What Is a Thought?: The Ontology of Thinking

Introduction

Imagine a universe made of two things: thoughts and non-thoughts. How could such a universe work? What could thoughts and non-thoughts have in common? How could non-thoughts interact with thoughts? How could non-thoughts produce thoughts, or thoughts produce non-thoughts? How could they co-exist in the same place? Why would nature produce a dualism of thoughts and non-thoughts? It’s one or the other.

Occam’s razor demands the simplest world. The simplest world is a monism, not a dualism or polyism. Since we ourselves are thinking creatures, defined by our thoughts (without which we would be mindless nothings), this is ipso facto a universe of thoughts. Whatever you might believe constitutes a non-thought doesn’t in fact do so … it’s just a thought you have yet to recognize and understand as a thought. How would you recognize whether or not something is a thought if you can’t define what a thought is, if you have no idea what the range of a thought is, and all the different ways in which it might manifest itself?

Whatever you may believe thoughts are, you are wrong. It’s because you don’t know what a thought is that you mistake certain things for non-thoughts when they are actually thoughts just like everything else.

This universe is a giant thought, divided into separate thinking cells called monads (or souls, to use the religious jargon), which can think individually or collectively. Collective thinking is what most people can’t grasp at all. They have no idea they are doing it.

At this exact instant, you are living in a world that is the collective thought generated by you and every other mind in existence. Everything you imagine is matter (non-thought) isn’t. Matter is collective thought, processed through the supplementary collective thoughts of space and time. You are inside a dreamworld conjured up by all minds rather than just one mind. Because all minds are involved in its construction, the collective dreamworld changes extremely slowly, whereas your own dreamworld changes every night, and even changes within the course of your dream. The collective dreamworld is a very special mathematical object – an ontological hologram that seems convincingly solid.

Humanity has failed to grasp that it inhabits a collective, holographic dream, and it has erroneously labeled this dreamworld a real world made of some bizarre thing called matter which no one has ever encountered in itself (i.e. independently of minds and of the thoughts in minds concerning matter).

There is no such thing as matter in the scientific sense. There is no such thing as reality in the scientific sense. All that exists are minds and their thoughts. Minds think individually or collectively. Collective thoughts have a special quality which humans misidentify as matter.

The task is to explain how thoughts are made, how they are organized, how they interact, what laws apply to them, and how they produce something – matter – which appears to be non-thought.

Humans operate in two modes: 1) when they are asleep, they inhabit their private dreamworld, created by their own minds; 2) when they are awake, they inhabit the public dreamworld, created by all minds (including their own).

Humans do nothing but switch between their many individual dreams and the single collective dream. The former are subjective, the latter objective. The latter is objective because it is constructed by all minds, not just one mind.

You are either in the world of your own mind, or in the world of all minds, but, one way or another, you are always inside a mind, inside a mental reality. You are never in a non-mental world, composed of non-mental things. In particular, you are never involved with a mind-independent world of scientific matter.

In the movie The Matrix, the collective human dream was not a real, physical world, but a computer simulation of a physical world, controlled by an Artificial Intelligence – the Architect – that functioned exactly like the Abrahamic God, with Agents operating as demons, and Agent Smith as the Devil. The Oracle was the Holy Spirit, Neo was the Messiah (Jesus Christ), Trinity was the beloved companion (Mary Magdalene), Morpheus was the prophet (Moses), the redpills (the truth seekers) were the elect, the saved, and the bluepills (the complacent mass of humanity) were the reprobates, the damned.

But artificial intelligences such as the Architect are just collective thoughts in the Collective Mind, so the Architect is our own mental construct, and cannot have any thoughts of its own since it is not a mind in its own right. It is merely a simulation of a mind. A simulated mind is never an actual, living mind with its own agency and teleology.

A simulated intelligence is not an intelligence. When Garry Kasparov, the world’s best chess player, lost to IBM’s supercomputer Deep Blue, Deep Blue had no idea who Garry Kasparov was, no idea what chess was, and no idea it had won. It had no idea of anything at all because it was not an actual mind, but merely a simulated mind, programmed to perform certain tasks with much more processing power than any human could apply to that particular task. Outside that task, Deep Blue was the biggest retard in the cosmos. A worm has enormously more general intelligence than Deep Blue.

These considerations have a profound bearing on what a thought is, and on the ontology of thinking. In a universe made of thoughts, if you have no idea what a thought is, you have no idea what life is. The correct definition of a thought will usher in the ultimate Copernican revolution.

The world is always divided in two: before and after the revolution. Humanity understood nothing before the revolution in thought. After, it will understand everything. We are the Revolution.

The Intelligible Universe

Einstein said, The most incomprehensible thing about the world is that it is comprehensible. What a bizarre thing to say. Why would the world be anything other than comprehensible? Why would incomprehensibility be favored or privileged over comprehensibility? And how could an incomprehensible universe be compatible with existence?

A comprehensible universe is a universe based on a system, based on rules and laws, based on organization and order, based on stability. An incomprehensible universe would be one based on no system. It would be a universe that operates via miracles, a universe without rules, laws, order, organization: a universe of chaos, randomness, instability, inexplicability, irrationalism, indeterminism, and unintelligibility.

Could we – as organized beings – exist in such a universe? Our own existence serves as a refutation that we inhabit such a universe. How would we come into being amongst the chaos? If we grant a miracle that brings us into existence despite the chaos, how could we then make sense of the chaos all around us given that it has no rational, explicable, intelligible basis? Most importantly of all, how could any part of the chaos interact or communicate with any other part given that there would be no basis, no system, for such interaction or communication?

A genuinely chaotic universe could never exist. It’s not a question of its being totally unstable hence instantly imploding and ceasing to exist, it simply could not exist at all.

It is a fundamental law of existence that only a complete and consistent system can exist. It is impossible for a non-system to exist, or any system that is incomplete or inconsistent. A non-system, or flawed system, lacks the fundamental requirement of existence: inherent stability. Not only can nothing unstable exist, it cannot even be conceived.

How can you imagine anything unsystematic, unintelligible, inexplicable, inconsistent, unfathomable, incomplete, irrational, illogical, miraculous? To conceive of it would itself require a miracle.

An unintelligible universe has no answer and cannot exist. An intelligible universe exists and has a definitive answer, which any intelligent being can work out, provided they focus on that which is intelligible, consistent, comprehensible, complete, rational, logical, and explicable, and nothing else. They must focus on Logos and not Mythos.

There is only one right answer to intelligible existence, but there are endless wrong answers, i.e. all the answers that arise when we fail to use reason and logic correctly. Humans produce pseudo-answers based on pseudo-reason and pseudo-logic. The vast majority of human thinking revolves around pseudo-answers, which is why we have silly religions, silly philosophies, and silly sciences.

The problem is not that no right answer to reality exists, but that it is buried amongst all the wrong answers, which makes it almost impossible to see. How do you reach the correct answer when you are surrounded by wrong answers, many of which are astoundingly popular and implicitly believed by vast numbers of the people around you? The whole culture you live in is geared up to serving the interests of false answers. Every false answer has its own priesthood, its own establishment, a whole bunch of people whose careers and status depend on it. They will fight to the end to preserve their lie.

There can only be one answer for why the world is comprehensible: it is made of something inherently comprehensible. If this weren’t the case, if it were made of something inherently incomprehensible, it would be incomprehensible forever, or it would never exist in the first place.

Nothing comprehensible can arise from the incomprehensible, and nothing intelligent can understand anything incomprehensible. No comprehensible process can be applied to the incomprehensible and extract anything comprehensible from it.

Only one thing is inherently comprehensible – i.e. comprehensible without any further discussion – and that’s mathematics. There is nothing inherently comprehensible about the concept of God, or scientific matter, or cosmic consciousness, or whatever.

What Einstein ought to have said is, The world is comprehensible, and it is comprehensible because it is made of an intrinsically comprehensible substance. What could be more obvious?

We don’t need an incomprehensible Intelligent Designer to make the world. We simply need an eternal substance which, of its own nature, ensures intelligent design wherever it is present (which is everywhere since nothing else exists).

Mathematics, not God, is the Intelligent Designer that the religious look to in order to explain the designed nature of the world. Thanks to the inbuilt properties of mathematics, the mathematical universe can’t help but be designed. We don’t need God (undefined) plus mathematics (defined) to give us intelligent design. We can dispense with the undefined, unintelligible God part, leaving us with pure, natural intelligent design ... ontological mathematics.

Any hypothetical incomprehensible substance posited as the foundational substance would give rise to an incomprehensible universe, or no universe at all since an incomprehensible substance could have no sufficient reason for its existence, would be cataclysmically unstable, and have zero chance of existing in the first place.

Mathematics is the only substance that automatically obeys the Principle of Sufficient Reason (PSR). Indeed, mathematics is the ontological expression and manifestation of the PSR.

Only mathematics is inherently intelligible, rational and explicable. Mathematics is the quintessential subject for providing answers to questions, so why would anyone imagine that anything other than mathematics is better qualified to be the answer to existence? All proposed alternatives are irrational and wrong.

Mathematics is the quintessence of design and comprehensibility. Nothing in science is comprehensible, except through mathematics. Take away mathematics from science and it’s incomprehensible and useless, and indistinguishable from another religious faith.

Nothing in religion is comprehensible, which is why religion relies on faith. Nothing in philosophy is automatically comprehensible, which is why there are so many philosophies, often directly contradicting each other.

Theists claim that their God is what makes the universe designed and comprehensible. The trouble is that they then say that God is incomprehensible to the human mind. This means they are effectively claiming that reality is incomprehensible. Eastern pantheists say much the same. The universe, according to them, is made of some unfathomable mystery, some mystical nondualism.

They are all wrong. The universe is made of mathematics. Anyone who disagrees is irrational. All suggested alternatives are irrational, inexplicable, unintelligible and incomprehensible.

Why would anyone prefer an irrational answer to a rational answer? Because they themselves are irrational. Who are the irrationalists? They are the people who reject reason and logic and instead worship their feelings, their senses, their emotions, their mystical intuitions, their subjective experiences, or whatever. You cannot reason with these people. They have rejected reason. That’s the entire problem.

Mathematics is the basis of all intelligible things, and the answer to all intelligible things. In particular, it is the answer to mind, life and matter. Mathematics is the foundation of thought itself.

Mathematics can even explain why so many people in this mathematical universe are mind-bogglingly irrational and anti-mathematical, and why they refuse to accept that this is a mathematical universe.

Nature’s Language

Existence has a language that each part of existence uses to communicate with every other part. What is this language? What is the language of existence, of Nature? There is only one candidate, the language that conveys eternal, necessary truths, hence is not constructed by any temporal, contingent beings such as humans. That language is mathematics.

Existence not only has a language, existence is a language. There is no mysterious dualism of a non-language using a language, or a non-language interacting with a language. That would be to commit the error of Cartesian dualism.

If mind and matter have nothing in common, they cannot interact. By the same reasoning, a language and non-language can have nothing in common. A non-language cannot communicate with a language. Monism demands that in order for existence to be intelligible, not only must it be associated with a language, in fact it can’t be anything other than that language. Existence is mathematics. Existence is an ontological language, a language that cannot not exist. Existence is the eternal language. It is the language of energy, of light, and these are just different ways of labeling ontological mathematics.

Mathematics is not something you write down on paper. Mathematics is the fiber and fabric of existence, ingrained in all things, and is the means by which all things communicate with each other. This is a universe that does nothing but reflect how mathematics is structured and organized. An ontological mathematical system has an optimal, perfect symmetry, but this is a symmetry that is easily broken. As soon the system’s perfect symmetry shatters, it immediately sets about restoring the symmetry. A Universal Age corresponds to the time it takes for the broken symmetry to be returned to perfect symmetry. It takes many billions of years. In fact, a precise calculation can be made for exactly how long it takes.

Imagine existence as a self-solving Rubik’s cube. Existence has a perfect configuration (a zero entropy state), corresponding in our analogy to the perfectly arranged cube. However, once existence’s symmetry is shuffled by an apocalyptic symmetry-breaking event (the Big Bang), it’s a fantastically difficult problem to bring it back to its starting state.

The shuffled state corresponds to the creation of space and time, and space and time then have to be abolished before symmetry can be restored. Undoing space and time is achieved through the relentless expansion of spacetime so that the mathematical waves that make up spacetime eventually flatline, which means that the spacetime universe of matter has died and the frequency universe of mind has reached maximum life (= God).

Spacetime corresponds to the universe being knotted. Matter is the result of this knotting. The expansion of spacetime steadily undoes the knots. It undoes matter, leaving, in the limit, only optimized mind (= God).

We are all part of a living mathematical organism constantly solving itself, but one which is so complex and dynamic that it can attain and yet never maintain its optimal state. As soon as it attains it, it loses it, and the next phase of the cyclic universe begins.

The universe is a wave pattern that goes on forever. It can never stop. It creates God then destroys God, over and over again. It is an endless sequence of reaching perfection, losing perfection, then starting over.

The extraordinary feature of mathematics – which baffles so many people – is that it is both syntax and semantics. Average people are brainwashed into believing that mathematics is nothing but an abstract syntax, probably manmade. In fact, it is concrete syntax – the syntax of existence itself – and is always accompanied by a semantics, which is to say that we can experience mathematics and assign meaning to our experiences.

Consider the visible spectrum of light. A photon of one frequency produces a different experience from a photon of a different frequency. The experience is color, or, to be more exact, is color once it has been received and processed by our eyes, brains and minds. The experience is the meaning, the semantics, of the photon, i.e. semantics relates to the empirical aspect of the photon, and syntax to its rational aspect.

Every unique wavefunction is associated with a unique experience. The wavefunction as syntax is the form of the experience. The wavefunction as semantics is the content of the experience.

Humans could have evolved in two different ways: as purely syntactic beings (as human computers, so to speak, in which case no one would doubt that we lived in a 100% mathematical world), or as semantic beings, i.e. we don’t tune into the mathematical syntax but, rather, into the mathematical semantics ... the experience and synthesis of mathematics rather than the form and analysis of mathematics. The form is actively concealed from us by the content (experience).

The masses are deluded by mathematics as phenomenon (as nothing but experiences of every conceivable kind), and fail to grasp that mathematics is also the noumenon, the thing that underlies, defines and conveys the phenomenon.

Experiences don’t float around in the ether. They’re not magical. They have an exact ontology. They are associated with an epistemology. The ontology and epistemology are both mathematical.

Brainwashed people have been conditioned to think of mathematics as something unreal, and to think of experiences as reality, i.e. they accept semantics and reject syntax. It never occurs to them that the experience is the content (semantic) aspect of mathematics, and it is underlaid, necessarily so, by the form (syntactic) aspect of mathematics.

A mathematical wave is both the ontological information carrier and the ontological information carried, i.e. a wave is a dual-aspect system. It is impossible to encounter a wave as pure syntax (form), as pure information carrier, divorced from the information it carries. To encounter a wave is to automatically encounter it as both syntax and semantics, form and content, form and matter, map and territory. However, our minds deal with the syntax, form and map in the depth of our unconscious, while only the content, matter, semantics and territory are experienced by us, and are capable of becoming objects of immediate consciousness.

The human problem is that we exist in a dual-aspect monism, but our minds experience only one of these aspects. Otherwise, we would require split minds to show us the syntax and semantics at the same time. Because we are on the semantic, empirical side of the fence, rather than the syntactic, rational, and logical side, we are presented with an almost insurmountable problem. If we are always looking at one side of a coin, and can never flip it over, how would we ever know what was on the other side? Humanity has used religion, philosophy and science to try to work out what’s on the other side of the coin, on the dark side of the moon, so to speak.

Humanity has invented countless interpretations, all mired in human delusion. The one thing that the average person has never considered is that on the other side of the coin is syntactic mathematics. Yet only mathematics is a perfect, eternal, necessary, infallible, absolute language that conveys the eternal truths of reason. Why wouldn’t it be there?

No temporal being can construct an eternal system. Eternal language and eternal beings expressing that language are one and the same thing.

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People use the most bizarre logic. They say things like, We invented the English language. Mathematics is a language. Therefore we invented mathematics. Humans can’t invent the language of existence. They can only discover it.

Start

The universe is made of language and is speaking to you. You need to know its language before you can understand what it’s saying to you.

The universe is a vast, thinking organism, and you are one of its nodes. Even though you don’t know it, your thoughts are contributing to the solution to the universe.

Curiously enough, the absurdist novel The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, by Douglas Adams contains a sub-plot concerning Deep Thought that is not so far off the truth. Wikipedia says, "Deep Thought is a computer that was created by the pan-dimensional, hyper-intelligent species of beings (whose three-dimensional protrusions into our universe are ordinary white mice) to come up with the Answer to The Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything. Deep Thought is the size of a small city. When, after seven and a half million years of calculation, the answer finally turns out to be 42, Deep Thought admonishes Loonquawl and Phouchg (the receivers of the Ultimate Answer) that ‘[she] checked it very thoroughly, and that quite definitely is the answer. I think the problem, to be quite honest with you is that you’ve never actually known what the question was.’

Deep Thought does not know the ultimate question to Life, the Universe and Everything, but offers to design an even more powerful computer, Earth, to calculate it. After ten million years of calculation, the Earth is destroyed by Vogons five minutes before the computation is complete.

Adams imagines a planet computing the ultimate question. In fact, the entire universe is a living computer, and it is computing the answer to the only question worth answering: how to become perfect. The pursuit of perfection is the meaning of existence.

Why do people believe in God? Because they crave perfection and know that ultimate meaning resides in perfection. Believers in God make two fundamental errors: 1) they have projected their internal craving for perfection and meaning on an imaginary external being, which they then worship, rather than realizing that they themselves are the agents that are turning into God, and 2) perfection is not eternal, it’s the culmination of an evolutionary process, and we are the nodes of that process, the nodes computing how to become perfect.

The meaning of our existence is to become perfect. There is no other meaning. The destination is everything. The journey is incidental, except insofar as it leads to the destination.

The Will

What is your will? It’s how you enact your thoughts in the physical world. Imagine raising your arm. Merely thinking about it doesn’t make it happen. You have to will it to happen, and then it happens.

How can your will – which is mental – make something