Light and the Feel of Numbers

Art by Michael Whelan

By: Jay

I once watched a show on a young girl named January who was a schizophrenic. Childhood schizophrenia is not a common mental disorder, but what fascinated me in this particular case was the fascination January had with numbers. In fact, she even “felt” numbers and had a certain emotional relationship to them. What immediately struck me was the insight in the midst of this dark situation that January gave: what if, aside from her real mental problems, January was actually on to something—something that her parents and counselors had never considered. What if January was right, and that numbers do have a “feel”?

I once interviewed a recognized mathematical genius who explained that when he was younger, math was difficult because he was more interested in the look of the numbers (as symbolic representations), than in the actual conceptual manipulations of the integers. In both of these examples we have a different perspective on something very common: the look and feel of a number. Similar statements are also made by those who experience altered states of consciousness on drugs, particularly hallucinogens. In those cases, the senses are often mixed up, and so numbers might be mistakenly thought to have a “taste.” While these three cases are not “proofs” per se, they do point in the direction of something I’ve intuited for a few years now.

In the modern Western world nothing is more divorced from one another than the supposed domain of numbers, reason, and logic, set over against the supposed independent domain of feeling, intuition and aesthetic creativity. In another sense, we have right brain versus left brain. The degeneration and collapse of the West is, as I have argued many times, intimately tied to the division of the sciences into specialized, discreet unrelated “fields,” resulting in a compartmentalization of knowledge.

This compartmentalization actually has a tremendous effect of stunting any real progress, leading to a bunch of incompetent drones who (in their minds) master “biology” or “physics” with a ridiculously myopic, stunted, and philosophically nonsensical, contradictory worldview. The average “science” major walks away with his government certificate certifying sound and fury signifying nothing: this “graduate” could no more think his way out of a paper bag than he could give a coherent explanation of the supposed subjects he has “mastered” by repeating socially engineered textbooks by rote. Those who study other exceedingly worthless fields like “sociology” are even more foolish. Read more of this post