Knowledge and Truth

One of the recurring themes in spirituality is that Truth is always beyond Mind, i.e., thinking alone cannot capture the fullness and richness of Truth as It Is. Even it is told that Mind is the only Barrier to Truth.  My goal in this short writeup is to reflect on this statement.

Mind as a barrier to Truth looks very strange and even contradictory at first because whatever we have at our hands is just the knowledge gained through our Mind. So if we put Mind aside, can we really understand anything?

To obtain a feeling about this, one needs to understand Mind itself. Mind works always based on the duality and separation between observer and observed or knower and the known. All the science and broadly speaking scientific methodology are based on the validity of this duality. Of course, while being and living in Mind we are so much used to this phenomenon that we take it as obvious. Based on this duality, during any observation,  observer needs to take a distance from observed and study observed from its own perspective. 

From this perspective, an observer can be a human Mind interacting through 5 senses or it can be a device interacting with some object to collect measurements or record some data.

A hidden assumption behind is the objectivity in the sense that the observed has an objective property not known to observer and then discovered by the observer during the observation process.

This objectivity assumption is known to work well in all daily life situations. However, it fails in Quantum theory as we know it historically.

There have been two ways to interpret this and get a clue about this failure:

• the first and the easiest to understand is that each observation involves some interaction with the observed and this interaction changes the observed. For example, to localize an electron, one needs to send a photon and study its scattering or reflection from the electron. And since electron has a tiny mass, the interaction with photon changes its property, in this example, its location. This makes the pure observation practically impossible.

• the second interpretation which goes even deeper is that there might not be any objectivity at all because objectivity makes sense when a property remains stable before and after observation. Only in such circumstances, one is allowed to define a property and assign it as the measurement or observation outcome to the observed.

This seems to point to a fundamentally different perspective about the existence, in the sense that the existence might be just subjective and objectivity might be only an emergent phenomenon, which seems to appear only at some scales but does not exist or is not well-defined or measurable beyond those scales.

We know that this is true in Quantum theory: Although each electron seems to behave like an individual subject of its own will and subjectively unpredictable, the collective, statistical, or objective behavior of a crowd of electrons seems to approach an objective behavior which can be predicted by statistics and probability.

Even going deeper, we may even question the concept of "objective" itself in the sense that "objective" might fail to have an independent existence of its own. For example, imagine we could like to measure the distance between two points in the space and we use a a light beam and use the time-of-flight as a measure of distance. But as we trace these concepts back,  we notice that all of them are products of Mind and associated to something outside and all their validity depends on the Mind model thereof. 

This may point to a deeper understanding of existence which is not captured by our human Mind, that is, existence is always subjective and indivisible and objectivity, division, and conceptualization and modelling exists only as a singularity seen in the Mind. Or even said better, Mind itself is the singularity and a phantom division imposed on the Truth.

Subjective vs. Objective

One of the problems with science is that, at its core, it does not believe in any subjectivity or better said cannot work with subjectivity. Science works with shape, form, property, etc. and they are all objectives that can be studied, measured, and modelled in separation.

Of course, science may go even further to model the Truth or try to build it bottom up.  This is the way many scientist try to model consciousness in human brain treating it as an emergent phenomenon from Matter. But what if consciousness is fully subjective and what we see in the Mind is its shadow singularity. 

All these do not mean that we should let go of the Mind: One cannot let go of the Mind because there is no understanding without Mind. The point is to understand Mind as It is and noticing that in its objective nature it creates a barrier to understanding the subjective Truth!

This dilemma is quite well-known in spirituality: One may go outside Mind singularity and experience something beyond Mind and afterwards have no clue what one has experienced. 

As an example, imagine a blind person that gains sight for 1 sec and loses it again afterwards. What does he/she think about what he/she has experienced? He/She cannot even figure out what has happened because "figuring out" simply means to understand and make sense of something through association with what is already known and available to Mind.  For example, consider kids learning about numbers for the first time and they use their finger and their intuitive "one-to-one" mapping to make sense of an abstract concept such as "Number".

As another example, consider a baby watching the Sun for the first time: He/She definitely experiences sun light through eyes and sun heat through skin in a pure sensual fashion but is it only later when he/she grows up and collects knowledge from parents, school, books, etc. that he/she notices that "Wow! What I saw was Sun". 

The nature of Truth is so pure and perhaps even unknowable  to Mind and knowing is just a shadow of this Truth in the Mind and of course immensely valuable since understanding is what Mind is very good at. 

From this perspective, Mind plays a complementary role for Truth: It generates understanding, modelling, representation, etc. trying to approximate Truth within its limited scales and finite concepts. So Mind is a dynamic Eye that keeps expanding while tracing the Truth from a distance.

Mind and Logic/Language

Mind is a dynamic thing and keeps expanding and growing. Language and symbols are just preliminary tools for such a dynamic Mind. But Mind is always in the danger of falling into trap of these symbols forgetting what its dynamic nature was. 

Many scientists especially mathematician in the past century tried to reduce Mind into Logic/Language and build an axiomatic system based on logical rules. This was and is a definitely a good idea and allowed to turn some of Mind mechanical operations into logical rules which can be run on a machine such as a calculator or computer, thus, gaining speed against quite slow human biological brain.

This process of axiomatization opened a ripe territory to understand limitations of logic/language as a deduction system. Some logicians even went further and started defining a new and more down-to-earth type of logic nowadays called Intuitionist Logic (IL). 

In Intuitionist Logic, a statement is True if it can be reached in finite steps from the original axioms of the logic system in which it is going to be verified. This process of verification is known and Proof in mathematics. Of course, several ingredients are needed for a logical system to be valuable:

• Consistency: There should be a valid Truth in the system in the sense that one does not obtain a contradiction while reaching a statement and its negate at the same time.

• Usefulness: There is some application or model which uses the logical system as a base for its growth and exploration of Truth.

The process of proof in finite steps corresponds to computation which is always finite in nature due to physical limitations of the device on which this computation is implemented.  As a result of this imposed finiteness on logic, some statements cannot be proved. In other words, in this type of logic there are three Truth values

• Yes: the statement can be reached in finite steps starting from axioms.

• No: the negate of statement can be reached in  finite steps starting from the axioms.

• Po (or I don't know): there is no way that one can reach into Yes or No answer in finite steps.  This corresponds to a computer that fed by the specific problem never halts to provide a definite Yes or No solution to the problem and is always stuck in loops, checking and checking but not able to reach any final answer.

This type of logic was  perhaps a down-to-earth replacement for Ultraism Logic (UL) in which there is an objective Truth, i.e., a definite Yes or No answer to any question even if it cannot be solved or reached in finite steps. through traversing the axioms.

There was a huge debate between these two classes of logicians forever. Perhaps the final answer to this debate nowadays is that:

• Intuitionist Logic is definitely the path to go in the age of computers as far as it does not create any limitation and does not stop useful theoretical developments.

• Ultraism Logic is definitely richer in concepts and contains more ideal mental objects such as infinity based on which one can build a more beautiful structure. Although at the end, one has to quantize and fracture the ultimate product to obtain a finite precision representation of it compatible with more practical Intuitionist Logic.

Since I am an engineer, perhaps I can provide a engineering perspective which might help here. For example, in engineering it always helps to work with ideal objects such as ideal voltage source, ideal current source,  ideal resistor, capacitor, and conductor, etc. Although they are impossible to build in practice, one can use these ideal objects as block stones to build a closer and closer approximate of physical device. Now from the perspective of these two types of logics:

• Intuitionist Logic is always practical and works with non-ideal models and ignores any ideal model that does not exists in nature: It puts a resistor in series with every voltage source and in parallel with a current source. So it always gets a correct answer to his Kirchhoff circuit equations and no way to reach a non-physical solution or contradiction.

•  Ultraism Logic is more refined and stronger and can build the non-ideal voltage and current sources of Intuitionist Logic very easily. But this power of modelling should be used carefully because it may try to connect two voltage sources in parallel or two current sources in series immediately reaching a contradiction. But this contradiction is the result of too much idealism together with inadvertent use of this idealism.

Mind beyond Logic/Language

What is for sure is that neither of these two logics can be the final answer to human Mind because all these logics are a by-product of human Mind. When one goes deeper and checks the presumptions of these logical models, one notices that both logics are inaccurate and in fact cheat in their basics: They always start from some basic mental products and assumptions calling them basic Truth or undeniable facts and then build their logic on top of this basic Truth. But they ignore this simple and obvious fact that this so-called "basic Truth" only makes sense for an above-average adult Mind. For example, if one explains this so-called basic Truth to children, their Mind will be to uncapable to treat or accepts this as a basic Truth.  

This shows that:

• Mind and human Mind is definitely beyond logic and is a live and dynamic creator of its own. In some sense, Mind is more like a fractal in the sense that it is capable to reaching deeper and deeper understanding but to do so, it has no option but to use its low-resolution part as a  basic model or "basic Truth" for gaining a deeper understanding. From this point of view, Mind is like a computer system that is loaded with some BIOS and keeps growing bottom-up while bootstrapping itself again and again. 

• Mind is always expandable and this shows its livelihood and growth beyond any logic or logical system.

  • For example, mental concepts such as Number, Function, etc. are so alien to Mind at first (e.g., to elementary school pupils) and after it gets assimilated in the Mind, they take a life of their own and become objects within the expanded Mind with which Mind can work directly without reference to the basic Truth from which these concepts get originated. This is something evident when one recalls his/her own mental growth while encountering new concepts.

  • As another example, a triangle is defined as an object built with 3 lines but later it becomes an object of its own and lives in Mind independent of 3 lines from which it was defined and got abstracted. This simply means that Mind does not really work based on reductionist approach logic tries to promote. Of course, this reductionist approach is needed while translating an idea or an algorithm into machine code to run on a computer. But apparently human mind does not work in this way and has the power for imagination and building new mental constructs and at some point completely forgetting about the process from which this happened.

• Mind has the danger to get identified by a dead and mechanical logic. The problem with such a Mind is that it has stopped growth and imagination and does not allow its basic axioms or mental constructs to be expand. Of course, one cannot expand these axioms by faking new axioms because they will remain within the framework of the original axioms. To expand, Mind needs to get alive again and eliminate all shackles imposed by logic and old constructs. This points to an intelligence beyond intellect which seems to be lacking in our society as well. The evidence is that we keep repeating the same mistakes that the past generation made.

Beyond Mind into Truth

In this writeup, I tried to show that an alive Mind needs to undergo death and then rise again. Such a Mind is the seeker of Truth and gets refreshed by it over and over. I tried to show that understanding belong only to such a dynamic Mind. 

My goal was to show that, albeit being very strong and in fact the only tool available for understanding, Mind is constantly biased by its objectivity and separation from Truth. Traces of this, can be found in many spiritual symbolism. I have listed two in the logo pictures:

• Sphinx as a big Eye in front of Giza Pyramid.

• Sauron as a big Eye in front of Mount Doom in the "Lord of the Rings" movie (my all-time favorite movie which I watched more than 60 times).

 This shows that:

• Mind is the Eye of Knowledge or the Singularity that gets emanated from Mount Doom or Truth which is only Being.

• Truth or Being is the support of Mind and Knowledge and accompanies it! No doubt this is why human mind is so much affected unconsciously with the Truth.

• Death of Mind in Mount Doom is the start of experiencing Truth as It Is. And this is a mystery that cannot be lived but cannot be disclosed or explained through Mind.