Since youth I always felt both a mathematician, and an idealist in both the metaphysical sense of the word, and its moral sense of perfectionism : the need to strive for an ideal world. Reading scientific popularization magazines in my youth, left me upset at their disdain, expressed in science's name, towards NDEs whose truthfulness seemed intuitively obvious to me. This inspired me the dream to disprove materialism by the best explanation from quantum physics, which I had yet to learn. While now considering this mission as done [1], I see it as of only limited importance in the big picture of the world's needs.
I am naturally inclined to logically analyze any real problem I stumble on, by any angle of mathematical or quasi-mathematical analysis that appears possible and can be found to keep relevance independently of the non-mathematizable aspects, given the roles visibly played by the latter. I am not after popular problems among mathematicians, like quantum gravity, where one more participant is too unlikely to become the author of any breakthrough, but problems effectively affecting the world, though often strangely ignored, and deserted by truly qualified thinkers. Whenever such a problem appears likely to have a possible solution like this under my reach, even if may take me years to discover, I do not give up: I need, and actually managed in multiple cases, to identify for sure the best theoretical solution, though writing down or implementing them can be another problem.
Many real troubles come down to the following metaphor. Imagine someone stuck in a closed building, and who can only be rescued by typing the code which will unlock the door. The diversity of problems is pictured as a diversity of such buildings, each requiring a different code to be unlocked. Depending on cases, there may either be only one possible code that works, or multiple possibilities with unequal efficiencies; there may be no possibility while this remains unknown; the right code may be discoverable by detailed analysis, or only approachable by lengthy random tries; or, its knowledge may be dispersed across multiple places, which rephrases the problem into how to effectively gather this information.
The problem of finding the best view and arguments of metaphysics, already fits this metaphor. Many other such problems would be called the possible technological breakthroughs.
While glimpsing during teenage about the potential value of my skills and perfectionist trends in this context, I felt upset at the seeming indifference of the world, which did not offer the relevant framework for nurturing existing skills and matching them with the needs. Everyone may be focused on specific issues, losing sight of the different nature of the issues faced by others, and not expecting possible solutions beyond their sight, which could work better than their current efforts. By a variant of the Peter principle, many skilled people appear attracted to the hardest problems for them, where they can make lengthy speculations or bits of discoveries often futile for the rest of humanity’s concerns. An exceptional researcher in one topic may need to flee it to avoid the misjudgement of peers at risk for their own jobs. If our institutions are designed to manage the less clever majority, or even to follow the best thousands of thinkers who anyway cannot be each one the author of a major breakthrough on any of the few most pressing needs of mankind, then they may fail to open proper jobs for the actually needed exceptions. Now, despite popular expectations, I found the exploration of ignored but crucial problems, often no less amazing than popular hard ones.
As I first suffered more than analyzed this hostile environment,
I got attracted to Evangelical Christianity, which seemed to offer
the desperately missing ingredients : a rejection of materialism,
a disdain for the current world order, and a care for the sense of
life and perfectionism. Yet, years of intense dedication in that
faith ended as a miserable failure out of which I had to break.
After the difficult step of recognizing the validity of my escape, which many others in this case failed to proceed and recover from [2], I was shocked and had to decipher this puzzle: to recognize that not only a better metaphysics, but also an intense perfectionism and personal dedication begging God to guide us into His way above human ways, generally remained of no help: neither out of depression in cases like mine, nor anyway towards any genuine truth or wisdom. That the latter was neither my personal failure trying to hear God's voice, nor my misfortune of having stumbled on the wrong church, but a worldwide doom affecting all religions and spiritualities, organized or not, since none ever provided some of the much needed codes which God logically had to know, and whose revelation should have made the world quite different than it actually is.
The usual excuse, that God is respecting our freedom and responsibility to try our own codes, appeared largely nonsensical. Indeed, most of the usually tried skills to figure out codes cannot match the actual conditions of success. Thus, both the actual intent of tentative rescuers and the freedom of victims, are effectively violated by the divine silence on the correct codes. Then, the unresolved metaphysical puzzle of this observed seemingly inexcusable silence, led me to a long period of desperate skepticism, where I focused on debunking the flaws of diverse religious and spiritual teachings, which usually hide their failures on effective issues by focusing on undefinables.
Admittedly, in lack of readily given solutions, a teaching merely emphasizing existing problems and the value of perfectionism to solve them, would be superfluous to those with the proper skills who need no teacher, needlessly humiliating to others, and may even worsen the existing trend of many people wasting energies promoting ill-thought utopias doomed to fail, praising the wrong thinkers, or boldly inventing each another theory of everything away from "dogmas", but with infinitesimal chances of success since they often contradict each other as much as they diverge from mainstream.
The profusion of failed physics or metaphysics research may not be as terrible as their enthusiasts, unable to bear criticism or dismissal, may assume failure to mean, considering the presence of much worse tragedies, such as those produced by failed utopias; and, after all, the deeper motivation which attracted these researchers to leave their innate higher knowledge behind and come to play the game of trying to rediscover it on our planet, could well be the adventure of the game itself rather than its correct solution. However, if you ask for my hints about how to correctly probe into the deep nature of our universe, they are as follows.
Our friend the universe is a great mathematician, who came with a specific mathematical theory or a similar kind of stuff, carefully chosen to serve his mission of continuously drawing from this theory, interactive results forming a convenient framework for our incarnated adventures. Now, to understand more intimately how he works, informing yourself of any specific list of results from him will not suffice. You need to follow his way by first becoming a mathematician yourself, which implies endorsing the mathematicians' faith in the existence of mathematical objects; then, as such, you can go on specifically studying his theory: you become a theoretical physicist. A number of us so managed to follow him already. Without having identified in these explicit terms the real object of their research, they still preserve its validity when they "shut up" and do not pollute it by any other metaphysical expectations.
Now, our question was how to go further; but a vital minimum of mathematical physics is required, and is terribly neglected by most philosophers, whose motivation restricting their thoughts to attempts of going further instead, bounds them to probable failure. Unfortunately, much of our current literature in philosophy of science (mathematics and physics) remains naive and worthless, which implicitly justifies scientists' disdain of it in return. Indeed, most science philosophers, lacking direct experience in the scientific fields they claim to philosophize about, appear more concerned to keep their work in tune with the bubble of similarly disconnected science philosophers. This risk of losing sight of the soul of what you only try to "rationally" study from the outside, focusing on information at the expense of more intimate knowledge, was pointed out by William James in ch. 4 of his Afterdeath Journal [3]
Mathematics is more than the sum of its results and theorems: it is primarily a mind-blowing endeavor. By keeping clear validity criteria throughout its endlessly complex topics, it offers to the mind an ideal training ground which expands the frontiers of reliable rationality. Familiarity with some mathematical topics can provide insights beyond formal proofs, escaping expectations of outsiders who mistake the adventure of mathematics as more reductionistic than it really is. This requires deep intellectual curiosity away from any hurry to prove predefined results: some people's need to conclude before understanding is leading nowhere. Whoever ventures into amazing pieces of math, such as algebraic topology or the proof of independence of the continuum hypothesis, is likely to discover there that Alice in Wonderland is a boring story, and that mainstream philosophy is just a badly played children's game.
Unfortunately, I even found most courses of mathematics and physics to be only poorly reflecting their souls, by their wasteful lengths and unfortunate choices of formalization. This feeds the illusion for so many amateurs that current science could remain miserable also in its known facts, so that trying to contradict them, either consciously or by ignorance while claiming compatibility, would be a reasonable endeavor. This is why I dedicated a great deal of work to develop some very clear and optimized initiation courses to parts of these fields. This is another instance of the value of perfectionism : the world does not need hundreds of further unsatisfactory attempts of the same, but only the best possible courses on each topic for each kind of reader.
The soul of quantum physics already leans to favor some interpretations such as Many-worlds, against others usually promoted by materialist philosophers (hidden variables, spontaneous collapse and superdeterminism). This light already has followers, but this did not suffice, as it misses the other, more metaphysical side of the picture of our universe's workings: what are some basic features of consciousness, how it differs from matter, and which principles enable the articulation between both.
The nature of these remaining needs does not seem to let mathematics be of great help to fulfill them. However, the temptation to leave mathematics aside and search elsewhere for the missing clues, faces obstacles formed by the rules of the game we came here to play. First, when coming to this planet, we temporarily left behind our innate clarity of understanding of subtle realities, mainly keeping logical reasoning and similar abilities as stable rocks to stand on. Then, these restrictions are made even more strict by the choice of trying to effectively debate things in an academic manner.
Surprisingly, the missing metaphysical clues can be found reflected in another branch of mathematics: mathematical logic. This is the successful, purely mathematical way to philosophize about mathematics, with formal definitions for diverse aspects of mathematical exploration: the structures of mathematical theories with their formulas, their semantics, and the range of their possible developments by definitions and proofs. By exploring all possible simulations of valid works of mathematicians by purely mathematical systems, it reveals both the precise structure of the similar features between mind and mathematics, and the presence of remaining irreducible differences.
A crucial lesson on those similarities which mathematical logic and its soul can reveal, is that, despite traditional assumptions, the ontology of "abstract", purely mathematical objects, is not one of absolute, timeless existence, but an ontology of relative existence structured by time flows, best approximated as the growing block theory of time in the philosophical literature. This provides not only confidence in the validity of this theory, but also resources to offer corrections and further details to its workings, resolving some difficulties usually attached to it. Namely, a crucial insight missed by philosophers but directly visible from mathematical logic, is the nature of semantics as a typical creation process: an act of introducing an interpretation of a given expression, relative to one's current memory of past events, as a possibly new real object.
The substantial divide between mind and mathematics, by which the nature of the mind transcends any possible mathematical system, can be considered obvious from intuition. Yet the game of trying to prove it by focusing on the mathematical side so transcended just because we can see clearer there, sounds challenging. Now such evidence can actually be found by pointing out discrepancies between their time structures : their flows cannot coincide. This divide can be verified on two basis : mathematical logic, and quantum theory.
In mathematical logic, time starts with the finite steps of algorithm processing, but can then theoretically reach infinity, where some results such as the true answers to halting problems can be collected and used to compute further. Speaking of "infinities of infinities" is only a poor introduction to how far this can go, which is structurally endless. Now the non-mathematical nature of a mathematician's mind is revealed by his ability to learn new descriptions of mind-blowing degrees of higher infinity and recognize their validity, despite his inability to effectively process any infinity of steps. This implies new arithmetical theorems, such as the fact that such descriptions will never lead to contradiction. Such theorems escape "natural" provability concepts (abilities of proof-checking algorithms), namely those only designed to conceptualize "simple" infinities, insufficient to distinguish some descriptions of higher infinities from nonsense [4].
A deep familiarity with quantum theory, leads to see the
tentative concept of "physical reality" as most plausibly made of
a flow of "observations" forming a growing block time structure,
similar to the time structure of mathematical logic, but escaping
any attempt of mathematical specification. These "observations"
cannot be captured or ruled by any aspect of the mathematical
semantics of physics, such as the concept of "physical event",
except somehow at macroscopic scales with classical physics
approximations; anyway, physical events with their physical "time
order" do not form a time structure in a metaphysical sense, since
they do not flow.
Observations do not precisely match any logical time of
syntactic or numerical processing of physics as a mathematical
theory either, while physics itself (quantum field theory) does
not look clearly formalizable as a mathematical theory. Their way
of seemingly coming as random outcomes, following fundamental
probability laws (relative to externally specified
"measurements"), contradicts the natural features of mathematical
ontology. They rather follow a conceivable order of the flow of
thoughts of some theoretical physicist, not a precisely human one,
but one whose computing power approaches the limit of actual
infinity.
For a long time, the main exceptions to the divine silence I knew of, were NDEs and related testimonies. These left me largely disappointed by their lack of explanations, including about the reasons for their own silence, even if special cases offered additional hints. But one day, I stumbled on the story of creation from the Seth Material [5], which amazed me by its metaphysical depths echoing the intuitions I had developed by my own research. Since then, I went through a few Seth books with great interest, in contrast with my lack of interest in the usual religious, spiritual or philosophical literature. I remain critical of some points, but I appreciate Seth's remarkable way of avoiding much of the pitfalls that are pervasive elsewhere, and am overall confident in the authenticity of this source. I also enjoyed the Afterdeath Journal of William James, with whom I relate for his life-long desperate perfectionism and his struggle to link faith and reason without compromise, which he reports including how he turned out to see this from the other side.
So, some of the codes I was longing for, had actually been revealed, only with quite smaller scope than I initially expected: they are focused on metaphysics (without the argumentative form needed to break into a certain corner of the academic arena which largely overrates its own importance in the world's intellectual adventure, not to mention the rest of the world's affairs), and basic clues on the purposes of our current lives, including hints on the reasons for the divine silence on other issues, which I still have troubles to swallow. By coming here, we actually chose this challenge of temporarily restricting our own freedom, and experimenting our skills and responsibilities in possibly adverse, helpless circumstances. The nonsense we may be experiencing here can appear quite huge; we just forgot how much bigger the afterlife realities are by contrast. How could prehistorical people cope without mobile phones ? By the most hazardous circumstances, the most excusable mistakes or the lack of proper tools or information, tragedies can happen, biodiversity may be lost, or generations may needlessly suffer. The fate of our world is our responsibility, yet the rules of responsibility are sometimes tortuous, some people carrying much heavier ones than others just because they happen to be in power, or by other circumstances. I remain stunned by the vertigo of having glimpses to crucial pieces of keys and being unsure whether they will actually get fulfilled.
References
[1] Growing block time structures for mathematical and conscious ontologies
[2] Religious Trauma Syndrome by Marlene Winell
[3] The Afterdeath Journal Of An American Philosopher; The View Of William James
[4] Gödelian arguments against mechanism : what was wrong and how to do instead