Text extracted via OCR from the original document. May contain errors from the scanning process.
inside Paris’s towering, echoing, Notre Dame Cathedral, hearing Latin chants in the
dank sweet smell of old church and chained, swinging canisters of smoking incense
as the pipe organ roared? Those realities that George Berkeley, the 1721 author of
Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge, the theist whose name
was given to a mostly agnostic Northern California city, saw as grounded in the
spirituality of God’s infinite mind and broadcast as universal ideas through our
derivative, finite minds. Rational religion and mystical religion joined in faith by the
presence of implicit and universal mathematical structure
| spent about two years at a mathematics institute in France, /nstitute des
Hautes Etudes, IHES, sitting at the guru feet of the mathematical great and
metaphysician, Rene Thom. His mathematical pallet was breathtakingly broad, a
taste of what in past centuries was called natural philosophy and what seemed to
me to be about the unapologetic geometrization of the Intuitive God of the Mind.
Natalie Angiers, erstwhile mathematician, now reporter and atheistic hard ass,
writing in the New York Times, called Thom’s ideas the talk of “...an Emperor
without clothes...” The Kantian theme of the personal a priori status of an intuitive
geometry, an already in us representation of all that’s out there, was implicit in his
Catastrophe Theory research program and was published first in his classical
Structural Stability of Morphogenesis (1977) and made more overt in his later
(1990) Semiophysics.
To get a feeling for the rational-logical versus mystical-intuitive spiritual issue
in a mathematical context, consider the following: most of us remember the struggle
to unify the strange and difficult cognitive duality of the high school geometry
experience. On one hand, shapes and their relations and rearrangements could be
intuitively grasped, even manipulated; on the other hand, we were taught that these
mental images and the results of their intuitive transformations were not to be
trusted.
In mathematics, as in my belief in the fireworks of primary religious
experience, seeing is not necessarily believing. In my high school geometry class,
what was to be believed was what followed from the proper practice of the tightly
organized, Euclidean system of axioms, postulates and the derivative logical
178
HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_013678