delusional human senses. No rationalist would ever take the human senses seriously as a potential vehicle for the exercise of reason and logic. It’s totally extraordinary how scientists believe that there is any connection between the temporal and contingent human senses and the eternal and necessary truths of existence, which are strictly rational and logical. Mathematics is the language of reason and logic. Science isn’t.
LEIBNIZ AND LANGUAGE he Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy says, “Language and Mind: Some scholars have suggested that Leibniz should be regarded as one of the first thinkers to envision something like the idea of artificial intelligence. Whether or not he should be regarded as such, it is clear that Leibniz, like contemporary cognitive scientists, saw an intimate connection between the form and content of language, and the operations of the mind.” Leibniz, unlike scientific materialists, saw that mind is all about language. Mind is nothing to do with matter. A mind is defined by mathematical language and operates according to mathematical language, in terms of both syntax and semantics. Ontological language in and of itself is about numbers and the rational, logical, mathematical operations that can be applied to them, especially those of ontological Fourier mathematics. But it’s possible to use numerical code to create a drastically different type of code, one based on words rather than numbers. Consider ASCII. Encyclopedia Britannica says, “ASCII, abbreviation of American Standard Code For Information Interchange, a standard datatransmission code that is used by smaller and less-powerful computers to represent both textual data (letters, numbers, and punctuation marks) and noninput-device commands (control characters). Like other coding systems, it converts information into standardized digital formats that allow computers to communicate with each other and to efficiently process and store data. ... The ASCII code was originally developed for teletypewriters but eventually found wide application in personal computers. The standard ASCII code uses seven-digit binary numbers; i.e., numbers consisting of various sequences of 0’s and 1’s. The code can represent 128 different characters, since there are 128 different possible combinations of seven 0’s and 1’s. The binary sequence 1010000, for example, represents an uppercase ‘P,’ while the sequence 1110000 represents a lowercase ‘p.’ Digital computers use a binary code that is arranged in groups of eight rather than of seven digits, or bits. Each such eight-digit group is called a byte.”
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Once we have a base coding system, we can then code other things. We can create whole new languages: manmade rather than the natural language of reality (ontological mathematics). All constructed languages self-evidently depart from the ur language, hence falsify it. There is only one true language. Only through that language can we understand reality (in which it is written). In the case of digital computers, the game is to code everything in terms of 1s and 0s (binary). In terms of reality, everything is coded in terms of sinusoidal waves. Where binary is digital and discontinuous, sinusoids are analogue and continuous. Binary can be thought of as a system where there are only two discontinuous options: baseline (0) and peak (1). This is a switched system. It’s either on (1 = peak) or off (0 = baseline). There is no continuous transition from baseline to peak. The transition is discontinuous. Reality, however, is not based on discontinuity. It is all about continuity. There is no entity behind the scenes switching things on and off. Leibniz invoked the principle of Natura non facit saltus (Latin for “nature does not make jumps”). Reality does not use any on and off switching mechanism. A self-sufficient reality must be able to do everything by itself. A digital system cannot. It needs a process to switch between 0 and 1, but this process itself has nothing to do with 0 and 1. Flicking a switch is neither a 0 or a 1. What flicks the switch to choose 0 or 1? What, ontologically, is the switch? God?!!! But then what is God? Imagine a Singularity comprising nothing but 0s. The “Big Bang” would then be all of these 0s suddenly being switched from off to on (0 to 1). But what would flick the switches? What are the switches? Why would the switches be flicked? And what could a universe of 0s only, or 1s only, achieve? So, we would need another process to switch off some of the 1s so as to create a system of 1s and 0s, where change would be possible (by engaging in a process of continually switching some things on and other things off). A system of sinusoidal waves is much more useful than binary switching. A sinusoid has three key numbers: 0 (baseline), 1 (positive peak) and -1 (negative peak). It cycles through all three numbers in a continuous process, meaning that it accesses all numbers from -1 to 0 to 1. But, in order to perform this operation, it actually needs to access all possible numbers, i.e., a sinusoidal wave, although it seems to exist within a limited numerical range, actually relies on every number.
Consider the most important formula of all, the Source Formula (Euler’s Formula):
To construct cos x and sin x, we have to use, as you can see, all natural numbers (and from the operations that we can apply to these natural numbers, we can create all the other numbers). In relation to the sinusoid, motion is built into the cycling process that takes place in the range -1 to 0 to 1 to 0 to -1, and repeat. We don’t have to add any external agent to flick a switch, or do anything at all. The system will do everything by itself, by its internal mathematical nature. It’s the Principle of Sufficient Reason itself that is encoded in Euler’s Formula, meaning that a reality made of nothing but sinusoids is a reality in which everything has a sufficient reason … everything has an explanation. The monadic, analogue system of sinusoids is infinitely more powerful and versatile than the digital system of 1s and 0s. It supports mind and life, not the artificial simulation of mind and life. Binary is a poor simulation of sinusoidal reality, picking out just two numbers (0 and 1). You cannot replicate reality using a discontinuous 0 and 1 switching system. Reality is based on unswitched, continuous sinusoids. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy says, “Indeed, according to his own testimony in the New Essays, Leibniz ‘really believe[s] that languages are the best mirror of the human mind, and that a precise analysis of the signification of words would tell us more than anything else about the operations of the understanding’.” Language is the basis of the intelligibility of existence. Reality must be made of language in order to be intelligible. It is in fact made of the ur language, ontological mathematics. Language not only mirrors the mind, language is the mind. Non-language, or, rather, the semantic, experiential aspect of language, is
the basis of the sensibility of existence. If reality is not made of syntactic language, it cannot be intelligible. Look at science, which believes that reality is made of non-language (matter). Matter is inherently unintelligible. It’s sensible. That’s why empiricist scientists advocate it. They’re not in the business of supporting rational and logical, ontological, intelligible languages in preference to sensible “stuff”. To confer intelligibility on “matter” in some tangential way, science has to invoke a language, mathematics, but it regards this language as an unreal, manmade abstraction. Logically, this means that science believes that reality is intrinsically unintelligible, but can nevertheless be understood via unreal abstraction. Don’t expect any scientist to explain this. They have no clue what they’re talking about and deliberately reject philosophy so that they never have to be pinned down and actually attempt any coherent explanation of their bizarre stance. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy says, “This view of Leibniz’s led him to formulate a plan for a ‘universal language,’ an artificial language composed of symbols, which would stand for concepts or ideas, and logical rules for their valid manipulation.” The real universal language is ontological mathematics, made of sinusoidal waves, which are basis thoughts. Everything Leibniz wanted to do is achieved via ontological mathematics. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy says, “Leibniz believed that such a language would perfectly mirror the processes of intelligible human reasoning. It is this plan that has led some to believe that Leibniz came close to anticipating artificial intelligence. At any rate, Leibniz’s writings about this project (which, it should be noted, he never got the chance to actualize) reveal significant insights into his understanding of the nature of human reasoning. This understanding, it turns out, is not that different from contemporary conceptions of the mind, as many of his discussions bear considerable relevance to discussions in the cognitive sciences.” True reasoning is mathematical reasoning. Human “reasoning” is conducted via manmade languages, which do not reflect proper, coherent, complete and consistent reasoning. We can work out how reality operates via knowledge of reality’s own language. Any artificial, manmade language will never reflect reality, but it may nevertheless produce valuable, practical results if it has a resemblance to reality’s own language. Why does computing succeed so well? Because it uses artificial
languages that have a distinct logical and mathematical form and feel to them. They’re nothing like verbal languages such as English and Spanish. Why does science work? Because it actually uses mathematics. Even though science is based on something that doesn’t exist (scientific “matter”), it uses mathematics, which of course reflects reality since reality is made of mathematics. Science believes it addresses reality because science is about matter and reality is material (sensible). In fact, science addresses reality only insofar as science uses mathematics (an intelligible subject). In other words, science totally misunderstands why it is successful. It stumbled upon the right answer (mathematics) by accident, and still doesn’t understand mathematics and what is. Before science used mathematics, it was useless, and if it got rid of mathematics, it would again be useless. No scientist grasps this. Scientists can’t see that mathematics, not science, is the organ grinder. Science is just the dancing monkey, deluding itself that it’s the main event. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy says, “According to Leibniz, natural language, despite its powerful resources for communication, often makes reasoning obscure since it is an imperfect mirror of intelligible thoughts. As a result, it is often difficult to reason with the apparatus of natural language, ‘since it is full of innumerable equivocations’.” Manmade languages such as English are hopeless in relation to accurate reasoning. Even computing languages don’t allow for entirely logical reasoning. Only reality’s own language – ontological mathematics – allows us to understand the actual operations of reality. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy says, “Perhaps this is because of his view that the terms of natural language stand for complex, or derivative, concepts – concepts which are composed of, and reducible to, simpler concepts.” All complex concepts can, by Occam’s Razor, be reduced to simpler concepts, in fact to the simplest possible concepts (the supreme expression of Occam’s Razor). The simplest possible concepts are sinusoidal waves, which are basis thoughts and the very foundation of reality. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy says, “With this ‘combinatorial’ view of concepts in hand, Leibniz notices ‘that all human ideas can be resolved into a few as their primitives’. We could then assign symbols, or ‘characters,’ to these primitive concepts from which we could form characters for derivative concepts by means of combinations of the symbols. As a result, Leibniz tells us, ‘it would be possible to find correct
definitions and values and, hence, also the properties which are demonstrably implied in the definitions’. The totality of these symbols would form a ‘universal characteristic,’ an ideal language in which all human concepts would be perfectly represented, and their constitutive nature perfectly transparent.” The trouble with this view is that it implies that there are core human ideas – primitives – that are valid. There are no such ideas. The core human ideas concerning reality – since they do not reflect mathematics and mathematics is reality – are false. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy says, “Now it is true that Leibniz eventually came to doubt ‘whether any concept of this [primitive] kind appears distinctly to men, namely, in such a way that they know they have it’.” Exactly! The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy says, “But it is also clear that he did not see this skepticism concerning our ability to reach the primitive concepts as much of a barrier to the project of a universal language. He writes in The Art of Discovery (1685) that ‘there are certain primitive terms which can be posited, if not absolutely, at least relatively to us’. The suggestion seems to be that even if we cannot provide a catalog of absolutely primitive concepts, we can nevertheless construct a characteristic based on concepts which cannot be further resolved by humans.” This kind of process would result only in systemic errors (“irrefutable errors”, as Nietzsche would have it). You would invent a fantasy version of reality, which is exactly what religion, philosophy and science have all delivered. Scientists actually believe that science is true. It isn’t. Leibniz’s system, if it had not proved reducible to the simplest possible, Occam’s Razor solution, would have been just as false. The truth can be constructed only from the simplest primitives, and these are sinusoids. (Science used to posit material atoms; many scientists now look to things like “strings”.) The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy says, “In addition to the resolution of concepts, and their symbolic assignments, Leibniz envisages the formulation of logical rules for the universal characteristic. He claims that ‘it is plain that men make use in reasoning of several axioms which are not yet quite certain’. Yet with the explicit formulation of these rules for the logical manipulation of the symbols – rules which humans use in reasoning – we would be in possession of a universal language which would mirror the
relations between the concepts used in human reasoning.” What Leibniz imagined was some kind of manmade language reduced to its most logical possible basis. Imagine an incredibly stripped-down version of English. George Orwell proposed “Newspeak”, a language of simplified grammar and restricted vocabulary designed to limit a person’s ability to think, especially to think of anything subversive. Leibniz’s version of Newspeak would be a language of simple concepts (primitives) being operated on by the most precise logical grammar that a rational genius such as Leibniz could contrive. His Newspeak would be applicable to any sentence written in a language such as English and would be able to show where it had logically erred, or, alternatively, to confirm its validity. But this would not have brought us closer to reality since reality is not made of any manmade language. It’s made of mathematics. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy says, “Indeed, the universal characteristic was intended by Leibniz as an instrument for the effective calculation of truths. Like formal logic systems, it would be a language capable of representing valid reasoning patterns by means of the use of symbols. Unlike formal logic systems, however, the universal language would also express the content of human reasoning in addition to its formal structure. In Leibniz’s mind, ‘this language will be the greatest instrument of reason,’ for ‘when there are disputes among persons, we can simply say: Let us calculate, without further ado, and see who is right’.” Sadly, this whole project was misconceived. It amounts to mixing and matching incompatible systems. You could not treat the English language, for example, in terms of mathematics and logic since the English language is nothing like mathematics and logic. It has a wholly different basis and serves an entirely different purpose. It’s a category error to treat illogical languages using logical languages. It’s a category error to treat a manmade language in terms of reality’s own language, and vice versa. There’s no way to use human reasoning, in terms of manmade languages and concepts, to get to the truth. Religion, spirituality, philosophy and science all show how impossible this is. Only ontological mathematics is true. Only ontological mathematics tells us about reality. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy says, “Judging from Leibniz’s plans for a universal language, it is clear that Leibniz had a specific view about the nature of human cognitive processes, particularly about the nature of human reasoning. According to this view, cognition is essentially
symbolic: it takes place in a system of representations which possesses language-like structure. Indeed, it was Leibniz’s view that ‘all human reasoning uses certain signs or characters,’ and ‘if there were no characters, we could neither think of anything distinctly nor reason about it’.” Leibniz understood the critical importance of language to human thinking and reasoning. Unfortunately, he thought there was some hyper-logical manmade language that could correct all human thinking, when in fact the only language that can actually ever be correct is ontological mathematics, reality’s own language. In his secret, unpublished writings, Leibniz was more and more aware of such considerations. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy says, “Add to this conception Leibniz’s view that human cognitive processes follow determinable axioms of logic, and the picture that emerges is one according to which the mind operates, at least when it comes to intelligible reasoning, by following implicit algorithmic procedures. Regardless of whether or not Leibniz should be seen as the grandfather of artificial intelligence, he did conceive of human cognition in essentially computational terms. In fact, as early as 1666, remarking favorably on Hobbes’ writings, Leibniz wrote: ‘Thomas Hobbes, everywhere a profound examiner of principles, rightly stated that everything done by our mind is a computation’.” Leibniz took what might be called a computer-language approach to the problem of language and of rectifying its errors. Much as he had a highly mathematical conception of reality, and was of course a towering mathematical genius, he didn’t, publicly at least, draw the essential conclusion that manmade language essentially falsifies reality (because it’s not reality’s own language), while only reality’s own language can capture reality’s essential truths. If everything done by the human mind “is a computation” – which indeed it is – then that automatically means that the mind is a mathematical calculator. It’s made of math, and does math. It doesn’t do anything else. We simply delude ourselves that it does something else because we see the empirical appearance of mathematics, and not its rational syntax. No one would be in any doubt about the mathematical nature of reality if they could see the structure, the syntax, of reality. But that’s exactly what they never see. They’re stuck with the other side of the coin: semantics rather than syntax. They see phenomena and never noumena. Leibniz imagined that some sort of logically generalized language could show humans where their reasoning had gone astray. It never can. For one
thing, very few humans are rational, for another, they don’t like reason and don’t accept it, and for a third thing, manmade languages were not constructed with reason and logic in mind. They serve the purpose of facilitating human communication and expressing feelings and hopes, not pursuing the rational and logical truth. Only mathematics can capture reality, but of course it’s not going to capture it in the invented terms of emotionalists, irrationalists, mystics, sensing types, believers, speculators, and so on. Leibniz’s hypothetical language system would have worked if it had been able to map to reality, but it never could. Non-mathematics cannot map to mathematics. Wittgenstein believed that manmade language could picture reality. Wikipedia says, “Picture theory of language states that statements are meaningful if they can be defined or pictured in the real world. ... The picture theory of language is considered a correspondence theory of truth.” Reality is about mathematical coherence, not about the pictorial correspondence of a language (such as English) to a non-language (such as matter).
INTRUSIVE THOUGHTS “An intrusive thought is an unwelcome, involuntary thought, image, or unpleasant idea that may become an obsession, is upsetting or distressing, and can feel difficult to manage or eliminate. ... Intrusive thoughts, urges, and images are of inappropriate things at inappropriate times, and generally have aggressive, sexual, or blasphemous themes.” – Wikipedia thoughts are a kind of silent Tourette’s syndrome. Where the I ntrusive Tourette’s sufferer involuntarily vocalizes obscenities which they did not want to think, the intrusive thoughts sufferer involuntarily thinks disturbing thoughts which they did not want to think. In each case, the unconscious mind is pushing through into consciousness. The production mind is not being adequately controlled by consciousness. If intrusive thoughts broke out into reality, as the obscenities of Tourette’s sufferers do, the world would collapse. Intrusive thoughts would turn into irrevocable physical crimes of the most horrific kind. Was Abraham’s flirtation with murdering his son an intrusive thought that he started to carry out for real?
Brain Waves hat are brain waves? They are oscillating electrical voltages in the brain. There are five main brain waves patterns: Delta (sleep), Theta (deep relaxation), Alpha (light relaxation), Beta (normal consciousness), and Gamma (deep concentration). A major science of the future will be concerned with relating the different
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brain wave patterns to the quantum brain. The production mind is dominant at low frequencies (where consciousness becomes passive) and the consumption mind is dominant at high frequencies (where consciousness becomes active). The transition from bicameralism to consciousness was accompanied by a transition from lowfrequency brain waves to high-frequency brain waves. It would seem that the invention of writing, and hence the appearance of complex language in the world, required the brain to operate at higher frequencies (beta waves) during waking hours to support this activity. (More brain energy was needed.) In terms of the triune brain, the brain stem is probably associated with the lowest frequency brainwaves (delta and theta), the limbic system with alpha waves, and the neocortex with beta waves. Fully establishing the relationship between brain waves and sinusoidal waves is key in understanding both the conscious and unconscious operations of the brain.
THE JEWS “The island of Thera was the site of one of the largest volcanic eruptions in recorded history: the Minoan eruption (sometimes called the Thera eruption), which occurred about 3,600 years ago at the height of the Minoan civilization. The eruption left a large caldera surrounded by volcanic ash deposits hundreds of metres deep. It may have led indirectly to the collapse of the Minoan civilization on the island of Crete, 110 km to the south, through a gigantic tsunami. Another popular theory holds that the Thera eruption is the source of the legend of Atlantis.” – Wikipedia ccording to Julian Jaynes, the Jews were refugees fleeing from the chaos caused by the eruption of Thera. Jaynes wrote, “The word for refugees in Akkad, the ancient language of Babylon, is the word khabiru, and this becomes our word Hebrew. The story of the Hebrews, or really one branch of the Hebrews, is told in what we call the Hebrew Testament or the Old Testament.” The Jews, with their countless prophets and messiahs, were probably the most bicameral people of them all. Jaynes wrote, “I suspect that such prophets as Amos were those left-over bicameral or semi-bicameral persons in the conscious era who heard and could relay the voice of Yahweh with convincing authenticity, and who were therefore highly prized in their societies as reaching back to the secure authoritarian ways of the lost bicameral kingdom.” The whole of Abrahamism is an attempt to restore the “lost kingdom”. It’s all about the “Word”, the voice of God. Abraham thought he heard a voice ordering him to murder his son; Moses thought he heard a voice coming from a burning bush; Jesus Christ thought he heard the voice of his
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“father” (God!). At Pentecost, the gathered disciples of Jesus Christ were “filled with the Holy Spirit, and began to speak in other tongues as the Spirit gave them utterance”. (Was this “speaking in tongues” another version of Tourette’s syndrome: unconscious vocalizations generated by the production mind?) Paul of Tarsus thought he heard the voice of God on the road to Damascus; Mohammed thought he heard the Angel Gabriel talking to him. In more modern times, Joan of Arc was convinced she heard providential voices. The English had her burned as a witch. We see Abrahamists yearning for the “voice” when they listen in rapture to Donald Trump, their new messiah. They are permanently in search of Godsubstitutes. They always need to have faith in something. They crave something to direct them. They are sheep, looking for their shepherd. Jaynes talked about conscious people changing behavior from within, using internal processes, “in contrast to Mosaic law that shaped behavior from without.” Abrahamists seem incapable of internal sovereignty. They always need external powers to direct them.
The Bicameral Mind ulian Jaynes said that Wernicke’s area in the right temporal lobe might store admonitory information, “processing it in such a way that it produced answers to problems and decisions (which is what the bicameral mind is).” So, by this view, the content that the voice of the god relied on was kept in the right hemisphere and, when high stress arose, the hallucinated voice manifested itself and produced decisions and gave answers to problems to the “man” who heard the voice. Jaynes characterized the left hemisphere as “the hemisphere that speaks, obeys, and manages behavior”. In consciousness, it’s the left hemisphere that issues commands, and the right hemisphere that obeys. Jaynes said, “…the right hemisphere is the hemisphere which processes information in a synthetic manner. It is now well known from many studies that the right hemisphere is far superior to the left in fitting together block designs, parts of faces, or musical chords. The chief function of the admonitory gods was indeed that of fitting people and functions into these societies.”
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The right hemisphere is holistic, synthetic, integrationist, and collectivist. The left hemisphere is parts-based, analytic, disintegrationist and individualist. Right-wing politics emphasizes, ironically, the separationist left hemisphere, while left-wing politics, equally ironically, emphasizes the holistic right hemisphere. It’s always about the individual versus the collective. The left hemisphere is about the individual; the right hemisphere about the collective.
IMAGINARY FRIENDS “…it is possible to suggest that a part of our innate bicameral heritage is the modern phenomenon of the ‘imaginary’ playmate. According to my own research as well as other data, it occurs in at least one-third of modern children between the ages of 2 and 5 years, and is believed now to involve very real verbal hallucinations.” – Julian Jaynes we think of a human baby as an animal (an unconscious, instinctual I fcreature, devoid of language) and an adult human as a conscious being (rendered conscious via the social acquisition of language) then it is highly plausible that a toddler, as it is first learning language, transitions from animal to bicameral being (hearing voices) to conscious being (hearing its own inner voice). The imaginary friends that many children experience is exactly what you would expect, given Jaynes’s bicameral hypothesis. No scientist has ever advanced a hypothesis to account for imaginary friends. There is no possible scientific procedure that could ever result in the hypothesis that many children will encounter this phenomenon. As the child acquires more sophisticated language skills, the imaginary friend should vanish, and this is exactly what happens in almost all instances. Jaynes wrote, “In the rare cases where the imaginary playmate lasts beyond the juvenile period, it too grows up with the child and begins telling him or her what to do in times of stress. It is therefore possible that this is how the personal god started in bicameral times, the imaginary playmate growing up with the person in a society of expectancies that constantly encouraged the child to hear voices and to continue to do so. This, then, is the bicameral mind.” This is fascinating, and quite persuasive. It suggests that ancient humanity was childlike, having childlike imaginary friends even in
adulthood, except these friends were, in adulthood, interpreted as tribal chiefs, kings, prophets, ancestors, and gods. The closest beings in our world to bicameral humans are children, who are well-known to have much greater paranormal abilities than adults, much greater imagination, much more vivid fantasies, and much more reverence for authority (especially parents and teachers). Who better to be religious, spiritual, superstitious, and mystical, in exactly the manner ancient humanity was? Modern humanity, by becoming conscious, lost much of its religious and spiritual impetus, which is why you will find atheists, materialists, nihilists, and skeptics in today’s world. Such people simply did not exist in the ancient world. If we, as adults, could recover our childlike ways, we could resurrect many of the great paranormal powers we had access to as children (even if many of us were prevented from using them because of cultural taboos and parental disapproval). Jaynes wrote, “[All bicameral theocracies] were based on strict and stable hierarchies … At least some of such civilizations could be compared to nests of social insects, where instead of the social control being by pheromones from a queen insect, it was by hallucinatory directions from an idol. Everything went like clockwork providing there was no real catastrophe or problem.” Children and adolescents are highly hierarchical. Firstly, they treat their parents as near gods, then their teachers, then their peers, and even some of their friends. Look at how high schools split into a popularity and status hierarchy. Just think of Mean Girls, Heathers, and countless other highschool movies depicting the star kids versus the also-rans, the jocks versus the nerds, the queen bees versus the worker bees. Jaynes’s bicameralism amounts to a depiction of humans as similar to bee or ant colonies, with the king or chief fulfilling the role of queen of the colony, and communicating telepathically with the colony, via a hallucinatory mechanism, as opposed to pheromones. Pheromones might be considered chemical telepathy: they give vital instructions from afar, insofar as a pheromone trail can be laid that others will then discover and follow, thus directing their behavior in the absence of another of their kind. Pheromones can be regarded as external hormones for collective rather
than individual use. Wikipedia says, “A pheromone (from Ancient Greek phero ‘to bear’ and hormone) is a secreted or excreted chemical factor that triggers a social response in members of the same species. Pheromones are chemicals capable of acting like hormones outside the body of the secreting individual, to impact the behavior of the receiving individuals. There are alarm pheromones, food trail pheromones, sex pheromones, and many others that affect behavior or physiology. … Their use among insects has been particularly well documented.” In the bicameral case, a collective hallucinated voice directed the colony (instead of a system of pheromones). If the mind is not located inside the body then there is nothing to prevent one person from manifesting their mind, so to speak, in the head of another person, prompting a vision of the first person. Since a monadic mind doesn’t die, this could continue to occur after bodily death. Julian Jaynes himself did not believe in any real communication between minds. Hallucination allows it to seem as if another person is communicating with you, while everything is in fact generated in your own mind, yet Jaynes’s own ideas concerning how the mind can manifest anywhere do not in fact preclude authentic inter-mind communication, even post mortem. Jaynes’s idea of many individuals in a tribe hallucinating the same voice (that of the tribal leader) via purely personal, internal mechanisms does not hold up well to serious scrutiny. Why would the voice not simply say whatever the person wanted to hear? It would say one thing to one person and something completely different and contradictory to another person. People would rapidly lose all confidence in such a voice. The voice would have to be coordinated in some way, meaning that everyone in the tribe agreed with what the voice was reported by each individual to have said. How is objective coordination possible without an objective communication process involving some kind of telepathy? Think of a Ouija board. Several people can use such a board and agree on a common outcome. How is this possible without some form of unspoken coordination between the participants? Assuming that their own unconscious minds dictate whatever message comes out of the Ouija board, how do they agree on what the message will be? Their unconscious minds must collaborate in some way. Even if we assume that one participant takes the physical lead and the others follow, why do none of the others have no sense that they were being pushed or pulled by the “leader”? Even that is an
astonishing phenomenon on its own. Was bicameralism a version of Ouija? Everyone in the group fell, perhaps, into line behind one dominant person’s interpretation of what the hallucinated voice said (the shaman or high priest, most likely).
The Breakdown of Bicameralism ulian Jaynes said, “But such a system [bicameralism] is obviously precarious. … given a time of social and political instability, bicamerality can break down like a house of cards. Some civilizations broke down frequently, as among the Mayans … A temple complex and city would be built up, last a few centuries, and then be completely abandoned, presumably because as the society became more and more populous, the voices did not agree anymore. Then after a few centuries as tribal bands, they would somehow get together again and another temple complex would be built up. This is why we find so many of these complexes that show evidence of their people suddenly leaving them. In Egypt we find that the bicameral mind broke down between what is called the Old Kingdom and the Middle Kingdom, and then again between the Middle and the New Kingdom. The evidence for these dark, chaotic periods is in the hieroglyphic writings after they occurred.” The total abandonment of great cities by the Mayans remains a great mystery of history. The most likely explanation is that resources became depleted by climate change, drought, or famine, or a disease came. Yet Jaynes’s hypothesis is also possible. A highly religious, superstitious people might leave a place if they felt it was cursed, or forsaken by the gods. The coming of a new god might require a mass migration to a new home, a promised land. Bickering gods – caused by bicameral breakdown, with the voices saying drastically different things, leading to loss of confidence in the gods – could also undermine a society, although a civil war would be more likely than a mass exodus. If such a people fled a city, they would simply take their bicameral problems with them to the next place. Disappearance of resources sounds much more reasonable. That’s why everyone would have to leave, or face starvation and death. An exhausted water supply would do it too. And plague. Jaynes wrote, “But in Mesopotamia, which was the most stable
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civilization in the world, there does not seem to have been a breakdown until around 1400 B.C. In the graphics of the period, gods are no longer depicted. In some instances kings beg in front of empty gods’ thrones – nothing like that had ever occurred before. … There is an epic called the Epic of TikultiNinurta where for the first time in history, gods are spoken of as forsaking human beings. The greatest literature of the period, which is possibly the origin of the Book of Job, is the Ludlul Bel Nemequi, the first readable lines of which translate as: My god has forsaken me and disappeared, my goddess has failed me and keeps at a distance, the good angel who walked beside me has departed.” Imagine a child who has had an imaginary friend for years, then suddenly never hears from it again. The child might write sad stories about the departure of their best friend. They might become depressed. They might keep searching for the friend, desperate to be reunited. Bicamerals migrating to consciousness felt the same way about their gods. Jaynes wrote, “There are various huge catastrophes such as the Thera eruption, which is well known and may be the origin of Plato’s myth of Atlantis. The ensuing tsunami crushed all the bicameral kingdoms around that part of the Mediterranean. Entire nations were destroyed or dislodged, resulting in large migrations of people invading other countries, looking for ‘promised lands,’ a place to settle down with their gods again and start another bicameral civilization. One of the reasons that we still have problems in this area of the world, I think, goes right back to this chaotic time.” The “Holy Land” remains the most bicameral place on earth. Jerusalem is Ground Zero of the bicameral infection of today’s world. Three insane religions – Judaism, Christianity and Islam – remain in thrall to bicameralism. Humanity would take a huge leap forward if bicameral Abrahamism perished, if Jerusalem was leveled and its earth salted. It should become an accursed place. Well, it already is. Jaynes wrote, “And in this breakdown, various things started to happen, including I think the beginning of consciousness. The immediate results of this loss of hallucinated voices giving directions are several and new in world history. The idea of heaven as where the gods have gone; the idea of genii or angels as messengers between heaven and earth; the idea of evil gods such as demons – all are new phenomena. By 1000 B.C., people in Babylon were walking around draped with amulets and charms, which they wore to protect themselves from a huge variety of demons.”
The bicameral human was a religious human. When bicameralism broke down, the gods departed. The human then became a searcher for the lost gods. The search goes on. Billions of humans believe the gods will return. The Second Coming will be the return of the Christian lost voice! Bicameralism: The Sequel. Forward to the past rather than back to the future.
THE WRITING IS ON THE WALL “Another cause [of the breakdown of bicameralism] is writing itself, because once something is written you can turn away from it and it has no more power over you, in contrast to an auditory hallucination, which you cannot shut out. Writing, particularly as used extensively in Hammurabi’s hegemony, weakened the power of the auditory directions.” – Julian Jaynes riting is a drastically different process from speaking. Once upon a time, more or less everyone could speak, but only a few people could write. Writing is much more complicated than speaking. Children lose their imaginary friends when they learn to write. Writing shuts down certain speech circuitry in the brain. It’s as if there is competition between two rival circuits and the writing circuit rapidly becomes dominant, suppressing parts of the rival speech circuit, and ending imaginary voices. Even today, many people struggle to become fluent writers. Writing is not their thing. Social media is dominated by videos, music, spoken speech, and very short written content. Long pieces of writing on social media are greeted with TLDR – Too Long; Didn’t Read – which shows how much contempt many people have for writing, and how resistant they are to it. You never find anyone who consumes porn writing TLDW – Too Long; Didn’t Watch.
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The Dawn of Consciousness
ccording to Julian Jaynes, consciousness arose only some three thousand years ago. Jaynes wrote, “…consciousness followed the bicameral mind. I have placed the date somewhere between 1400 B.C. and 600 B.C. This is a long period and that date may have to be adjusted. But I believe this to be a good approximation.” Consciousness was a new way of decision-making. In bicameral times, the “god” made the decisions, using Archetypes. Archetypes are default behaviors that work reasonably well in most situations. The bicameral decision-maker was the production mind (the unconscious). The conscious decision-maker is the consumption mind, not the production mind. According to Jaynes, there was a period between bicameralism and consciousness when a bizarre type of decision-making took place: divination. Through divination, priests tried to work out what the lost gods would have said if they were still around. Jaynes wrote, “Throwing of lots, the simplest kind; putting oil on water and reading its patterns; dice; the movements of smoke; a priest whispering a prayer into a sacrificial animal, sacrificing it, and then looking at its internal organs to find out what the god intends. All of these were extensively and officially practiced. And then the method of divination that is still around, astrology. It is remarkable to go back and read the cuneiform letters of kings to their astrologers and diviners of around 1000 B.C. These cruel Assyrian tyrants, who are depicted in their bas-reliefs as grappling with lions and engaging in fierce lion hunts, are, in their letters, meek and frightened people. They don’t know what to do. Astrologers tell them, ‘You cannot move out of your house for five days’; ‘You must not eat this’; ‘You should not wear clothes today’ – extraordinary strictures that official diviners would interpret as what the gods meant. It is interesting to note that not only has astrology lasted, but it is being followed by more people at present than ever before.” Decision-making remains incredibly difficult for people. Most people are staggeringly submissive and look to dominants or celebrities to tell them what to do. They literally buy things because celebrities tell them to in advertisements. They have simply relocated the bicameral voice from inside their head to powerful and influential people in the world around them. They are basically still bicameral. Consciousness – real consciousness, real personal agency – is still to take hold. Only in a bicameral society would so many people act against their own interests, as they do so eagerly in predatory capitalist societies. Only in
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fundamentally bicameral societies could you end up with people such as Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk and Donald Trump.
Solon: The First Person? “Solon (630 – 560 BC) was an Athenian statesman, lawmaker and poet. He is remembered particularly for his efforts to legislate against political, economic and moral decline in archaic Athens. His reforms failed in the short term, yet he is often credited with having laid the foundations for Athenian democracy.” – Wikipedia ulian Jaynes wrote, “Solon is the first person who seems like us, who talks about the mind in the same way we might. He is the person who said ‘Know thyself,’ although sometimes that’s given to the Delphic Oracle. How can you know yourself unless you have an analog ‘I’ narratizing in a mind-space and reminiscing or having episodic memory about what you have been doing and who you are?” Were the Greeks the first conscious people? They can make a better case than anyone else. Just look at their astonishing achievements and innovations. When the Romans became the dominant regional power, they adopted Greek culture, such was its magnificence and glory. The Romans were the new conscious people and the Roman empire an empire of consciousness (well, actually, much of Roman life was mired in divination and was plagued by superstition). Yet Rome was conquered – by Middle Eastern bicameralism (Christianity!). Later, much of the world was conquered by Islamic bicameralism.
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Time
“Spatialized time is something that I have not dwelt upon, but I suggest it is one of the hallmarks of consciousness. We cannot think consciously of time apart from making a space out of it.” – Julian Jaynes ime is spatialized: it’s imaginary space, orthogonal to real space. Science is wholly unable to specify the ontology of time. That’s because time concerns imaginary numbers. Science, as an empiricist undertaking, denies the reality of imaginary and complex numbers.
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The Origin of Religion “Apart from this idea [of bicameralism], there is a problem of explaining the origin of gods, the origin of religious practices in the back corridors of time that is so apparent with a psychological study of history. The bicameral mind offers a possibility to tie it all together and to provide a rationale for it.” – Julian Jaynes he origin of religion is a much-neglected topic. Atheists often say things like, “Everyone is born an atheist” or “Babies have no religion”. Is this true? One could just as easily say. “No one is born an atheist” or “There are no atheist babies.” Just look at human history! Atheists want to claim that atheism is the default, but in fact religion is the default. Human history is utterly dominated by religion. Even in the 21st century there are relatively few atheists, so plainly atheists are abnormal and an aberration. Babies are manifestly born with a predisposition to religion and that’s precisely why humanity became and remains religious. Humanity is certainly not born with a predisposition to atheism. If it were, humanity would have an unbroken history based on atheism, and we
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would be living in an atheist world with only a tiny number of religious weirdos, resistant to atheism. In fact, it’s the atheists who are the weirdos, for being resistant to religion. Do these people suffer from some psychological or genetic defect? Many of them deny the existence of free will and regard themselves as nothing but biological robots, exactly as Descartes once described animals. Atheists actively want to think of themselves as zombielike beings, without real life or mind. They are, they say, mere aggregations of lifeless, mindless atoms, and life and mind are pointless illusions, pointless epiphenomena, or pointless emergent properties. There is something in most humans that makes them crave religion. Bicameralism is an excellent hypothesis for why early man was so religious. What was more likely to make us religious than hearing numinous, authoritative voices in our own heads? But shouldn’t all humans have become atheists when the voices departed? According to Jaynes, humans were bereft after the loss of the divine voices that told them what to do. They tried to get the voices back by prayer, via oracles and prophets, and so on, or they used divination as a means to communicate with the lost powers. Or they turned to astrology to predict the future. Even when humans became fully conscious in the modern sense, they quickly organized themselves in hierarchical groups, where the head of the hierarchy was always a god-substitute. Consider all the kings, prophets, high priests, shamans, gurus, emperors, generals, dictators, fuehrers, demagogues, prime ministers, presidents, chancellors, popes, messiahs, tycoons, moguls, and celebrities. There is another critical factor in play in relation to religion, namely that of the “alpha”. Wikipedia says, “In studies of social animals, the highestranking individual is sometimes designated as the alpha. ... Other animals in the same social group may exhibit deference or other species-specific subordinate behavior towards the alpha or alphas. Alpha animals usually gain preferential access to food and other desirable items or activities, though the extent of this varies widely between species. Male or female alphas may gain preferential access to sex or mates…” All societies automatically start organizing themselves around alpha dominants. If you look at someone such as the American president Joe Biden, he’s clearly not an alpha. (It’s extremely rare for anyone who supports democracy to be an alpha.) However, he has made use of the alpha
institutions of the USA – those concerned with political power – to rise to the top of the political tree. Betas who can exploit alpha institutions can take the roles that would otherwise rightfully belong to authentic alphas. Almost no alphas go into politics these days because democracy has rendered politics so sterile, trivial and stupid. Biden is a phony alpha. He has no real power. All true power in America is wielded by Big Business (the real American alpha system), and politics is just the sideshow to keep the masses occupied. Religion is what you get when people belong to a society organized around alphas. God is just the cosmic alpha, and ordinary people can completely understand a universe organized with the ultimate alpha at its center. They are drawn to all alpha-substitutes, all people claiming to be acting on behalf of, or with the approval of, the cosmic alpha. Humans’ brains are hardwired to identify and worship alphas. The human is, after all, the “fifth ape”. That’s why we have religion, a system of submissives worshiping dominants who tell them what to do.
Talking to Yourself “The simplest idea, obvious I think to anyone, would involve the two cerebral hemispheres. Perhaps in ancient peoples – to put it in a popular fashion – the right hemisphere was ‘talking’ to the left, and this was the bicameral mind.” – Julian Jaynes lthough the idea of the right hemisphere talking to the left hemisphere seems logical and attractive, it cannot be correct. It’s actually the production mind that does all the talking and the consumption mind that does all the listening. The production mind (the unconscious) is located across the entire brain, and so is the consumption mind (the entity that evolved consciousness). You could not remove the unconscious, or consciousness for that matter, by removing either of a person’s brain hemispheres. The left hemisphere is the one most concerned with locality (with the
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spacetime world of matter, with parts), while the right hemisphere is the one most concerned with non-locality (with the non-spacetime world of mind, with holism). Jaynes wrote, “Could it be that the reason that speech and language function are usually just in the areas of the left hemisphere in today’s people was because the corresponding areas of the right hemisphere once had another function?” Actually, the language areas are in the left hemisphere in order to be able to map to spacetime, which is processed by the left hemisphere. What is language? It’s a set of universals established in response to a world of particulars to provide an analogue of that world, a conceptual version of a perceptual world. It’s a conceptual summary of that world that we can take with us wherever we go, regardless of the actual presence of the particulars of the world. It’s the vast world of particulars described in a few thousand words and a handful of core concepts. Manmade language had to be aware of the sensory world since that’s where it got its core data from, but it was then able to go far beyond it and create concepts with no sensory counterparts (such as “God”). The corresponding areas of the right hemisphere, we can speculate, respond to reality’s own language, that of mathematics. The left hemisphere in these terms would be verbal, and the right hemisphere numerical. If any hallucinated voice were to exist, it would have to use the language circuit in the left hemisphere of the brain, because how else would it get access to language in order to speak? It’s true that experiments show that the right hemisphere can understand language, but it can’t articulate language. Kirsten I. Taylor and Marianne Regard wrote, “Evidence for a right hemispheric involvement in language processing, in particular at the level of word meaning, has emerged within the last half century. Hemispheric functional specializations are dynamic; right hemispheric language participation significantly increases under certain conditions, such as during an epileptic seizure and during recovery from stroke. ... Perhaps the most striking gross morphological characteristic of the human brain is that there are two seemingly symmetrical cerebral hemispheres. However, the functions attributed to each half of the brain are very distinct. One major question in neuroscience is how each hemisphere contributes to language processing. A variety of methods have been employed to answer this question: experimentation with ‘callosotomy’ patients whose corpus callosum had been
resected to prevent the spread of epileptic seizures from one hemisphere to the other allowed researchers to test each hemisphere in isolation; investigators have studied patients with brain damage restricted to one hemisphere to determine which language functions are impaired and which spared by the lesion and thus to deduce which language functions the lesioned region was responsible for; transient, local dysfunctions induced by epileptic seizures illustrated the effects of temporary ‘lesions’; and, finally, experimenters have conducted behavioral and functional imaging experiments with healthy individuals. The findings from these approaches provide converging evidence that each hemisphere plays a critical and, importantly, complementary role in language processing. ... An association between the left cerebral hemisphere and language has been recognized since antiquity. ... The initial results from callosotomy patients seemed to confirm the neurological axiom of a language-incompetent right hemisphere: verbal information presented to the isolated right hemispheres could not be read aloud and language questions could not be verbally answered. However, later experimentation revealed that these findings merely reflected the right hemisphere’s lack of naming (articulatory) ability. Indeed, when nonverbal responses were required, a different picture emerged: the patients with disconnected right hemispheres demonstrated written and auditory word comprehension by, for example, selecting with their left hand the appropriate object from among an array of objects.” Whatever the language skills of the right hemisphere, it seems likely that all spoken language is controlled by the left hemisphere, which would falsify Jaynes’s hemispheric claims. His bicameral hypothesis itself isn’t refuted. The hallucinated voice would still occur, but in the same hemisphere as the normal voice, and by the same means (via the production mind).
Auditory Hallucinations ulian Jaynes wrote, “What is an auditory hallucination? Why is it ubiquitous? Why present in civilizations all over the world?” It’s not only auditory hallucinations that are extraordinary, it’s also the inner voice most of us hear, which we hear as a voice, but not as any normal voice. It has a very distinct quality. It’s a silent voice (which is to say mental), not a physical voice.
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How can a voice be “silent” and yet be heard? Yet it is. And the hearing is done without ears! We hear the silent voice with absent ears. And what about the people who have no inner voice? Where do they stand with regard to auditory hallucinations? Inner voices are fascinating and need to be much more widely studied.
Human Nature Jaynes asserted that consciousness originates in language. He said J ulian that this “can be empirically studied in the learning of consciousness in children, as well as in the study of changes of consciousness in recent history.” So, never forget, consciousness is not something we were born with. It’s something we learn. It’s taught to us. It’s an add-on, one that defines us! Consciousness is a learned behavior. Jaynes asserted that the precursor of consciousness was the bicameral mind. He said that bicameralism “can be studied directly in ancient texts and indirectly in modern schizophrenia.” Jaynes asserted that the neurological model for the bicameral mind is related to the two hemispheres. He said, “What I have tried to present to you is a long and complicated story. It leaves us with a different view of human nature. It suggests that what civilized us all is a mentality that we no longer have, in which we heard voices called gods. Remnants of this are all around us in our own lives, in our present-day religions and needs for religion, in the hallucinations heard particularly in psychosis, in our search for certainty, in our problems of identity. The final thought I will close with is that all of this that is most human about us, this consciousness, this artificial space we imagine in other people and in ourselves, this living within our reminiscences, plans, and imaginings, all of this is indeed only 3,000 years old. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is less than 100 generations.” Think of how far humanity has come in 100 generations. Think of how far it will go in the next 100 generations. Or will it make itself extinct? Jaynes said, “For if consciousness is based on language, then it follows that it is of much more recent origin than has been heretofore supposed. Consciousness comes after language! The implications of such a position are extremely serious.”
If we perfect language, we can perfect consciousness. The perfect language is ontological mathematics, and that’s where perfect consciousness – God consciousness – is found.
The God Hemisphere “The language of men was involved with only one hemisphere in order to leave the other free for the language of the gods.” – Julian Jaynes id we once have a “god hemisphere” (right hemisphere) that spoke to us? Did it then get replaced by a “man hemisphere” (left hemisphere) whereby we spoke to ourselves (via our inner voice)? Did that plunge us into despair because we no longer received instructions from the gods and now had to give ourselves instructions? We transitioned from divine certainty and decisiveness to human uncertainty and hesitancy. Humans have proved that they do not like decision-making. They are weak and indecisive, looking to be told what to do. That’s why most people are employees working for predatory capitalist employers. It’s the employers who get rich, never the people who do the actual work. Jaynes wrote, “The bicameral mind with its controlling gods was evolved as a final stage of the evolution of language. And in this development lies the origin of civilization.” In fact, written language was the final stage of the evolution of manmade language, and it killed off bicameralism.
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Language: An Organ of Perception “All of these concrete metaphors increase enormously our powers of perception of the world about us and our
understanding of it, and literally create new objects. Indeed, language is an organ of perception, not simply a means of communication.” – Julian Jaynes describe language as “an organ of perception” is a breathtaking insight. T oLanguage creates a system where instead of perceiving the external world, we perceive our analog of the external world, namely the world of language, the internal world. Language allows us to have internal senses to supplement our external senses. It still concerns perception … the perception of internal concepts, not external percepts! Moreover, language allows us to conceive, and add new concepts, free of the external world, to our inner world, and thus create radical new material to be internally perceived. We can also work out what the core concepts of reality are. Ontological mathematics concerns pure conception, and so does reality in itself, contrary to what Kant believed. Only a conceptual reality is a knowable reality. Jaynes wrote, “The lexicon of language, then, is a finite set of terms that by metaphor is able to stretch out over an infinite set of circumstances, even to creating new circumstances thereby.” The versatility of language unlike the versality of the world (which, for the most part, remains stubbornly the same day after day) gives the language world much more range and power. Humans rule the world because of the power of language. Animals are what they are because they do not have language. If they did, they would be our direct competitors, not our pets.
The Sensory Mash-Up synesthesia, one sense automatically triggers another. Some synesthetes I nmight hear colors, some might feel sound, some, when they hear a certain word, might immediately get a taste and texture in their mouth. One person liked a particular underground station because its name conjured the taste and texture of sausage, crispy fried egg, and toast. One person reported seeing colors and feeling textures when she heard music. Some types of music, particularly the most exquisite, could cause her intense, physical pain.
These people have unusual brain wiring! A woman, following a stroke, was no longer able to picture images in her mind. This condition is aphantasia (“without a mind’s eye”). It has been referred to as “internal blindness”. The reality of subjectivity is that each of us experiences a unique reality constructed by our brain and our sensory system. This of course prompts the question of what is real and what is illusion.
Sleep Paralysis r Guy Leschziner said, “Imagine waking up and finding you’re paralyzed. Unable to move. Dark, shadowy figures enter your room, demonic images press against your face. You open your mouth to scream but you can’t make a sound. A heavy pressure bears down on you. You feel like you’re suffocating. The more you panic, the longer it lasts. Welcome to the terrifying world of sleep paralysis. … Dreaming usually occurs in REM sleep (Rapid Eye Movement sleep) when our brains are very active, but our bodies are not. A switch in the brain paralyses almost all our muscles, to stop us hurting ourselves. But sometimes this switch is faulty, causing sleep disorders that can significantly impact daily life. Some people can experience sleep paralysis and horrific hallucinations.” Imagine a world in which everyone experienced sleep paralysis every night. It would have a profound psychological effect on the human race. They would have a drastically different psyche from people that never experienced sleep paralysis. Imagine a world in which everyone had much more powerful and vivid dreams than they experience now, and remembered them much more sharply than they do now. Such a humanity would have great difficulty disentangling dream content from real content. Imagine a world in which all humans had large amounts of hallucinogenic drugs – such as DMT – in their brains. They would have a drastically different experience from humans who had very low levels of circulating DMT. Imagine a world in which people were not paralyzed during REM dream sleep and could physically act out their dreams. That fact would have profoundly affected the human experience of reality.
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Imagine a world where humans could see in the dark and were much more alert at night than during the day. Human reality would once again be drastically different. People are all too ready to project back from today’s humanity to past humanity and regard them as much the same, but what if they were in fact entirely different? The central mistake people make is to focus on the human body, as per science, and to imagine that this has barely changed over hundreds of thousands of years, hence the “problem of consciousness” could just as easily be addressed by studying a Stone Age man as a modern person. Anyone who believes that – and 100% of scientists do – has no clue what consciousness is. A Stone Age man of 200,000 years ago would not seem conscious at all, any more than an ape would. A Stone Age man of 200,000 years ago would be more like a sophisticated ape than an early version of a modern human. That’s because the evolution that is most applicable to humans is not physical but mental. A Stone Age man could be close to 100% biologically equivalent to a modern man, and yet bear no resemblance to a modern man because their psyches were so different, and their mental evolution so primitive compared to ours. Julian Jaynes stands as a towering genius because he was the first person to plausibly describe a prior humanity with an absolutely different psyche from that of modern humanity. He was the first to suggest that humans are subjected to cultural evolution (affecting the mind), which turns out to be much more important than biological evolution, which, for human beings, may well have ended (to all intents and purposes) hundreds of thousands of years ago. This means that we have to study culture, not biology, in order to understand the modern human, and how the modern human actually became the modern human. A superior understanding of cultural evolution could totally transform the human race and create a Higher Humanity as far distant from us as we are from Stone Age humanity.
Free Speech?
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afka said, “People talk loud and long in order to say as little as possible.” Free speech is the right to talk gibberish endlessly to satisfy some imagined benefit that multitudes of people taking a long time to say
nothing is supposed to have. It has no benefit at all.
EMPIRICISM f you say, “The only way to gain valid knowledge of the world is to observe it” – which is the central clam of empiricism – you have already presupposed the world (i.e., that which you are observing). But how are you going to explain what you have presupposed? You cannot use a method based on the prior existence of the world in order to explain why the world exists in the first place. Empiricists encounter this exact problem with the Big Bang. How do they explain the existence of an observable spacetime world when it supposedly originates in an unobservable Singularity outside, and preceding, spacetime? The precise method the empiricists have chosen – observation – means that they have already ruled themselves out of explaining the Singularity, since it is by definition unobservable, yet they have staked everything on observation. To try to get out of this category error, science proposes that the universe randomly jumps into existence out of non-existence, for no reason, via no mechanism, to no purpose. This supposed random creation of existence from non-existence – a logical impossibility and a refutation of all conceivable valid conservation formulae – is itself 100% unobservable, hence completely non-empirical, hence it’s a category error for an empiricist to refer to any such thing. Some scientists realize this and so they attempt to use semantics to avoid the issue. They say things like, “There is nothing before the Big Bang since ‘before’ is a temporal term and you can’t have anything temporal existing before the beginning of time.” There are two immediate and fatal problems with this: “Before” is in fact an ordering term, not a temporal term. “Before” – in time terms – is simply one way of creating a sequential order, e.g., one o’clock comes before two o’clock. What caused the Big Bang? Cause is a “before” term in relation to order, not time. Things can be causally ordered without any involvement of time. The cause always comes before the effect. So, trying to twist “before” to suit the temporal, empiricist ideology is never going to work. Moreover, rationalists contrast the eternal and necessary order with the temporal and contingent order. If you wiped out the entire temporal and contingent order,
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i.e., the whole of science, you would not thereby have wiped out the eternal and necessary order. This is an unobservable order, hence empiricists cannot access it. But rationalists certainly can. It’s a mathematical order. The reason why empiricists are happy to imagine the universe popping into existence out of nothing at all is that the alternative makes them profoundly distressed. It refutes their entire ideology and paradigm. Scientists are faced with two basic alternatives regarding what precedes the Big Bang: 1)
First comes non-existence, a singularity of nothing at all (it is immaterial, not in space or time, has no properties at all, hence is just a point of infinite emptiness, incapable of doing anything or being anything).
2)
First comes core existence: a singularity of all that exists, but mathematically perfectly configured to ensure that it has no net properties at all. All properties, of which there are potentially infinite, net to exactly zero. This Singularity has infinite potentiality waiting to be actualized.
So, both of these opposite singularities (the first is empty and the second is full) are totally unobservable, hence form no part of the empiricist paradigm. Which singularity should the empiricist choose as the state that preceded the creation of the empirical universe? Neither option is good because both refute empiricism. The empiricists cannot observe them in any way, hence they are forced to leave their empiricist paradigm and add on something external to their paradigm (thus invalidating the entire empiricist paradigm, although no empiricist ever logically accepts this). The empiricist’s logic is not that of a truth seeker. The empiricist, as a matter of faith, believes in empiricism, so the actual question the empiricist poses is: “Which singularity poses the least threat to my empiricist faith?” The empiricist then chooses the singularity of non-existence because it does not in any way interfere with the subsequent empirical universe. If they instead chose the singularity of absolute existence, this would be something that definitively existed, but was non-empirical, hence refuted the whole paradigm of empiricism. It would be something that continued to exist within the empirical universe and continually influenced the empirical universe but was itself non-empirical, thus falsifying empiricism. So, for reasons of ideology and dogmatism, and, let’s not be coy about it,
religious faith in empiricism, the empiricists deny that anything except nonexistence preceded the Big Bang. They do not arrive at this conclusion for rational and logical reasons, but for reasons concerning how to protect their paradigm at any price. What is the least costly addition to empiricism? That turns out to be a singularity of non-existence being the source of empirical existence. This is of course logically ridiculous. It’s a category error to claim that non-existence can produce existence. Non-existence, by definition, cannot produce anything at all! But never forget that empiricists privilege their senses and experiences over reason and logic, so we should have no expectation that what they say will be rational and logical, and, indeed, it never is. Here’s the simple Truth, the Occam’s Razor Truth, reflecting the Principle of Sufficient Reason. What precedes the temporal and contingent order of science (of space, time and matter) is the eternal and necessary order of mathematics, which exists outside space and time as an indestructible, immaterial Singularity. Science, because of its irrationalist, ideological dogmatism of empiricism and materialism, refuses to accept an unobservable, immaterial mathematical precursor of science. It has no evidence that such an order does not exist, and even overwhelming and irrefutable rational and logical proof that it does, but it flatly denies it because such considerations are ideologically forbidden by its paradigm based on the limited, fallible and unreliable human senses, and its absolute rejection of reason and logic (hence mathematics) as the true means to understand science, the universe, and existence itself. Ontological mathematics is all about rationalism, not empiricism. We do not start with observation. We start with the source of all reason, the Principle of Sufficient Reason, and its immediate corollary Occam’s Razor, which we shall define as the principle of absolute simplicity. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy says, “There is a widespread philosophical presumption that simplicity is a theoretical virtue. This presumption that simpler theories are preferable appears in many guises. Often it remains implicit; sometimes it is invoked as a primitive, self-evident proposition; other times it is elevated to the status of a ‘Principle’ and labeled as such (for example, the ‘Principle of Parsimony’). However, it is perhaps best known by the name ‘Occam’s (or Ockham’s) Razor.’” People go on about reality being an unfathomable mystery, or they say that only the “infinite” mind of God can understand it, and no human ever
can. Or they say that only meditating mystics can access it and these people arrive at something called “non-duality”, whatever that is. This is all comical nonsense, irrational and illogical. Reality is necessarily the simplest thing possible. There is no sufficient reason why existence would ever not be the simplest thing possible. From this idea of total simplicity, everything else flows. All we are required to do is work out what “total simplicity” means and then we have worked out the whole of reality. Ontological mathematics has already done this. The simplest possible coherent system is that of points moving in circles and generating waves. Go on, apply the PSR and Occam’s Razor and try to find a simpler rational system. Good luck with that. We have not in any way referred to the human senses, human feelings, human beliefs, human opinions, or human mystical intuitions. We don’t care about any of that. It’s 100% redundant. Existence existed before any human, so the human condition in itself cannot explain existence. We explain existence via consciousness, which is added on to the human! It can therefore be analyzed completely separately from humans. It can be analyzed in pure language terms. The purest language, the ur language, is ontological mathematics: the basis of true cosmic consciousness. What has always existed? – reason and logic, enshrined in ontological mathematics, that’s what. The truths of analytic reason and logic are eternal and necessary. Of necessity, they must inhere in eternal and necessary things. The eternal and necessary things in which they inhere are eternal and necessary mathematical monadic minds (immaterial singularities outside space and time). These are the true basis of what religious types have called “souls”. It is logically essential that souls are uncreated and uncaused, that they have always existed. Abrahamists claim that an eternal and necessary God creates “immortal” souls (souls that, once created, can never perish). This is a category error. Anything that begins must end. If your soul is created, it must perish, hence it’s mortal, not immortal. The defining error of Abrahamism is that it is predicated on only one eternal and necessary being (God), who then allegedly creates immortal beings (angels and humans). In fact, there are countless eternal and necessary beings – eternal monadic minds (immaterial singularities) – and, all together, they create the “God System”, an interactive Hive Mind. The only thing that exists is God – the collection of all monadic minds,
the Singularity – and 100% of what happens to all of us is the unfolding of this incredible God system. Every one of us is an essential unit, cell or node of God. Each of us is a God monad. “God” is an incredible, wondrous mathematical system, entirely grounded in reason and logic. The quickest analogy that people can grasp is that of the Rubik’s Cube. God, in itself, prior to the Big Bang, is the complete, perfect Rubik’s Cube. The “Big Bang” is the total scrambling of the Cube (caused by the inbuilt, dynamical mathematical process of asymmetry, aka entropy). The Rubik’s Cube, once scrambled, immediately starts to restore itself to its original perfect state of zero entropy (perfect symmetry). It seeks to return to itself, to find its home again. It takes exactly the length of a cosmic lifecycle for the cube to completely solve itself. Everything all of us are experiencing is just this incredible force of the ontological Rubik’s Cube going about solving itself. We are all essential nodes of this calculation, and we all need to work with each other to get the right answer. If we all compete, we set the solution back, just as happens with a Rubik’s Cube when you take a wrong turn. The answer is further away than it was before. Hegel identified the process that allows this incredibly complex, ontological Rubik’s Cube to solve itself. It’s called the dialectic, and conflict is built into it. A move is tried – the thesis – and this generates a countermove – the antithesis. If this was all that happened, we would be stuck forever. However, there is another process – the synthesis, which takes the best of both the thesis and antithesis and rejects the worst. It creates a higher solution, which is in fact just a new thesis, which in turn triggers a new antithesis, and the process then leads to an even higher synthesis. We keep going on like this until we reach the completed Rubik’s Cube, the Absolute, the Omega Point, the Final Synthesis. All of us together bring about the solution of the problem. But that is simply the signal for a new cycle to begin, a new Big Bang. This game never ends. Think of it in this way. The completed Rubik’s Cube is God: a perfect whole, unity, harmony. Every cell of God is perfectly aligned with every other cell. But all that is required is for any node of the Cube to do anything individual and the alignment of the Cube immediately breaks and is engulfed by an entropic chain reaction of asymmetry affecting every cell in the Cube,
in God. This is the Big Bang. The Big Bang is God entropically “exploding”. God goes from a perfect unity to a total disunity (the Devil, we may say). God suddenly becomes a system of competing cells rather than perfectly cooperating cells, which then need to learn the painful lesson that, if they wish to go back to what they were, they need to cooperate (altruism; collectivism; Godliness) rather than always competing to serve their own interests (selfishness; individualism; Satanism). This is a staggeringly simple system, based on astoundingly simple principles. Yet it creates a vast number of phenomena – all the things of the universe and our experiences of them. Leibniz said, “In whatever manner God created the world, it would always have been regular and in a certain general order. God, however, has chosen the most perfect, that is to say, the one which is at the same time the simplest in hypothesis and the richest in phenomena.” Remember that key formula: “simplest in hypothesis and the richest in phenomena.” That is the ground of existence itself. Leibniz said, “Without Mathematics one cannot understand the fundamentals of Philosophy. Without Philosophy we cannot reach the Foundation of Mathematics. Without both one cannot reach anything that is fundamental.” This is absolutely right. Ontological mathematics is, in these Leibnizian terms, Philosophical Mathematics, i.e., mathematics which serves as the perfect instrument for conducting philosophy, or mathematics which is informed by philosophical considerations and is not some mere abstraction with no connection to ontology, epistemology and metaphysics (as science would have you believe). Ehrhard Behrends wrote, “Without mathematics one cannot understand the world. According to Galileo, ‘The book of nature is written in the language of mathematics.’ At his time, that was no more than a vision. Today it is known that mathematics is the bridge that leads us across the unknown into realms that lie beyond the limits of human perception. Without mathematics, it would be impossible, in Goethe’s words, ‘to know what holds the world together from the inside.’” Faust wanted to know what inner forces hold the world together. The forces are those of mathematics, of rationalism. It’s not empiricism that holds the world together. Empiricism concerns how we experience the universe, not what the universe is. The ontology of the universe and existence is a rational issue, not empirical. That’s why mathematics is right and science is wrong.
THE PROBLEM OF CONSCIOUSNESS to science, matter in itself is not conscious, but either matter in A ccording general, or specific kinds of matter, can, via their material interactions, generate consciousness. Let’s call this “matter-consciousness”. No scientist has ever been able to explain how objective material interactions produce subjective experiences and conscious thoughts. They simply assert it. They never explain it. It’s one of those “emergent” things. Is consciousness a property of any material interactions, or just the interactions of certain kinds of matter? In which case, what is special about these specific types of matter, the interactions of which allegedly produce consciousness? Is there anything less likely than that that material interactions – the interactions of mindless, lifeless things with no subjective properties and no language properties – can produce consciousness? Imagine that one kind of interaction between material objects produces gravity, and another kind produces … consciousness. Really? Remember what Carl Sagan said … “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.” The claim that mindless matter produces mind, subjectivity and consciousness is without doubt one of the most extraordinary claims ever made. Where is science’s extraordinary evidence? It doesn’t have any evidence at all. It simply proclaims it. It simply says that it “emerges”. It might as well say that it’s a miracle and have done with it. In so many ways, science resembles a religion, making absurd claims and assertions without a shred of evidence, and ruthlessly excluding anything it dislikes because it dares to disagree with its faith in empiricism and materialism. Some people claim that consciousness is only an aspect of “living matter”, i.e., the matter that belongs to plants and animals. In this view, consciousness is not in matter per se, or even special types of matter, but only one kind of matter: that present in living things. One-celled amoebas can be
conscious in this view, but not anything below that (although viruses might be something of a grey area). Yet how can anything at all be alive if it is made of lifeless matter? The problem of life as an emergent property of lifeless matter is just as big a problem as that of mind and consciousness as an emergent property of mindless matter, something without a scintilla of consciousness or potential to generate consciousness. Panpsychists claim that consciousness is an aspect of matter. In their view, mind is present in all matter and it is this mental component that is responsible for consciousness. Mainstream science totally rejects this view, yet panpsychists remain poodles of scientism.
THE INNER VOICE ost people have inner speech and therefore inner hearing. Two different minds are involved. The production mind (the unconscious) produces the inner speech, and the consumption mind (consciousness) is what listens, then makes suggestions for what the production mind should say next. The production mind is incredibly suggestible (i.e., responsive to suggestions). In the absence of active suggestions, it obeys default suggestions (archetypes, instincts). Most animals exist in the state where their production mind is in default mode. Consciousness allows us (humans) to learn new tricks and escape the default mode. Thanks to language and concepts, we can learn, and learning changes everything.
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Inner Sight person with phantasia (inner sight) can picture anything they put their mind to. They can summon an image even if the thing imagined is physically absent. A person with aphantasia (inner blindness) cannot. A woman who lost her inner sight after a stroke said, “I couldn’t imagine anything and the imagination was where I [as an artist] lived. I felt I wasn’t human anymore. Grandma passes away and you remember her via images. You can’t do that anymore [when you have aphantasia].”
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Inner and Outer have outer senses (showing us the external world) and internal senses W e(showing us our internal world). Some people are blind, or deaf, or mute, or cannot smell, or cannot taste. These are defects of the external sense organs. It seems that similar defects can apply to the inner senses. Some people are internally blind (aphantasia), some are internally deaf and
mute (no inner voice), and we can be sure that some people, and perhaps the vast majority, have no means to internally conjure a vivid smell or taste. The inner senses both echo and surpass the outer senses. They are not nearly as restricted. They are the basis of hallucinations.
Active and Passive n our dreams, we are passively aware of what is happening but have no active, conscious agency. If we become lucid dreamers, we switch to being actively aware and can impose our will on the dream and shape it as we wish. In terms of the waking world, bicameral humans had passive awareness but no active, conscious agency. They had to wait for the voice of the god to tell them what to do in any important situation. Consciousness turned bicameral humans into lucid wakers who could make their own decisions and didn’t have to wait for any mysterious voice.
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The Power t’s all about the power of suggestion. Humanity is shaped by this power. The laws of the universe are the default suggestions of the universe, which “matter” obeys by default. Our unconscious mind is incredibly suggestible and takes most of its suggestions from our own consciousness, but it also accepts suggestions from the external world, and from people who replace our conscious mind, e.g., hypnotists. The conscious mind is suggestible too. It’s very susceptible to advertising, subliminal messaging, dominant personalities, cultural norms, social proof, peer pressure, and so on. The unconscious generates nearly all the activity in the mind. It’s the production mind, after all. Consciousness, performed by the consumption mind, is what is aware of the content and edits it, and selects and requests new content … by suggestion, according to its personality type (its tastes, preferences and biases). Consciousness is the observer of the unconscious. It’s the executive, the decision maker, the internal hypnotist that gives suggestions. When
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consciousness loses lucidity, as it does in insane people, the person can no longer function. They are in the same position as a non-lucid dreamer. They are passive and have no agency. They cannot gain control of their life and exert direction. Their will is more or less negated. Consciousness can be turned off by drugging the brain, or by sleep, or by hypnosis. Hypnosis is induced sleep; sleep brought about by suggestion, by which the person agrees to render their own consciousness passive. The individual, having deactivated consciousness, then resembles a sleepwalker, but one in a state highly receptive to external suggestion (from the hypnotist). In bicameral times, stress induced a need for a reaction to the stressful situation to resolve it. It triggered the need for a hallucinated voice to make a decision. Stress acted as a powerful suggestion to cause the production mind to generate a decision-making hallucination. Bicameral people were under unconscious control. They were like sleepwalkers, performing complex tasks without any awareness. They needed hallucinated voices (the “gods”) to provide crisis management. When something serious happened, a sleepwalking response wasn’t sufficient and so evolution produced the add-on of a hallucinated voice to provide better decision making. However, as society grew even more complex, and crises became much more common, the hallucinated voice proved insufficiently responsive, and its archetypal decisions often weren’t fit for purpose. A new decision-making apparatus was needed, and as soon as it appeared (well, over the course of a few decades) it gained an overwhelming advantage. The newcomer was consciousness, whereby, according to Julian Jaynes, righthemisphere dominance was replaced by left-hemisphere dominance. The hallucinated god vanished, and was replaced by an inner voice, highly controllable by consciousness (by the power of conscious suggestion). To gain a good idea of the bicameral mode of operation, imagine dreams in which in reaction to each crisis generated by the dream, a voice spoke and told you what to do. It might yell, “Run!”, or “Hide behind that tree!”, or “Dive into the river!” You would carry out the command without question. You would therefore not be responsible for decision making. When consciousness is in control, you weigh up the situation and think to yourself, “I need to run”, or “They won’t see me if I hide behind the tree”, or “If I dive into the water, it won’t be able to come after me.” Notice how “I” is absent from bicameralism, while consciousness is all about “I”. Notice how bicameralism is about the imperative mood of command and consciousness
about the subjunctive mood of possibility. In bicameral societies, people were told what to do by their unconscious mind. Their conscious mind (or, rather, the mind that would in due course become the conscious mind) was aware but not active, and incapable of taking decisions. It lacked will. When consciousness arrived, this mind was both aware and active. It could make decisions.
The Science Fallacy models the real, mathematical universe using a sensory heuristic S cience called “matter”. This “matter” in and of itself is useless, as you would discover if you prohibited the use of mathematics in relation to “matter”. Mathematics has no need of “matter”. You could get rid of this heuristic entirely and mathematics wouldn’t suffer in any way. Ontological mathematics is what you get when you remove “matter” from science, leaving just mathematics. Ontological mathematics is based on sinusoids, which are basis thoughts, so ontological mathematics concerns mind, not matter. Matter is mind’s creation, not mind’s creator.
The Primary Mode has a primary mode with which they engage with the world. E veryone Sensing types always rely on their senses, feeling types always rely on their emotions, intuitives always rely on their mystical intuitions, and thinking types always rely on reason and logic. The thinking types are radically different from the others because they are the only ones who use reason, logic and language. They are much more conscious than the others. They actually think about what’s going on. The sensing types simply react to the given world. They don’t need to think. The feeling types simply react to whatever feeling wells up in them, and the mystical intuitives simply react to whatever intuition downloads itself to them. None of these three types uses any language, any thinking, any consciousness. They are effectively glorified animals. Sensing types, feeling types and mystical intuitives are exactly those that detest ontological
mathematics and refuse to accept it. Only thinking types (including thinking intuitives) are receptive to ontological mathematics. The sensing types, feeling types and mystics all deny that thinking is real, in the sense that they regard thinking as an abstraction with no direct connection to reality. To them, perceptions are real, feelings are real, and mystical intuitions are real, but thinking isn’t real at all. It’s just something we apply to real things. Scientists accept matter alone as real. They regard mathematics as an unreal, manmade abstraction that, for completely unknown reasons, which they choose not to contemplate at all, is perfect for rendering reality intelligible. The sensing and feeling types, and the mystics, would never under any circumstances accept that reality is made of ontological reason and logic (which is to say, of mathematics, the quintessential thinking subject, the quintessential subject of reason and logic). They would never accept that reality is made of thought, made of language, and can only be understood via thought and language. This idea is abhorrent to them. Sensing types believe that reality is made of something sensory (matter), feeling types that it is made of an emotion (love), and mystics that it is made of something mystical (non-duality, bare awareness, cosmic consciousness, the Oneness, or whatever). These three types are repulsed by the idea that reality isn’t made of matter, love, or non-duality but is in fact made of mathematics. They are repulsed by the idea that we live in a language system, a living, thinking organism with an exact answer, which we can arrive at as soon as we learn reality’s own language – ontological mathematics. The Rosetta Stone allowed Egyptian hieroglyphics to be deciphered because it contained the same text written in three different languages (hieroglyphics, demotic script, and Greek). The universe itself is the cosmic Rosetta Stone. On the one hand, it seems to be written in non-language (apprehended by perceptions, emotions and mystical intuitions), but the only way to translate it into something intelligible is via the thinking language of mathematics.
Doggie Land doggie world. It’s overwhelmingly about smell. Dogs smell the I magine world. The world is a huge landscape of smells. Dogs wander through a
world of scents. They’re always stopping to smell things. Smells endlessly fascinate them.
Occam’s Razor Jordan wrote, in response to the question “When is Occam’s Razor C laire wrong?”, “Occam’s Razor is a tendency, not a law. It says that ‘on average’ the simplest solution is most likely to be correct. But sometimes, of course, the complex solution is the correct one.” Occam’s Razor, in relation to ontology and epistemology, is an absolute law and is never wrong. In what possible circumstances would reality do something needlessly complicated, when a simpler solution was available? Reality, of necessity, is reducible to the simplest possible solution. It is impossible for reality to choose a complex solution in preference to a simpler one. And what on earth does “tendency” mean? Is gravity a “tendency”? There is no such thing as a “tendency” when you are discussing analytic, syntactic definitions. Things are either true or false. They are either laws or they are nothing.
THE THIRD MAN “The Third Man factor or Third Man syndrome refers to the reported situations where an unseen presence such as a spirit provides comfort or support during traumatic experiences. Sir Ernest Shackleton, in his 1919 book ‘South’, described his belief that an incorporeal being joined him and two others during the final leg of their Antarctic journey. Shackleton wrote, ‘during that long and racking march of thirty-six hours over the unnamed mountains and glaciers of South Georgia, it seemed to me often that we were four, not three’. His admission resulted in other survivors of extreme hardship coming forward and sharing similar experiences. … Some journalists have related this to the concept of a guardian angel or imaginary friend. Scientific explanations consider this a coping mechanism or an example of bicameralism. The concept was popularized by a book by John G. Geiger: ‘The Third Man Factor’, that documents scores of examples.” – Wikipedia n bicameral terms, the “third man” would be considered a stress-induced hallucination, furnished by the mind to provide a powerful decision maker. The implication is that in times of severe stress and danger, the conscious mind of some people is overwhelmed and is unable to make a decision. The need to make a decision nevertheless remains and so the person reverts to the hallucinatory bicameral mode to furnish their decision-making capacity. The great thing about Jaynes’s bicameral hypothesis is how many uses it can be put to. Scientific materialism, by contrast, wouldn’t have the vaguest
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idea how to explain the third man factor, except through its usual practice of dismissing it as an “illusion” (which of course doesn’t explain anything … how does the brain know how to create illusions, why does it feel any need to produce illusions, and why do certain situations in particular generate these illusions, while others do not?).
Zero Entropy “When an extremely improbable situation arises, we are entitled to draw large conclusions from it.” – Gödel most extreme state is zero-entropy, T hetemperature of Absolute Zero, where
existing immaterially at a there is no friction and superconductivity is perfect. This is the state from which we draw all other conclusions, including the complete explanation of the Big Bang universe. For ideological reasons, science refuses to accept the existence of a zeroentropy Singularity – because such a state is mathematical, not scientific, and science will never accept that mathematics, not matter, is the foundation of existence. Science is an anti-mathematical religious faith. Despite its constant use of mathematics, it hates mathematics. If it didn’t, it would switch to ontological mathematics.
The Hemispheres “Hemispherectomy is a very rare neurosurgical procedure in which a cerebral hemisphere (half of the upper brain, or cerebrum) is removed, disconnected, or disabled. This procedure is used to treat a variety of seizure disorders where the source of the epilepsy is localized to a broad area of a
single hemisphere of the brain…” – Wikipedia orothy M. Aram wrote, “Probably the strongest evidence of hemispheric dominance for language comes from sodium amytal studies, also referred to as the ‘Wada procedure’ after the neurologist who developed the technique. This technique uses a short-acting barbiturate injected into either the left or the right internal carotid artery, which is repeated on a separate occasion in the alternate carotid artery. During the short period in which the drug circulates through the hemisphere, functions normally sustained by that hemisphere are significantly impaired, thus permitting determination of that hemisphere’s role in a specific function.” It’s vital to pin down the exact abilities of both brain hemispheres, and understand how they interact with each other and relate to each other. It’s vital to study the corpus callosum that connects the two hemispheres. It’s essential to understand the differences between those who are hemispheric dominant (where either the left or right hemisphere is running the show), and those who have hemispheric parity (neither hemisphere is dominant). Isn’t it amazing how much importance scientists put on the brain (they claim it’s responsible for mind, consciousness, subjectivity and the illusion of free will), yet how many scientists, especially of the highest rank, are involved in studying the brain? The answer is zero. Science, for all it goes on about the brain, has seriously little interest in it. Isn’t it time that the brain, and not the universe, became the primary object of scientific study? After all, according to science, the brain is the most complex object in the universe, and it is only through the brain, according to science, that we gain knowledge of the universe. Why aren’t at least 50% of scientists working on the brain? It should be the No.1 scientific game in town. It’s not. Most scientists have spectacularly little interest in the organ with which they do their thinking. That’s science for you! Reason and logic are not scientists’ things. Using their sense organs is what turns them on. They are empiricists who despise rationalism. They can’t abide the reality of language. Terence McKenna wrote, “The syntactical nature of reality, the real secret of magic, is that the world is made of words. And if you know the words that the world is made of, you can make of it whatever you wish.” This would be entirely true if you simply replaced “words” by
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“numbers”. Words cannot cope with quantity. Words are qualitative only. Ontological mathematics, based on ontological numbers, is, by contrast, both quantitative and qualitative, syntactic and semantic, hence covers everything.
God and Language “I am afraid we are not rid of God because we still have faith in grammar.” – Nietzsche od is language. God is the PSR, which exists ontologically as the eternal and necessary language of ontological mathematics, which, via ontological Fourier mathematics, can translate eternal and necessary language (basis frequencies) into temporal and contingent language (the spacetime universe). It’s all about language.
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THE JOKE PHILOSOPHY “A serious and good philosophical work could be written consisting entirely of jokes.” – Ludwig Wittgenstein of today’s academic philosophy is a joke, which doesn’t understand M ost that it’s a joke, which makes the joke even funnier. Wittgenstein himself was one of the worst offenders. He was largely responsible for making modern philosophy unintentionally hilarious, and totally unable to address the big issues of existence. Wittgenstein wrote, “The book [Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus] deals with the problems of philosophy, and shows, I believe, that the reason why these problems are posed is that the logic of our language is misunderstood. The whole sense of the book might be summed up the following words: what can be said at all can be said clearly, and what we cannot talk about we must pass over in silence. Thus the aim of the book is to draw a limit to thought, or rather – not to thought, but to the expression of thoughts: for in order to be able to draw a limit to thought, we should have to find both sides of the limit thinkable (i.e., we should have to be able to think what cannot be thought). It will therefore only be in language that the limit can be drawn, and what lies on the other side of the limit will simply be nonsense. ... the truth of the thoughts that are here communicated seems to me unassailable and definitive. I therefore believe myself to have found, on all essential points, the final solution of the problems. And if I am not mistaken in this belief, then the second thing in which the of this work consists is that it shows how little is achieved when these problems are solved. ... We feel that even when all possible scientific questions have been answered, the problems of life remain completely untouched. Of course there are then no questions left, and this itself is the answer. The solution of the problem of life is seen in the vanishing of the problem. (Is not this the reason why those who have found after a long period of doubt that the sense of life became clear to them have
then been unable to say what constituted that sense? [JT: That’s the Eastern mystics and New Agers for you!]) There are, indeed, things that cannot be put into words. They make themselves manifest. They are what is mystical. The correct method in philosophy would really be the following: to say nothing except what can be said, i.e., propositions of natural science – i.e., something that has nothing to do with philosophy – and then, whenever someone else wanted to say something metaphysical, to demonstrate to him that he had failed to give a meaning to certain signs in his propositions. Although it would not be satisfying to the other person – he would not have the feeling that we were teaching him philosophy – this method would be the only strictly correct one. My propositions are elucidatory in this way: he who understands me finally recognizes them as senseless, when he has climbed out through them, on them, over them. (He must so to speak throw away the ladder, after he has climbed up on it.) He must transcend these propositions, and then he will see the world aright. What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence.” Here, Wittgenstein says that only natural science is meaningful, and philosophy is meaningless, which makes it something of a joke that he posed as a “philosopher” and wasn’t a scientist. When he said, “The solution of the problem of life is seen in the vanishing of the problem”, he was essentially saying the same thing of philosophy, ontology, metaphysics, the mind, subjectivity, the unconscious, consciousness, free will, and the Source of All. He had not “answered” all the burning questions of philosophy, he had instead ended philosophy as a serious subject and made it the joke it now is, full of bad comedians, ineptly impersonating smart people. Reality’s language is the basis of everything and the only way to explain everything. Reality’s language is ontological mathematics, and everything that does not concern ontological mathematics is nonsense and meaningless. All philosophy must be attached to ontological mathematics. To do philosophy in the context of manmade language, as Wittgenstein did, is comically silly. He didn’t complete philosophy, he killed philosophy.
REINCARNATION AND LANGUAGE time you reincarnate, you have to re-learn a manmade language. All E ach manmade languages are temporal and contingent. They are constructs. Reality’s own language never changes. It’s eternal and necessary. It’s ontological mathematics. Ontological mathematics is the language that defines reincarnation, that sets the framework in which reincarnation is rendered possible. Reincarnation is a temporal and contingent process within the eternal and necessary order. The succession of Big Bang universes constitutes the reincarnational process of the universe itself (the collection of all monadic minds), as opposed to the reincarnational process that applies to the highest individual contents of the universe, i.e., the monadic minds that inhabit a succession of bodies (avatars) in the universe. It’s all about language. Even reincarnation depends on language. Resurrection is false because it makes no sense in terms of locating the temporal and contingent order within the eternal and necessary order. Everything that has a beginning also has an end. Reincarnation is consistent with this. As each body dies, you get a new one. The mind (soul) does not have a beginning, hence does not have an end. It is eternal and necessary. Resurrection is not consistent with these considerations. With resurrection, your body has a beginning but no end. This is logically impossible, hence Abrahamism, which relies on resurrection, is formally disproven.
Binary? people who are very much “binary”, the idea that there are people who F oridentify as “non-binary” is bizarre. It’s as surprising as discovering that some people have no inner voice. It’s more or less impossible to relate to. Of course, the same must be true in reverse. Non-binary people must find it
bizarre that “normies” so strongly identify with one sex or the other.
WITTGENSTEIN “The limits of my language means the limits of my world.” – Wittgenstein consciousness is language, then the limits of language are the limits of I fconsciousness. You cannot be conscious of anything you cannot think in language. The more extensive your language skills, the more extensive your consciousness. People with limited language have limited consciousness. All of New Ageism and Eastern mysticism is predicated on trying to reach states that cannot be expressed in language, in which case they cannot be part of consciousness. They are sentient states, not conscious states. No one who reaches them can ever say anything about them since they belong to private sentience and not public consciousness. Hence, no one is ever able to describe such states to others, or to have any knowledge of them. They do not belong to the domain of conscious knowledge and they are therefore useless states, hence it’s pointless reaching them. You might as well take DMT or shoot up on heroin and you will reach these inexpressible states outside consciousness much faster! Wittgenstein said, “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.” That applies to the whole of New Ageism and Eastern mysticism. Wittgenstein said, “Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language.” Manmade language produces manmade philosophy. If you want to be aligned with reality’s philosophy, the Truth of existence, you must learn reality’s own language, ontological mathematics. Wittgenstein said, “To imagine a language is to imagine a form of life.” Language is the basis of mind (mind has to be coded in a language) and mind is the basis of life. The ontological mathematical universe is a thinking, living, purposeful, striving organism.
If the universe were made of matter, as science claims, it would just be a meaningless, pointless, dead “thing”, with no conceivable reason for its existence. In terms of Occam’s Razor, what is the simplest explanation for life and mind? 1) That existence is eternally and necessarily alive and minded, hence life and mind will inevitably be expressed in any temporal and contingent universe that existence generates, or 2) non-existence randomly, for no reason, produces a temporal and contingent universe of matter (lifeless, mindless, purposeless, meaningless and pointless) and then random interactions of these lifeless and mindless material things produce, as miraculous “emergent properties”, life, mind, the unconscious, consciousness, subjectivity, free will and purposes, all of which are, however, inherently meaningless and pointless and mired in illusion and epiphenomenalism. Never forget: extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Where is the scientific evidence for any of these scientific claims? There isn’t any. Anyone who accepts the scientific worldview is more or less insane. People are persuaded by the “success” of science (as Nietzsche said, “Success has always been the greatest liar”), but the real success of science lies in what it considers an unreal, manmade abstraction, namely mathematics. Take “unreal” mathematics away from science and there is no scientific success left. Science then becomes a pure religious faith, exactly as it was prior to its adoption of mathematics (when it was alchemy). The success of science is actually the success of mathematics, yet scientists have never understood this foundational fact. Wittgenstein said, “Language is a part of our organism and no less complicated than it.” Language, foundationally, is the organism. Life and mind are defined by the language of ontological mathematics. Language is life. Language is mind. Philosophy has largely imagined existence to be some kind of nonlanguage substance. Science has asserted that this non-language substance is “matter”. The idea that the foundational substance of existence is in fact an ontological language is arguably the most radical thought ever. Only one language has the requisite properties to serve as existence: ontological mathematics. Mathematics is the least understood subject there has ever been, and that’s why humanity has believed anything other than the Truth.
Wittgenstein said, “It will therefore only be in language that the limit can be set, and what lies on the other side of the limit will simply be nonsense.” Ontological mathematics sets all the limits for existence. There is nothing on the other side of these limits. Only ontological mathematics has the property of existence. Existence is an eternal and necessary property of sinusoidal waves – basis thoughts. Wittgenstein said, “The limits of my language are the limits of my mind. All I know is what I have words for.” The limits of the mathematical language are the limits of the mind. The mind is defined mathematically. Wittgenstein should have said, “All I know is what I have numbers for.” Wittgenstein said, “The world and life are one.” Both are mathematical! Wittgenstein said, “For remember that in general we don’t use language according to strict rules – it hasn’t been taught us by means of strict rules, either.” All manmade languages are wrong. No one uses them strictly, and they weren’t formulated or taught strictly in the first place. They were born in hallucination! Ontological mathematics, reality’s language, is the exact opposite. It is the most precise and strict language you can get. It needs to be to in order to support eternal and necessary existence without generating a single syntactic error. Wittgenstein said, “But ordinary language is all right.” Ordinary language is definitely not all right. It radically falsifies reality. Wittgenstein said, “The difficulty in philosophy is to say no more than we know.” If you use a manmade language, you will deploy manmade concepts that have no bearing on reality. The difficulty in philosophy has proved to be its inability to identify the language reality uses, and Wittgenstein was one of the worst perps in this regard. Wittgenstein said, “We must plow through the whole of language.” The game is to identify and use the right language and then plow through the whole of it. Wittgenstein said, “An entire mythology is stored within our language.” An entire falsification of reality, total fantasy, is stored within manmade language. All the absurdities of religion and spirituality are grounded in the falsehoods and false concepts of manmade language. Wittgenstein said, “The aim of philosophy is to erect a wall at the point
where language stops anyway.” There is nothing beyond the wall of reality’s own language, ontological mathematics. Wittgenstein said, “Like everything metaphysical the harmony between thought and reality is to be found in the grammar of the language.” Reality is a dual-aspect monism, defined by the syntax and semantics, form and content, of ontological mathematics. Wittgenstein said, “What we are destroying is nothing but houses of cards and we are clearing up the ground of language on which they stood.” Ontological mathematics destroys the houses of cards based on trying to use manmade language, rather than reality’s language, to explain reality. Wittgenstein said, “The sole remaining task for philosophy is the analysis of language.” Philosophy must analyze the right language, and that is ontological mathematics. Wittgenstein said, “If we spoke a different language, we would perceive a somewhat different world.” It’s incredible how much difference language makes to how we relate to and understand the world. People of high literacy have an entirely different consciousness from people of low literacy. People who are numerate as well as literate have the highest consciousness of all. Brian L. Silver said, “Wittgenstein spent much of his later life examining the way in which language may shape our reality.” Language is reality. Wittgenstein never worked that out.
What’s Going On? the perspective of normality, there are countless strange phenomena F rom in the human condition … no inner monologue, aphantasia, autism, schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, dissociative identity disorder, transgenderism, non-binary, dyslexia, phantom limb syndrome, synesthesia, and so on, and so on. What an astonishingly rich tapestry. The incredible thing is that all of these conditions, outside the normal range, are actually the best means to explore the human condition. They throw much more light on the toughest problems. For anyone to claim they have “really cracked it” – in terms of a full explanation of the human condition – they need a theory that explains normality plus all of the exceptions. Most theories are very much concerned with the normal, and make only token gestures towards the exceptions, but
the abnormal is really what has to be understood. In many ways, the “normal” can be regarded as simply the average across many abnormal states, i.e., an abnormal person typically has one characteristic that qualifies them as abnormal. Every normal person, it might be said, has the potential to go down any of the abnormal tracks, but all of their properties are so averaged that they are kept within a small range. Isn’t that what “normality” is? – the average across the whole population. Normality doesn’t imply any kind of sanity. The normal human being is no model of reason and logic. The rational and logical person is very much abnormal in this world. There must be, out there, conditions of the psyche that we don’t even know about it. Look at how the absence of inner voice – a mind-boggling fact – only seems to have come to light, certainly popularly, in the last few years. Yet it must always have existed. Many people have come and gone without knowing that they had no inner voice!
THE BASIC BUILDING BLOCKS basic building blocks of reality are simple objects: sinusoidal waves, of T heevery possible frequency. These are the basis thoughts, the basis language, of existence. Simple building blocks combine to produce complex blocks. That’s all you need for a universe. Wittgenstein absurdly claimed that objects are unanalyzable. If you start with that position, you will never be able to understand existence, and Wittgenstein certainly didn’t and couldn’t. In ontological mathematics, the foundational objects (sinusoids) are precisely definable and analyzable, and that’s exactly why reality is completely intelligible and knowable. It’s impossible for reality to be intelligible and knowable if this isn’t the case (i.e., if you cannot precisely define core reality, as Kant couldn’t). Sinusoidal waves fit together by virtue of their mathematical form alone, and do not need something extra (like a relational object) to bring them together and hold them together. The basis objects have everything they require to combine with each other and produce compound objects. The language of existence must have certain properties in order to sustain eternal and necessary existence. Ontological mathematics alone possesses these properties. Why doesn’t manmade language reflect reality? It’s because word-based languages cannot mirror the number-based language of reality. They do not share its mathematical, logical form. Absurdly, once again, Wittgenstein believed that manmade language did share the logical form of reality, hence could mirror it, even if it couldn’t explain it. Wittgenstein promoted a “picture theory” of language. Wikipedia says, “The picture theory of language, also known as the picture theory of meaning, is a theory of linguistic reference and meaning articulated by Ludwig Wittgenstein in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Wittgenstein
suggested that a meaningful proposition pictured a state of affairs or atomic fact. Wittgenstein compared the concept of logical pictures with spatial pictures. The picture theory of language is considered a correspondence theory of truth.” All correspondence theories are inherently empiricist and false. Truth is necessarily coherent, hence is rationalist. Manmade language in any case creates a false picture of reality since reality is numerical, not verbal. Wikipedia says, “Wittgenstein claims there is an unbridgeable gap between what can be expressed in language and what can only be expressed in non-verbal ways. Picture theory of language states that statements are meaningful if they can be defined or pictured in the real world.” Most of reality is unobservable! You cannot picture core, noumenal reality. It does not have any kind of sensory appearance accessible by humans. It can be reached by reason and logic – by thinking – but not by pictures. Only an irredeemable empiricist relies on pictures and simplistic picture thinking. Wittgenstein was one of those. That’s why he wasn’t a great philosopher. Wikipedia says, “Wittgenstein’s later investigations laid out in the First Part of Philosophical Investigations refuted and replaced his earlier picturebased theory with a use theory of meaning.” So, Wittgenstein migrated to a use theory of meaning, yet another mistake! Reality itself uses a coherence theory of truth and meaning. It’s no good appealing to what humans do, and what humans accept. Reality existed before any human and has no need of the human condition and human biases at all. Wittgenstein argued that a picture can represent a fact by means of sharing its logical form, but this logical form in itself cannot be depicted. So, language, for Wittgenstein, can picture the world but cannot say what the world actually is. This is why, in Wittgenstein’s view, all metaphysics was nonsense, since it was trying to explain what the world really was when the nature of language meant that it could do no more than picture it. A picture of a tree isn’t a tree, but only logically mirrors the tree. The whole point of ontological mathematics is that it isn’t merely mirroring the actual thing, it is the actual thing, hence it both mirrors its logical form and, in fact, constitutes its logical form, or, to put it another way, it mirrors it exactly because it constitutes it. Wittgenstein was oblivious to all such considerations – because he was an empiricist and not a rationalist. Most
philosophers are now of his ilk. Spark Notes says, regarding the Tractatus, “We cannot say what the logical form of a proposition or fact is, but this form shows itself in the way the proposition or fact is held together. Similarly, the logical connections between states of affairs and between elementary propositions show themselves, so that there is no need for logical objects (like ‘and’ and ‘not’) to hold them together. Wittgenstein calls the observation that logical objects do not represent anything his ‘fundamental idea’.” In ontological mathematics logical objects are everything and the likes of “and” and “not” are built into the mathematics of the fundamental objects (sinusoidal waves). Wittgenstein believed that the propositions of logic are all tautologies, and so are all equivalent. His views on tautology constitute the biggest failure ever to understand reality. He said, “All mathematics is tautology. … A tautology’s truth is certain, a proposition’s possible, a contradiction’s impossible. … Tautology and contradiction are, however, not senseless; they are part of the symbolism, in the same way that ‘0’ is part of the symbolism of Arithmetic. … Propositions show what they say: tautologies and contradictions show that they say nothing. … The tautology has no truthconditions, for it is unconditionally true; and the contradiction is on no condition true. Tautology and contradiction are without sense. Tautology and contradiction are not pictures of the reality. They present no possible state of affairs. For the one allows every possible state of affairs, the other none. In the tautology the conditions of agreement with the world – the presenting relations – cancel one another, so that it stands in no presenting relation to reality.” The value of tautology and its relation to the world is the supreme battleground between empiricism and rationalism. J. M. Coetzee said, “Reason is simply a vast tautology.” The rationalist relies on mathematics being tautological, hence consistent and complete. That’s exactly what makes the world intelligible. That’s exactly why it has an answer. Every state of the world is tautologous because every state is just the original state of zeroentropy restated in more complicated (entropic) ways, i.e., reality comprises simple tautologies (eternal and necessary basis states) and complex tautologies (temporal and contingent compound states). For a rationalist, it’s essential for all states to be mathematical tautologies in order to reflect the coherence theory of truth and meaning. For an
empiricist, who relies on a correspondence theory of truth and meaning, tautologies have no relationship to the world at all (since you cannot see ontological tautologies; the tautologies are never apparent to the senses, by which all followers of correspondence swear). A rationalist says that tautology constitutes the world. Tautology is constitutive (having the power to establish or give organized existence to something). An empiricist says that we can create a picture of the world that represents the world but we can never know what the world is in itself, stripped of any appearance, of any picture of it. Reality in itself is therefore unintelligible. That’s what happens if you reject tautology, as empiricists do. Empiricists are unable to accept that all facts about reality are analytic. Instead, they believe that all facts about the world are synthetic, hence analytic tautologies cannot be connected to reality. This is one of the profoundest issues in all of philosophy. Bertrand Russell said, “Leibniz based his philosophy upon two logical premisses, the law of contradiction and the law of sufficient reason. Both depend upon the notion of an ‘analytic’ proposition, which is one in which the predicate is contained in the subject – for instance, ‘all white men are men.’ The law of contradiction states that all analytic propositions are true. The law of sufficient reason (in the esoteric system only) states that all true propositions are analytic. This applies even to what we should regard as empirical statements about matters of fact.” For rationalists such as Leibniz, all matters of fact are actually truths of reason. “Matters of fact”, for empiricists, are what you get by observing things. “Matters of fact”, for rationalists, are a species of truths of reason. That’s why empiricists support a scientific understanding of reality and rationalists a mathematical understanding of reality. Wittgenstein never accepted Gödel’s incompleteness theorems since they seemed to demonstrate that mathematics was incomplete and/or inconsistent whereas, for Wittgenstein, mathematics was pure tautology, hence necessarily complete and consistent. What Gödel actually proved is that mathematics based on multiple axioms cannot be both consistent and complete. This is entirely right. For something to be both consistent and complete, it must be fully derivable from a single principle or axiom, meaning that everything is tautologous (since it’s just a re-expression of the original principle or axiom). The governing principle of reality is the PSR. Everything has a rational
explanation, and that’s because everything belongs to exactly the same rational system, defined by the PSR. Spark Notes says, “We do not need axioms or laws of inference to tell us how to proceed in logic, since this should make itself manifest. ‘Logic must look after itself’: we should not need external laws to tell us how proceed with logic since there is nothing external to logic.” There is nothing external to mathematics, and all logic is built into mathematics. It’s not a question of finding a language that mirrors reality but is not reality. Rather, it’s all about discovering the language that is reality. That has been done. Ontological mathematics is the answer. Ontological mathematics is the foundation of science. “Matter” is simply how ontological mathematics appears in the mathematical spacetime frame.
String Theory H said, “I was surprised you don’t believe in string theory. You talk a lot about how reality is formed by sinusoidal waves; what are strings but vibrating waves that are the basis for all energy and matter?” You know what the surprising thing is? It’s that you didn’t say, “I was surprised that string theorists don’t immediately accept ontological mathematics. After all, what are strings but vibrating waves that are the basis for all energy and matter?” Do you see how prejudiced people are? KH is pro-science, so believes that we have to migrate to non-analytic, very poorly defined “strings”. It never occurs to him that science should be migrating to exactly defined, analytic mathematics.
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Unification “The unification of the forces is generally thought of, by physicists, as reducing that number of required dimensions.” – Richard Muller
he ultimate unification of forces requires dimensionality to be removed entirely, thus arriving at the Zeroth Dimension, the mental Singularity, made of only one kind of thing: the zero-dimensional sinusoidal wave, the basis thought.
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The Confused eople committed to reason and logic do not go around saying, “Hello, beautiful people. Love you all, fam. I’m so happy to be part of this community.” That’s the language of emotionalists, of love and lighters. Your language defines you. If you keep using emotional language, you reveal yourself as an emotionalist, not a rationalist. Rational and logical people do not use love and light language on social media. Someone said, “I’d love to know where you got your knowledge. Was it Ayahuasca?” WTF! Knowledge is produced by reason and logic, not by drugs, not by prayer, not by faith, not by perception, not by mysticism, not by meditation, and not by mindfulness. You see, people do not want to work hard to gain knowledge. They don’t want to study or use reason and logic. They want to take a pill or a drug, or meditate, or pray, and get “knowledge” that way. They never will. What they are likely to get is alternating psychological inflation and alienation, and that never ends well.
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Words versus Numbers ou can lie with words, but not with numbers. People despise mathematics because it allows them no scope to lie and cheat and pretend. You actually have to know what you’re talking about. Nothing could be more frightening to the average human being!
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IT’S ALL IN THE MIND n anonymous contributor said, “Your writings on philosophy, religion, history, politics, and the paradigm shifting ontological mathematics have all been ground-shaking for me, but your work on psychology has helped me navigate some of the most difficult times of my life. The very nature of your work makes you question the fundamental tenets of reality, but it was this information I craved as an INTJ who holds truth, reason, and rationality in the highest esteem.” Most of our books are written from the INTJ perspective. We therefore expect them to resonate most strongly with INTJs. The INTJ personality type, which is very rare amongst the general population, has been referred to as “The Mastermind”, “The Scientist”, “The Visionary”, “The Director”, “The Strategist”, “The Architect”, “The Conceptual Planner”. Scott James wrote, “INTJ is one of the most rare types, with the most rare type of genius. It’s estimated that INTJs may be as rare as 1 or 2 in 100 and some will even reach adulthood without having a personal connection with a single other person of their type. The genius of the INTJ type is a function of the brain known as Introverted iNtuition. It’s believed that this is the most recently evolved function of the human brain, so, relatively speaking, it’s new to the world. It’s also, from a certain perspective, the most evolved of the functions. Unfortunately, since it’s so uncommon, few people are ever taught how to use it and INTJs can often feel isolated and misunderstood and may never realize their amazing potential. With some clarity and understanding, Introverted intuition is a remarkable strength. What it allows us to do is to disconnect from the present moment and environment and to tap into the unconscious mind to see the patterns and connections between people, places and things. It gives us the ability to project patterns forward to predict trends in the future and it gives us the uncanny ability to get inside the minds of other people. Introverted iNtuition also allows us to see through assumptions and surface level appearances.” This is all true. The problem for INTJs is that the world is extremely hostile to the INTJ worldview. The world does not do things in an INTJ way.
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It more or less acts in the opposite way. ESFP is the world’s psychological type. Nearly everything revolves around extraversion, sensing, emotionalism and perceiving. Introversion is sneered at, intuition is regarded as “weird”, thinking (using reason and logic) is incomprehensible, and passing judging is demonized. People actually talk about the merits of living “non-judgmentally in the moment, entirely emotionally and experientially.” Today’s humanity is about as far from a rational and logical world that passes judgment as it is possible to get. The wonder is that all INTJs haven’t gone crazy. On the other hand, INTJs can be amongst the most robust, resilient, strongest and dominant minds you can get. In an intellectual Sparta, the INTJs would be the soldiers in the front rank, holding off the hordes of barbarians. Our work does indeed make people question “the fundamental tenets of reality”. Or, rather, what INTJs do is tear up how all the other personality types have characterized reality – expose all their logical flaws, confirmation biases, and refusals to accept the inconvenient truths to which they insist on turning a blind eye – and present a shiny, rational, logical New World Order unlike anything that has ever previously been accepted. Most of the world detests, and fears, the Mastermind worldview. It’s deeply intimidating to them. They are utterly alienated from it. The Pythagorean communities were the first INTJ communities, and Plato’s Republic was the first breathtaking and defiant public statement of the INTJ worldview. Nowhere on earth has ever implemented Plato’s Meritocratic Republic, the Sparta of the Mind. Abrahamism, Eastern mysticism and New Ageism are anti-INTJ, anti-Plato, anti-Meritocracy and anti-intellectual. Science, based on sensing and the outer world, is no friend of the INTJ worldview either. But the INTJs are not without any hope of valuable alliances with other types. The INTJs can potentially make common cause with INTPs, INFJs, ENTJs, ENTPs, and ENFJs. It’s more or less impossible for INTJs to be in anything other than profound opposition to sensing types, and also the most extreme feeling and mystical types. Why aren’t our books sweeping the world and soaring up the bestseller charts? It’s because they are INTJ books, and there are very few INTJs. If we had written ESFP books, we would have topped the charts. If, say, twenty percent of humans were INTJs, we would be running the world. None of us has control over the world we are born into, but you’re up
against it right from the gun if you have a rare personality type in a world that does not value that personality type. INTJs are way too intellectual, and this is not only an unintellectual world but an actively anti-intellectual world. The Dunning-Kruger effect prevails, and that is kryptonite to INTJs. It means that total morons imagine themselves smart, and they have no regard at all for the genuine intelligence of INTJs, which they find weird and “faggoty”. The Narrator of the movie Idiocracy – which sums up how INTJs view this world – said, “But the English language had deteriorated into a hybrid of hillbilly, valleygirl, inner-city slang and various grunts. Joe was able to understand them, but when he spoke in an ordinary voice he sounded pompous and faggy to them.” A doctor says to the protagonist, “…it says on your chart that you’re fucked up. And you talk like a fag, and your shit’s all retarded.” INTJs come up against that every day! The Narrator said, “As the 21st century began, human evolution was at a turning point. Natural selection, the process by which the strongest, the smartest, the fastest, reproduced in greater numbers than the rest, a process which had once favored the noblest traits of man, now began to favor different traits. Most science fiction of the day predicted a future that was more civilized and more intelligent. But as time went on, things seemed to be heading in the opposite direction. A dumbing down. How did this happen? Evolution does not necessarily reward intelligence. With no natural predators to thin the herd, it began to simply reward those who reproduced the most, and left the intelligent to become an endangered species. … The #1 movie in America was called ‘Ass.’ And that’s all it was for 90 minutes. It won eight Oscars that year, including best screenplay. … The years passed, mankind became stupider at a frightening rate. Some had high hopes the genetic engineering would correct this trend in evolution, but sadly the greatest minds and resources where focused on conquering hair loss and prolonging erections.” For INTJs, Idiocracy isn’t a prophecy, it’s history … it’s what actually happened to the world. We’re actively living in the Idiocracy. Anonymous said, “I come from a family with a high number of psychiatrists and medical professionals and from an early age I developed a curiosity for psychology and religion. Religion was not forced on us, but my grandfather was an important player in bridging a Protestant and Catholic divide in my province. In university I completed a history degree but took as
many psychology and religious studies courses as possible. When I graduated, I was still left with a desire to learn philosophy and more about psychology, so I was ecstatic when I came across your material. “After some reflection, I think what I had been searching for was a complete understanding of myself and my psychology (know thyself), plus an interpretation of why we are here and what life is all about, or what I would now call Gnosis. What I didn’t realize is that there are real psychological dangers when you go exploring uncharted parts of your psyche. It’s not to say that I wasn’t genetically predisposed or that life circumstances did not cause them to emerge, but when I went deep into your material I triggered 3 bipolar episodes (Bipolar II, Bipolar I, and the latest Bipolar II). I am not placing blame as I took the risk on myself, but I want to extend a thank you for equipping me with a psychological (Jungian) understanding of bipolar that will hopefully let me live a well-adjusted life.” There are certain books, including ours, which have the capacity to trigger psychotic episodes. This is a danger in any material that purports to deal with ultimate reality, hence is intruding, in the popular imagination, in the territory reserved for God. It can provoke Jungian inflation whereby a person who relates intensely to the material starts to see themselves as God. It’s the literary equivalent of Jerusalem Syndrome. Wikipedia says, “Jerusalem syndrome is a group of mental phenomena involving the presence of religiously-themed obsessive ideas, delusions, or other psychosis-like experiences that are triggered by a visit to the city of Jerusalem. It is not endemic to one single religion or denomination but has affected Jews, Christians, and Muslims of many different backgrounds. … The best known, although not the most prevalent, manifestation of Jerusalem syndrome is the phenomenon whereby a person who seems previously balanced and devoid of any signs of psychopathology becomes psychotic after arriving in Jerusalem. The psychosis is characterized by an intense religious theme… given the religious focus of Jerusalem.” There are probably books for every Myers-Briggs personality type that can provoke a psychotic episode in that particular type. All “holy books” and “sacred scriptures” can clearly overwhelm people. Ken Wilber’s “Integral Theory” provokes a fanatical response in some people. New Age gurus and populists such as Eckhart Tolle can beguile the masses. Self-help books such as The Secret by Rhonda Byrne, based on the “law of attraction”, can take over people’s lives. Books such as Conversations with God by Neale Donald
Walsch, The Celestine Prophecy by James Redfield and The Shack by William P. Young have all gone viral and had immense influence. QAnon was a conspiracy theory that caused people to become inflated and believe they were acting on God’s behalf against Satanists. In the sphere of art, Stendhal syndrome applies. Wikipedia says, “Stendhal’s syndrome or Florence syndrome is a psychosomatic condition involving rapid heartbeat, fainting, confusion and even hallucinations, allegedly occurring when individuals become exposed to objects, artworks, or phenomena of great beauty.” All books that are capable of having a transformational effect on you may trigger epiphanies or psychosis, and often it’s difficult to tell the difference. Many people who believe they have attained enlightenment have actually gone mad, or become acutely inflated and mistaken manic episodes for breakthrough episodes. In Howl, Allen Ginsberg wrote, “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked ... angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night...” It has been clear to us for years that quite a few of our readers are treading a fine line, but the more that people can understand themselves and the potential dangers they face, the better protected they will be. Anonymous said, “In my latest hypomanic state, I was much more prepared to know what was happening with me and was equipped with enough language and terminology to rationally understand what I was going through. The first two episodes were not as fortunate, and in retrospect were a situation where ‘summoned or not, the Self will come.’ I want to try and briefly share with you my subjective experience of my encounters with the Self to highlight how some of my experiences relate to your material.” This is very important. Once you have a language, a terminology, a context, a rational and logical framework, for whatever happens to you, you are much better equipped to deal with what life throws at you. Our work provides an absolutely vast, indeed cosmic, framework for understanding your life. Anonymous said, “The first time I went hypomanic I read about the Jungian encounter with the scarab beetle. I was in bed and had what I would now consider to be an unintentional kundalini experience, with all sorts of cracking and somatic sensations. I barely slept that night and when I woke up
and went outside the next morning I was struck in the face by a golden/emerald scarab beetle that I had never seen before in my province. It defied rational explanation and left me questioning previously held assumptions. It spiraled me into a state where everything suddenly seemed to hold special meaning, then eventually into a gradual decline into the downfalls of bipolar.” To encounter a scarab beetle in such circumstances is a true WOW moment. No doubt about it. A person in that situation really has felt the awesome power of the Collective Unconscious. That is both a numinous event, and an event that can, without doubt, trigger inflation. A tell-tale sign of imminent trouble is when “everything suddenly seems to hold special meaning” because it is almost always accompanied by the feeling that you yourself hold special meaning, that you are a very special person, a chosen one, and then you’re well on your way to inflation and mania. You are succumbing to Jerusalem syndrome, with no need of the physical presence of the city of Jerusalem. People can become inflated anytime, anywhere. People with any preexisting susceptibilities, any history of mental disturbance and perhaps a history of a significant use of drugs, are especially vulnerable. Psychonauts are overwhelmingly likely to endure psychosis at some point in their lives. They seek inflation, and they get it, but they call it “epiphany”. Anonymous said, “My ego was becoming inflated with the power of the Self, and I was starting to have delusions of grandeur, reference, and mood. I had visions of past life regression, particularly as a Canadian soldier in the WWI trenches (which I did study a lot in school). I did not feel a complete personal connection with the thoughts, it was more as though I had ‘downloaded’ images from the collective unconscious or noosphere. I know these were products of an amplified imagination and not grounded in the reality principle, but the unexpected power of the Self completely overwhelmed my unsuspecting Ego. “The second episode was full mania (Bipolar I) and included hospitalization. In retrospect I can see that I was gradually moving into mania and starting to feel synchronicities in music and benign events. Then suddenly I had what I would describe as a near death experience. I was not sleeping one night and started having delusional thoughts about past life regressions to Egyptian times and having to answer a riddle proposed by the Sphinx. When this intense visualization happened, I stumbled to the kitchen
in a cold sweat and delirious state and collapsed to my knees. The experience was very strange and overwhelming. The next day I had intrusive thoughts about a past life regression as a Mistah Kurtz type of character in a jungle environment similar to the movie Apocalypse Now. I walked around the block and dogs were angrily barking at me as if they sensed I was in a psychotic state. I felt godlike and had forgotten my Ego and the reality principle. I was totally consumed by the inflated power of the Self and became dominated by the mana personalities and delusions. “After I was put on the proper medication and heavy doses of antipsychotics I was brought back to reality with authority. I completely lost touch with the Self and had destroyed my Ego. I entered a long and dark depression where I felt alienated and abandoned from the Self, was melancholic every day and had a deep sense of ennui. I was stuck in a job, having relationship issues, and essentially in a mid-life crisis. I had to completely rebuild my Ego and managed to do so through the strength of Will. I got a new job, started playing rugby again, built social connections, got back to the gym, and nourished a healthy Ego and Persona to help navigate my life. “As I was recently starting to feel balanced again and like I had brought my Ego and mental health completely back to normal, I underwent my third hypomanic episode. However, this one felt entirely different than the previous two. Although I was hospitalized voluntarily for the comfort of my family, I did not feel as though I became entirely irrational or that I was caught completely off guard. I did adjust my medications as I am a believer in the Bio-Psycho-Social-Archetypal model proposed by Tim Read, and am a proponent of Western medicine. I know medication works and get annoyed at new-age spiritualists who think you just need to up the dose of kombucha and St. John’s Wort. I was having trouble sleeping and that is always a trigger for me, but to me my mood seemed balanced. I was certainly on the cusp of further problems and was having contact with the Self and Shadow, but this time I feel like I had a rational way of understanding it through Jungian psychology, philosophy, and ontological mathematics. “This time I felt my Ego was strong enough to help me see through delusions of reference, grandeur, and mood. I felt I was experiencing some synchronicities but that I was grounding them with the reality principle. Continuing sports was good for the Ego to stay humble and not get too lost in thought. I realize Ego and Self are not two separate entities, but it can
sometimes feel as though the two aspects of your psyche are alien to each other. When I was approaching the aspects of the Self this time, I was confronted by aspects of my Ego’s personal unconscious from this incarnation that are not always pleasant. Honestly confronting all of the unsavory parts of your psyche and reliving the moments that you are least proud of is extremely hard and most people are not up to the challenge. I think some catch a glimpse of the Self and it may stick with them for their entire life, but unless they are willing to honestly face elements of the personal unconscious then will never be able to deal with the Shadow of the Self and the dark parts of the Collective Unconscious.” This is excellent and candid personal testimony and vividly relates to many of the topics we have discussed in our books. It delivers many salutary lessons. It’s a psychological minefield out there for everyone, and it’s getting worse. Social media is magnifying psychological problems and creating a mental health epidemic. But these things are always highly nuanced. Our anonymous contributor, via his intense experiences, was also getting glimpses of a reality most people never encounter. He was indeed pushing into the territory of the divine, but, like the Quest for the Holy Grail, most people are more likely to be crushed by this Quest than to achieve it. But who would deny themselves the chance to take hold of the Grail, despite the dangers? The task is to enter the Unknown Land armed with knowledge and understanding. Most people just blunder in, and then suffer the inevitable psychological consequences. Anonymous wrote, “I believe the Self uses Archetypes and access to world historic figures or past life regressions as masks to deal with accessing the Collective Unconscious. Because the Collective Unconscious is so powerful, the Self needs to use Archetypes in the same way that the Ego uses the Persona to deal with the collective community. The goal is to make sure the Self does not over identify with an Archetype and become possessed and inflated (manic), and you need a strong Ego to stay grounded in reality.” This idea doesn’t work, at least not in terms of Jung’s theory. The Ego, as has been stated, doesn’t belong to the collective community. It’s a step back from it. To protect itself, it sends the persona into that community to do battle on its behalf. In terms of the Jungian Self, the Self is not only part of the Collective Unconscious, but the actual base of the Collective Unconscious. It doesn’t need any protection any more than God does, and indeed the Self is more or less identical to God in Jung’s system.
The Self can be considered the repository of past lives and the director of world historic figures, much as God, in Abrahamism, is in charge of providence, hence is responsible for all lives and all world-historic figures. In Hegel’s system, all past lives and world-historic figures are agents of the dialectically evolving Spirit. It’s the Ego, not the Self, that is in danger of over-identifying with Archetypes, and becoming liable to processes such as possession and inflation. You absolutely need a strong Ego to stay grounded in reality. The Ego has a difficult job. It needs to resist being taken over by elements of the Collective Unconscious (in which case it ends up believing it’s something it’s not), it needs to resist being swallowed by the Collective Unconscious (Jonah in the belly of the whale), and yet, if it wishes to expand and grow stronger and more powerful, it needs to start understanding, embracing and integrating the elements of the Collective Unconscious. It’s in an incredible dance with the Self and the Collective Unconscious. Anonymous said, “When encountering the Collective Unconscious or the Shadow of the Self, you also need to have a historical understanding of the horror show of human history to deal with the unconscious thought intrusions and be able to choose the appropriate Archetypes to don to deal with such thoughts (i.e., infanticide, mass rape, napalm bombings, trench warfare, torture, etc.).” It’s for sure that a rich understanding of human history is vital. History is not accidental. According to Hegel, it’s the dialectical unfolding of the Spirit as it follows its trajectory towards Absolute Knowing. The world-historic figures are, so to speak, the puppets of the cosmic Spirit. History, psychologically, is a record of the workings of the Collective Unconscious. It’s the biography of the Shadow. It’s about the Persona (faking it), it’s about the Ego (self-concealment), it’s about the obsessive pursuit of the Soul Image (Anima/Animus), it’s about the desire to absorb the power of the Mana personalities, and it’s about trying to understand the Self (God). It’s about projection, individually and collectively. It’s about possession. It’s about alienation and inflation. It’s one giant psychological clusterfuck. Anonymous said, “I think that I have had contact with the Self since I was young, but to me it was never reified like Jung’s Philemon or a Socratic Daemon. Studying the Self using psychology and understanding comparative religions has given me the sense that the Self is really an immortal expression
of me, while the Ego is a temporal expression of the Self. They are the same but different. The Ego is immanent and the Self is transcendent, but the sum of them together makes up the entire psyche.” Yes, that’s exactly how it works. The Ego is the agent, the emissary, in spacetime, of the Self, which is outside spacetime. Anonymous said, “When I think about it in terms of ontological mathematics, I have an intuitive sense that Euler’s identity (eiπ + 1 = 0) relates to the psyche in this way. The Self can be considered as eiπ because of its infinite and complex nature, the Ego can be considered as 1, and the Collective Unconscious is the Eternal 0.” It’s a neat idea, but Euler’s identity simply picks out the value of Euler’s Formula at the value of x = π. For sure, Euler’s identity is astounding in terms of its mathematical elegance. It combines five constants of mathematics (e, π, i, 1 and 0) and three mathematical operations (exponentiation, multiplication, and addition, each occurring only once). It’s awesomely beautiful. However, it’s a good move not to see it in mystical terms. It’s the core of rationalism. Anonymous said, “I think that all infinite Selves are nodes in the eternal Collective Unconscious, who are continuously reincarnating as Egos to eventually help the Collective Unconscious gain consciousness as each monad becomes optimized and maximizes/sublimates its will to power.” That’s right. The Selves are the eternal and necessary monadic minds. They are the foundation of existence. Nothing stands behind them. They are transcendent. They constitute the immaterial Singularity outside space and time that preceded and caused the Big Bang. The zero-entropy domain of pure transcendent Being is perfect Collective Consciousness: God Consciousness. The Collective Unconscious is formed at the same time as the Big Bang universe of space, time, matter, gravity, entropy and temperature. It’s the collective mind of the universe in the immanent domain. The Selves, in relation to the temporal and contingent aspect of Becoming (as opposed to the eternal and necessary aspect of Being) in due course emanate all the familiar Jungian archetypes and, above all, the Ego, which is our vehicle of the mind in this particular world. It’s worth highlighting the difference between the Self as Being, and the Self as Becoming. The Self as Being is, like Aristotle’s God, perfect, but disconnected from the world. The Self as Becoming is connected to the world and being actively influenced by it. In the same way that the Persona, the
mask, is in a feedback loop with the Ego that stands behind it, the Ego is in a feedback loop with the “Becoming Self” that stands behind it. We improve our “Becoming Self” via the Ego and how the Ego interacts with both the world and the Collective Unconscious. We need to cultivate the Ego, not annihilate it, as Eastern mystics and New Agers so often advocate. Anonymous wrote, “In these terms Zero is like the container for the Collective Unconscious, Infinity is the multitude of expressions of the eternal Self, and One is the Ego that has to navigate the material world and our interactions with others.” Although it’s always interesting to engage in such speculation, how does it advance anything, really? It’s bordering on numerology. This type of thinking is what mystics like to indulge in, and our advice is that it ought to be avoided. The point of ontological mathematics is to accurately define all terms, not to engage in mystical speculation. The focus must always be on the generalized Euler Formula (the Source Formula). Of course, there is always a temptation to make provocative connections between things. We do it ourselves. Sometimes it can trigger astonishing new intellectual journeys. However, unless the tendency is reined in, it can lead to mania, where people start connecting everything, in the manner of conspiracy theorists. Forming patterns where none exist is a particular danger-sign of mania. Anonymous said, “When I consider the Psyche in terms of photonic electromagnetism, I think that our Self makes up the higher frequency ranges, and our Ego takes up the visible light spectrum and lower frequencies that ‘mingle’ with other waves to create the illusion of matter. Our senses interpret this lower frequency domain as the totality of our experience and in a sense we become locked in our Ego and sensory perception. When we experience mystical or altered states of consciousness from drugs or mental illness I think our mind is experiencing higher frequency perceptions and can ultimately tune into the ‘zero’ domain which contains all monads and is the collective unconscious.” It certainly is all about frequencies. Some frequencies are simply far too energetic to be present in spacetime … they would incinerate anything they touched, like ultra-powerful laser beams. They can only be contained by the immaterial, dimensionless mind, which is made of sinusoidal waves of all possible frequencies and is a net zero. Anonymous said, “As for psychic connections and synchronicities, I find
it hard to determine if anything I’ve experienced has merit or if it is simply delusional thinking. I will say I think I have had legitimate synchronicities, but I am uncertain about any type of telepathic connections. I don’t think I’ve ever ‘read’ anyone apart from having very strong intuitive abilities, but I do wonder if I have ever projected psychic contents or if this is even hypothetically possible.” Intuition is the most common form of telepathy. If you have ever met a really powerful intuitive, they can “read” strangers with incredible accuracy, instantly. Telepathy, when people try to imagine it, is conceived as a temporal process where one person is thinking thoughts and another person is reading them in real time. But intuition, in its pristine form, is about getting a total download in one go. There is no real-time process going on. The intuitive gets all the information they need in one flash of insight. A lot of paranormal activity – such as synchronicity – goes on at a deep unconscious level, and much of it is rarely noticed. Never forget that a famous experiment showed that people couldn’t even consciously see a gorilla standing right in front of them on a basketball court, beating its chest. That’s how easily distracted people are, and how they see what they want to see, and not what’s actually there. The unconscious is forever tapping us on the shoulder and prompting us to pay attention, but most of us are too wrapped up in all of our nonsense – smartphones, social media, and all that – to actually take any cognizance. Projecting psychic content for others to see is hypothetically possible, but actually achieving it requires an astoundingly powerful and disciplined mind. A dream is an internal projection of psychic content, which only the subject can see, but the same mind could externally project its dream images into another mind, or even into the world. A projected image is just a wavefunction, a thought-function, made, like everything else, of sinusoidal waves. Poltergeist activity is an example of the mind physically altering the real world by remote action. Visual projection – generating visible images – is not in principle any more difficult than making sounds, knocking things over, or propelling objects across the room. The visual projection is not any more solid than a visual projection is in a dream, and it’s perceived as an apparition. Anonymous said, “If I ever have intuitive insights now, I try to take them with a grain of salt, humility, and good humor instead of imbuing them with
meaning and profundity.” That’s certainly a good idea. Anonymous said, “Regarding the Anima and Animus I think of the Native Canadians’ concept of two spirits. Because of reincarnation, each of us has had multiple bodies and experiences as both sexes. When we delve into the unconscious we realize this and have to take on the male and female psychic elements (which is uncomfortable). Our ego consciousness also expresses two spirits. Many people fall at different points of the Kinsey Scale. Even if someone is 100% hetero, they would have at some point reincarnated in different mortal bodies of different sexes. If they project homophobia their personal unconscious is likely struggling with homosexual thoughts.” The idea that homophobia implies that the homophobic individual is a latent homosexual is wildly overplayed and frequently totally false. Many homosexuals pretending to be heterosexual (as many Christian preachers do) project homophobia because they are dealing with their own internal contradiction. However, there are plenty of heterosexuals who straightforwardly find homosexuality repulsive and they are homophobic because they are disgusted by the very idea of homosexuality. It produces a gag reaction. It creeps them out. By the same token, many male homosexuals are disgusted by female genitalia. No one accuses such people of being latent heterosexuals. You can’t force people to like things they don’t like. You can’t make people who are disgusted by tarantulas hold out their arm to allow a tarantula to crawl up it. Many heterosexuals will never be reconciled to homosexuality, and people who imagine otherwise are not living in the real world. The best that can realistically be achieved is to try to get them to keep their homophobia to themselves and not go around broadcasting it. You can’t make them happy about homosexuality, but you can at least expect them to keep their opinions to themselves. Why would a masculine man who relishes his masculinity be expected to approve of effeminacy? It’s a simple fact of life that masculine men like feminine women and dislike effeminate men and masculine women. Why would that be surprising to anyone? In a meritocracy, the task is not to somehow make people like that which they do not like, but to make them understand that some people are very different from them and should not be discriminated against because of their
nature. A smart gay man is every bit as valuable to a meritocracy as a smart heterosexual man. Meritocratic individuals should not be blocked because of their sex, sexuality or race, or indeed anything else (provided it does not contradict meritocracy … religious extremism certainly would). However, no one should expect to have a society where everyone likes everyone else. That’s impossible. The love and light ideology will never succeed. Moreover, even though most people have presumably been members of the opposite sex in past lives, it’s also highly likely that souls develop a distinct preference. People that like being male will keep reincarnating as males, and people that like being female will keep reincarnating as females. If this were not the case, transgenderism would be rife, and it isn’t. Only a tiny number of people find themselves trying to overcome their own biology. Anonymous said, “When I had my severe bipolar I episode I came into contact with the unconscious archetypal forces of my mind and it was like a possession. My Self became immediately inflated and I was having delusions of grandeur, reference, and mood. When I did not have the ability to think about it from a rational perspective using psychology or philosophy it was like I had turned into Mr. Hyde without the ‘serum’ of rationality to turn me back into Dr. Jekyll. I felt lost in metaphor as though all music, art, poetry, and entertainment took on a new meaning. I was often overcome with emotions from hearing a certain song, or looking at a piece of art. These subjective feelings were like mirages in the desert preventing me from seeing things clearly. Metaphorically, the ideas of the Collective Unconscious, Self, and Ego are difficult to express, and they even get confused in language or symbolism when using precise psychological terms.” Yes, that’s is an excellent description of the kind of states of mind that many mystics and emotionalists plunge into, and they lack the tools – reason and logic, psychology, philosophy, science and mathematics – to recover. They embrace one mad idea after another, in the manner of QAnon conspiracy theorists. These people have fallen down the rabbit hole into total insanity. Anonymous said, “I believe you said in one of your books that the Ego is the emissary of the Self, and the Self is the emissary of the Collective Unconscious.” What we said is that the Persona is the emissary of the Ego in the public world, and the Ego is the emissary of the Self in spacetime. The Self is the base of the system (it’s the monadic mind itself), hence is not anything else’s
emissary. That said, it could be argued, as already mentioned, that there are two Selves: one of Being (eternal and necessary; the true base) and one of Becoming (temporal and contingent; the false base, the Demiurge as opposed to the True God). In this specific sense, the latter Self would be the emissary in the entropic domain of matter of the former Self (which only ever experiences zero entropy and the immaterial). The Self, as Being, is, like Aristotle’s God, not affected by the world at all. The Self, as Becoming, is connected to, and influenced by, the world, hence has an evolutionary journey to go on just as the Ego does, and it needs to have a great and productive relationship with the Ego. The Collective Unconscious is centered on the Self. It’s not something different from the Self, acting independently of it. In Neoplatonist terms, the Self can be likened to the “One”, and entities such as the Mana Personalities, the Anima/Animus, the Shadow, the Ego and the Persona can all be considered its dynamic emanations, all of which have been subject to evolution over the millennia. Anonymous said, “This struck me as true because you really have to understand your own Ego and discover and understand the personal unconscious before you can start to conceptualize the power of the Collective Unconscious. I think my latest experience with hypomania may have been a glimpse of the power of the Collective Unconscious and I was only prepared for that because of my history.” The personal unconscious is generated by the Ego. It’s what it rejects, for whatever reason. For Freud, only the conscious Ego and its personal unconscious (its mental rubbish dump) existed. For Freud, the personal unconscious – the store of rejected energy, so to speak – was repressed, but not destroyed. This energy of the personal unconscious was incredibly strong and burst through into the conscious world in many different ways, which the conscious mind always found troubling (since it wanted what it had buried to remain buried). The personal unconscious was an “absent presence”. It was pushed out of sight, swept under the carpet, yet continued to exist and to threaten to come back, which it frequently did via the “return of the repressed.” Jung went beyond Freud’s scheme by positing a Collective Unconscious, a common psychic structure for everyone, a common operating system of the psyche, composed of Archetypes, revolving around the base Archetype: the Self, the center of the entire psyche. Jung said, “The Self is not only the
center but also the whole circumference which embraces both conscious and unconscious; it is the center of this totality, just as the Ego is the center of the conscious mind.” The Self is the central ordering principle of the psyche, and the image of the unity of the psyche as a whole. Jungian individuation requires the Ego to have a healthy relationship with the Persona, and then to start integrating the Shadow, which oversees the personal unconscious. The Ego then has the opportunity to integrate the Soul Image (Anima/Animus), then the Mana Personality, and finally it can approach the Self itself … the Holy Grail, more or less. Jungian individuation is the uncomfortable process of finding your authentic Self. It is typically presented as a journey of the Ego towards the Self. In fact, Jung makes it clear in some of his writings that it can also be viewed in the opposition direction: the journey of the Self towards the Ego, although he rarely emphasized that view of the process. Yet it’s a critical “theological” consideration because it means that God is affected by his Creation. In Abrahamism, God does not need his Creation and cannot be changed by it. He could do without it. In Hegelianism, and Jungian psychology, God comes to self-awareness through his Creation. His Creation is therefore indispensable to his own operations. Jung wrote, “The Western ‘God-image’ is a representation of the collective unconscious, an archetype of the psyche that undergoes a continual process of transformation... The God image evolves through its relationship to humanity. Whoever knows God has an effect on ‘him’. For the individual, knowing God is the process of recognizing and assimilating the pressured and paradoxical contents of the self, which come to consciousness – seek incarnation – within the ego. ... The term ‘self’ seems a suitable one for the unconscious substrate whose actual exponent in consciousness is the ego. The ego stands to the self as the moved to the mover, or as object to subject, because the determining factors that radiate outward from the self surround the ego on all sides and are therefore supraordinate to it. The self, like the unconscious, is an a priori existent out of which the ego evolves. It is, so to speak, an unconscious prefiguration of the ego. It is not I who create myself; rather, I happen to myself. ... It isn’t possible to kill part of your ‘self’ unless you kill yourself first. If you ruin your conscious personality, the so-called ego-personality, you deprive the self of its real goal, namely to become real itself. The goal of life is the realization of the self. If you kill yourself you
abolish that will of the self to become real, but it may arrest your personal development inasmuch it is not explained. You ought to realize that suicide is murder, since after suicide there remains a corpse exactly as with any ordinary murder. Only it is yourself that has been killed.” Hermann Hesse wrote, “To die is to go into the Collective Unconscious, to lose oneself in order to be transformed into form, pure form.” It’s absolutely right to emphasize the power of the Collective Unconscious. At its base is God. People have no conception of just how powerful the unconscious is. The personal unconscious exerts a considerable control over us, while the Collective Unconscious constitutes a ladder to God, hence is able to unlock our divine powers. It takes a godlike mind to produce the dreams we have every night. Imagine trying to consciously produce a dream, i.e., creating dream images from scratch and then fitting them all together, incorporating real people from your life and giving them agency and things to say to you that accurately reflect what they would say in real life. You wouldn’t know where to begin. Yet your unconscious does it effortlessly. Anonymous said, “Having bipolar is like a dysfunctional relationship with the Self that cycles through alienation and inflation.” Exactly! Anonymous said, “I don’t want to lose myself and become alienated and depressed, but I also don’t want to inflate myself and become pompous and arrogant.” Very sensible! The problem for many people is that they become addicted to inflation. After all, from the point of view of the ordinary person, who wouldn’t want to feel like God?! The most powerful psychological forces in the world – revolving around religion and spirituality – are all about inflation. People of faith imagine they have a personal relationship with God. That’s pure inflation, which totally distorts their psyche. Meditators actually believe they can break through to some “enlightened” state by simply, ahem, concentrating. That’s pure inflation. The great thing about Jungian psychology is that it highlights the dangers of inflation (and alienation) and offers a realistic, sane way (individuation) of approaching “God” (the Self). We need to replace mainstream religions based on faith and mysticism (inflationary agents) with psychological religions, based on understanding the
psyche, and understanding that God stands at the center of the psyche of absolutely everyone. Everyone has a relationship with God. Sadly, due to mainstream religion and total psychological, epistemological and ontological ignorance, it’s a dysfunctional and destructive relationship for most people and for the world. Just look at world history. Anonymous said, “My Ego feels healthy now and I hope it stays this way, but the struggle with mental health is not for the faint of heart or the weak. I have resolved myself to win the battle but I know there will be setbacks and obstacles along the way. I will try to look at them as obstacles to overcome and will always try to remember to think rationally as an ‘elixir’ to avoid getting caught in illusory metaphors.” Yes, this is realistic. People who have had mental health issues are never going to jump clear with one magnificent bound. There will definitely be setbacks and obstacles. But by building up knowledge and a battery of useful techniques, these problems can be prevented from spiraling into debilitating manic episodes. When a person gets into the habit of combating problems at the first sign of trouble, eventually these problems will more or less vanish from their life. Anonymous, “However, thinking too rationally can take some of the mystery and joy out of life and reduce it to a mechanical experience or type of drudgery.” This is very true, and that’s why we emphasize the need for Mythos. Our formula is: Logos for work and Mythos for play. The world, sadly, is all about Mythos (hence why it succumbs so easily to inflation and alienation), and hates Logos. Sanity is all about getting the right, healthy balance. Thinking too much in sensory terms, as scientists do, also takes the mystery and joy out of life given that the most important ideas are not sensory at all. Science, if carried out honestly, inevitably leads to atheism, skepticism and nihilism. “Religious” scientists are a classic example of acting in bad faith and being inauthentic. Anonymous said, “Appreciating metaphor and intuition is a hugely important aspect of my life as an artist. The fact that music and art have the power to bring all of us to tears shows that they transcend complete rational understanding and connect to something deeper. If anything, rationality now allows me to better appreciate art by viewing it through a Jungian lens I can see more layers of meaning and appreciate the subtlety and beauty of the amazing pieces of work people create.”
Art will play a key role in the New World Order. We want the world to be much more artistic and psychological, and much less religious and spiritual. The only excuse for religion is the beautiful art to which it gave rise. But there’s nothing deeper than complete rational understanding. That’s when the Source is reached. The PSR is the end of the road. Anonymous said, “To me the only way to navigate between the Ego and Self is by using rationality and logic, or the Principle of Sufficient Reason and Occam’s Razor.” The PSR and Occam’s Razor lead to real knowledge. It’s real knowledge that the Ego needs in order to come to terms with the Self. The trouble for the Ego is that it has been led astray – above all by religion, spirituality, scientism and bad philosophy – and is more or less totally ignorant about what the Self is and its relationship with it. How can the Ego make progress when something as basic as consciousness is so woefully misunderstood? That’s why this book is so important. It’s bringing people to a proper understanding of what’s going on. Anonymous said, “I have spent a great deal of time studying history, philosophy and psychology and that is the only thing that gives me confidence that I have been able to contact the Self without the disastrous consequences of inflation.” Knowledge is power. The more you know, the more you can place the Self in its correct context. People such as the Abrahamists project the Self as a terrible external God which they, like Abraham himself, must slavishly, mindlessly obey and worship. These people are totally alienated from themselves and reality. They are living in a disastrous fantasy world. Anonymous said, “Nowadays people are often using meditation and mind-altering drugs to get a glimpse of the Self and tend to become megalomaniacs and self-professed gurus.” Yup! Anonymous said, “They have no humility and go on social media to preach, and have often taken on one of the positive archetypes of the Self such as the Guru or Prophet.” Indeed. We come across this so often. Anyone who emphasizes the importance of their personal subjective opinions, beliefs and feelings is extremely prone to this. Love and light is entirely about this. The “law of attraction” panders to it. None of these people ever refers to reason and logic, knowledge and understanding. The PSR and Occam’s razor never feature in
their lives or their “thinking”. Anonymous said, “I read that one delusional psychotic symptom of bipolar is sometimes thought broadcasting, but it could be possible that this is a vestige of Jaynes’s bicameral theory and if one were a naturally strong leader, they might subconsciously direct members in their group.” Wikipedia says, “In psychiatry, thought broadcasting is the belief that others can hear or are aware of an individual’s thoughts. Thought broadcasting can be a positive symptom of schizophrenia. Thought broadcasting has been suggested as one of the first rank symptoms (Schneider’s first-rank symptoms) believed to distinguish schizophrenia from other psychotic disorders. In mild manifestations, a person with this thought disorder may doubt their perception of thought broadcasting. When thought broadcasting occurs on a regular basis, the disorder can affect behavior and interfere with the person’s ability to function in society.” Thought broadcasting is, by one interpretation, Julian Jaynes’s central idea concerning bicameralism. The tribal chief, alive or dead, could broadcast his thoughts and commands to the tribe. The dead chiefs later morphed into the gods – the great power directing this world from some other world. A strong leader can indeed subconsciously direct his followers. Leaving aside schizophrenia, thought broadcasting is a real thing, but conducted at the unconscious level, i.e., we all encounter each other’s thought broadcasting, but we don’t consciously know it … our unconscious mind, however, does, and can act on it. This process is intimately connected to Jungian synchronicity. Thought broadcasting is very powerful in large groups and can cause emotional contagion and mass hysteria, as everyone saw when the Capitol was stormed by Trump’s QAnon legions. Anonymous said, “In my latest illness, I did not go looking for a Nekyia again or in search of the Self, but it happened and I used every tool at my disposal to not be overcome. The thought of losing my family, job, and friends was a major motivating factor to stay healthy. I may have glimpsed Gnosis, but it is an extremely fine line between Gnosis and Psychosis.” That’s exactly right, and everyone needs to be aware of this. Rimbaud wrote, “A poet makes himself a visionary through a long, boundless, and systematized derangement of all the senses.” Psychonauts are always in danger of ending up on the wrong side of the line. Going in fanatical pursuit
of DMT trips, lucid dreaming, out-of-body experiences, and so on, can, and often does, push people into psychosis. That’s why secret societies turn these pursuits into group rituals, where people engaged in these activities can monitor and look after each other in an organized, knowledgeable, controlled environment where people know what warning signs to watch out for. Anonymous said, “In my most recent hypomanic episode I felt as though the only thing that kept me hypo (or under) full mania was the use of the PSR and Occam’s Razor. Otherwise I may have had a full blown manic episode and experienced another major setback in my life.” Most people have no idea how powerful the PSR and Occam’s Razor are in keeping a person grounded. A person who can always ask themselves: “What is the rational explanation for this, what is the simplest rational explanation for this?” is never going to fly off into fantasy. It’s the rejection of the PSR and Occam’s Razor that allows people to believe so much nonsense and to become highly susceptible to being overwhelmed by unconscious forces such as possession and inflation. Anonymous said, “Thank you for equipping me with such a broad scope of knowledge. I am often disheartened that I have such resistance discussing it with others, but I continually plant seeds when the opportunities arise.” Yes, our work encounters the most tremendous resistance, but we always bear in mind Schopenhauer’s formula: “To truth only a brief celebration of victory is allowed between the two long periods during which it is condemned as paradoxical, or disparaged as trivial. ... All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.” We live in the Idiocracy and all intelligent ideas are bitterly fought and repudiated. Adam Curtis got it right. He wrote, “Then one day in Central Park, looking at the people, Eduard Limonov decided that he was going to write a novel, but one that would have him as the central figure. It would be about the real experience of America, not the fake democracy. In the book, he described watching Americans in a café where he was working as a waiter. ‘It is they,’ he wrote, ‘who have introduced a plague into this world. The plague of money, the disease of money, the plague of buying and selling is their handiwork. I hate this system, and I am not ashamed that my hatred has sprung from my wife’s betrayal. I clear away your leftovers while my wife
fucks and you amuse yourself with her, for the sole reason that there is an inequality. She has a cunt for which there are buyers, you, and I don’t have a cunt. I’m going to blow up your world.’ The book, called It’s Me, Eddie, gave a picture of a new reality that Limonov saw emerging from under the surface of America’s everyday life. People think they are free, but really they are becoming like simplified robots, following the rules of money, limited to satisfying only those desires that can be bought and sold. Every publisher he sent it to refused to publish it. ... Limonov would finally get his novel published in Russia. It would cause a sensation and its dark vision of the reality behind the rhetoric of American democracy was going to influence an entire generation in Russia. It was the generation to whom the Americans would then try and sell the idea of democracy. All the talk of democracy, the book told them, was just a sham. Really, it was all about the money.” Money is the only thing the world is interested in. Because money is power. To work out who is in power, follow the money! The only true conspiracy if that of those who control the money. The people don’t!
THE THING ITSELF ou will never cease to hear New Agers and Eastern mystics saying things like, “The menu is not the food” and, “The map is not the territory”. They will quote Alan Watts, who said, “What we have forgotten is that thoughts and words are conventions, and that it is fatal to take conventions too seriously. A convention is a social convenience, as, for example, money ... but it is absurd to take money too seriously, to confuse it with real wealth ... In somewhat the same way, thoughts, ideas and words are ‘coins’ for real things.” Why do mystics say such things? It’s exactly because they are mystics, and mystics inherently rely on obscurity and paradox. They never want to define anything because that would pin them down. A mystic is intent on saying: “How you describe reality is not reality. Only by experiencing reality do you grasp reality.” This is just mystical empiricism, making absurd claims on behalf of private language (a logical impossibility). The idea is that you can have a private epiphany, but you cannot explain it to anyone else, except in the “degraded” terms of language. This of course allows a mystic to pretend to have achieved the most wondrous states, and then, when they are challenged to say anything meaningful and relevant about these states, they reply, “Language cannot describe it … nothing can.” And then they proceed to recite metaphors and poetry and Zen Buddhist koans, none of which clarifies or explains anything but allows the mystical guru to pose as “profound” and his credulous disciples to learn to play the same game to impress their equally gullible friends. It’s all a racket. It’s all self-delusion. The hilarious thing is that these people all fall for their own trick, i.e., mistaking one thing for another thing, confusing the phenomenon with the noumenon. Specifically, 100% of these people mistake the “feeling of being enlightened” for “being enlightened”, i.e., they have misperceived a “coin” of enlightenment as enlightenment itself. Here’s the horrific truth for all mystics. Enlightenment is about objective
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knowledge, not subjective experience. That’s the death of New Ageism and Eastern mysticism right there because all of these people are emotional and mystical empiricists who detest rationalism and knowledge. The truth is that, ontologically, the map is the territory, the menu is the food, and the coins are the wealth. Ontological mathematics rationally reveals to us that the definition of the thing, the true description of the thing, is the thing. There is no gap between the language of reality and what reality is. They are one and the same thing. Reality is not non-language that is falsely described by language. Reality is language, and can only be understood in terms of its own language, which is ontological mathematics. It’s absolutely true that manmade language falsifies reality because, selfevidently, reality is not made of manmade language. However, the fallacy that New Agers and mystics then promote is that no language can ever capture reality. They ignore the Truth, which is that reality has its own eternal and necessary language, which has nothing to do with manmade language, and which is both language and ontology, i.e., the language of the thing in itself is the thing in itself. Its definition in its own language is what the thing is, and it has no other definition, and certainly not a mystical, emotional or empirical one. Reality’s own language is ontological mathematics, and that’s the last thing the mystics, emotionalists and empiricists want to hear, and so they don’t hear it. They infinitely prefer their feelings, subjective experiences and mystical intuitions. Reason, logic and mathematics have no value for them. They don’t want knowledge and understanding. They seek an empirical, subjective state of emotional and mystical ecstasy. That state – a state of nonknowledge and no-understanding – is all they will accept as “enlightenment.” It is in fact the purest endarkenment. Buddhists like to say, “A finger pointing at the moon is not the moon. The finger is needed to know where to look for the moon, but if you mistake the finger for the moon itself, you will never know the real moon.” So, why not regard feelings, mystical intuitions and subjective experiences as metaphorical “fingers”. They point at the thing in itself (the moon, in the metaphor), but they do not bring any “knowing” of the thing in itself. They entirely miss what the moon is. They never “know the real moon”. Why not? Because knowledge is about reason and logic, about precise definition and exact understanding. It’s not emotional, or mystical, or subjective, or a matter of faith, or a matter of perception, or a matter of opinion. It’s not obscure and
paradoxical and all things to all men. It’s exact, precise, analytic! Enlightenment is a cognitive state, not an experiential state, where we are defining cognition as “the mental action or process of acquiring knowledge and understanding through thought, through precise, analytic thinking.” Enlightenment is mathematical. Enlightenment is about knowing what light – the foundational substance of existence – is. Light is ontological mathematics! Light is basis thought. Light = thought = ontological mathematics. All things are made of light, made of thought, made of mathematics. That’s what you need to know in order to be enlightened. Once you know what you are, and thus how you function, and what your true potential is, you can then start fully actualizing your enlightened state, which ultimately means that you create your reality just by thinking about it … because reality is thought! Thoughts are ontological. They are what reality is made of, and so we can use our minds – our instruments of thinking – to create any state we desire. We can do this, to some extent, individually (as in private dreams), but we can do it to the fullest extent only when we all think together, to create perfection (heaven, nirvana, paradise, gnosis, moksha, etc.). Individualists won’t be pleased to hear that real enlightenment is collective, not individual, so there’s no point in sitting on your own, meditating and being “mindful”. What is perfection? We can define it exactly: it’s the state of zero entropy where all minds have perfectly converged and become one, whole, complete, fully integrated system of absolute harmony and perfect symmetry. This is none other than the God State, the Absolute. Between us, we can all become the one, True God, and that’s the state where we enjoy perfect reason, perfect logic, perfect thinking, perfect emotion (perfect love), perfect knowledge, perfect understanding, perfect intuition, and perfect perception. We are all things, we see all things, and we are in a state of total bliss, ecstasy, and knowledge. That’s what true enlightenment, delivered by ontological mathematics, provides. It’s what New Ageism, Eastern Mysticism, Western Abrahamism, and Scientific Materialism will never deliver. These are the systems that never allow us to know the “true moon”. The Buddhists say, “The teaching is merely a vehicle to describe the truth. Don’t mistake it for the truth itself.” In fact, the language of true teaching both defines the truth and is the truth. That’s the whole point of ontology. True ontology is one and the same as epistemology. To know what
existence is is to know that existence is knowledge. It’s mathematics. It’s not something unknowable, or infinitely mysterious, or beyond our capacity to understand. We can know what existence is for the simplest reason of all: existence, as we said, is knowledge. It’s made of knowledge. The language of existence (the vehicle that allows us to know what existence is) is also existence. Mathematics, the language of existence, is existence. That is the absolute, infallible Truth that refutes all anti-mathematical systems, all of which are mired in faith, mysticism, unknowing and ignorance. They are anti-gnosis. Gnosis can work only if reality is knowledge (gnosis) in itself. You achieve gnosis through understanding that reality is gnosis! We can know reality for one reason only: it is made of pure knowledge (mathematics). If it weren’t, we could never know what reality is. Achieving a blissful state, such as the New Agers and Eastern mystics seek, does not tell you what reality is, hence is not a state of gnosis. It’s a “false awakening”. You have accepted the blue pill, not the red pill. You have cut yourself off from the Truth. Never forget that we live in a reality defined by the Principle of Sufficient Reason. Everything has a precise explanation. Never forget that we live in a reality based on the simplest possible principle, since there is no reason why it would choose anything else, i.e., we live in the Occam’s Razor universe. The simplest form produces the richest content. The most universal form produces the most particulars. Existence isn’t infinitely mysterious. It’s as simple as it can possibly be! That’s exactly how we can work out what it is.
The Mystery is no problem more baffling to the academic world than the problem T here of consciousness. It’s fair to say that no academic has any clue at all about what consciousness is. In fact, academics have totally confused it with something radically different, namely sentience. The problem that faces the academic world is the insurmountable one of how you get lifeless, mindless, purposeless objects (material atoms) to manifest subjectivity. It’s a category error to imagine that matter can provide any answers at all to the foundational issues of mind. Academics believe that
to answer the problem of subjectivity is thereby to solve the “hard problem” of consciousness. In fact, the problem of subjectivity (sentience) is totally different from the problem of consciousness. To understand why, simply ponder all of the following statements: 1) animals are sentient but not conscious; 2) human babies are sentient but not conscious; 3) humans who have never encountered another human are sentient but not conscious; 4) sleepwalking humans are sentient but not conscious. The problem of sentience is drastically different from the problem of consciousness and if you conflate the two you have immediately set yourself an impossible task, especially if you make any attempt to solve these problems within the framework of materialism (i.e., the ideology of antimind). To understand what consciousness actually is, it’s essential to understand the difference, in the world of sleep, between dreaming and lucid dreaming. Exactly the same dichotomy is present in the waking world. A sleepwalker is a person who can do complex tasks – such as riding a motorbike for half an hour – without any consciousness. A conscious version of a sleepwalker engages in what we refer to as “lucid waking”. Lucid waking is the key to consciousness. The fact is that consciousness is not an inherent property of human individuals. It’s not built into them. It’s acquired, just as some people acquire the ability to become lucid dreamers. Since sleepwalkers could do many of the same things as conscious individuals, the question is invited of why consciousness is required at all. In philosophy, there exists the issue of the “philosophical zombie”. This is a hypothetical being physically identical to and indistinguishable from a normal person but which does not have conscious experience, qualia, or sentience. It’s a sleepwalker without subjectivity, which doesn’t experience anything yet nevertheless carries out complex tasks, just like real, conscious people. A zombie world is the same externally as this world, but is internally totally different. No one has any subjective experiences or conscious experiences. The issue is, given the ideology of materialism, predicated on lifeless, mindless objects, why isn’t zombie world the real world? Why do subjectivity and consciousness exist at all? Who needs them? They are entirely superfluous in a material universe. Evolution does not produce superfluous things. To produce pointless things is contrary to Occam’s Razor.
But subjectivity and the need to generate consciousness are absolutely essential in a reality predicated on monadic minds, as opposed to material atoms. We have furnished the true explanation of subjectivity and consciousness. The first geniuses to have real insight into the problem were Leibniz, Hegel and Nietzsche, but the most important breakthroughs were by the twentieth century psychologist Julian Jaynes. Jaynes produced a dazzling new theory of consciousness, but went astray in a few key areas. These errors are now corrected in the present text. If you want to change your consciousness, read and re-read this book! Is there any state of consciousness beyond lucid waking? Lucid consciousness is tied to the physical body. We all go around imagining that our consciousness sits behind our eyes, and watches the world through them. The state beyond lucid waking, involving as radical a jump as from normal dreaming to lucid dreaming, is “hyper-lucid waking” whereby consciousness is freed from physicality and the person can start routinely having out-ofbody experiences. If you don’t know what consciousness is, how can you expand your consciousness to the maximum? Wouldn’t you like to be maximally conscious? Think of the power you would have.
Out of Body Experiences anguage creates a mind-space (a language space) that exists separately from the physical world, the given world. The mind-space has no physical location. Once you truly grasp that your mind is not stuck in your body, in your brain behind your eyes, you can start locating it anywhere. Your mind actually belongs to a mental Singularity that is everywhere. The Singularity, the controlling Cosmic Mind, is present everywhere in the physical cosmos (the whole is in every part). A mind can adopt any viewpoint of the universe it desires. A body, by default, makes us link our mind’s coordinate frame to that of the body, but this is simply a matter of convenience. We can choose any coordinate frame we like. The more highly evolved your mind becomes, the better. Some people, usually highly intuitive people, break through by accident into the domain of
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out-of-body experiences. If you want to have a real presence in that domain, you have to become an expert at ontological mathematics, reality’s language, and then you can use the inherent properties of mathematics (relating the frequency Singularity to the material spacetime universe) to confer on yourself any viewpoint you like. Your mind space has thereby become totally detached from your physical body and can enjoy a life of its own, freed of the restrictions of the given world.
Genius he production mind has the capacity to be a genius, even a god. Most people do not use their production mind to make geniuses of themselves. They use their production mind to make morons of themselves. Look around you. Look at how many people are failing with their lives. They have trained their unconscious to lose, lose, and lose again. They are addicted to failure.
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WHAT ABOUT AI? ccording to materialists, amongst whom some of the most fanatical are AI enthusiasts, consciousness is something that belongs to material systems and can therefore be emulated or simulated by an AI. They look to techniques such as “deep learning.” Marshall Hargrave wrote, “Deep learning is an artificial intelligence (AI) function that imitates the workings of the human brain in processing data and creating patterns for use in decision making. Deep learning is a subset of machine learning in artificial intelligence that has networks capable of learning unsupervised from data that is unstructured or unlabeled. … Big Data, which normally is unstructured, is so vast that it could take decades for humans to comprehend it and extract relevant information. Companies realize the incredible potential that can result from unraveling this wealth of information and are increasingly turning to AI systems for automated support. One of the most common AI techniques used for processing big data is machine learning, a self-adaptive algorithm that produces increasingly better analysis and patterns with experience or with newly added data. … Deep learning, a subset of machine learning, utilizes a hierarchical level of artificial neural networks to carry out the process of machine learning. The artificial neural networks are built like the human brain, with neuron nodes connected together like a web. While traditional programs build analysis with data in a linear way, the hierarchical function of deep learning systems enables machines to process data with a nonlinear approach. … The first layer of the neural network processes a raw data input … and passes it on to the next layer as output. The second layer processes the previous layer’s information by including additional information … and passes on its result. The next layer takes the second layer’s information and includes additional raw data … and makes the machine’s pattern even better. This continues across all levels of the neuron network. … Each layer of its neural network builds on its previous layer…” Let’s go through all the steps that are involved in allowing people to manifest consciousness. Only by understanding these steps is it possible to
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gauge whether an AI could ever genuinely be conscious. Is it possible for it not just to simulate consciousness but actually be conscious? Let’s start off by imagining a universe comprising just one monadic mind. Could this mind, a natural mind, ever become conscious? A monadic mind is based on dual-aspect sinusoids. They are dual-aspect because they are both the information carriers and the information (experiences) they carry. A monadic mind is both syntactic and semantic, i.e., it concerns both form and content. The syntax is the intelligible aspect. The semantic aspect is the sensible, experiential part. The syntactic aspect is machine-like. The semantic aspect is life-like. A syntax-only universe would be nothing but a machine. A semanticsonly universe would be nothing but experience. Reality necessarily contains both aspects (they are built into the dual-aspect ontology of sinusoids). Science omits life and experience from its account of core reality (it believes only in lifeless material objects), and it regards mathematics purely as abstract, unreal syntax, meaning that “matter”, in scientific terms, is neither syntactic nor semantic. It’s actually impossible to say what “matter” actually is. No scientist will be able to tell you. Scientists equally can’t say what space is or what time is. Instead, they merely measure these things, without knowing what they are. A clock measures time, a ruler measures space, a weighing machine gives an indication of how much matter is present. Scientists keep mistaking measuring things for knowing what things are. They never provide ontological and epistemological definitions, only pragmatic, heuristic and instrumental definitions. A system based on syntax and semantics generates two different systems: one centered on syntax and the other on semantics. We can call these two systems “minds”. One takes care of making things. It does so because it knows all the rules of syntax, hence automatically knows how to combine all the basis sinusoids. The problem is that it has no aims. It doesn’t care about anything. What will you make if you don’t care what you make? Well, if you don’t care, you will simply obey defaults. That’s exactly what the “scientific” universe is: a place of default syntax, which looks like a place of machinelike laws being robotically executed, where free will, choice and purpose are entirely absent. In circumstances where the syntactic mind is dominant, life is invisible. The dual-aspect nature of reality means that the syntactic mind is coupled with a semantic mind. This latter mind has no clue how to do anything, how
to make sinusoids combine. It doesn’t understand syntax. However, it experiences everything that the syntactic mind does, and it reacts to it. Kant famously said, “Concepts without percepts are empty; percepts without concepts are blind.” We could say, “The syntactic mind without the semantic mind is blind; the semantic mind without the syntactic mind is impotent.” The semantic mind has a very simple objective: to maximize pleasure and minimize pain; to pursue what it considers advantageous to itself, and to avoid everything it considers disadvantageous. It is, in effect, the Nietzschean will to power. Nietzsche said, “What is good? All that heightens the feeling of power, the will to power, power itself. What is bad? All that is born of weakness. What is happiness? The feeling that power is growing, that resistance is overcome.” The semantic mind is what has the capacity to exercise desire, power, purpose. To say that the semantic mind provides suggestions to the syntactic mind is to say that the semantic mind trains the syntactic mind in what it likes. Yet this training also, of course, has the opposite effect of that desired … it equally trains the syntactic mind in what the semantic mind doesn’t like and which it wants to suppress and repress. What is a nightmare? It’s when the syntactic mind – which is dominant in sleep and dreaming – serves up content that the semantic mind finds horrible, but the semantic mind is in such a passive state it can’t do anything about it and just has to endure it, or cause the person to wake up. The syntactic mind – since it receives a powerful reaction from the semantic mind during a nightmare – may believe that the semantic mind likes this kind of content. Indeed, isn’t it the case that most people enjoy horror movies, ghost trains, terrifying rides at adventure parks, tales of serial killers, and so on? People, at some level, like the dark side of life, or are at least highly curious about it, which is why the production mind serves up this kind of content. It would be perverse for humans to have nightmares if they served no purpose and were absolutely hated by our semantic mind. They must have some utility and they must be fascinating to the semantic mind, and that’s why we have them. The semantic mind is the trainer for the syntactic mind, and the syntactic mind learns what to serve to the semantic mind and what to keep away from it. Through this interactive, feedback process, a character, a personality, is established. How would an AI fare? You would need to create an AI production mind
(syntactic mind) that generates content according to some default procedure. Then you would need to create a consumption mind (semantic mind) that responds to whatever content is served to it. But how would this mind know what content it liked? In nature, a semantic mind operates according to its inbuilt subjectivity and will to power. How would you program subjectivity and will to power into an AI? In nature, the semantic mind is inherently subjective. It feels pleasure and pain. It feels increases and decreases in its power. It trains the syntactic mind in what it likes and what it dislikes. An AI could never have any inherent subjectivity. It’s a construct, not an eternal and necessary ontological entity. External agents – programmers – would have to program into the AI what its “values” were, what it liked and what it disliked, what it pursued and what it avoided. So, it wouldn’t be the AI’s choices, tastes, and preferences but those of its programmer, or whoever commissioned the programmer. It could therefore never be anything but a programmed puppet. These considerations get us nowhere near consciousness. The single monad we have described is sentient, not conscious. Its response to the content created by the production mind isn’t intelligent, reflective, planned, and calculated. It’s just an instant, unmediated response. This is an exceptionally primitive system, barely escaping from default behavior. It appears devoid of mind. It appears “scientific”. Consciousness does not bubble up inside a person. It is added to them from outside through the process of instilling language in them, an exercise carried out by education, on behalf of a culture and society. Consciousness, since it is mediated by language, is about conceptualization, about intelligence. A manmade language has its own syntax and semantics, so consciousness involves superimposing a constructed language (with its own syntax and semantics) over reality’s own language (of ontological mathematics, with its own natural syntax and semantics). Consciousness resides in escaping from the given world (which shows us only its semantic appearance and not its underlying syntax) and creating an analogue of the world in the mind-space, the language space. What does this entail for an AI? To be conscious, an AI would need a secondary language to allow it to reflect on the language in which it is programmed (the “given” language). This language would need to be of a
different kind from the first language (verbal or some such, rather than computer code) and be conducted within some equivalent of a mind-space, where the computer could reflect on being a computer and make plans. This AI mind-space would be directly generated by its own production mind, and evaluated by its own consumption mind. Of course, only an actual mind (a monad) can provide a true mind-space. An AI can therefore never be conscious, or anything like it. It will never have subjectivity, a will to power, free will, a mind-space, a secondary language of a different kind from its first language, which it can use to reflect on the first. When consciousness is actually understood, it becomes glaringly apparent that it can never be simulated by any machine, not even in principle. This proves that we do not live in any kind of simulated universe. Our own consciousness refutes any such notion. If we actually did live in a simulated universe, if that were actually possible, why would animals not be conscious and able to communicate with us? Why wouldn’t the simulators build that into the simulation? Why wouldn’t babies be conscious from birth? Why wouldn’t trees and flowers be conscious? In a simulation, just as in a Hollywood movie, all such things would be possible. Why would death exist in a simulation? Why would diseases exist? Why would mental illness exist? Why would there be schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, autism, dissociative identity disorder, paranoid delusions, and so on? The proponents of simulation theory are always talking about how skilled the simulators would be. Just look around you. Does the world, with all of its horrors, look like it is designed by intelligent people? It looks more like an Idiocracy. Reality is the way it is because it is largely unconscious, and it is trying to make itself better via consciousness. Consciousness, not simulation, is the special ingredient that changes everything. An AI expert, who focused on one tiny aspect of human existence, such as a conversation lasting fifteen minutes, could no doubt get a machine to pass as a conscious human in a short conversation with a real conscious human, but anyone who imagines that this denotes consciousness has no idea what they’re talking about. The Turing test, laughably, makes this claim, i.e., if a machine successfully imitates a human it is in some behaviorist or functionalist sense itself human. In fact, it’s no more human than a parrot that echoes humans is human. We could probably train a parrot to pass the Turing test!
Consciousness applies to every aspect of our waking life. The only Turing test that could ever be valid is one where an android that looked exactly like a human lived an entire life of seventy years amongst humans, and every human accepted it as human. No such android will ever exist. It would truly need to be conscious to pass it, and an android’s simulation of consciousness, via a conscious human programming team, will never amount to actual consciousness.
Hegel “History is … Spirit emptied out into Time.” – Hegel n Hegel’s philosophy, the Spirit operates on human beings to make them conscious and thus bring reality to consciousness. Wikipedia says, “The Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel is a work that presents an abbreviated version of Hegel’s systematic philosophy in its entirety, and is the only form in which Hegel ever published his entire mature philosophical system. The fact that the account is exhaustive, that the grounding structures of reality are ideal, and that the system is closed makes the Encyclopedia a statement par excellence of absolute idealism. ... The Encyclopedia has three main parts, each of which is further subdivided, which together purport to cover all the fundamental aspects of reality, and form a closed systematic unity: 1) Science of Logic (Being, Essence, Concept); 2) Science of Nature (Mechanics, Physics, Organics); 3) Science of Geist (Subjective Spirit, Objective Spirit, Absolute Spirit) ... The purpose of the Encyclopedia is descriptive: to describe how Geist (Spirit or Mind) develops itself ... The first stage of Spirit’s development is described in the Logic. Thus the Logic presents the categories of thought as they are in themselves; they are the minimal conditions for thinking anything at all, the conceptions that run in the background of all our thinking. These logical categories turn out to be none other than Geist itself. In order to get at what a thing is, we must think about it. No amount of observing will bring us to the essence of things. Thinking and being are equivalent, and so logic and metaphysics are equivalent as
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well. The underlying element of it all is Geist; thus the activity of thinking is no less than Geist articulating itself. (This is how Hegel could say that logic is the thought of the mind of God before creation.) As Geist works itself out more fully, it reaches the point where it simply cannot remain as it is; it is incomplete, and therefore it ‘others’ itself; this is where the philosophy of nature emerges. When this stage of its development is completed, Geist ‘returns’ to itself, which is the emergence of the philosophy of mind.” Try to make an AI reflect Hegelian philosophy! Good luck with that.
The Science Fraud “Thousands and thousands of people have a desire to understand C Fthesaid,universe and are actually working towards that goal. (Actually working.) They are called... wait for it... scientists.” Yeah, scientists haven’t even worked out that reality is mathematical. Remove mathematics from science and then let’s see how your “scientists” get on. They are so far from understanding life, mind, the unconscious, consciousness, free will, subjectivity, qualia, the source formula of existence, ontology, epistemology, metaphysics, and so on, that they haven’t worked out that what makes science successful is mathematics, a subject which totally contradicts the scientific method, scientific empiricism and scientific materialism! Tom McFarlane wrote, “In 1959 physicist Eugene Wigner wrote a famous article, The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences. Reading this title alone, one might get the impression that Wigner was simply marveling at the fact that mathematics is so effective a language for formulating scientific theories of the natural world. “But that would be wrong. “Wigner was marveling at something much more profound and remarkable: the uncanny capacity we have to discover and use mathematics to generalize far, far beyond an original, limited set of empirical data, using mathematical concepts that often were not initially developed for that purpose at all. “In his article, Wigner cites the example of Newton’s law of gravitation. Empirically, this law was based upon observations of parabolic projectile motion on the surface of the earth and upon observations of the elliptical
motions of the moon and planets. But, as it turned out, Newton’s law of gravitation did not merely encompass these two specific types of motion, but extrapolated (using mathematics) far beyond these. It was, as its name implies, a universal law. “Wigner also cites the example of Heisenberg’s matrix mechanics, which was abstracted from the semi-classical model of the hydrogen atom. Wigner finds it miraculous that this mathematical framework of quantum mechanics turned out to be applicable to systems so far beyond that special case. … I must agree with Wigner that it indeed seems marvelous and mysterious that the most beautiful and elegant mathematical theories, which often employ mathematical structures developed without any connection to physics, prove to be so remarkably effective when extrapolated so far beyond the limited domain of empirical data on hand at the time of their development.” There is nothing “uncanny” going on. Reality is mathematical. 1 + 1 = 2. What actually is uncanny is how scientists can be presented with such information and yet keep failing to understand it. They keep dismissing the ontology of mathematics and they keep believing in non-mathematical “matter”, which they can’t define in any way, except by reference to mathematics. You really couldn’t make it up!
Zero Entropy t zero entropy, the production mind perfectly generates eternal and necessary basis waves, and the consumption mind perfectly consumes these basis waves. The two minds are in perfect harmony. This is the God State. This is perfect rational and logical thinking, and also perfect experience. This is total knowledge of everything, and total perfection of experience (perfect love, bliss, peace, security, contentment, unity, wholeness, completeness, integration, intuition, perception, emotion). Everyone, whether they know it or not, is drawn to zero entropy: Perfection, the Absolute, Unity, Wholeness, Completeness … God.
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THE OBSTACLES hat are the obstacles to understanding how the mind works? They are the most severe imaginable. Scientists do not believe that mind even exists. Mind, for a scientist, is simply a product of matter and its interactions and organization. There is no mind per se. So, you can’t get to grips with the functions of the mind if you actually believe those functions belong to the world of lifeless, mindless, purposeless atoms and the forces acting on and between these atoms. If you ask an Abrahamist what God is made of, they will likely be baffled. If they venture any answer, they will probably say, “Spirit”. So, then, of course, you ask them what “spirit” is made of, and there the conversation ends. The ontological question – what is it made of? – is the most fundamental of them all and destroys all pretenders to knowledge. The only subject that possesses true knowledge is ontological mathematics. Its defining activity is defining what everything is made of. Without knowing what everything is made of, you cannot know anything else since all knowledge flows from the properties of what existence is made of. There are no such things as “emergent properties”, as science laughably claims. All properties that manifest themselves in the world are already present in potentiality in the foundations of existence, and are simply waiting to be actualized by arranging the building blocks of existence in the myriad ways potentially available to them. Most scientists stop at atoms as the building blocks of existence. Some might go down to subatomic particles. Some might speculate about “strings” as the basis level. Some might talk about “energy”, but they can’t ontologically define energy. Ontological mathematics does so easily. The non-analytic “strings” of science are replaced in ontological mathematics by analytic sinusoids, and these are exactly what energy is. Moreover, they are not any old energy. Basis sinusoids are basis thoughts and their energy is thought energy, the energy of thinking, the energy of mental activity. Absolutely everything in the world is made from the energy of minds,
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from their basis thoughts, which are the basis energy of existence and the source of all energy in the universe. There is no other source. There is no random source, or “uncertain” source, or anything else that science unfeasibly claims. The law of conservation of energy requires that no energy is ever created or destroyed. There can be no energy created “randomly”, and there can be no uncertainty regarding energy. It is always absolutely precise and analytic. It needs to be in order to furnish a conservation law. If conservation isn’t exact, it doesn’t belong to a conservation law! 1 + 1 = 2. Anyone who says differently has no clue what conservation is. There is no such thing as randomness, uncertainty and probabilism. These are all fundamental misinterpretations by scientists of the ground energy of existence. Above all, they arrive at their systemic misinterpretations through a fatal inability to understand singularities (zero-infinity entities). They cannot understand dimensionless monadic minds made of dimensionless, analytic thought energy. They cannot understand such things because their ideology and dogmatism of materialism and empiricism paradigmatically excludes and forbids any notion of monads, yet monads are exactly what resolve all the incoherence science generates with its illogical and irrational talk of randomness, uncertainty and probabilism. The next fundamental problem is that people imagine they have only one mind. In fact, they foundationally have two related minds. A monadic mind belongs to a dual-aspect system of syntax and semantics, and this necessitates that there are two related, coupled minds: the syntax mind and the semantics mind, forming one dual-aspect mind, but seeming, in functional terms, to generate two independent minds. The syntax mind is the production mind. It’s the unconscious. It is not concerned with meaning, purpose, subjectivity, experience, or anything like that. It is, however, concerned with patterns, symmetry, synchronicity, and so on. It can look like a scientific mind, or a paranormal mind (linking things via non-locality and entanglement which would never be linked by localist, unentangled science). The semantic mind is the consumption mind, the awareness mind, the experiential mind. It is all about meaning, feeling, purpose, will to power, subjectivity, experience, and so on. It is the mind that can be converted via the acquisition of language into the conscious mind, which can then direct the unconscious mind to syntactically execute its bidding. If you don’t know what your mind is made of, and how it produces a
dual-aspect system which operates like two different, but coupled, minds, how will you be able to actualize your potential? It’s not by altering your genes that you will become more conscious. It’s by altering the memes to which you are subject. It’s not the gene pool that counts, it’s the meme pool. It’s the culture we create between us. Today’s prevailing culture is one of emotionalism, consumerism, celebrity, worship of the rich, dumbing down, the lowest common denominator, short attention spans, triviality, faith, superstition, prayer, mysticism, meditation, mindfulness, gurus, preachers. And that’s why the world is the shambles it is. Language is the key to the mind. The mind is literally made of language. The syntactic mind uses its inherent language automatically, but unconsciously. It’s the semantic mind that develops consciousness, via language, and eventually understands that reality itself is made of language. If you don’t grasp that reality is a language, hence intelligible, then you will never understand reality and never arrive at the answer to existence. If you believe that reality is made of some undefined “spirit” or “bare awareness”, you will never understand reality. If you believe that reality is made of undefined “matter” and is sensible rather than intelligible, you will never understand reality. This is literally a thinking reality, a language reality. The vast majority of people erroneously believe it’s an unthinking reality, perhaps a sensory reality, or a mystical reality, or an emotional reality. They detest the idea that it’s a thinking reality, an intelligible reality, a reality based on the simplest possible principle of rationality (PSR/Occam’s Razor), and therefore with a definitive solution that any rational and logical person can work out. They have no need of observation, prayer, faith, mysticism, meditation or mindfulness. A mental reality means an intelligible reality. A non-mental reality means an unintelligible reality, a reality with no answer. A language-based reality means an intelligible reality. A non-languagebased reality means an unintelligible reality, a reality with no answer. There are two minds operating in an inherent feedback loop. That’s the great secret of how our mind functions. This is nowhere clearer than in our dreams. Our production mind creates content, and our consumption mind is aware of it, consumes it, and reacts to it. In dreams, our reactions are passive (we have no control, no agency). In lucid dreams, our reactions are active and we start to control the dream and exercise agency.
In the waking world, we are lucid and have the capacity to direct our own fate (although most people succumb to default, archetypal behavior). Humanity has barely even started to comprehend its true powers.
THE EXCEPTIONAL Why We Write Such Exceptional Books books are unique because we alone refer to reason and logic. People of O urreligious faith refer to faith in their holy texts. People of religious mysticism refer to their mystical intuitions. People of faith in empiricism refer to their observations and experiences. None of them makes arguments grounded in reason and logic. These people hate reason and logic and believe them unreal and abstract. There are no books like ours. They are exceptional. They are world changing. That’s why they encounter so much resistance. The establishment, the powers-that-be, the careerist Mandarins, the dynastic elites, do not want anything to change. The world is just the way they like it: where they have all the wealth, power, status and control.
THE HUMAN MIND . J. Hollingdale wrote, “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 calls these impressions ‘particulars’; the thinking part is the organ of the understanding and the objects of the understanding he calls ‘concepts’. [Concepts are applied to particulars.]” The two parts, in a dual-aspect arrangement, are in fact the production mind (dealing with syntax) and the consumption mind (dealing with semantics). The production mind does the thinking, the conceiving. The consumption mind does the non-thinking, the perceiving. Animals are perceiving creatures. Humans (well, some of them!) are conceiving creatures. That’s why humans are so different from the other animals. Animals are sentient, humans are conscious. R. J. Hollingdale wrote, “Sense perception in time and space Kant calls the perceptual manifold: the categories are not derived from the manifold but imposed upon it, and this – the imposition of the categories upon the perceptual manifold – constitutes ‘thinking’. It will now follow that an ‘object’ is that which is capable of conforming to the categories; if it cannot do so, it cannot exist for a human observer. [The mind imposes structure upon the world.]” Thinking, in human terms, is in fact about imposing language structure on the sensory world. Animals “see” the world. Humans do not. They interpret the world using language. Animals experience what Hegel called “sense-certainty”, but they have no idea what they are seeing. Whatever they see, they react instinctively to it, but they have no knowledge or understanding of what they are seeing. If an animal sees the moon, it has no clue at all what the moon is. It has no concept of “moon”. What humans do is “see” everything through the prism, the mediation, of language, hence we never see the world itself, but our language-based interpretation of it.
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Language = consciousness is what human thinking is. Consciousness is not inherently part of us. We are not born with the English language, for example, built into us. We have to acquire language (consciousness) – via the group, the collective, society. It’s an add-on. Once it is added on, it serves as a second system of perception, superimposed over our sentient, animal system of perception. We simultaneously perceive the thing via sentience and conceive it via consciousness. We perceive language, so to speak. We don’t see an object that we later call a tree. Rather, we immediately see that object and perceive it (conceive it) as a tree. This means that we have converted all of our simple perceptions into language-perceptions, aka languageconceptions. We immediately and automatically add a language label, a conceptual label, to whatever we see. The language-label is not of course present in the thing, but now we can’t see the thing without imposing the language-label on it. This happens by default, so we can never see the thing in itself, in terms of sense-certainty, free of our language-based description of it. Eastern mystics, via meditation and mindfulness, are effectively seeking to be animals. They want to be non-judgmentally in the moment, experiencing everything in terms of sense-certainty alone, without any mediation by language, which they believe falsifies the experience. Hilariously, what these Eastern mystics and New Agers call “bare awareness” is just dumbed-down Hegelian sense-certainty. The mystics and New Agers believe it is “pure consciousness”. Actually, it’s the total absence of consciousness! Consciousness is language, so if you remove language from your perception, you have ceased to be conscious and you have become an animal. Consciousness is also where judgment resides (no animal judges), so everything about the Eastern and New Age project – avoiding language, avoiding judgment, avoiding conception, avoiding language mediation, avoiding past, present and future in order to live in the moment – constitutes nothing but an all-out attack on consciousness and on being human. These people crave being dogs, or whatever. They were probably dogs in their past lives, and have been unable to come to terms with being human, with being conscious, with having language and being able to plan and judge. They want the simple life, the animal life, which they see as “freedom”. In fact, it’s the purest slavery. As John Stuart Mill said, “It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool
satisfied.” The mystics and the New Agers are the pigs and fools satisfied. They are an insult to the human race. They want to devolve into bestiality rather than get more and more conscious via higher and higher acquisition of language, judgment, conceptualization and intelligence skills. Human thinking is something we acquire. Human thinking is not built into us. We think via language, so without language we do not think, we merely behave instinctually, just like animals. Everything changes when you realize that your ability to think is cultural, not biological. In terms of Hegelian philosophy, the Spirit, via institutions and society, acts on the human individual to convert them into a thinking individual capable, eventually, of understanding reality. Scientists, who uniformly despise Hegel, are totally resistant to the idea that human thinking (consciousness) has nothing to do with biology and matter and is instead a learned method of altering our perception by superimposing language over it. The even more extraordinary thing is that language actually frees us from the given world of sentience. We always superimpose language over the perceived world, but when the perceived world is no longer there (if we are in a sensory deprivation tank, for example) we can still perceive the world in our own mind. It is now a pure language world and our images of it are conjured by our language alone. We think “red sheep” and we see a red sheep! But there are no red sheep in the world. Language allows us to both perceive the given world and also any other world describable in language. The true “Multiverse” is the one that becomes available to us via language. We can think of any world at all if we have the words and concepts for it. Why do people have incredibly weird DMT experiences? It’s because their perceptions of normality are so radically changed (their sense-certainty has undergone a drastic, chemically-induced transformation) that they no longer have words for what they are perceiving, and so their mind becomes incredibly confused because it can’t label what it’s looking at. It starts reaching for crazy descriptions such as “machine elves”. Terence McKenna wrote, “There’s a whole bunch of entities waiting on the other side, saying ‘How wonderful that you’re here! You come so rarely! We’re so delighted to see you!’ They’re like jeweled self-dribbling basketballs and there are many of them and they come pounding toward you and they will stop in front of you and vibrate, but then they do a very
disconcerting thing, which is they jump into your body and then they jump back out again and the whole thing is going on in a high-speed mode where you’re being presented with thousands of details per second and you can’t get a hold on [them ...] and these things are saying ‘Don’t give in to astonishment’, which is exactly what you want to do. You want to go nuts with how crazy this is, and they say ‘Don’t do that. Pay attention to what we’re doing’. What they’re doing is making objects with their voices, singing structures into existence. They offer things to you, saying ‘Look at this! Look at this!’ and as your attention goes towards these objects you realize that what you’re being shown is impossible. It’s not simply intricate, beautiful and hard to manufacture, it’s impossible to make these things. The nearest analogy would be the Fabergé eggs, but these things are like the toys that are scattered around the nursery inside a U.F.O., celestial toys, and the toys themselves appear to be somehow alive and can sing other objects into existence, so what’s happening is this proliferation of elf gifts, which are moving around singing, and they are saying ‘Do what we are doing’ and they are very insistent, and they say ‘Do it! Do it! Do it!’ and you feel like a bubble inside your body beginning to move up toward your mouth, and when it comes out it isn’t sound, it’s vision. You discover that you can pump ‘stuff’ out of your mouth by singing, and they’re urging you to do this. They say ‘That’s it! That’s it! Keep doing it!’. We’re now at minute 4.5 [of the trip] and you speak in a kind of glossolalia. There is a spontaneous outpouring of syntax unaccompanied by what is normally called ‘meaning’. After a minute or so of this the whole thing begins to collapse in on itself and they begin to physically move away from you. Usually their final shot is that they wave goodbye and say ‘Deja vu! Deja vu!’.” The weirdness of the DMT trip in terms of sentience provokes a kind of hallucination of the language function itself as it struggles to describe what it is seeing and experiencing. This extraordinary type of hallucination – consciousness is hallucinating – seems numinous and life-changing to those who have no idea what is going on. What are dreams? These are also language-induced hallucinations, and often seem numinous. The words “red sheep”, as we have noted, produce an image of a red sheep. A red sheep does not appear in the world, but it can certainly appear in dreams. The dream mind uses language to produce dreams, but suppresses the actual words, so you will see a red sheep without anyone having to say “red sheep”, but underneath all dream images are
words. Language drives the whole thing. The dreaming mind can even produce characters that actually speak to us, showing just how connected dreaming is to language.
Errors? here are no syntactic errors in ontological mathematics. One error would crash the entire system. Manmade computing languages are full of errors, and implemented with myriad errors, which is why so many systems crash or hang or lag. It’s impossible for that to happen to the universe. It can never go “blue screen”. This consideration is a direct proof that we do not live in a simulated universe. Any such hypothetical universe would definitely glitch, and would definitely crash, and everything in it, all content, would perish. The system would need to be rebooted. Have you seen the world being rebooted lately? Have you been rebooted lately? It’s remarkable how many dumb ideas – such as the Multiverse, and the Simulated Universe – take off, even though they are manifestly false. The Truth, by contrast, faces an immense struggle to succeed. People despise the Truth.
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CONCLUSION onsciousness has posed one of the greatest of all challenges for the human understanding. Virtually no one on earth has a clue what consciousness is. Science, philosophy, religion and spirituality alike have no comprehension of the very thing – consciousness – that makes their practitioners who they are. The defining failure to grasp what consciousness is lies in the notion that it is innate, that it is something that automatically resides in us, meaning that human beings have always been conscious. Stone Age people, in this view, were exactly the same as modern humans, just at a much more primitive level of knowledge. They were not different in kind from modern humans, only in degree. Materialists all hold such a view because they believe that everything is about matter, that everything in the body including consciousness is biological, which is to say material. Idealism, the opposite of materialism, changes everything because it allows us to escape from the tyranny of lifeless, mindless, purposeless matter. We are not determined by our bodies. Think of how much everything will change when it becomes universally known that consciousness is not innate to a person but is in fact added to a person by culture, by society. Animals are not conscious. A human baby is not conscious. The baby acquires consciousness thanks to its parents, siblings, teachers and society. A human being who never met any other human beings would never become conscious. So, the last place in which you would look for consciousness is in matter, in the body, in the brain, in biology, in the individual. That’s why science has never found it. It’s not there! Consciousness is an external add-on, not an innate internal property, and it’s for exactly that reason that we can totally transform human consciousness. All we have to do is change the culture, the external environment, the nature of society. Consciousness has been fatally conflated with something that does belong to the individual: subjectivity, which is the same as sentience (which concerns qualia).
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Subjectivity is another thing that science and philosophy have no clue about it. Subjectivity exists because we are minds. It’s impossible for matter to be subjective. Scientists and philosophers both buy into materialism, hence cannot get any handle on subjectivity. They are actually faced with two “hard” problems. They don’t know what subjectivity (sentience) is, and they don’t what consciousness is. They erroneously believe the problems are the same and that their solution lies in materialism, or some modification of it, such as materialist panpsychism (where mind is simply bolted on to matter to enable subjectivity, but doesn’t change it in any way, i.e., all the laws of material physics remain exactly the same as before, with no place for mind in any of their functional equations). If consciousness were located in the body, we couldn’t do much about it, any more than we can’t do much about our liver or kidneys. If consciousness is located outside individuals, in the collective, in culture, in society, then we can create an entirely different human consciousness by changing the collective, society and culture. Consciousness is therefore downstream of politics and economics, just as Marx claimed. Marx said, “It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness.” George Orwell said, “Until they become conscious they will never rebel, and until after they have rebelled they cannot become conscious.” This is a highly Marxist statement! Sentience exists in the individual, but consciousness is something added to the individual. Culture does not exist in the individual, but is supplied to it by the external environment, by society. If we improve the culture, we improve the consciousness. Consciousness is added to the person, and that changes everything. Consciousness is group action on the individual. Consciousness is an acquired operator, not an intrinsic property of the body. Parents are those most responsible for giving their children a degraded consciousness. Philip Larkin wrote, “They fuck you up, your mum and dad. They may not mean to, but they do. They fill you with the faults they had and add some extra, just for you.” Parents are of course screwed up by their own parents. Larkin wrote, “But they were fucked up in their turn by fools in oldstyle hats and coats, who half the time were soppy-stern and half at one another’s throats. Man hands on misery to man. It deepens like a coastal shelf.” We can only change our fate by breaking out of this vicious circle, and
that means by totally transforming our culture. Revalue all values! Geniuses such as Leibniz, Hegel, Nietzsche and Jaynes gave us the decisive insight: consciousness and language are the same thing. We are conscious because we have language and we would not be conscious if we did not have language. We would be like animals: sentient but not conscious. Once language is understood as the answer to the problem of consciousness, all we have to do is optimize language in order to maximize consciousness. Ultimate consciousness resides in becoming perfect in the use of reality’s own language: ontological mathematics. Only when we achieve that do we become God. We achieve perfect understanding of ontological mathematics at a specific point: the attainment of zero entropy, where all space, time, matter, gravity, entropy and temperature are eliminated and we are finally fully free of materialism. The mind, at last, is totally liberated. Nietzsche said, “Nothing has been purchased more dearly than the little bit of reason and sense of freedom which now constitutes our pride. … How is freedom measured, in individuals as in nations? By the resistance which has to be overcome, by the effort it costs to stay aloft. One would have to seek the highest type of free man where the greatest resistance is constantly being overcome: five steps from tyranny, near the threshold of the danger of servitude.”