Introduction
A while back there was an internet meme going around in functional programming circles called My Road to Lisp. It was a survey that you would fill out, and share with others that documented how you came to "get" the programming language Lisp. It asked the following questions:
- When did you first try Lisp seriously, and which Lisp family member was it?
- Many of us had multiple run-ins with Lisp before it “stuck”. The “stick” date is of most interest, but you can share earlier encounters if you like.
- What led you to try Lisp?
- What other languages have you been using most?
- How far have you gotten in your study of Lisp? I know this is hard to quantify. Just wing it.
- What do you think of Lisp so far?
I think the idea behind this survey was twofold.
First, Lisp is pretty rare language. If you've started to understand it's subtlety, simplicity, and power, you'll probably be hard pressed to find anyone you work with who's knows it, or is into it as much as you are. By filling out the survey and sharing it, it introduces you to others like you, who you can learn from as well as help foster a sense of community.
Lisp, at least on the surface, and certainly to those who come from a more traditional object-oriented language, is a very obtuse language, and is in many ways a complete inversion of traditional languages. It's a terse, dense, expressive, and beautiful language: once you've become "enlightened" to its mysteries of course. And once you've had a breakthrough on anything, you naturally want to share it with the world, and seek out others like yourself, who get it too. Again, filling out the survey and sharing it helps with that.
Secondly, since Lisp is typically not officially taught in universities or used for any real-world coding, everyone who discovers it kind of stumbles into it over a long path of several years. It can be interesting to read about other people's path to the Tao of Lisp, since almost every path is different (it wouldn't be interesting to learn about how people learned Java, for instance, since the answer would mostly be I learned it at school, or I used it at work etc.). And people who fill out the survey can provide you with some resources or insights about Lisp that you weren't aware of, since they came in on a different route, which you can then use for your own further edification.
Now, substitute "Pythagorean Illuminism" (PI) for "Lisp", and "belief" for "language" and you have the makings for a useful exercise, because PI, like Lisp, is an esoteric, not widely known, but also a powerful, and insightful "language". And asking the Road to Lisp questions with regards to PI, I believe will prove very useful
In other words, PI is the Lisp of the philosophy world, and exploring the survey question will help you.
So in the spirit of the Road To Lisp survey, I will do the same for My Road to Pythagorean Illuminism.
My Road to Pythagorean Illuminism
When did you first try PI?
It was around August 2015. I discovered the Armageddon Conspiracy web site (now defunct) and then quickly moved into reading The Last Man Who Knew Everything (The God Series 3) (I started on book 3 not book 1 since most of the material from the AC site seemed to come from there).
I spent the next sixteen month reading and reviewing the books from the three authors, to the exclusion of any other books, and have read almost all of the books from Mike Hockney and Michael Faust, and to a lesser extent Adam Weishaupt.
Many of us had multiple run-ins with PI before it “stuck”. The “stick” date is of most interest, but you can share earlier encounters if you like.
This is perhaps one area where PI differs from Lisp, in that it's difficult to have had multiple prior run-ins, since it was only made available to the general public around 2012.
But I would say I had several levels of "stickiness" in the sixteen month digest cycle. Right off the bat I was totally fascinated by it. I loved the way they compared zero and infinity, and basically said they were the same thing (which is something I long suspected), and the way someone finally had the audacity to blatantly call out Abrahmic religions for the complete idiocy that they spew.
But even though I was fascinated with it right away, it wasn't until about three months that I began to take it seriously, as a challenge to my existing belief system which one might crudely characterize as atheistic materialism. But I didn't begin to "buy" into it until anywhere from several months to a year after I first started reading the series.
Then at about 14 months, I had this two week period where I had an explosion of ideas and insights that more or less were directly coming from what I learned in these books. I filled up two notebooks worth of insights and notes in two weeks, where it normally takes me about two months to fill up a single notebook. In other words, I was having insights at 10x my normal rate. I almost couldn't write the ideas down fast enough! I think I was having a mini-enlightenment, not exactly on PI proper, but more on my own personal belief system, where I was incorporating ideas and themes from PI into my own belief system. I wouldn't go as far as saying that I became enlightened, but looking back on it, it was a really interesting period that just came out of nowhere. After this period, I returned to my normal insight frequency (actually a little slower even). I'm still working on the next insight notebook at about 2.5 months -- suggesting I've normalized on my new level of insight and understanding.
And now, at about 16 months, I think I may actually be reverting back to my original scientific roots a little. I'm also starting to read other books on philosophy and starting to get a different take on certain ideas. Plus, there's no more PI books to read! I plan on going back on reviewing them again, but it planted a lot of interesting seeds that I can fulfill in other places now (i.e. in more "traditional" philosophy books). I would say PI expanded my worldview, but didn't (entirely) replace my prior world view.
What led you to try PI?
Before discovering the God Series, I mostly read non-fiction popular science books -- "Science Faction" as it's sometime called. There were a lot of hints of some PI-like ideas in several of these books that resonated with me. I thought I was really "out there" for knowing, thinking, and appreciating ideas such as higher-dimensions, many-worlds, Bohm's implicate order, and Einstein's block-time. That is to say until I read the God Series, where my supposedly adventurous maverick ideas now looked like the ideas of a kindergartner compared to the level they took it to. But the fact that I had come across these ideas in the "conventional" science world, primed me to accept them in PI.
Here's a partial list, roughly in chronological order, of some of the milestones I passed on the road to PI.
1) The Physics of Immortality, Frank J Tipler
I found this book really inspiring when I read it. This basically presents a purely materialistic model of how the Omega Point could be achieved (versus PI's idealistic version). It was the first book that made me think there could possibly be an afterlife (although I would have put the probability at about one-tenth of one percent).
2) Godel, Escher, and Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, Douglas R Hofstadter
Sometimes referred to as "the rapture of the nerds", I have read and re-read this book several times. While some ideas are easier to get than others, it requires a very deep read to really get its finer points. I've deceived myself a couple of times into thinking that I've understood his message at a deep level, but I always end up feeling that I'm just kidding myself. Still, it gave me an appreciation for Godel's incompleteness theorem, and the idea that there are some things that are unknowable, at least if you're using a mechanical approach to computing, and ignoring intuition.
3) After Death: A New Future for Human Consciousness, Daryl Reanney
This book attempts to come up with a case for there being an afterlife and a form of immortality while still maintaining a scientific, materialistic, and atheistic point of view. Basically, the author says that consciousness is a universal subjective sensation, and that all humans, or any sentient beings for that matter, experience the same consciousness. However, everyone's experience of consciousness is colored by their unique life experience. So everyone is different in this regard e.g if I had had the same life trajectory as someone else, or you implanted their memories into mine, then I would be at the same point in "consciousness space" as that person, and thus actually be that person. That is to say, everyone who is born is basically "you", but will diverge shortly thereafter with a different life experience. When you die, you lose your life experience, but you are essentially born again when consciousness appears in someone else, thus achieving a form of reincarnation without requiring a soul.
I really leaned on this book after my Mother passed away when I was about 25, as I had never experienced the death of a close family member, and, as an atheist, I had no comforting mythos of an afterlife to fall back on.
1) The Physics of Immortality, Frank J Tipler
I found this book really inspiring when I read it. This basically presents a purely materialistic model of how the Omega Point could be achieved (versus PI's idealistic version). It was the first book that made me think there could possibly be an afterlife (although I would have put the probability at about one-tenth of one percent).
2) Godel, Escher, and Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, Douglas R Hofstadter
Sometimes referred to as "the rapture of the nerds", I have read and re-read this book several times. While some ideas are easier to get than others, it requires a very deep read to really get its finer points. I've deceived myself a couple of times into thinking that I've understood his message at a deep level, but I always end up feeling that I'm just kidding myself. Still, it gave me an appreciation for Godel's incompleteness theorem, and the idea that there are some things that are unknowable, at least if you're using a mechanical approach to computing, and ignoring intuition.
3) After Death: A New Future for Human Consciousness, Daryl Reanney
This book attempts to come up with a case for there being an afterlife and a form of immortality while still maintaining a scientific, materialistic, and atheistic point of view. Basically, the author says that consciousness is a universal subjective sensation, and that all humans, or any sentient beings for that matter, experience the same consciousness. However, everyone's experience of consciousness is colored by their unique life experience. So everyone is different in this regard e.g if I had had the same life trajectory as someone else, or you implanted their memories into mine, then I would be at the same point in "consciousness space" as that person, and thus actually be that person. That is to say, everyone who is born is basically "you", but will diverge shortly thereafter with a different life experience. When you die, you lose your life experience, but you are essentially born again when consciousness appears in someone else, thus achieving a form of reincarnation without requiring a soul.
I really leaned on this book after my Mother passed away when I was about 25, as I had never experienced the death of a close family member, and, as an atheist, I had no comforting mythos of an afterlife to fall back on.
4) Penrose's notion of a trialist world (as opposed to a dualist, or monist world). I first heard him talk about this in The Emperor's new Mind. He believes a kernel (or "best part") of the platonic world, namely Mathematics, gives rise to the material world. And a kernel (or "best part") of the material world, namely the brain, gives rise to the mental world. And finally a kernel (or "best part") of the mental world, namely studying Mathematics, gives rise to the original Platonic world, completing the cycle. A really beautiful notion -- a sort of self-exciting loop.
Math (platonic world)-> Brain (material world) ->Studying Math (mental world) -> Math (platonic world)
6) Appreciating the concept of the platonic world. Believing in it.
a) Contemplating on the concept of prime numbers.
The deep realization that the universe simply has no choice in this matter. How could it be any other way, that there are simply not any two numbers that when multiplied yield 17? Try to imagine a universe where 17 is not a prime number. Where did this property come from? It's just a property of the universe that is somehow "there", eternally, even if no thing is ever conscious of it. Not even God could change it.
b) Ideas like the fact that any number is the sum of the square of four or less prime numbers.
I mean it just blows my mind that in all the infinite number of prime numbers, there isn't one that somehow is the sum of more than 4 squares. Where did this come from? What's so special about the number 4 etc.?
7) The book Why Does the World Exist: An Existential Detective Story by Jim Holt. This book explores the ultimate question: why is there something rather than nothing? He actually answers the question on the first page of the book, in what I think is probably one of the powerful and insightful paragraphs ever written:
A Quick Proof That There Must Be Something Rather Than Nothing, for Modern People Who Lead Busy Lives
Suppose there were nothing. Then there would be no laws; for laws, after all, are something. If there were no laws, then everything would be permitted. If everything were permitted, then nothing would be forbidden. So if there were nothing, nothing would be forbidden. Thus nothing is self-forbidding. Therefore, there must be something. QED.
Holt, Jim. Why Does the World Exist?: An Existential Detective Story (Kindle Locations 55-59). Liveright. Kindle Edition.8) Software Engineering.
I've been a professional Software Developer for over twenty years. But my formal education is in Electrical Engineering, and I am mostly self-taught on software. About four years ago, I decided to become more substrate independent (less dependent on syntax and more dependent on semantics) and move up the abstraction ladder. I ended up getting a certificate in Software Engineering from a local university.
Software Engineering is really Systems Engineering. And it's a small step to the next level of abstraction which would be Knowledge Engineering. Metaphysics is the ultimate abstraction that applies to the universe as a whole. Learning Software Engineering moved me up the abstraction ladder, and made the leap to the metaphysics of PI that much easier.
9) Noumena vs Phenomona
Donald Hoffman, the evolutionary argument against reality this is a fantastic TED talk that basically says evolution goes off phenomona and not the underlying reality (the noumena). In other words, we have evolved to understand and deal with the illusion of reality, rather than reality itself. He doesn't actually use the words "noumena" and "phenomona", but this talk really opened my eyes to the difference between illusion and reality from a scientific point of view, instead of the religious or mystical point of view, which is the only places I ever heard this sort of talk
10) The_Zero_Dimension_Quantum_Universe, by Peter Didomenica.
In this brief academic paper, the author explains how a zero-dimensional universe get rids of all the paradoxes of quantum mechanics, and can arguably be considered the most "natural" way to present physics. I'm not sure if the paper is meant to be taken seriously as a scientific theory, or if it's more of a "hey, this is kind of interesting" sort of thing. He also talks about the concept of zinfinity which is that number which is zero and infinity combined, since, in many ways, infinity and zero are actually the same number or the same idea expressed in different ways. A zero dimension universe corresponds exactly with concept of the r=0 domain in PI.
I found this paper really interesting. But, perhaps most importantly, it was in me trying to find this paper again after first seeing it (unfortunately I didn't bookmark it the first time ), and searching on Google for things like zero, infinity, quantum mechanics, that I found the Armageddon Conspiracy Website.
11) Armogeddon Conspiracy Website.
I briefly read parts of this first, but I prefer an e-book format, so I quickly moved into the God Series.
12) Illuminatus Pythagoras: YouTube blogger.
This person didn't lead me to PI, but he did address one issue that was really blocking me from embracing PI more closely, and that is problems I have as a Libertarian with Meritocracy. Illuminatus Pythagoras is a very articulate spokesman for PI and Libertarinaism. I don't know if this guy is an official Illuminatus, but his rhetoric is very close to it. Indeed this site is recommended by the authors of the God Series, and was probably where I initially discovered him. He also made me realize that people who believe in a PI philosophy are not whack jobs, or satanists, or something. This guy seems eminently sensible, rational, and "normal".
-> Update: 1-13-2020: While I still like Illuminatus Pythagoras when he keeps to metaphysics, quite frankly, he's a bit of a neo-nazi, and conspiracy-theorist on other topics, which I reject. In other words, when he goes off the reservation, he goes off the reservation, if you know what I mean.
13) CTMU (Congitive Theory Model of the Universe)
This is another attempt at a TOE (Theory of Eveything). It seems very compatible with PI, but I'm not really knowledgeable enough about either PI or CTMU to really say so definitively
14) Everything Forever, Gevin Geobran
Another interesting TOE. Definitely, a little more mystical than PI or CTMU.
What other belief systems have you been using most?
Scientific Materialism, Atheism. and Libertariansim. I used to believed in Strong AI, the belief that it's possible to create full consciousness from ordinary matter, but PI has made me skeptical of this.
How far have you gotten in your study of PI? I know this is hard to quantify. Just wing it.
Well according to the Contra Mundum book:
All of the material in the books of the AC Project is of course concerned with the ten degrees of the Illuminati. If you have read every book and internalised the values they express, you are in a position to validly regard yourself as an IlluminatusAnd there was another quote somewhere that said if you read and understood all 32 books of the God Series, you have the equivalent theoretical knowledge of either a sixth or seventh degree Illuminatus. Of course, I assume there's more to achieving each level than simply reading the material,
Weishaupt, Adam. Contra Mundum (Kindle Locations 11884-11886). Hyperreality Books. Kindle Edition.
All I know is that after about 16 months of reading and studying the books, I feel like I've reach a logical milestone of some sort. Not that I know everything by any means, but that I've reached a sort of a basic threshold level of understanding, and I would need something else, some catalyst, to kick me up to the next level.
What do you think of PI so far?
As I said in my introductory post, I consider these books to the most insight filled and life changing books I have ever read. While I don't buy into everything they have to say, they've really expanded my horizons, and given me a whole new vocabulary with which to analyze and understand life and the universe. I can't thank the authors enough for putting out this great series of books.
Update History:
2020-07-06: Minor grammatical fixes.
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