Dr. Thomas Stark - Inside Reality: The Inner View of Existence

Copyright Dr. Thomas Stark 2018

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The Ontological Mathematics Foundation

In mythology, the male gaze brings life and the female gaze death. In the tale of Pygmalion, the sculptor carves a woman out of ivory and his creation is so beautiful and realistic that he falls in love with it, losing all interest in women of flesh and blood who cant compete with his ideal. Pygmalion makes offerings at the altar of Aphrodite and begs the goddess for a real woman who will be the living likeness of my ivory girl. Upon returning home, he kisses his perfect statue, and is amazed that its lips feel warm. He kisses it again, and it miraculously comes to life. Aphrodite has granted his wish. So, the male gaze brings women to life. It animates them, vivifies them, exhilarates them.

Another famous tale provides the opposite lesson. Medusa the Gorgon is a terrible creature with hair made of living, hissing, poisonous snakes. Her face is so terrible to behold it turns to stone anyone who dares to look at her. She is the classic instance of the female gaze, destroying men. She turns them to stone. She is the anti-Pygmalion. Instead of making dead statues into living women, she makes living men into dead statues. The female gaze literally petrifies men.

This book is about a different pair of gazes: inwards and outwards. There are those who look out and never in, and those who look in and never out. To understand reality, you must do both. You need to be like the Roman god Janus, looking in both directions at the same time.

Janus is the liminal god, the god of transitions, beginnings and endings, the sacred and profane, gates, doorways, passages, and every type of duality. With his two faces, he looks to the future and the past at the same time. He looks at the inside of reality and also the outside of reality, thus seeing all of reality, its full range, its complete nature.

There are those, such as scientists, who see only the outside of reality, its appearance, its surface, its phenomenal aspect. They are blind to the inside, the substance, the foundation, the noumenal aspect. They dismiss it as non-existent, or illusion, or epiphenomenon. Scientists are those that believe that phenomena have no underlying noumena. What you see is what you get. Seeing is believing. Everything is appearance. Nothing is concealed. There are no hidden variables, and no unobservables. The scientific method says, Observe. That works only if everything is observable. If there are foundational unobservables, science is catastrophically wrong and has cut itself off from the truth. The only truth it can furnish is that of surfaces and appearances with no substance.

Then, on the other side, there are those, such as mystics and gurus, who believe they can meditate and find their way to the inside of reality, to cosmic consciousness, or non-duality, or the One. They dismiss the outside as an illusion, as mere appearance and surface, as pure phenomenon that conceals the noumenal truth from us, which we must overcome if we wish to access the truth. They are the opposite of scientists.

Those who truly want to understand reality must become masters of both perspectives inside and outside, noumenon and phenomenon and see how they relate, communicate and interact.

If you fail to do this, you will never comprehend existence. It will always be a mystery to you.

The Big Bang was the archetypal dual-aspect event, where the inside of reality a noumenal, immaterial Singularity outside space and time gave rise to the outside of reality, the phenomenal, material universe of space and time.

The Singularity is eternal and necessary. The universe, its construct, is temporal and contingent. The Singularity is the thing in itself, and the universe its projection, the appearance it confers on itself, how it makes itself visible and tangible.

Its time to put on your Janus head and come and see reality from two perspectives, inside and outside, and then you will know everything.

The inside-outside relation isnt simple. Think of a Russian doll a nested doll, a stacking doll with dolls of decreasing size placed one inside another. What is the ultimate inside of a Russian doll? As we look for the inside, would we keep reaching smaller and smaller dolls, with no end? Unless we reach a definitive end then we are caught in infinite regress, a process which can never come to an end, which has no bottom, no base, no sufficient reason, which belongs to the order of magic and miracle.

Plato argued that the innermost kernel of a doll isnt a doll at all, but, rather the form of a doll. Its a mental entity, outside space and time: the physicality of a doll distilled down to the pure idea of a doll. For Plato, all forms/ideas belonged to an immaterial, transcendent domain of mind, a singularity outside space and time that only the soul could access.

Aristotle switched from a transcendent to an immanent view of form. He proposed a system of hylomorphism: matter-form hybrids (substances). He built an inside (form) into all material objects. The only exceptions to the general rule were formless matter (prime matter) and matterless form (God).

Form, for both Plato and Aristotle, prevented infinite regress. Science has no concept of form. Science is all about matter, hence is totally reliant on infinite regress, or on random events, such as the universe popping into existence out of non-existence by chance. Without form, eternal and necessary form, there is no other way to get a Big Bang universe going in the first place.

The ancient Greek Atomists, to prevent infinite regress, expediently decreed that the ultimate things (atoms) were tiny and indivisible, thus providing a finite limit. They offered no explanation of why reality should operate in such a way. Descartes attacked this position in a twofold way: by denying that there was any void in which atoms could move, and asserting the existence of an immaterial, unextended, mental substance: mind. As for Leibniz, he posited that the ultimate atoms were immaterial minds, not physical objects.

Materialism is an outside philosophy, while idealism is an inside philosophy.

Empiricism is an outside philosophy, while rationalism is an inside philosophy.

Heres the question. Do you understand reality from the outside-in (you look at the external world and then try to work out how it got there), or from the inside-out (you consider the internal world and then wonder how it produced the outside world)?

Insideout is an a priori, analytic, eternal, necessary, rational, logical, holistic, deductive perspective. Outsidein is an a posteriori, synthetic, temporal, contingent, empirical, sensory, parts-based, inductive perspective. These are therefore opposite worldviews.

All of the problems of philosophy stem from the clash between these opposing perspectives. Materialists come from the outside view, idealists from the inside; empiricists from the outside view, rationalists from the inside; immanents from the outside, transcendents from the inside. Physics concerns the outside, metaphysics the inside.