The Patterns Of Existence

By Ron Hooft

This book is about the patterns of existence and how they show us evidence of how existence works, as well as explaining the mechanisms and origins of subjects like consciousness, how the mind works, what will is, what love is and so much more. It also shows the connection of all things using science and logic. I hope it proves useful.

My priority is to get information out there for people to build on or prove wrong. Particularly people seeking only the truth. A lot of the information I'll be talking about will be facts. From those I have built models. Models/hypothesis, while based on fact, are not necessarily fact themselves unless they become self evident. They are interpretations. Therefore some may/do need testing. I think some of the models should be interesting to scientists who are interested in doing exactly that. I hope so. Had I the money I'd fund testing myself, but I don't. And were I a well known physicist with lots of degrees and influence, I'd get it done. But I'm not. So all I can do is try to get it out there and plant seeds.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ron Hooft
• Release date: Dec 22, 2021
• ISBN: 9781005231194

Ron Hooft

As some people who read my work know, I’m a philosopher. I do not have a degree in philosophy because I never went to university. Well that’s not true. I did sit in on philosophy classes for about a year, but since I couldn’t pay I obviously never got any credits for it.I never the less studied philosophy all my life by reading and thinking and debating. I know most if not all the philosophical arguments of old, but I was always more interested in finding new truths. That is to say discovering what others had not.To that end I went about things in rather a backward way from traditional schooling. I never went out and read so and so’s opinion on this or that problem before I had studied the issue logically and had come to my own opinions first. Then I would read other people’s work and compare notes. People told me all the time that I was constantly reinventing the wheel when I could have been working with someone else’s wheel and improving on it. But I can’t work that way. I have to know it for myself. I can’t just accept the wheel someone else found. If at the end I discover it was the same wheel all along then that’s great. While consensus does not mean something is true, it does give one the feeling of vindication that someone else has gone through the same line of reasoning even if it turns out to be a false lead.I began to question life at age 6. I am now 58. I’ve told this story many times in other essays, but the reason for telling it is always from a different perspective.I began by asking questions about the Church and the religion I was brought up in. When I was informed by my mother that probably no one knew for certain what the answers were to the questions I was asking I promised myself that before I died I would find them. That led me from religion to religion, including Eastern philosophies like Zen, questioning, reasoning, debating, and learning. Learning mostly that everyone had their own ideas on the matter and for some reason none of them satisfied me. There was always something that did not feel right.At a certain point you get stuck. How do you know the answers you get from your queries are true and not just some personal bias or another? Every seeker comes to that point and the ones who really want to know find a formula. The formula usually goes something like this: Listen and take in everything, but don’t be quick to accept anything as the whole truth. Above all, care only about truth for its own sake. Be ready to drop any belief if it proves to be false.When one sets out to find the truth with only rationality, it becomes a hit and miss game. I came to a number of conclusions, however, that were born out as true. We can get a lot from intuition mixed with rationality. One such revelation was that all things are interconnected. More than one field of science has shown that to be true. But the one that hit me the hardest was that I once predicted that we would discover that all things are energy, rather than energy just being the work matter/a system can do.What a surprise it was to me to find out that the little equation I had seen before but like most people never understood said exactly that: E=MC squared. While I had reinvented the wheel and felt vindicated in my conclusion, Einstein had proven it long before I was born. Yet few people even today besides scientists know what it means, and that it means exactly the above.The other event in my life that blew me away happened in grade 10 science class. We were studying physics, and the teacher told us that all atoms tend toward their lowest possible output of energy.Up until then the class had been rather dull. But the implications of that started to hit home right away as if it was a revelation from god. That’s how and why we have the substances we have today. That tendency forces atoms to merge and create new things. The laws of conservation and thermodynamics were like getting the secrets of the universe handed to me on a silver platter. The teacher treated it all as if it was old hat, though I am sure she didn’t get it.I started studying science like I used to study religion, and in particular physics. And low and behold there were answers out there, but it seemed that few people had any idea what they meant.What dawned on me too is that the scientific method resembles the method every serious seeker that I have ever spoken to has to come to on their own. In science the goal is to falsify your hypothesis. If through experiment you continuously can’t falsify it, and no one else can, it must have some truth to it.This is philosophy at its best.So gradually I realized that the best source for answers to philosophical questions is science. The best way of thinking in terms of day to day living is by using the scientific method. After living this philosophy I came to the conclusion that I could take my formula one step farther. One does not in fact have to believe anything at all. You can form opinions based on the evidence, but that is speculative and should not become a belief.Should we then believe in facts? No. Why? They are facts until someone proves they aren’t, or finds a modification to them. No belief is required. And since there is only fact or speculation belief is never required. What is not fact is speculation and disserves only an opinion on its probability of being correct or wrong based on the evidence. That’s nothing to spit at if the evidence and the logic are good, but still not worth investing faith in.To use science in philosophy one has to study science and understand it. If one understands the math as well then all the better. But it is not required.So I decided there should be a new type of philosophy: Science Philosophy. Of course, when I looked it up, someone had beaten me to it. I feel good about that.The point is that in my writing I use the philosophy of science in explaining what has been discovered and what it means. Scientists do this as well, even if they are loath to admit they are engaging in philosophy when they explain what the data they have unearthed means in any broader sense than just telling us about the data. A scientist is only doing science when they are gathering data or reporting it. When they are explaining the factual data and its implications they are taking on the role of philosophers.Even though science more and more relies on math as opposed to intuition and even though the findings of science become more and more counter intuitive, it still takes intuition coupled with logic to figure out what it all really means. It just means we have to fine tune our intuition, and I’ve written a lot about how to do that.The modern philosopher and seeker still has to rely on intuition, but now they have new mysteries to solve. Even though we get data from scientists and new ideas as to what the data means, there is still a place for philosophers if they use the wealth of data that scientists supply.The fact is that scientists are specialized. There is not enough cross referencing going on. The studied science philosopher can bridge that gap and perhaps find leads scientists are not finding.For instance one can look at behaviour from the view point of how our atoms, what we are made of, behave. To me the biggest revelations in that regard have come from the laws of thermodynamics. Because obviously the laws of thermodynamics while determining the behaviour of atoms, also must affect the behaviour of mankind. And so they do.But another great place to look is in chaos theory.Traditionally the philosopher has also been the scientist trying to prove their hypothesis. Descartes was a scientist in his own right, and so were many others. But with the advent of quantum mechanics, physics seemed closed to anyone but the mathematician. It doesn’t have to be that way, and it isn’t.Science philosophy is the philosophy of the new millennium and beyond. It is also a world view, a way to the ultimate questions for the seeker and even the average human; and yes, a way of life.

Book preview

Chapter 1

The Case For Non-belief. A method for thinking to prevent yourself from fooling yourself.

Don't believe anything. Contrary to what we're constantly told, belief is not required. In fact, it can be dangerous for several reasons which we'll go into. What is belief? It can be used with no faith attached meaning: I think. But usually there is some faith involved, and often the desire for something to be true, even if it isn't. Faith itself is the feeling of certainty without the ability to be certain. It is the death of the desire to know, as well as the end of logic. You become sure you already know, but in some cases, you can't.

So if we want to know the truth, we have to drop faith. And to do that, don't believe anything. You don't have to. If it is a fact, belief is redundant. You accept facts when they are proven to be facts. The only other thing we believe is speculation or lies. Obviously it's not a good idea to believe lies. Nor is it beneficial to believe speculation to be true.

Beliefs become part of who you are and how you behave. If you are certain about something and it turns out to be wrong, it can be devastating. People have killed themselves over it. People have killed others over false beliefs. So there's no reason to believe anything. Accept facts, when they are proven, and wait and see for the rest.

Yes, you have to make choices without knowing anything with certainty all the time. So you give it your best guess based on the evidence and your experience. But you don't need to believe it's right. Just hope. Hope is fine. It's not belief, and it can drive you to research, which is key. And without belief you'll be far more willing to drop any model you've created at the drop of a hate if it proves false; which is often easier to do than prove many things are fact. Hence why scientists try to prove their own theories false. If they can't through experiment after experiment, it gives the theory more credence. And the more others try to prove it wrong and can't, the closer it comes to being considered fact.

So to avoid fooling ourselves while searching for answers, we have to believe nothing, use everything, and fall to nothing. That's the basic method for searching for truth, and making sure you don't fool yourself. Nothing wrong with admitting you don't know, rather than believing what you can't know. And nothing wrong with admitting you were wrong if proven so.

All beliefs are potentially dangerous. Strange idea? Certainly not what most people are led to believe, as it were. But obvious if one thinks about it. Sure we can get a good glimpse of the dangers of religious belief by looking at the daily news. Fanatical Muslims believe the west is evil. That belief based on one interpretation of their religion. A religion, by the way, that had been a model of a peaceful, tolerant and inclusive belief for much of its history. We need only go back a short time to the many bloody and violent inquisitions of both the Protestants and Catholics to see what dangers those beliefs have the potential of unleashing on the world.

And why are these religions prone to having violent periods? Well the short answer is that heretics teach falsehoods and threaten the church. After all, heretical ideas cause decent and weaken the religion. The believer thinks they have the right model of life. Contradictory beliefs lead to actions based on those ideas, so those ideas must be stamped out so as to keep the religion pure and on track. This is only an option when the religion holds power. The Christian churches only hung up their weapons when power was slowly taken from them in western democracies. Some argue that these periods of terrorism are not what the bible teaches, so the religion is not to blame. Rather it is those who perverted the message and intent of the bible that are to blame.

That may be true, and the vast majority of Muslims say the same thing. But the fact that the books can be interpreted to demand violence make the belief in these religions potentially deadly for those who disagree with them. Along with religion we know that belief in political systems can create conflict and violence. The debate between capitalism, communism, fascism, socialism, etc: can get very heated and end up in war. Why? Because each ideology threatens the others core values. Each convinced they are right; each having the desire that their core values spread and become universal.

But is that all? I said that all beliefs were potentially dangerous. We all know that religion and politics are subjects that cause fist fights, but why is any belief at all potentially dangerous? The answer is that all beliefs exclude. Because all beliefs declare that they are truth; and therefore they exclude other people’s contradictory beliefs. Anything a person believes in; they act on. Each idea believed excludes those with other beliefs. Fine if your statement is fact and can be proven. But again, that's not belief. So I'm not saying we need to include all ideas. Far from it. Just that faith excludes all other ideas as wrong and often evil.

So it isn’t just the big things like politics and religion which are dangerous, but all beliefs; because exclusion causes conflict and can lead to violence. Also, if you have faith in something and you realize you were wrong, it can be devastating. The potential for problems in any belief is when it becomes a faith. Faith gives the feeling of knowing what you believe is the absolute truth without giving the possibility of actually knowing that at all, As i have said many times: belief is never required. A thing is true or not. No amount of belief either way changes that. A fact does not require belief; and the other option besides fact is speculation. If not a fact then it is speculation. Why on earth would one need to have faith in something speculative?

We are forced to act every day on speculative ideas. We know something will happen but we can’t always be 100 percent certain what the result of our actions will ultimately be. So if we don’t know all the facts we have to try to form educated opinions based on what we do know. Regardless of how we act we will always potentially exclude someone and contradict their beliefs. That's inevitable. But opinions based on facts are easier to drop if other facts show our opinion was wrong, and there's no reason to get insulted by other opinions. And knowing that you might be wrong as opposed to assuming you are right makes you a little less hasty and less inclined toward radical measures or jumping on the latest band wagon.

So in effect it is ideas themselves and our desire that they be true that is at the root of all problems because each idea contradicts someone else’s and excludes their idea from being true. Even this book contradicts and threatens the idea that faith is good, and potentially could cause conflicts, as it excludes that idea as being true. Yet the conclusion that faith/belief is by nature more prone to be used to do violence than not having faith and relying on facts and logic to govern our actions, seems to me an obvious self evident, logical fact. While belief is bad, as I said: hope and desire are not. One can and should hope and desire without having any faith. Hope and desire for something better motivates us to go forward. But faith won’t be the answer for a better future and never has been; logic will.

Chapter 2

Logic Is For Everyone.

Logic is simply a tool of thought. The average person doesn’t necessarily understand what formal logic or informal logic is, but there is little doubt that they use some every day in making choices and in deciding what is real or fake, rational or irrational. We call it common sense or reasoning.

After all, we have to make choices all the time without the benefit of all the facts. We often have to guess at what the best way to do something is, or whether we are making a good deal or a bad deal for ourselves. Humans do have the capability to use past experience and observation as ways to help them make choices, and logic uses exactly those skills and techniques.

For example: if when I did not pay the electric bill and the result was that the company cut me off, paying the bill seems to be the key to keeping the lights on. It is a self evident conclusion. It is common sense.

But it is not the only answer. One could generate their own power or illegally tap into someone else’s. And just because you pay the bill it does not mean the power won’t go out anyway due to a system malfunction or clerical error.

Things get complex fast when trying to sort things out; and options/conditions/variables are too numerous for us to consider every single one of them. We are not even aware of all the variables in any given scenario. So we are always guessing in the end. Our guesses range from weak to strong depending on how good we are at putting everything that we do know or think we know together to come up with a final conclusion which we can turn in to action.

After all, it is all about finding out as much as possible about the situation we face before we take as much control as we can and manipulate it to what we perceive to be our advantage. This is part of the pattern.

So we have a stake in what the truth is, so to speak. That is to say: we need to know what the truth actually is, not what we would like it to be. But finding it is not always easy, and there are many pitfalls in thought that actually keep the truth from us.

To help us get it right we developed rationality and eventually logic. Formal logic deals in the forms logic can take to reach a valid conclusion from a given premise. It is often formula driven: if A then B. Informal logic is the art of argument and points out the fallacies of certain ways of thinking and modes of argument. Both are just different aspects of logic, not separate types of logic.

I have often spoken about the next step in human evolution being the logical mind. But what is the logical mind and what is logic?

Logic is really just a way around the pitfalls I mentioned. Formal and informal logic recognizes them and categorizes them for us, allowing us a better chance at finding the truth of a matter. But there is not just one form of logic, there are at least three major types in philosophy and several more in math. The logic of mathematics is usually strictly formal, and that is not what I am discussing here as such, though there is overlap. I am mostly interested in discussing the logic of philosophy.

The main three categories of logic are: inductive, deductive and abductive reasoning.

Now this all sounds complicated but it really isn’t. Well perhaps it is a bit. But it doesn’t have to be. After all, it’s all just common sense.

Deductive reasoning is usually attributed to Aristotle and the Greek philosophers. But I wouldn’t say that’s exactly true. What I would say is that Aristotle and friends are the first that we know of in the West who started recognizing patterns in human thought and how they work; thereby allowing us to examine our thought process, find the pitfalls, and refine our way of thinking.

Deductive reasoning is the type of logic most philosophers use, because if you start from a valid premise and follow the rules of deduction then the conclusion must necessarily be true. But only if your original premise is true. A deductive argument might start like this: All unmarried men are bachelors. Bob is a man and he is not married. Bob is therefore a bachelor.

Not too complicated so far. It is the kind of thing most of us are able to do without thinking it through consciously. The answer is just there, pushed up by the subconscious which has been taught that unmarried men are by definition bachelors.

Now the problem with deduction is as I have said: your premise must be true for the conclusion to be true. But if you follow the rules of deduction your conclusion will be true relative to your premise even if it is not the correct answer.

For example: if I said that all men who wear baseball caps eat chilli, Bob wears a baseball cap, therefore Bob eats chilli. My argument/conclusion is valid in that it follows from the premise, but my premise and conclusion are wrong. Not all men who wear baseball caps eat chilli. But if they did then Bob would eat chilli because he belongs to the set of men who wear baseball caps.

Hence deduction depends on a valid premise to achieve truth. What if there is no way to start from a valid premise? Aristotle and the gang had an answer for that as well. Induction.

Induction is used by science. It relies on observation but does not give you absolute truth in the same way deduction does if followed correctly. Inductive reasoning deals with probability.

Since the sun has come up every morning for the last 4 billion years or so, and since its life span is expected to be at least 5 billion more, it is highly probable that the sun will come up tomorrow.

We humans use this method of thought all the time. We assume the sun will come up tomorrow because it has always come up as far back as we know. We assume the tap will give us water every time we turn it on. But these are not assured things. Something could happen to the sun that we are not aware of long before its estimated best before date. But probably not tomorrow, as far as we know.

So we can say with some assurance that the sun will eventually fail to come up. Can’t we? Yes. With some, but not with absolute assurance, even though the probability nears 100 percent. Something could happen to extend its life. Probably not, but...

Besides which, are we really talking about the sun? The earth revolves which gives us night and day. The sun doesn’t really come up or go down at all, except from our perspective due to the rotation of the earth. What if one day the earth slowed and stopped rotating? For some of us the sun would never come up again even though it still exists intact. For others it would never go down again, until it went out.

Inductive reasoning is simply based on experience and observation which is then interpreted in rational ways. But more about induction in a minute.

Abductive logic was started by Charles Sanders Peirce in the late 1800s/early 1900s.

Abductive logic uses inference from observation to create a hypothesis/model that explains the observation and all its relevant facts or evidence. It is also where we get the idea from that the simplest answer has the most likelihood of being true.

Abduction infers the best answer from a body of evidence. If we look up from our boat on a river and notice a car flying off the bridge at us we can abduct that the driver lost control of the vehicle for some reason.

So from our empirical observation we create a likely hypothesis. But it is not necessarily true. The car could have been dropped by an aircraft and its trajectory may have just made it look to us as if it fell from a bridge. It may have been parked and unmanned and knocked off the bridge after being hit by a truck, leaving the driver out of the entire scenario.

All we can say with certainty then is that the car seemed to come crashing down from the bridge and definitely landed in the water, or on our boat depending on how close we were to the incident.

As you can see, abduction is the process science uses. Science creates models from observations and the facts surrounding them. The models are not intended to always be the way things actually work. They are tools to orientate the scientist and give them something to test and build on. A good working model must make good solid predictions for it to be useful.

Our model that assumes there was a driver because: 1 most cars have a driver, and 2 we do not have any other information to go on, makes this model the most economical explanation and it gives us a chance, if we are not under the falling car, to see if we can rescue the driver and or passengers, or contact someone who might be able to: asap, if there are any.

Abduction then garners a set of possible explanations and reduces them to the most likely one based on the evidence. Peirce once said of the method that it is really just guessing. Of course it is in essence the art of educated guessing. And science does a lot of that.

As you may notice, abductive logic is a form of inductive logic. They are really the same thing with abductive logic being the more refined version. And in fact all three forms of logic are melded together today to form part of the scientific method. Hardly anyone talks about abductive logic anymore though it is still alive and well in modern science.

It is interesting to note that these categorizations of logic are what divide the traditional philosopher from the scientist. In Darwin’s day scientists were known as natural philosophers. However, in 1833 that all changed because of an argument in Cambridge University at a meeting of the British association for the advancement of science.

At that meeting Samuel Taylor Coleridge stood up and told the audience that they had to stop calling themselves natural philosophers because philosophy is based on deductive reasoning and what natural philosophy advocated was inductive reasoning. After a short debate William Schule stood up to calm the crowd and agreed that there was no proper name for the members of the group who practiced natural philosophy. But since they practiced science, like the word artist, they should perhaps call themselves scientists. And so they did.

Humans naturally use all three forms of logic every day without knowing it. Each type of logic applies to different types of inquiry.

Inductive reasoning allows for the possibility that even if all the premises an argument is based on are facts, the conclusions drawn may still be false or incomplete. An inductive argument deals in probability. So the argument is weak or strong depending on the probability of the conclusion drawn being true or correct.

in 1000 BCE It would be valid to assume the world is flat and not moving. After all, if you place something on a ball and spin it, it flies off pretty fast.

So if you asked a logical thinker of the time if the earth could be round and spinning he or she would understandably think you nuts and laugh at the idea. It is a lack of knowledge here that is the problem. The person from 1000 BCE had no way of knowing about gravity.

The deductive thinker might have said: If I spin a ball and place something on it, the object will fly off. Therefore the earth cannot be a ball and cannot be spinning. If the earth is flat or even a disk which is stationary it would allow people to walk on it without throwing them off. Therefore the earth must be flat and stationary.

The abductive thinker might have said that the simplest explanation is the most likely to be true so side with the deductive thinker.

An inductive thinker might have said that it was highly unlikely due to the evidence at hand that the earth was round and spinning, but that he could be wrong. As it turns out, the inductive thinker would have had the stronger position.

Deductive reasoning starts from general principals and applies them to specific problems, coming to a specific conclusion which must be true if the premise you start from is valid.

All people are mortal I am a person. I must therefore be mortal.

Whereas inductive reasoning starts from specific examples and results in a probability factor. From observation, all people that we know of are and have been mortal as far as we know.

I am a person I am most probably mortal.

It could be argued that the deductive certainty that I am mortal, while having a high probability of being true, might not be entirely true. There may be more to say on the matter in the future. If we start extending human life indefinitely that statement may no longer be exactly true.

Also it is impossible for us to know with certainty that no one is immortal. How would we know such a thing with absolute certainty? I would lay odds that the probability nears zero with the information we have. But no one can be 100 percent certain. 99.99999 to infinity? Perhaps. But not 100 per cent.

You cannot say with certainty that all ravens are black just because you have never seen a green raven. You can only say with certainty that they are rare if they exist, as no one has ever seen a green one to our knowledge. Or you could say with certainty that you have never seen or heard of a green raven, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t any. It just means there is no way to know for certain unless you see one, or perhaps if you start seeing and hearing about them on the news and elsewhere you would accept that they exist.

Absolutely true deductive certainties by and large turn into tautologies: All black ravens are black. Unless of course, someone paints one green.

Now we have to talk about truth and what it is. Many people say that an absolute truth has to be absolute no matter what the conditions.

Others tell us that there is no such thing as absolute truth. The obvious flaw in the logic of that statement is that it shoots itself in the foot as