Basically I believe, like the logical positivists, that all truths break down into tautologies and empirical claims; strict structure and specific content. However, I consider it ridiculous that they did not continue on that basis to conclude that principles of ethics, aesthetics, theology, etc. could be expressed validly in those terms. In fact, I believe that every meaningful thing a person has ever uttered can be expressed, with precise correlation to how they understood it themselves, as a combination of tautological and empirical content, proving it to relate to their own mind in the way that they thought it did. I believe that everything is math. However, I would consider it ridiculous to take any vital, precious, human thing like love or suffering or consciousness or ecstasy, and refer to it as "just mathematics". That would be a heinous misinterpretation. No, I believe that the meaning, the essence, the power and depth and value of these things that such a phrase intends to split off from 'mere' mathematics are themselves founded in mathematical truth. That is, that the intuitive response of a person who balks at their deepest experiences being "just mathematics" is right, and the reason they are right is mathematics! I believe we can show the meaning and depth and value of such personal and emotional experiences to be provably real in a mathematical sense, and not just an illusion superfluously imposed on what we should understand to be "just mathematics". In short, I want to be the first rationalist mystic. I want to be the first mathematically rigorous spiritualist, with nary a compromise in precision and accuracy of thought. *Everything* is mathematics, and the fact that *everything* is mathematics shows us obviously and directly that dismissal of the breadth of human experience as per the logical positivists must itself stand up to mathematical rigour. I believe that the math for that situation shows the opposite--that such a distortion of priorities is arbitrary and poorly reasoned, and that in fact everything a human being cares to do has a legitimate cause on one level or another, if not several. So I do not believe that the human experience can be "reduced" to mathematics. How preposterous! If everything is mathematics, then the human experience as well as our every analysis of it has always been mathematics. We do not need to reduce our experience to mathematics, we need to raise it to mathematics: we need to complete the picture of just how complex and beautiful and detailed mathematics can be in an appropriate implementation. This is not something to rail against; this is something to aspire to--being able to understand how mathematics compells our very deepest experiences to be as they are. I eagerly await the beauty of the picture that will unfold as we begin to truly map the math of human experience, from our first and immediate realisation that the math itself shows how small our understanding will always be, to the awe and wonder at our discovery of deep and complex meaning in places we were ever so quick to dismiss.
