Cutting some Slack .The How & Why of Symbols At this late hour it occurs to me why there should be material in an immaterial world. Without matter we could not construct symbols. Without symbols we could not communicate. Space and time are required to allow us to manipulate symbols. Only with the void and externality of space and time is it possible for one thing to represent another.
If in heaven there were no accidents there would be no externality. There would be only internal relations. There would be a spiritual plenum, or an over-determined spiritual ecology, if you will. This would be experienced as the direct mystical vision of God. There would be no room and no need for symbols or representations, because everything would be fully present. This is not where we are, not in our normal state of consciousness, at least.
We occupy the regenerative portion of the cosmos, and to carry out that function we must have the space and freedom to rearrange the furniture of the cosmos. This we do with symbols until we are ready for the metaphysical re-creation commencing with the eschaton.
Indirect perception can be very frustrating. Our indirect perceptual aparati are susceptible to all sorts of (mis&dis)information. That is the (small?) price that we pay to carry out our cosmic function as the creators and manipulators of symbols. Color is one of the many freebies. Imagination is another.
Mathematics serves as the science of symbols. It provides formal systems of rules for manipulating symbols. Language is our informal system. These rules describe possible systems for a plenum that we might aspire to create.
The hope is that mathematics will serve as a bridge between the objective and subjective aspects of reality. As of yet, not a single point of contact with the experiential can be claimed. The nearest possibility appears to lie in the domain of quantum logic. This at least is the hope of several consciousness researchers.
Know thyself. This is the ancient prescription. This will not happen until mathematics can be expanded into the experiential domain. Mathematicians succeed to the degree that they can appropriate the structures into an intuitive repertoire. This is a good indication that mathematics involves more than just a superficial manipulation of symbols.
Our need to manipulate symbols accounts for much of our mathematical skill. That need may also account for much of our physics, looking at the world teleologically. What is not clear is how the mathematics comes to be so deeply embedded in these two domains, namely in physics and psychology. An idealist might well suppose that the physics and psychology have evolved in concert.
The presence of deep and complex mathematical structures indicates that the core of our reality was somehow preexistent. There is no reason that we should have had to reinvent or re-evolve these structures. They are the closest thing we can imagine to a cosmic language. The fact that previous attempts at integrating mathematics and natural language have largely failed is not a reason to abandon the project. I can again point to quantum computers as the most likely impetus for this project in the near future.
Mathematical structures appear to subsist in domains that are usually remote from our attention. One might say that they take up the slack in the cosmic mind space. They keep the world running smoothly at night. They also provide the optimal space for our projects.
Mathematicism is a bad word for some people. Pythagoras was the first mathematicist. He believed that numbers governed the world. Spinoza was a Platonist and so was Einstein, and Plato was a Pythagorean. The problem is that some people think that there is not room for love in a universe that is run by the numbers. Fear not. It all works out. It is our job to work it out. Will there still be room for poets? Obviously I am trying to figure out how to add a little math to this poetry. Quantum computers will help, but God is not a quantum, she is just a good ol’ girl.
Doug Hofstadter was in my freshman dorm, and his Dad was my adviser. He has done as much as anyone to combine math with poetry. We will have to do a lot more, but no one else is trying right now. We can do whatever we put our minds to, all that we need is the motivation, and from where will that come? And that is a rhetorical question. .
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rev. 10/23/98