Far Outer Mathematics

We have already seen what I refer to as "Outer Mathematics". This has been added to that section of the compound posting "Mind-Bending Cosmology", on this blog.

We use mathematics to describe the world around us. To be able to describe something using mathematics we must completely understand it. Once we do we can do all kinds of useful calculations because everything we know operates by the same mathematics.

But we do not have unlimited capacity to understand the world around us. Our minds have a certain complexity and we can only understand that which is less complex than our minds. Anything that is more complex than our minds we would not be able to understand enough to apply mathematics to it because we would have to be "smarter than ourselves", which is impossible.

Somewhere out there is a formula that describes everything that you do. You cannot access it because it deals with your mind's own complexity and this would require you to be "smarter than yourself", which is impossible. But yet this unseen formula must operate by the usual mathematics. 

This is what I refer to as "outer mathematics", mathematics which must exist but which is beyond our grasp because of our own limited complexity. All of textbook mathematics is "inner mathematics", which is within our grasp.

But aside from this set of "outer mathematics" there must be a still more distant set of outer mathematics. As stated we use mathematics because it effectively describes the world around us. But what if that world, actually the entire universe, had been different? 

The matter that all except particle physicists deal with is made of atoms. We could say that atoms are "exclusive" so the mathematics that works for us uses numbers and has the basic operations; addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, exponents, roots, etc. What I mean by "exclusive" is that atoms, and the matter that is composed of them, does not come into existence spontaneously and stays as it is until something changes it.

The numbers that we use have no real existence until they are manifested in some way. There is no such thing as the number six that we can see but we see it whenever we have six of something. But any number must exist whether it is manifested by anything or not. Consider the number 37,683,992,651,801,384,161,079,177,209,184. Let's refer to this number as "W". It may be that nowhere in the universe is this number manifested anywhere, but it is still just as much a number nonetheless because it could potentially be manifested. Just as a parking space still exists whether or not there is a car in it.

The mathematics that we use, both inner and outer mathematics, works for us because the matter that we deal with is as it is, matter could be said to be "exclusive". But what if matter, or the entire universe, was completely different?

There would still be mathematics that described it although it would be completely different from the mathematics that we are using. If matter, or whatever that universe was made of, was non-exclusive then there would be no reason for the addition, subtraction and, so on that we use. If that universe was somehow immeasurable or unquantifiable mathematics might express the effect that it has on the living beings rather than what it is actually made of.

Mathematics is inevitably related to scarcity, of not having everything that we need or want and of having to labor to get what we don't have or build what doesn't yet exist or get to somewhere other than where we are. Have you ever noticed that there is no mention of mathematics in Heaven? In Heaven we will have everything we want so why would we have any need to count or calculate?

The universe of atoms, electric charges and, electromagnetic radiation that we have is just one of an infinite number of possibilities that the universe could have been. It is like rolling dice. The numbers that came up are our universe. The numbers that didn't come up are all of the universes that never physically existed, but yet these numbers still exist.

But the mathematics, completely different from our own, that would have described them must nonetheless still exist. Just as we saw with the number "W" above, a number still exists whether it is manifested or not and the mathematics, which we cannot begin to imagine, of every different universe that never actually existed must also still exist.

This is what I refer to as "far outer mathematics". It is the mathematics of would-have-been universes and physical realms that do not even use the same basic operations as the mathematics that we use. What we could call "near outer mathematics" is, as explained above, mathematics that would use the same basic operations but is beyond our reach because we could not completely understand something whose complexity is greater than our own.