Dear Friends,
It seems to me, consciousness isn’t the hard question, life itself is the hard question, and once we figure it out we’ll understand consciousness. I wonder if there’s more to reality than we are able to interact with by mere physical means. What if life, consciousness, and other unexplainable phenomena happen on another level? Like the quantum but instead of being small it’s something else? Moreover, if we apply the rules of the quantum plane to this hypothetical plane, maybe observation collapses it into material reality. As a wave becomes a particle upon observation. Maybe there’s a quantum erasure effect on a macroscopic scale, where reality is rewritten as in the quantum eraser in the double slit experiment? What we have in unexplained phenomenon are examples of logical singularities.
A logical singularity is where logic breaks down, as in a physical singularity is where the math describing it breaks down. Kung Sung Lung’s White Horse analogy is apt here. In it he describes a white horse as not being a horse but a black or yellow one is. In doing so he is overtly attacking universals, and subversively attacking the ability of language itself to convey true thought… but more importantly for our discussion, he does it by building a logical singularity. That great sage lived around 300 BC, so we can presume logical singularities have been around since the dawn of time. Yet the materialist ideology states that only the material exists and all material existence can be modeled by math. A theocracy that breaks down when confronted with logical singularities.
The fact that logical singularities exist and are so widespread is because our material based science isn’t correct. Just as the math that breaks down in a black hole is insufficient to describe it, not that the black hole itself cannot exist. These holes in our understanding prove we don’t have the whole picture. Moreover, to believe we do is the acme of expert hubris, leading to the Dunning Kruger Effect. Even as James Webb breaks cosmology, quantum physics breaks Einstein’s physics and as his physics complemented Newtonian physics, our understanding of reality is proven to be less rigorous than we had thought. Reality itself has proven to have tricks up its sleeve that our brightest minds hadn’t counted on. Proven and highlighted by the logical singularities that surround us… like life itself.
I am firmly of the opinion that philosophy leads technology. The Harappan people of the Indus Valley were contemporaries of the Egyptian pyramid builders. They had running water and a slew of other technological innovations not seen again for thousands of years. Yet upon their disappearance their astounding technology fell to ruin. Because the people who moved into their abandoned homes didn’t have the philosophy to understand let alone maintain those systems. The Romans were more advanced technologically than Medieval Europeans… yet Medieval Europeans created capitalism, the industrial revolution, and the scientific method. All these innovations led to our technological age and the closed-minded hubris of our experts.
What we need then to understand the logical singularities that surround us, is to accept a different philosophy. As someone in one dimension can’t imagine two dimensions, let alone a third, because these are not imaginable… until they are. Philosophy is the same way. Science, technology, and our understanding of reality are hampered by our philosophy. If we brought a Roman to today, he or she might be amazed at the technology but they would be shocked at the philosophy that allowed it. They couldn’t explain why the Earth revolves around the sun or the chemical makeup of steel, these were logical singularities to them. Singularities that were overcome by a different philosophy… which is what we need. One that allows for explanations of our logical singularities.
Sincerely,
John Pepin
