The Moonshine Memoranda: MATTER IS ONLY A STATE OF MIND

The following is the gist of a topic currently featured in V.H. Ironside, Behold! I Teach You Superman (see below):

“From deepest dream I've woke and plead - The world is deep, and deeper than the day could read.”

Nietzsche

Is the Universe intelligent?

Intelligence is a form of free energy, inseparable from it. It is the constant of integration in all conceivable equations. And yet, the mathematical equation has superseded the mental experience. One of the greatest difficulties in the whole problem, therefore, is to arrive at some kind of objective measure of intelligence as a means of conceptual communication. We measure quantity by ratio and length by comparison. Suppose, therefore, we make a start with a relation hypothetical enough in its application but also very concrete - the relation between matter and antimatter.

The antithesis of matter and antimatter is an essential foundation of human thought, a kind of polar double-think, determining opposite attitudes towards every epistemological problem. An anti-particle is, in fact, a self-contradictory or essentially absurd concept. While it appears to conflict with a preconceived notion of what is totally unreasonable, it yet turns out to be perfectly possible. The rationalization, in a word, is the same for both, the particle and the anti-particle. Both are psychological archetypes, defining conceptual categories. But when isolating two permanent and opposite kinds of conceptual intelligence in their purest and most fundamental expression, we need hardly point out that they are incapable of synthesis.

Antimatter is the most complete antithesis to matter. It is an intellectual inversion of that categorical imperative: Reality! It substantiates the rigidity and authenticates the formality, while remaining constitutionally hypothetical. Which is equivalent to saying that when the two equals meet, they cancel each other out, leaving nothing but a great deal of energy. It is fair to say, however, that this is true only in a certain limited sense since the physical evidence for the existence of contra-terrene material in the universe is not so much a matter of fact (which it nevertheless is), as a matter of inference. The inference, namely, of results based upon logical necessity. The necessity for sameness as a self-contradictory property may seem paradoxical, but antimatter is the mirror of the universal structure we know. In reflecting it, it reverses it - unchanged.

The problem thus resolves itself into one of intellectual distinction. It is the clash of identity not of polarity - the result of a fundamental contention between identical selves that are mutually exclusive. Indeed, given these circumstances, it is logically impossible for matter to acknowledge, let alone accommodate, antimatter. Or, to put the matter categorically, they set up an intellectual reaction (an extreme form of cognitive dissonance) determined by the difficulty of distinguishing between two synonymous and interchangeable sets of relations - so that the one differs from the other solely in the properties of the mirror image itself.

If therefore logical necessity precedes and conditions thought, it is not perhaps surprising to find that when logic by its force and use of necessity precedes and conditions reality, reality should be seen to assimilate. Hence it is essential to the proper appreciation of logical necessity to realise that ‘sameness’ cannot be double, or different, from itself. That the inherent distinction is not in the thing but in the thought. That the thought reverses the thing. Or that thought, indeed, is essentially reciprocal and the principle of mutually exclusive opposition something inherently intractable in the process of thinking itself.

If the object of universal polarity, then, is intelligent animation, and its catalyst the dynamic conceptual tension between cognitive or logical opposites, one must never forget that such polarity is by nature twofold. That the mind is forced into an increasingly dual existence. For in assessing a

complex mental mechanism whose chief characteristic is inherent opposition to itself, such logical necessity as may compel the mind in the process of thinking also engenders the tensions from which the universe derives its dynamics. Thinking, if it is anything at all, is a resolution of the conceptual and logical paradoxes that spring from chaos, from the inadequacies, one might add, of things to thoughts.

Inasmuch as our thinking proceeds by units, cognition, evidently, is a medium explicitly concerned with contradictions, the contradictions namely, such as high and low, good or bad, hot or cold, etc., whereby consciousness resolves into thought. Hence it is essential to the proper appreciation of consciousness to realise that the dialectical process of thesis versus antithesis is at the deepest core conceivable, determining opposite attitudes towards every conceptual problem by the sheer intensity of its antithetical power.

Matter and antimatter are paradoxes to be resolved. The former is essentially substantial, dynamic, literal, and owes its existence to the principle of contrast, as in the physicist’s reference to positive and negative, whereas the latter is essentially virtual or hypothetical. It is the mirror image of thought itself - an alternative, virtual reality. The two can never stand side by side. They exist respectively as element and expression of mutually exclusive selves. They cancel each other out. They are in truth indistinguishable. To solve the problem is to resolve the conflict created by a contradiction of terms: identical opposites. And since the human mind cannot grasp multi-dimensional spacetime directly, this ubiquity of the paradox can only be resolved by passing through to the other side of the mirror - which is to say, by leaving the Continuum.