What Is a Thought?: The Ontology of Thinking

What connects your thoughts to the world? If your thoughts are not connected to the world, how can you understand the world? How can you bridge the gulf between thought and non-thought? If you don't understand what your own thoughts are, and what they are made of, how can you understand reality, and what reality is made of?

Humans communicate with each other via language. How do the different parts of the universe communicate with each other? How do things "know" what to do in any situation?

According to pantheism, everything is actually God, so every part of the universe can communicate with every other part on the basis that they are all actually just parts of a single cosmic system.

According to theism, God created the universe out of nothing, but designed it so that every part could communicate with every other part.

For atheism, or non-God systems, explaining how everything communicates with everything else is a serious problem.

Kant claimed that the universe in itself was inherently unknowable. Our knowledge, such as it was, came via the language of the mind. Our minds, equipped with laws, imposed these laws on the universe and thus made it comprehensible to our minds. In Kant's system, without minds, nothing is knowable.

Kant made no attempt to explain how mind came to be configured in this very convenient way. Kant's successors Fichte, Schelling and Hegel all rejected the concept of unknowable reality and believed they could solve Kant's problem by making everything mind. So, the laws of mind were now the laws of everything. There was nothing external to mind, so nothing unknowable by mind.

Science is a version of Kant's system. Where Kant had laws of mind acting on the world in itself and making it knowable to mind, science takes these laws out of the mind and places them in the cosmos itself. Science posits a reality made of "stuff" (matter) being operated on by laws of Nature. These universal laws allow everything to communicate with everything else. Via experiments and observations, we can infer what these laws are. The fatal problem with this system is that it is an incomprehensible and incoherent dualism. On the one hand, we have spatial, temporal matter subject to processes that degrade it, i.e. subject to friction, entropy, and so on. Yet the laws of Nature are immaterial, eternal, non-spatial, non-temporal, immutable, not subject to friction or entropy, and never degrade.

Such a system is rationally preposterous. In fact, it's just a version of Platonism, with Plato's metaphysical Forms, which are never explained by Plato, being replaced by metaphysical "laws", which are never explained by science.

Science ridicules Plato's philosophy, while having an identical architecture: inexplicable things (laws) outside space and time control things (material objects) inside space and time. The "matter" is as unknowable as Kant's noumenal world. Humanity makes sense of matter purely through the laws that operate on it. What matter is in itself, independent of laws, can never be known.

All of these considerations pose fundamental problems about how to define minds and thoughts. The architecture of science is as inexplicable as the one proposed by Plato (with his Forms outside space and time), or Kant (with his Forms inside the mind).

In this book, we explore the radical alternative. The universe is literally made of language - a single, ubiquitous language, which is exactly why every part can communicate with every other part. To express it in other terms, the universe is an intelligence, made of thought, constantly thinking in terms of its intrinsic language. Have you guessed what the language is? It's an eternal, absolute, infallible, immutable, ubiquitous, perfect language. This book reveals exactly how the whole of reality can be constructed from this language, the language of thought itself.