Rationalism Quotes

“The “Empirical Fallacy” is that experience is knowledge when in fact it is just experience. A person could have infinite experiences and literally know nothing about what reality is. A person could perform a trillion observations and have no more clue about what reality is than someone performing divination in the ancient world, or a cockroach. It is not perceptualism that has led to humanity’s body of knowledge, it is conceptualism. Humanity doesn’t perceive better today, it conceives better, and that is purely thanks to mathematics, reason and logic.”
― Thomas Stark, Tractatus Logico-Mathematicus: How Mathematics Explains Reality

“But maybes are for dreamers, people who wish on stars.”
― K.A. Knight, Their Champion Complete Series: Books 1-4

“Never forget – there is nothing other than mathematics. The reason why you imagine that the universe is not mathematical is that your mind experiences the information carried by mathematics – its empirical Content – but you don’t regard this as math. Yet it is. It’s just the other side of the ontological mathematical coin It’s mathematical Content rather than mathematical Form, but it’s math all the same. Mathematics is Janus-faced. It looks two ways at once: empirically and rationally. You have been brainwashed to think that only the rational Form is math – and that it’s cold and abstract, with nothing to do with reality. In fact, both sides of the coin are fully mathematical. That’s what it means to say that mathematics is ontological.”
― Mike Hockney, Transcendental Mathematics

“The trouble begins when a group of people are conditioned in different ways to believe that their heritage is superior to that of others. That is a dangerous kind of conditioning, especially in a country like ours that has a shared heritage. However, many people have convinced themselves about the supremacy of their mythologies over the ideas that their mythologies are trying to convey. So, while our epics warn us against arrogance, we embody the same arrogance to promote our religions. In a way, that is self-defeating. Many of us are stuck up in stagnancy of pride over our heritage, without taking the pain of diving deeper in ancient ideas to understand the essence of those epics. Only if we did, we would realize that in almost every country, majority of the population is brainwashed to commit the same mistake that their holy books warned them against, while ironically celebrating mythological as well as historical figures with empty hero worship.”
― Samir Satam, Litost: Sliced Stories

“Everything feels utopian at some point or another. The ideas we have accepted today felt utopian in the previous era. If reformers would have given up their 'fight to abolish Sati' as an utopian idea, we would have never gotten rid of the practice. The question is; how far is our generation ready to go against the grain, when we see injustice happening in our day? Are we ready to introspect, why the idea of brotherhood across religious and caste lines feels utopian and radical today?”
― Samir Satam, Litost: Sliced Stories

“If you want to know the secrets of existence, do the math. There is no other way. There is only one truth, the truth of mathematics. It is the infallible, absolute truth. All truth-seekers come in the end to mathematics. Pythagoras got there first. It’s time for everyone else to join him and hear the Music of the Spheres. Are your ears attuned to the perfect notes of the universe? Only the gods can hear the divine music. Are you one of them?”
― Thomas Stark, The Sheldrake Shift: A Critical Evaluation of Morphic Resonance

“The great rationalist Descartes said, “I think, therefore I am.” The religious mystic the Buddha said, “I think, therefore I am not.” Why is the Buddha much more popular than Descartes? Because the average person barely thinks at all.”
― Thomas Stark, The Sheldrake Shift: A Critical Evaluation of Morphic Resonance

“What is a perceptual “proof”? You can observe the world forever and it will not explain itself to you. What is physical evidence? All physical evidence is interpreted according to some paradigm or other which is created by conception, not perception, hence is unperceivable and contradicts perceptualism.”
― Thomas Stark, Tractatus Logico-Mathematicus: How Mathematics Explains Reality

“Philosophy is dead. Only ontological mathematics can resurrect it. Ontological mathematics mathematizes metaphysics and shows how it underpins physics, thus returning metaphysics to the pinnacle of intellectual activity. Ontological mathematics restores the grand tradition of philosophy, Big Philosophy. Come and join the real thinkers.”
― Thomas Stark, Tractatus Logico-Mathematicus: How Mathematics Explains Reality

“Why is there something rather than nothing? Only because something can exist as nothing – via the mathematical capacity to express “ nothing ” in non-zero terms, e.g. e iπ + 1 = 0. In other words, wherever you see “ nothing ” (zero), you might in fact be confronting e iπ + 1 (“something” ), without knowing it. Only mathematics has this unique capacity to the ground state of the universe. The compulsory ground state of the universe is zero, the minimum value possible. There is no sufficient reason for any arbitrary non-zero number to serve as the ground state.”
― Brother Abaris, The Illuminist Army

“Under a certain state of being, when the rational mind shuts down, Time and Space as our minds perceive them, change. So, if we are conscious enough, we can expand Time and compress Space.”
― Diana-Maria Georgescu, THE UNSTOPPABLE THIRST : El Camino de Santiago de Compostela An Alchemic Path Towards The Inner Self

“All of the central ideas that mark religious and spiritual thinking can be translated into exact mathematical concepts and made compatible with science. Mathematics is true religion and spirituality, as Pythagoras understood.”
― Thomas Stark, The Sheldrake Shift: A Critical Evaluation of Morphic Resonance

“Every time you come across a reference to “God”, you should test to see whether the word “mathematics” could be used instead. God is deemed the invisible cause of all. Ontological mathematics asserts that mathematics is the invisible cause of all.”
― Thomas Stark, The Sheldrake Shift: A Critical Evaluation of Morphic Resonance

“What is the eternal, necessary order? It is the order of reason and logic. It is the analytic, a priori order, the conceptual order. It has traditionally been associated with God (religion), but it ought to be associated with mathematics (rationalism). Much of what is said about God in philosophy could equally be said about mathematics. The traditional proofs of the existence of God can easily be repurposed as proofs of the existence of mathematics.”
― Thomas Stark, The Sheldrake Shift: A Critical Evaluation of Morphic Resonance

“Reality is defined by the Principle of Sufficient Reason. Anyone who denies this is ipso facto an irrationalist. Whatever they say is necessarily irrational, hence can be immediately discounted. The very act of trying to provide reasons why the Principle of Sufficient Reason is wrong is irrational because, in trying to find reasons, you have already acknowledged the supremacy of the PSR. You cannot use reasons to attack reason while denying the worth of reason. Yet it’s astounding how many people try.”
― Thomas Stark, The Sheldrake Shift: A Critical Evaluation of Morphic Resonance

“The PSR is equivalent to a generalized version of Euler’s Formula, the most important analytic formula of mathematics, which is in turn ontologically conveyed through mental, metaphysical, mathematical points (monads: eternal sinusoidal energy systems, each of which constitutes an autonomous mind). Despite what science says using the fallacies and incongruities of correspondence, the whole scientific world is in fact rooted in total coherence, in the generalized Euler Formula, the God Equation. The God Equation is ontologically conveyed not by a single eternal God, but by a myriad of eternal minds.
All of these minds considered collectively constitute “God”, and they have a net result of zero.”
― Thomas Stark, Tractatus Logico-Mathematicus: How Mathematics Explains Reality

“Reason, when understood ontologically, takes on an entirely different meaning from the one conventionally assigned to it. It takes on the extra “dimensions” of emotion, perception, intuition, desire and will. All of these are involved in the intricate nexus for providing sufficient reasons for actions. People who don’t understand our work keep reducing reason to one dimension, which means that our central point that reason is ontological and explains everything – including love, human error, insanity, and everything else that, according to the conventional treatment of reason, has nothing to do with reason – has completely escaped them. Reason, in our system, is both syntactic (structural) and semantic (meaningful). Its semantic aspect is what gives it the capacity to generate all the weird and wonderful things that average people do not associate with reason. They regard reason in strictly syntactic, machinelike terms. That is only one aspect of reason. It has many others.”
― Thomas Stark, Base Reality: Ultimate Existence

“Just as you could not have a smartphone serving up semantic content without a syntactic smartphone technology to enable it, you cannot have an empirical world without a syntactic framework to support it, which is provided by eternal and necessary mathematics.”
― Thomas Stark, Base Reality: Ultimate Existence

“You can never get enough generality. The more general solution the better. The solution to existence is the most general solution of all, the solution least infected by particularity. That is its defining quality. The entire way of thinking mathematically – in terms of simplicity, generality, tautology, elegance, beauty, stability, the eternal, the necessary, coherence, the analytic, the a priori – is totally different from the way a scientist thinks, which is always mired in particularity, inelegance, ugliness, the temporal, the contingent, the ad hoc, the arbitrary, the heuristic, the speculative; in Feynman’s crude guessing game.”
― Thomas Stark, What Is Mathematics?: The Greatest Detective Story Never Told

“All contingent truths (“truths of fact”) must be grounded in eternal, necessary truths (“truths of reason”). Contingent truths cannot explain eternal, necessary truths, but the converse must be true. Existence cannot be grounded in contingency, only in necessity. Science claims that existence is purely accidental, hence entirely contingent. There is no sufficient reason for the “random fluctuations” upon which science bases its entire “philosophy”. Science is completely false at the level of the non-observable: the level of ultimate noumenal truth.”
― Mike Hockney, Richard Dawkins: The Pope of Unreason

“Science should have been about reason, but, instead, it chose to be a crude reaction and retort to religion, and that drove it down a catastrophic atheistic path. Had it not been for religion, science would have become what Leibniz always thought it should be: a union of the empirical and rational, of the physical and metaphysical, with the rational and metaphysical being the dominant partners.”
― Mike Hockney, Richard Dawkins: The Pope of Unreason

“You yourself are a soul. And that’s exactly why you are free. No machine can ever be free. Nothing born in time can be free. You may think that you yourself were born in time, but you weren’t. Your body was created at a specific time, but not your soul. Your soul was never created at all and doesn’t exist in time. It’s eternal.”
― Mike Hockney, Free Will and Will to Power

“Imagine a DVD movie with a “mind”. Would it understand that it’s actually a DVD (Form) and not the movie (Content) it contains? The Content is far more appealing and vivid than the Form, which is why we live in a Mythos world rather than Logos.”
― Mike Hockney, Mind and Life, Form and Content

“Hegel was an advocate of panlogism: reason is literally everywhere. Existence is made of reason, hence existence is entirely knowable. Reality is constituted by the mind and is its construction. Given that mind can know everything it made, there is no unknowable, noumenal world. If mind creates everything, there is nothing outside mind, no noumenal objects existing independently of mind.”
― Mike Hockney, Magic, Matter and Qualia

“You’d think that it would make them all the more credible to be free of any obvious agenda or emotional bias, motivated only by objective logic. But there’s something off-putting about these hyperrational types; they’re immune to any appeals to common sense or humor, the “for fuck’s sake” defense. (Think of hard-core libertarians carefully explaining to you why the fire department should be privatized or heroin should be legal or everyone should be allowed to have automatic weapons.) As Kim Stanley Robinson writes, “An excess of reason is in itself a form of madness.”
― Tim Kreider, We Learn Nothing

“There are no such things as material particles (enduring “things”). There are no forces in the sense of things that can be transferred from one thing to another. What actually exists is information. This is defined mathematically. Information is intelligible; “things” are sensible. The evolving cosmic wavefunction is an information wavefunction. It’s made of mathematical information. Every part of it reflects information. It’s this information that is mathematically interpreted by minds as matter, force, energy, sensory things, and so on. Because humans interpret information non-mathematically (i.e. empirically, not rationally), they are astounded by the assertion that the universe is entirely mathematical. Our own interpretations are what conceal the Truth from us. We must transcend our empirical viewpoint if we ever wish to attain the divine – rational – perspective. Science, as pure empiricism, is anti-divinity. It locks us into human sensory delusion. Mathematics frees us.”
― Mike Hockney, Science's War On Reason

“The universe is alive. Rules and equations aren’t dead... they’re the formulae for life itself. They are Platonic Forms of Life. Monads – the basic constituents of living mathematics – are living, self-solving, self-optimising minds. Life is breathed into math because math is inherently alive. Of course, you have to be an idealist, not a materialist, to understand this.”
― Mike Hockney, Ontological Mathematics: How to Create the Universe

“Meritocracy is about blending Plato’s Republic with Rousseau’s Social Contract, and reflecting the Hegelian dialectic and Pythagorean-Leibnizian logic and rationalism, combined with the artistic and spiritual sensibility of Goethe. It’s about the fierce commitment to political justice reflected by Adam Weishaupt, Thomas Jefferson and the two great Jacobins Robespierre and SaintJust. It’s about the dynamism and Logos of Heraclitus. It’s about the shamanism of Empedocles and his two dialectical cosmic forces of attraction and repulsion: Love (Philia) and Strife (Neikos). It’s about the wisdom of Solomon, and the divine intuition and magic of Simon
Magus. And it’s about the celebration of Hypatia, the heroic symbol of martyred Reason, feminism and classical paganism.”
― Michael Faust, The Case for Meritocracy

“Facts that don't elevate the human condition are nothing but fiction.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Şehit Sevda Society: Even in Death I Shall Live

“Sciencelessness and senselessness are all okay, as long as they don't lead to heartlessness.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Making Britain Civilized: How to Gain Readmission to The Human Race