The Musical Theory of Existence: Hearing the Music of the Spheres

By Steve Madison

Existence is mathematical music, and all of us are the instruments playing the cosmic symphony. Our task is simple – to arrive not at any old music, but the finest music that can possibly be played. The ideal music is reached when every player is in perfect harmony with every other player, and not a single discordant note is played. The orchestra is as one, and there are no disruptive soloists trying to play their own song.

It takes the lifetime of the universe to arrive at this perfect music. Every disruptive soloist has to be brought into the collective orchestra. Who is the Devil? He’s the final hold-out, the last player to be integrated into the orchestra. Who is the conductor of the orchestra? It’s Abraxas, the first God, the first to play a tuneful song and recruit others to his song. Whose side are you on?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Oct 12, 2020
• ISBN: 9781716513619

Steve Madison

Steve Madison investigates all the mysteries of mind and soul.

Book preview

The Musical Theory of Existence

Hearing the Music of the Spheres

Steve Madison

Copyright © Steve Madison 2020

All rights reserved.

978-1-71651-361-9

Imprint: Lulu.com

Table of Contents

The Musical Theory of Existence

Mind Music

The Metaphysics of Music

The General Root

The Poles

Universal Feelings

Parsifal

The Curiosity

Pessimism

The Romantic

Tranquility?

Genius

Will and Idea

Music and the Will

Nietzsche and Music

The Orphics

The Hierarchy of the Arts

Nietzsche’s Mirror

Order and Disorder

Will and Idea

The Ideas and the PSR

Clashing Magisteria

Experience

The Failure

The Amazing Pythagoreans

The Origin of Painting

The Ancient Division

The First Scientist

The Will to Power

Poiesis

The Source

Access to Excess

Respite and Salvation

Theory of Mind

Angels and Aliens

Mount Hermon

The Supreme Art

The Shadow

The Reproach

Soul Music

Good and Bad Music

Good Music?

The Muses

Death and Circles

Conclusion

Mind Music

Without music, life would be a mistake. – Friedrich Nietzsche

Is the mind the ultimate musical instrument? Is the world a unique symphony composed by the World Mind, a symphony so extraordinary that it has been rendered physical, available to all of our senses and not just to our ears? Are atoms actually physical notes? Chemistry’s Periodic Table would then be a musical scale of the elements, and the laws of ontological music would determine what and how the elements can combine. Is the material world actually music that is enormously slowed down or frozen? Is it just low-frequency music, inaudible to our ears (infrasound)? Are quantum mechanical wavefunctions really musical functions, made of countless blended notes? They play music all the time, but our ears aren’t attuned to this kind of music.

Imagine the most special of pianos. This exceptional piano has been reduced to nothing but a keyboard – one that can play any possible note. The keys of this piano are eternal. They have compulsory existence. They are the very foundation of existence. In fact, they are the only things that have Being, i.e. fundamental reality.

This piano wouldn’t be of much use if it had no one to play it. Well then, who does play it? If we were the philosopher Plato, we would say that a Cosmic Being – the Demiurge – is the piano player. But then we have to explain the existence of the Demiurge as well as that of the piano, and we have thereby created a problematic dualism: there are two types of things in this system – the piano and the piano player. Do we actually need an external Being, an external player? Why can’t the system operate on its own? There’s nothing to stop the piano playing itself. Such a thing already exists. It’s called a pianola. A pianola is a mechanical piano that uses a roll of perforated paper to operate its keys, hence can dispense with the services of an external pianist.

The type of piano we are contemplating in our thought experiment is much more sophisticated than a mechanical piano. It’s a living piano. It spontaneously, automatically, naturally, habitually plays itself and it is actually trying to understand itself via the music it plays. After all, its music is all it has with which to comprehend itself. Music is its only output.

The living piano experiences its own music. It feels pleasure when it plays well and pain when it plays badly. It tries to make more and more of the music it likes, and to get rid of all the music it doesn’t like. It learns from its mistakes. It learns what it likes and wants more of, and equally what it dislikes and wants less of. It thereby takes on a character, a distinct way of doing things, a clear pattern of behavior – a personality.

Every such piano is different. These pianos all develop differently. Each piano is unique, playing its own unique songs, its own soul music.

Imagine a whole world of these pianos, a world comprised only of these pianos. There is literally nothing else. Each is a self-playing piano, playing its own compositions.

Let’s imagine that none of these living pianos can hear the work of any other piano. Each piano is on its own, playing its own music and learning strictly from its own work. Each is a private music domain. If one of these living pianos is going to become a better musician, it will have to do it all by itself. Some might learn fast. However, we can imagine that many pianos will take an age to learn how to properly play themselves, to produce the results they really want. Getting good at anything is hard work, and hard work for most creatures is painful. They avoid it. The path of least resistance is the path most creatures like to take.

Now imagine an alternative scenario. Imagine that all these different pianos can in fact listen to each other, can play together, can create joint compositions, can learn from each other, copy each other, collaborate with each other.

We now have two interacting systems: a private domain and a public domain. In the private domain, each piano does its own thing. It plays its own music, hears its own music, learns from its own music, and tries to make its own music better. It dreams, of course, of producing the perfect music that will be so good that it will make it feel like a god, and explain its own existence to itself. But this private domain offers such slow progress. There’s no multiplier factor to speed things up. It’s all down to the individual and how fast, or otherwise, the individual is at learning.

In the public domain, by contrast, all the pianos are playing together. They can all hear each other, they can all hear plenty of what works and what doesn’t, and they can rapidly learn from each other. They can hear and create vastly more and grander music than they could ever have composed on their own. Think of the difference between a soloist, no matter how brilliant, and an enormous orchestra, full of every possible instrument and expertise. Even the finest soloist will want to be informed by others. It will make the soloist shine all the more brightly.

In this public domain, progress is potentially much, much faster than in the private domain since every player is exposed to much more music, and to many more musical influences, possibilities and experiments.

Yet the public domain has its own drawbacks. There’s a drastic danger of discord. All of the pianos might play out of tune, disharmoniously, discordantly. Everything might clash. This could be the worst music ever.

Or perhaps the public system will produce a lowest common denominator music – muzak – bland, dull, banal, unadventurous, average, merely competent, but with none of the great virtuoso potential of music ever coming to fruition.

Or perhaps the public system will generate competing music – two rival orchestras, let’s say, playing two totally different symphonies. Each individual piano will have to choose which collective orchestra it joins, which symphony it signs up to. If it joins one orchestra, it’s out of tune with the other, in conflict with the other, and causing pain and even hatred amongst the pianos playing the rival symphony.

Or perhaps the public system produces a totalitarian, authoritarian music, with which everyone has to join in or face ostracism.

Or perhaps the public system is taken over by a small, dominant elite and everyone else has to dance to their tune and fit in with their music, whether they like it or not.

So, the public domain – although it offers the chance to make speedy progress – also offers the potential for conflict and disharmony on a truly grand scale, and thus for much slower progress. The pain in the public domain can be much worse than it is in the private domain.

How can the public music possibly get better given how much conflict is likely? How can the collective music be optimized? It would require some methodical process to slowly push it towards the perfection it contains within it, waiting to be released. What would such a process be, a process to take us from total public discord to total public harmony?

How about the Dialectic? We start with one song – the thesis. Some pianos like this and join in with it to amplify it. Other pianos don’t like it and play a song with opposite properties – the antithesis. A bitter musical war breaks out between the two competing songs. Each tries to drown out the other. Gradually, other, neutral pianos see virtues in each of the two rival songs and compose a new song, combining elements of both. This is the synthesis song. Yet it also functions as a new thesis, higher than the previous starting thesis – because it contains elements of its rival. However, like any thesis, it generates an antithesis, and thus the process is repeated all over again. A new synthesis is required, which, again, will raise the thesis song to a higher level.

So, all of the pianos go through this long and laborious – yet also fascinating and creative – dialectical process, until there is a grand synthesis of 100% of the pianos. They have all arrived at the Absolute Synthesis, the song that every piano regards as perfect. This is the music of the spheres, the music of the gods themselves. You have to be a god to play it, hear it, and appreciate it.

Musically, the Big Bang is an event of total musical chaos – when the public space is first created and all the different pianos discordantly play their own private tunes, with no regard to any other piano. This is absolute musical entropy – song entropy at its maximum.

After a while, perhaps an age, the first discernible collective song appears from the chaos – the thesis song, the first public song – and this sets in motion the musical dialectic, which finally concludes with the Absolute Song, the final, perfect song. At that point, the musical universe has come to an end. It has played itself out. There are no more songs to be created. It either plays the Absolute Song forevermore, or it starts all over again.

What we have described is, as it turns out, a musical version of reality itself. Simply replace the eternal pianos with eternal minds, and replace the piano keys with mathematical frequencies (sinusoids).

What is a mind? It’s a complete electromagnetic spectrum, containing every possible frequency. It’s an immaterial singularity. It’s a frequency domain that performs ontological Fourier mathematics.

Minds are self-thinking entities (just as the pianos were self-playing instruments). They automatically think. It’s their nature, their fundamental, essential activity. They think by a process no more onerous than putting together their eternal basis frequencies in various combinations, thus generating temporal and contingent thought functions (just as pianos play combinations of keys). Each mind makes its own thought song, and likes it or dislikes it, and learns from it.

All the different minds can also enter a public mind-space and create collective thought functions. Their primary collective thought function is nothing less than the material world of space and time that we all inhabit.

All of the minds that connect to this public world will either sing together (cooperate) or sing apart (compete). We therefore have the classic dialectical situation. All the different minds will clash over and over again until they achieve the perfect mental synthesis – God.

We live in a dialectical mathematical system of frequency waves, which are the essential components of living, striving minds seeking to perfect themselves. Music is an ideal analogy for this process, given how closely aligned with mathematics music is.

Music might be regarded as a direct copy of mathematics – the continuation of mathematics by other means, by auditory, empirical means. With music, we can literally hear mathematical patterns. As Leibniz said so tellingly, Music is the pleasure the human mind experiences from counting without being aware that it is counting.

Music is the perfect metaphor for mathematics. If you find it hard to grasp reality in mathematical terms, you will find that you can make incredible progress by instead thinking of it in musical terms, and you will end up at more or less the same destination – intuitively rather than analytically. Just think of musical compositions as mathematical wavefunctions.

You can work out how reality works simply by contemplating the nature of music and how to arrive at the perfect collective music. As we have shown, the evolution of the musical universe exactly parallels the evolution of the mathematical universe, and is just an alternative way of thinking about the same thing, without having to confront any difficult mathematics that may obstruct your ability to grasp the essentials of reality.

If you find mathematics too daunting, use your superlative musical intuition instead. Just replace mathematical frequencies with musical notes, just replace eternal basis sinusoids with eternal pure notes. Instead of individual monads, think of individual, self-playing pianos, violins, trumpets, guitars, drums, or whatever musical instrument you prefer to contemplate. Instead of the monadic collective, think of an orchestra. The members of the orchestra can play separately or together, and obviously the music is much more powerful when everyone is playing together, in harmony, in a single symphony with a common objective and just one conductor.

Imagine the musical world that is created by the orchestra all playing together, and then imagine members of the orchestra doing solos and adding to the grand symphony, adding their own features to the public world.

Imagine musical discord as a measure of mathematical entropy (disorder), and musical harmony as a measure of mathematical negentropy (order). The perfect state both mathematically and musically is zero entropy – absolute unity, interconnectedness, wholeness, completeness, symmetry.

The universe is a collective mathematical composition, and we are all solo artists adding our own individual contributions (via our free will, our self-determined actions). Our collective entropy goes down the more we cooperate and harmonize, and goes up the more we compete and engage in libertarianism, anomie, anarchy, and extreme individualism, i.e. Discordianism.

Selfish individualists are discordants, while altruistic collectivists are concordants. The former want to play their own songs, no matter how bad and how out of tune they are with everyone else.

The metaphysics of music provides a rather painless way of understanding the metaphysics of existence itself.

Pythagoras spoke of the gods designing the cosmos so that it would play the most sublime music – the music of the spheres, the divine music that can be heard everywhere in the cosmos by those with the ears to hear.

When the gods configured reality mathematically, that necessarily meant musically too. The better the mathematics, the better the music. The best songs always reflect key mathematical features and properties.

But the gods are no different from anyone or anything else. They too are mathematical musical organisms: wave-based monadic minds playing the grand music of mathematics. Music is about making auditory patterns, and mathematics is about making all possible patterns.

Existence is mathematical music (frequencies), and all of us are the instruments playing the cosmic symphony. Our task is simple – to arrive not at any old music, but the finest music that can possibly be played. The ideal music is reached when every player is in perfect harmony with every other player, and not a single discordant note is played. The orchestra is as one, and there are no disruptive soloists trying to play their own song.

It takes the lifetime of the universe to arrive at this perfect music. Every disruptive soloist has to be brought into the collective orchestra.

Who is the Devil? He’s the final hold-out, the last player to be integrated into the orchestra.

Who is the conductor of the orchestra? It’s Abraxas, the first God, the first to play a tuneful song and recruit others to his song.

Whose side are you on? That of the Devil or Abraxas?

The Metaphysics of Music

Arthur Schopenhauer (22 February 1788 – 21 September 1860) was a German philosopher. He is best known for his 1818 work The World as Will and Representation, wherein he characterizes the phenomenal world as the product of a blind and insatiable metaphysical will. Building on the transcendental idealism of Immanuel Kant, Schopenhauer developed an atheistic metaphysical and ethical system that rejected the contemporaneous ideas of German idealism. He was among the first thinkers in Western philosophy to share and affirm significant tenets of Eastern philosophy, such as asceticism and the notion of the world-as-appearance. His work has been described as an exemplary manifestation of philosophical pessimism. … [Schopenhauer] deemed music a timeless, universal language comprehended everywhere, which actually embodied the will itself. – Wikipedia

No philosopher has given music such a place of prominence in his metaphysics as Schopenhauer. He believed that the Will, the key element in his metaphysics, was embodied in two different ways: by Nature (the world as Idea; the represented world) and by Music (the world not as Idea; the unrepresented world).

For the world as Idea, Schopenhauer turned to Plato’s Ideas (Forms; Cosmic Archetypes) to explain his system. However, right alongside conventional Platonist philosophy, he gave equal ranking to music, which he regarded as the supreme art. Many artists, most notably Wagner, consequently fell under the spell of Schopenhauer’s philosophy. Nietzsche, as a young man, also succumbed to Schopenhauer’s ideas, later proposing Will to Power rather than Will to Live as the basis of his own philosophy. Nietzsche too accorded music an extremely high philosophical rank.

For Plato, Ideas were eternal, immutable and perfect. The intellect apprehended them given that they themselves were the basis of intellect. Music, however, did not belong to the Ideas.

Music is temporal and mutable, and is apprehended above all by the emotions. The Ideas require only a mind. Music, of necessity, requires ears, and a body capable of feelings (in order to be moved by the music).

The Will generates two worlds, one visual and one audible. Through visual art such as sculpture and painting, we can reproduce the visual world. Through music, we can reproduce the audible world.

Music and Nature, Schopenhauer believed, share certain parallel features. He wrote, In the deepest notes of the harmony, in the ground bass, the will begins to objectify itself. I recognize the mass of the planet and inorganic nature.

This is a critical notion. For any system of idealism (predicated on mind as the primary, foundational reality), the apparent existence of matter has to be accounted for. In Schopenhauer’s philosophy, mind – the Will – undergoes a process of objectifying itself, and it does so in definite grades. The lowest grades correspond to basic matter. As the grades rise, simple bodies are produced, then complex bodies such as those of humans, where the will is able to express itself consciously. The wide range of music is able to track these various material gradations and the increasing ability of the Will to manifest itself more individually and intentionally, culminating in human consciousness, the highest expression of Will in Schopenhauer’s system.

Schopenhauer wrote, All the higher notes, easily mobile and sounding more quickly, are to be understood as emerging from the repercussions of the deep notes of the ground bass… This is to be understood as parallel to the fact that all bodies and organizations of nature must be viewed as arising through the development of the substance of the planet, step by step: as its bearer, so its source, and the same relationship can be established between the higher notes and the bass notes… And further in all the array of steps that follow the ripieno voices which produce a harmony, between the bass and the leading voice which carries the melody I recognize the full series of ideas in which the will objectifies itself. Those which stand closer to the bass are the first such steps, which are not yet organic, but are in a multiplicity of external forms: the higher notes represent to me the world of plants and animals… And lastly in the melody, in the high, singing, integral principal voice, which reflects an uninterrupted, meaningful connection of a thought progressing from the beginning to the end, I recognize the highest stage of objectification of the will, the contemplative life and strivings of the human.

Since the structures of Nature and Music run in parallel, humans can, through music, conjure Nature in a second way – for our ears rather than our eyes, for our emotions rather than our reason.

Music possesses people in a way reason never does. Schopenhauer thought he understood why this should be the case. He saw the Will in itself as ferociously irrational, and therefore reason could never convey its nature. Music, by contrast, bypassed reason and therefore got closer to the Will’s true nature. Exactly because of that, it could move us more than anything else. It revealed, in the core of our being, the true inner workings of reality. It linked us better than anything else to the Source, to reality in itself. It set up a resonance between us and the fundamental pulse of Life.

The Non-Phenomenon

In Schopenhauer’s philosophy, all phenomena (i.e. things which are seen in the material world of the senses) are derived from Plato’s Ideas. Since music does not originate in Plato’s Ideas, hence has no appearance, it cannot be a phenomenon (in the strict sense). The word phenomenon is derived from the ancient Greek phainomenon thing appearing to view; that which appears or is seen.

For Schopenhauer, music was a