Magic, Matter and Qualia

By Mike Hockney

Magic illusions are all about misdirection: making sure that the audience is looking away from what’s really going on. For humanity, both religious faith and scientific materialism misdirect us away from truth and reality.

Magicians claim to pull rabbits out of empty hats. The God of Abraham pulls a whole universe out of nothing whatsoever, while scientific materialism performs the greatest magic trick of all by abolishing God and pulling the entirety of existence out of its opposite – non-existence – through nothing other than a random accident, with no conceivable explanation or sufficient reason.

Scientific materialism puts all magicians to shame. It manages to magic life out of lifeless atoms, and mind out of mindless atoms. That’s some trick!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Dec 19, 2014
• ISBN: 9781326126513

Mike Hockney

Mike Hockney invites you to play the God Game. Are you ready to transform yourself? Are you ready to be one of the Special Ones, the Illuminated Ones? Are you ready to play the Ultimate Game? Only the strongest, the smartest, the boldest, can play. This is not a drill. This is your life. Stop being what you have been. Become what you were meant to be. See the Light. Join the Hyperboreans. Become a HyperHuman, an UltraHuman. Only the highest, only the noblest, only the most courageous are called. A new dawn is coming... the birth of Hyperreason. It's time for HyperHumanity to enter HyperReality.

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Quotations

Magic is believing in yourself. If you can do that, you can make anything happen. – Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

There is a real magic in enthusiasm. It spells the difference between mediocrity and accomplishment. – Norman Vincent Peale

One man’s ‘magic’ is another man’s engineering. ‘Supernatural’ is a null word. – Robert A. Heinlein

Love can sometimes be magic. But magic can sometimes ... just be an illusion. – Javan

I regard matter as derivative from consciousness. – Max Planck

The great leaders are like the best conductors – they reach beyond the notes to reach the magic in the players. – Blaine Lee

Believe in yourself. Believe in your dreams. If you don’t, who will? – Jon Bon Jovi

As a man who has devoted his whole life to the most clear headed science, to the study of matter, I can tell you as a result of my research about atoms this much: There is no matter as such. – Max Planck

Those who mind don’t matter and those who matter don’t mind. – Bernard Baruch

[The] mind is the matrix of all matter. – Max Planck

Table of Contents

Magic, Matter and Qualia

Quotations

Table of Contents

Introduction

The Magic of Qualia

The Impossibility

Quantia and Qualia

The Mathematical Universe

The Old Days

Atheism

The Unholy Trinity

Jesus Christ

Enlightenment

The Direction of the Pyramid

The End of Philosophy?

Sin

Tabula Rasa

The Unconscious Mind

Unnatural Unselection

The Hare Krishnas

Common Sense Perception (Misperception)

TV and Cinema

The Atomists’ Soul

Esse is Percipi

Berkeley’s Philosophy

The Dream Key

The False Prophets

The Cosmic Hologram

Hell?

The Life Mystery

Retardation

Dimensional and Dimensionless Mathematics

Immortality versus Reproduction

The Oversoul

The HyperSoul

Noumenal Idealism

Modern Jacobinism

The New Science

Schopenhauer and the Power of Music

Abracadabra

The Magus

Mirror Talking

Dreamers Amongst the Awaking

The Discernment of Spirits

Idealism and God

The SS and Jihad

The Singularity

The Phantoms

Conclusion

Introduction

Magic illusions are all about misdirection: making sure that the audience is looking away from what’s really going on. For humanity, both religious faith and scientific materialism misdirect us away from truth and reality.

Magicians claim to pull rabbits out of empty hats. The God of Abraham pulls a whole universe out of nothing whatsoever, while scientific materialism performs the greatest magic trick of all by abolishing God and pulling the entirety of existence out of its opposite – non-existence – through nothing other than a random accident, with no conceivable explanation or sufficient reason.

Scientific materialism puts all magicians to shame. It manages to magic life out of lifeless atoms, and mind out of mindless atoms. That’s some trick!

Bizarrely, scientific materialism sees itself as anti-magic. It regards free will, mind and consciousness as magic illusions – epiphenomena – that have no impact whatsoever on the material world of atoms and the implacable laws that rule them.

If the world consists exclusively of public atoms obeying the public laws of science, why are there such things as private experience and the private laws of free will? Of what use is it for any human being to see the redness of a rose, and to marvel at its beauty, or to smell the fragrance of a rose and write poetry about it? How can public atoms, with no private aspect, come together in physical bodies and create a mental world of private experience, a world of qualia? How can public atoms produce private freedom? Now that’s magic!

The true magic of our world is supplied by the vividness of our private experiences, by our internal feelings, reflections, desires, awareness and freedom – all of which are formally inexplicable in terms of scientific materialism, not just now, but forever. No final theory of science will ever address qualia (the objects of private experience) and free will. That’s a simple fact. So, such a theory certainly won’t be an explanation of everything, hence there will still be a whole domain beyond the reach of science.

Only one subject can explain qualia and free will in a rational context and that’s ontological mathematics, the antidote to all of the magic thinking of religion and science.

We don’t live in a world of faith, we don’t live in world of mysticism, and we don’t live in a world of lifeless, mindless matter. We live in a universe literally made out of mathematical reason, which is exactly why the universe is intelligible. If the universe weren’t made out of reason, it would not be a rational place of order, organisation and pattern. Instead, it would be a place of irrational chaos, a world of things happening for no reason, and with no continuity between events.

When people refer to magic, they usually mean things happening for reasons unknown to science. Yet, if the universe isn’t made of reason, then it means that all things are in fact happening for no reason. If the universe is made of reason, then rational causation is inbuilt in existence. Everything happens because of specific rational causes (ontological reasons); there are no effects that have no causes. There are no magic processes. There are no random processes. Everything can be rationally explained. The Universe is ruled by the Principle of Sufficient Reason, which is the ontological source of causation.

We do not live in a magic universe ruled by magic beings (gods), we live in a mathematical universe ruled by mathematical law. The world of Mythos – of emotional religions, emotional political and economic systems, emotional stories constructed on the basis of what our senses do or do not reveal to us – is a world of magic, and it’s an entirely false world. There is literally zero truth in Mythos, even though 99.9% of humanity subscribes to one Mythos or another.

The world of Truth is the world of anti-magic, of anti-Mythos. The True World is the Logos world.

Logos is the Truth and Mythos the Lie. Magic is a fraud. It’s all about lies, stories, fakes and falsehood. Religious prophets – such as Moses, Jesus Christ and Mohammed – are the greatest magicians of all, conjuring endless false worlds, false beings and false commandments into existence.

God didn’t make the universe out of nothing. Magicians (prophets) did make God out of nothing. Or out of their fantasy. Or out of their insanity.

It’s time for humanity to leave behind Mythos magic. The true magic – the only magic that actually works, that actually explains everything – is ontological mathematics.

Elon Musk said, If you go back a few hundred years, what we take for granted today would seem like magic – being able to talk to people over long distances, to transmit images, flying, accessing vast amounts of data like an oracle. These are all things that would have been considered magic a few hundred years ago.

Hundreds of years from now, when humanity is fully engaged with ontological mathematics and we are on our way to becoming a divine species, we will routinely be doing things that the scientists of today would regard as magic, i.e. as impossible. Ontological mathematics – the subject of Truth – is how we convert the impossible into the possible.

This book is about showing that we cannot reach and master the world of the impossible, of magic, until we understand that we inhabit two worlds: public and private. The material world is that of public bodies and public objects, capable of being publicly observed. The mental world is that of unobservable private souls that can privately experience qualia and act freely, regardless of other things. Public science can say nothing at all about private qualia and private freedom. Qualia and free will are the proof that scientific materialism is false.

If we really lived in a world exclusively of public atoms and their public laws, we would have no private world of private minds, private consciousness, private free will, and private experiences. You cannot have a private reality in a world that contains only public things. That’s a fact. Even less so, can you have the illusion of a private reality, which is what science claims in respect of our free will. How can public atoms obeying public laws generate public bodies that suffer from the extraordinary and inexplicable delusion that they are private and free?

Space and time are public dimensions. You can have private experiences only if there is a private dimension, which means an autonomous domain for you alone, into which no one else can intrude. The private domain is of course your own soul, which is a mathematical singularity, outside space and time, and independent of all other singularities (souls).

You can experience qualia, and you can exhibit free will, purely and simply because you are not a public, material object (body) at all, but a private, mental being (soul). Your body is a public, material entity in space and time, your mind isn’t: it’s a private, immaterial entity outside space and time. All of this is reflected in ontological Fourier mathematics, where there is a material spacetime domain and an interlinked, immaterial frequency domain outside space and time. There’s nothing bizarre, wacky or woo woo about it. It’s all in the math.

Ontological mathematics alone can rationally account for a public world (material spacetime) containing private minds (immaterial, autonomous frequency singularities, outside space and time). Any science or philosophy that does not reflect a Fourier-linked, dual-aspect reality of public and private elements is inherently false and bogus. Virtually all contemporary thinking regarding qualia, consciousness and free will is predicated on a public, spacetime, mono-aspect scientific materialist world as the exclusive reality. Given that this paradigm has no private elements whatsoever, it is formally impossible for it to explain private aspects of reality, and has to ridiculously claim that all such aspects are illusory. Of course, no attempt is ever made to explain how atoms and atomic laws can produce pointless delusions and illusions.

Dreams, qualia, feelings, desires, free will, consciousness ... they are all possible for one reason only: you are a private, mathematical singularity. You are an immortal, indestructible soul. And that’s pure magic, isn’t it?

Public and Private

The public world reflects the operations of the Monadic Collective. The private world reflects the operations of individual monads. Reality comprises individual monads operating within the collection of monads, the private operating within the public. What could be simpler and more self-evident?

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The public world concerns objectivity and the quantitative; the private world concerns subjectivity and the qualitative. The public world is about quantia, the private world about qualia.

Qualia

Qualia are the subjective or qualitative properties of experiences. What it feels like, experientially, to see a red rose is different from what it feels like to see a yellow rose. Likewise for hearing a musical note played by a piano and hearing the same musical note played by a tuba. The qualia of these experiences are what give each of them its characteristic ‘feel’ and also what distinguish them from one another. Qualia have traditionally been thought to be intrinsic qualities of experience that are directly available to introspection. However, some philosophers offer theories of qualia that deny one or both of those features. – http://www.iep.utm.edu/qualia/

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Quale: A quality or property as perceived or experienced by a person. A sense-datum or feeling having a distinctive quality. A property considered apart from things having the property. A property as it is experienced as distinct from any source it might have in a physical object. Plural = Qualia.

Qualia: subjective mental experiences; raw feels; the ways things seem to us; what it’s like to undergo an experience or state; the introspectively accessible, phenomenal aspects of our mental lives.

Qualia are at the core of the mind-body problem. Qualia are conventionally discussed in terms of consciousness, but they apply equally to the unconscious mind. A newborn human baby isn’t deemed conscious, yet no one can deny that it’s having subjective mental experiences of exactly the same type that it will have later when it has developed consciousness. What’s the difference between a baby unconsciously experiencing the colour red, and a child consciously experiencing it? The only distinction is that the child can reflect on the experience and give a name to red. The experience itself is identical in each case: it’s our framing, understanding and savouring of the experience that differs.

Likewise, a highly intelligent, or highly sensitive person (connoisseur), frames, understands and savours the same experience radically differently from a stupid person, or person of low sensitivity.

*****

Qualia are simply how we experience our world when we are conscious. We are not conscious of the electrical spikes that are buzzing in our brain, but we are conscious of the qualia which represent these spikes. The experience of colours represents the electric spikes conveyed from our colour sensitive cells in our eyes, and that of sound from sound sensitive cells in our ears and so on for all the other senses. – Nagi Hatoum

Qualia are the empirical contents that accompany the electrical signals. They are the other side of the signal. They are Content rather than Form. Of course, we don’t have to be conscious to experience qualia, just as babies and animals aren’t conscious when they experience qualia. Qualia are a feature of mind, not of conscious mind. There’s no qualia cut-off point between non-human unconscious minds and human conscious minds, just as there’s no soul cut-off between animals and humans.

It’s often said that our subjective experiences – our qualia – are the only things that each of us is really sure of. However, although we may be certain we are having subjective experiences, we certainly can’t be sure of what it is we are actually experiencing.

When we have dreams, we have vivid subjective experiences. So, what’s the difference between waking and dreaming qualia? If we are having a drug trip or hallucinogenic experience, our qualia have a different source from our normal waking qualia, yet are every bit as real to us.

At any one time, how can we know what reality we are actually experiencing, and which connects us to the truth? How do we know we’re not in the matrix? Or a matrix within a matrix? Where is the bottom of it all, the root, the source?

Déjà Vu

In How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe, Charles Yu wrote, We perceive the present, but we remember the past. The converse is not possible. We obviously cannot remember the present. Or can we? Déjà vu. What does that feel like? It is the oddest experience, one everyone has had, one that is commonly described as a feeling of certainty that one has experienced just this exact experience before. Which in itself is quite strange, the idea that one could have an identical experience, down to the last detail, down to the internal qualia, the exact interior frame of mind, emotions, a frame of consciousness duplicated with startling exactitude...

Form and Content

Form is quantity, Content is quality. Form is rational, Content is empirical. Form is intelligible, Content is sensible. The signals are the Form, the qualia are the Content.

The Magic of Qualia

Qualia are a kind of magic. They make no sense in terms of the physicalist model of reality, yet they add all the magical colour and vividness that elevates reality above the meaningless, grey machine world conceived by science. When you attach this magical content to mathematical causation, you get a world ruled by a very special kind of magic: holographic, ontological Fourier mathematics, which furnishes everything to which conventional magic aspires. Mind over matter is magic. It’s possible in ontological Fourier mathematical terms, and impossible according to physicalists.

Science is an ad hoc, butchered, non-analytic version of mathematics that rejects qualia, mind, free will, the unconscious and consciousness, and adds verbal labels such as electron and proton to mathematical functions. Science is all about measurable quantities (quantia) and cannot accommodate unmeasurable qualities (qualia). Science will never be able to accommodate mind because it simply has no means for doing so. Mind is not miraculously going to appear by shuffling around equations dealing exclusively with atoms and sub-atomic particles.

Scientists are clueless. They say that mind is made of matter but they have no grounds, other than blind dogmatism, for this claim. Mind does not, and never can, feature in scientific materialism. Science has as much ability to explain consciousness as Islam or Buddhism, which is none at all.

The Argument From Privacy

You can have private experiences purely because you are an autonomous, private subject (soul). Public entities (bodies), made of public atoms, cannot experience qualia. Androids – public machines – cannot experience qualia. Only eternal souls can experience qualia.

Private experience is all about interiority, withinness. Only immaterial souls (singularities), outside space and time, can be free from public matter and public space and time (i.e. from the shared, collective domain). Only souls can have an inner space which belongs to them and them alone.

Physicalism

According to Nagel, we currently do not have the conceptual apparatus necessary to even begin to understand how physicalism might be true. In order to solve the hard problem of consciousness, we would have to undergo a complete overhaul of our entire conceptual apparatus – a conceptual revolution so radical that we cannot even begin to conceive what the resulting concepts would be like. – http://www.iep.utm.edu/qualia/

Physicalism isn’t true, and it’s precisely the illusion of physicalism that prevents people from properly thinking about the problem of qualia. If this is a rational universe, which it is, then qualia and consciousness have a rational explanation, and rationalism, ontologically, means mathematics, and only mathematics. The overhaul of our conceptual apparatus that’s required is simply to move from science to mathematics, which is no great stretch since science is just a bad, empiricist misunderstanding of mathematics. Without mathematics, there could be no science at all. Therefore, who needs science when we have mathematics?

A false ontological layer has been constructed by scientific thinking: the layer of physical matter independent of minds. There’s no such layer, and, once it’s abolished, all of the intellectual problems it creates are abolished with it.

In ontological mathematics, the fundamental atoms of existence are mental, not physical. They are mathematical monads, and everything derives from them, both individually and collectively. At no stage is anything physical (i.e. completely independent of mind) created, and, indeed, it’s impossible to create anything physical. This is a mentalist, living universe, not a materialist, dead, machine universe.

You cannot think about any problem correctly if you start off with the wrong ontology, and that’s exactly what science does, and what mainstream religion does. If the universe is rational, its ontology must be rational, and rationalism can exist ontologically solely mathematically. To say that we live in a mathematical universe is to say that we live in a rational, comprehensible, intelligible universe to which we can find a full analytic solution merely by applying our reason.

Property Dualism

Property dualism describes a category of positions in the philosophy of mind which hold that the world is constituted of just one kind of physical substance, but it has two distinct kinds of properties: physical and mental. It contends that non-physical, mental properties can belong to physical substances such as brains. This stance contrasts with Cartesian substance dualism which holds that there are two different kinds of substance: physical and non-physical (mental). Physical properties inhere in physical substances, and mental properties in mental substances.

In ontological mathematics, mathematics is the single substance of existence, and it has two properties: Form (rational) and Content (empirical). Content concerns sensations, feelings, desires, will, beliefs, opinions. We escape Content only when we use reason to access Form, which reflects the eternal truths of reason, encapsulated in ontological mathematics. There are emphatically no physical things in the world.

Philosopher David Chalmers asks why does the feeling that accompanies awareness of sensory information exist at all? In philosophy, this is known as the hard problem. There is of course no reason why the feeling should exist in a physicalist system such as the one proposed by scientific materialism, but it’s part of the furniture in a mathematical system of Form and Content. Everything feels like something and is experienced as something. It’s inescapable because Content is inescapable. Content is always subjective and empirical.

It’s the notion of physicality that is in fact impossible to explain, not the existence of subjective experience. Materialism isn’t a fact. It’s an interpretation, an opinion, a belief, a hypothesis, a conjecture. And it’s false and wrong. The hard problem vanishes as soon as the fallacy of materialism vanishes. The real hard problem is why humanity is so wedded to the materialist belief system given that literally not one shred of evidence exists to support materialism.

Chalmers argues for an ‘explanatory gap’ from the objective to the subjective, and criticizes physical explanations of mental experience, making him a dualist. Chalmers characterizes his view as ‘naturalistic dualism’: naturalistic because he believes mental states are caused by physical systems (such as brains); dualist because he believes mental states are ontologically distinct from and not reducible to physical systems. – Wikipedia

There are no physical systems. There are simply systems that are interpreted as physical. It’s impossible for anything physical to have mental properties. It’s a category error, and a return to the old hylozoistic notions of living matter. The real distinction isn’t between mind and matter but between Form and Content. Both are mental, but one is rational and the other empirical, one objective and the other subjective. A secondary distinction is between the operations of the collective mind (Monadic Collective) and the individual mind (single monad).

As for Chalmers, if his system is meaningfully dualistic, he should be willing to say that physical brain states are as much caused by mental states, as vice versa. To privilege one over the other is to cease to be a dualist, or to be an incoherent dualist.

...Chalmers is famous for his commitment to the logical (though, importantly, not natural) possibility of philosophical zombies, although he was not the first to propose the thought experiment. These zombies, unlike the zombie of popular fiction, are complete physical duplicates of human beings, lacking only qualitative experience. Chalmers argues that since such zombies are conceivable to us, they must therefore be logically possible. Since they are logically possible, then qualia and sentience are not fully explained by physical properties alone. – Wikipedia

Qualia and sentience are not explained by physical properties at all. Zombies are impossible because purely physical human bodies are impossible.

In order to believe that a machine can be as conscious as a human being, it’s necessary to believe that humans do not have immortal, indestructible souls. If machines and humans are both purely physical, there’s no reason why machines can’t perfectly simulate humans. If humans do have souls – ontological mathematical singularities with infinite capacity – then it is of course impossible for any machine to emulate a human being since a living, eternal soul can never be programmed into a machine.

"...Chalmers argues that consciousness is a fundamental property ontologically autonomous of any known (or even possible) physical properties, and that there may be lawlike rules which he terms ‘psychophysical laws’ that determine which physical systems are associated with which types of qualia. He further speculates that all information-bearing systems may be conscious, leading him to entertain the possibility of conscious thermostats and a qualified panpsychism he calls panprotopsychism. Chalmers maintains a formal agnosticism on the issue, even conceding that the viability of panpsychism places him at odds with the majority of his contemporaries." – Wikipedia

Consciousness is not a fundamental property. It’s unconsciousness that’s a fundamental property, with consciousness being derived from the unconscious. Consciousness develops when we start to tune into Form via the advent of reason. The most conscious people are the most rational people. Irrational people are scarcely more conscious than animals. As for Chalmers’ contention that there may be ‘psychophysical laws’, if this is so then minds are as much involved in the production of physical brains, as physical brains are in the production of mental states. Chalmers would have to reject evolution based on random, materialist Darwinism. Instead, mind – via psychophysical laws – would be involved in driving evolution.

In the philosophy of mind, double-aspect theory is the view that the mental and the physical are two aspects of, or perspectives on, the same substance. The theory’s relationship to neutral monism is ill-defined, but one proffered distinction says that whereas neutral monism allows the context of a given group of neutral elements to determine whether the group is mental, physical, both, or neither, double-aspect theory requires the mental and the physical to be inseparable and mutually irreducible (though distinct). – Wikipedia

In ontological mathematics, Form and Content are inseparable and formally irreducible, though distinct.

Neutral monism is the metaphysical view that the mental and the physical are two ways of organizing or describing the same elements, which are themselves ‘neutral’, that is, neither physical nor mental. This view denies that the mental and the physical are two fundamentally different things. Rather, neutral monism claims the universe consists of only one kind of stuff, in the form of neutral elements that are in themselves neither mental nor physical; these neutral elements might have the properties of colour and shape, just as we experience those properties, but these shaped and coloured elements do not exist in a mind (considered as a substantial entity, whether dualistically or physicalistically); they exist on their own. – Wikipedia

In ontological mathematics, everything exists within minds, either individual minds (monads) or the collective mind (Monadic Collective).

I do not think it is strictly accurate to say that rocks (for example) have experiences ... although rocks may have experiences associated with them. ... – David Chalmers

Souls have experiences; rocks do not since they are not controlled by individual souls. They certainly have content associated with them, but no individual soul that can experience the content.

Many find it extremely counterintuitive to suppose that fundamental physical systems have phenomenal properties: e.g. that there is something it is like to be an electron. – David Chalmers

Souls linked to bodies have experiences. Bodies don’t have any experiences at all. There is nothing it is like to be an electron. A soul attached to an electron can experience what is like to be attached to an electron (just as a human soul can experience what it is like to be attached to a human body), but an electron itself can have no experience (just as a human body, with no soul, cannot experience anything, and nor can an android experience anything). Chalmers’ entire philosophy is fallacious because he is unable to include immaterial, autonomous, monadic minds outside space and time in his thinking. These are the experiencing agents (the subjects). Material electrons in space and time are objects, not subjects. Objects can never have experiences. They don’t have qualia. That’s why machines can never simulate or emulate living beings.

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Why do people believe in things rather than in ideas, rather than in information? Every day, we look at screens and we see depictions of physical reality on those screens that look very much like physical reality, but plainly aren’t (we’re just seeing information on a screen, arranged into something that simulates physical reality). Every night, we dream about a reality that seems very physical, but isn’t. A dream is all about internal information. Why do people imagine that the real world is any different, that there’s something out there other than information, some miraculous physical thing somehow different from information. Information is reality, not atoms.

Atoms themselves are just information. And information is mental, not physical. There is no physical world at all, only the idea (the collective idea) of a physical world, which is a wholly different concept. The only difference between dreams and waking