Spiritual logicism is my term for my philosophy of the universe. I hope to be able to get into some interesting discussions about it and the nature of reality generally here. There is a lot to unpack, so I suggest reading this a little bit at a time, and feel free to comment and specific parts of it without having read the whole thing. I don't want to bore you!
Spiritual logicism
Part 1: The basic idea.
Logicism is a pre-existing philosophy of mathematics. (We'll get back to reality in general momentarily.) I'm not going to define it here, but instead recommend reading this webpage for more information. The reason I omit the definition is that I would instead like to present my own version of logicism somewhat strengthened from even strong logicism: All of mathematics is an extension of logic. Not just certain fields, and not just mathematical truth, all of mathematics. This still isn't too radical of an idea, but spiritual logicism is, in my experience, basically unheard of. Here is my definition:
Spiritual logicism: The belief that spiritual truths about the universe can be understood as, and fundamentally are, an extension of abstract logic. An extension of logicism to the nature of reality.
Part 2: Why?
One could reasonably ask how on earth I would come to such a conclusion. As such, I don't just want to go straight to explaining the ramifications of such a belief system, but rather want to begin by explaining how I came to believe what I do. I have always wanted to understand the deeper truth about the universe, and having a mathematical/logical background I realized that to conclude anything, I would need at least one assumption. My goal, however, was to minimize assumptions. In the end, I settled on one and only one assumption, but it soon became clear just how vast the implications were. I present, the truth premise:
The truth premise: There is a valid and complete notion of truth.
Despite how short it is, there is a lot to unpack. First of all, there is an issue here: The truth premise asserts itself as true, before any sort of notion of truth has been established. My resolution to this: Ignore it. Performing some sort of bootstrap here is entirely necessary. We effectively just accept the truth premise as if it has already been established as true within the valid and complete notion of truth that it assures the existence of. Now let's break down what the truth premise really means. There are two key words: Valid and complete.
Valid: Consistent and sound.
Complete: Capable of assigning every objective and meaningful statement a truth value of true or false.
Consistent: Containing no contradiction. No statement is both true and false.
You may have noticed that I have omitted the definition of soundness. In logic, the soundness of a set of axioms means that they imply only true results. The issue here is that we are trying to obtain a notion of truth in the first place. Soundness as it is used here is to say that if there is any sort of underlying truth structure within the universe, this notion of truth is consistent not only with itself, but with this underlying truth structure. It is not clear what such a structure would be, but nonetheless it is an important precaution. Now, why should we accept the truth premise? Put simply: We need it. Without the truth premise, it is impossible to conclude anything. Let's suppose we put together some other set of assumptions that did not include the truth premise. Without the truth premise, an assertion of their truth wouldn't even be meaningful. We need a meaningful notion of truth as described in the truth premise. If someone wants to see it, I will explain why each assumption on the notion of truth is necessary for meaningful deductions to be made, but for now I will omit the specifics. Now, reasonably, we should be able to define binary functions (such as and, or, not, etc.) and have a meaningful notion of certain statements about them being true. Let's define f to be the or operation for an example. Then f(0,0) = 0, f(0, 1) = 1, f(1, 0) = 1, and f(1, 1) = 1. Reasonably, these should all by definition be true statements. This could be considered to fall under the soundness condition, where, for an example, f(0, 0) = 0 must be considered to be true, because the value of f(0, 0) is by definition 0. Replacing 0 and 1 with the truth values T and F we can rewrite these values as f(F, F) = F, f(F, T) = T, f(T, F) = T, f(T, T) = T. We now get propositional logic. We can show, for example, that P implies P or Q. (I can't type logical connectives, so I'll just use words.) We create a truth table:
P = F, Q = F: P or Q = F or F = F, P implies P or Q = F implies F = T.
P = T, Q = F: P or Q = T or F = T, P implies P or Q = T implies T = T.
P = F, Q = T: P or Q = F or T = T, P implies P or Q = F implies T = T.
P = T, Q = T: P or Q = T or T = T, P implies P or Q = T implies T = T.
So in all cases P implies P or Q is true. At this point, we have seen that any notion of truth as in the truth premise should include propositional logic, and thus that we can consider the axioms of propositional logic can be considered a part of our definition of truth. It is possible that this notion of truth, to satisfy completeness, needs to include other axioms. Recall that completeness requires that our notion of truth assigns true or false to every "meaningful and objective" statement. To uncover what this means for our notion of truth, let's take a quick detour to another belief. Some people hold the belief that they are imagining the entire universe, and that it is all within their head. While this doesn't seem particularly reasonable, we can't prove them wrong with empirical evidence. The key thing to realize is that in different contexts, there are different reasonable/useful assumptions. Another example would be mathematics, in which we (at least in most areas of math) assume the nine axioms of ZFC. In conclusion, the notion of truth described in the truth premise can be thought of as all possible extensions of propositional logic, where we must specify the context (which extension it is in reference to) of any non-tautological truth.
Part 3: Axiomatization and conceptualization.
We left off with the conclusion that truth can be viewed as all possible extensions of propositional logic. Namely, with certain additional axioms, we should be able to describe our own reality. This leads us to the axiomatization principle:
The axiomatization principle: The reality we live in can be entirely described by a set of axioms.
At this point, spiritual logicism is an obvious conclusion. So what are these mysterious axioms? Well, we don't know, but one could view science as the field which searches for this answer. Science attempts to find the laws by which the universe abides by studying it from the inside. Our best guess at the moment is probably M-theory. The laws of M-theory can be seen as a candidate for the set of axioms which define our universe. This notion of truth also has another critical implication. Concepts separate from reality are just as real as it, so long as they are well-defined. One such example is math. The reason math is an important example is that it also relates to our reality. This demonstrates how concepts separate from our reality being just as real as it could potentially have some very big implications. At this point, we approach the realm of more specific conclusions about the nature of reality, of which there are many, so I will leave it at this for now, as this has gone on long enough.
