Mathematics, Apollo, Dionysus & Truth

What a session. Honestly, I'm still thinking about it.

Bernardo reconciled two incredible features of mathematics: its unreasonable effectiveness, and its proven incompleteness, taking questions from this page which we revisit next week:

Tues 24th March: Maths & Archetypes

18th & 24th March Q&A with Bernardo Kastrup hosted by Nour. 7-9pm UK / 8-10 CET / 3-5pm EST

Bernardo Kastrup: With Reality in MindNour Elhuda Zuraiki

For Bernardo, whilst mathematics has special status amongst the instruments of science, it is not a window into the deepest nature of reality. It is precise and powerful, but ultimately confined to the phenomenal, to the world as it appears.

This suddenly made Gödel's observations on its limitations feel less like a dry logical curiosity and more like a profound confirmation: even from within mathematics itself, there is a proof that truth exceeds what structure can contain.

The system points beyond itself. It cannot close.

If mathematics only ever describes the dashboard representations, then its unreasonable effectiveness stops being quite so mysterious. Of course the instrument of science describes the world of appearances well, that's exactly the world it was forged in. The real mystery lives one layer deeper, in what the noumenal actually is, and whether anything in us can reach it.

Even analytic idealism is fundamentally Apollonian:

philosophically, or logically speaking, (and the observant ones amongst you will have already understood that) everything I do is Apollonian. The whole of analytic idealism is Apollonian, and therefore fundamentally incomplete.

It offers the most rigorous rational framework we have for that attempt. But the territory, it seems, remains beautifully, stubbornly beyond our reach, perhaps better illuminated by poetry, prayer and intuition.

As such, we ended the session with a poem read and authored by Reuben Hunt and included below, that echoed several themes. Some things are better felt than explained. Thank you Reuben.

We also discussed:

• Why nature obeys the psychological intuitions of logic: to deny them is to deny your own existence
• Why Apollonian projects have a psychological trap.
• Russell and Whitehead's Principia Mathematica, the 200-page proof that 1+1=2, and why their project of grounding all mathematics in logic was eventually shown by Gödel to be untenable
• The cosmic itch: the impossibility of nature stepping outside itself to fully describe itself gives rise to the entire game of existence?
• Why the self-reference problem is actually worse under analytic idealism than physicalism — because under idealism, everything is potentially self-referential; nothing can be isolated from the observer

See you next week, where we'll continue with questions on archetypes :)

With love,

Nour 

PS. Escher's Drawing Hands two hands, each drawing the other into existence, is the perfect image to sit with when thinking about Gödel, a system that reaches back and touches its own foundations, only to find it can never fully grasp them.

The Creature

In a dank and rancid dream

I had a thought—my eyes agleam

Was a revelation nigh?

There spilt a gloom across the sky

I looked upon a ring of stones

And heard sepulchral baritones

There was I amidst a mire

That festered like a fell desire

Tendrilled vines spread o'er the lands

And lithely poised their creaking hands

The stinking guck beneath my weight

Began to spume and suppurate

Then I saw, to my disgust

A creature standing in a gust

A crooked shadow leapt, it seemed

From this bent and gangling fiend

Ashen figures filled the henge—

Their woeful dirge a dour wenge

The creature then aglare with glee

Turned its glowing lamps to me

And as I loft my old guisarme

The creature mimicked with its arm

For it had been a dreadful lie

The creature, then I saw, was I

As I looked down at my state

My sour, wretched, pointless fate

I opened once my doors, bereft

There was truly nothing left

Bind me up and sink me deep

Give the earth my bones to keep

So as I rot, my whispers weep

That I should sleep, and sleepA

And sleep

by Rueben Hunt

Speakers

Bernardo Kastrup

Analytic idealism

Bernardo Kastrup is the Executive Director of Essentia Foundation and Founder/CEO at AI systems company Euclyd BV. His work has set off the modern renaissance of metaphysical idealism. He has a Ph.D. in philosophy (ontology, philosophy of mind) and another in computer engineering (reconfigurable computing, artificial intelligence).

As a scientist, he has worked for the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) and the Philips Research Laboratories (where the ‘Casimir Effect’ of Quantum Field Theory was discovered). He has also been creatively active in the high-tech industry for almost 30 years, having founded parallel processor company Silicon Hive (acquired by Intel in 2011) and worked as a technology strategist for the geopolitically significant company ASML. Most recently, he has founded AI company Euclyd BV.

Formulated in detail in many academic papers and books, his ideas have been featured in Scientific American, the magazine of The Institute of Art and Ideas, the Blog of the American Philosophical Association and Big Think, among others. His most defining book is Analytic Idealism in a Nutshell: A straightforward summary of the 21st-century’s only plausible metaphysics.

Explore Bernardo’s work →