Why Mathematics Fails

Disclaimer: Before you start to think that this is just an angry rant on mathematics from someone who probably failed at it all his life, I assure you that it’s simply not true. Having a graduate degree from Computer Science and Engineering, I did my fair share of maths and passed through all of that. So to think that I have a grudge against Mathematics is objectively untrue. This article is much deeper than that.

In this 21^st century where the whole world is obsessed with technology, mathematics has literally become the most widely used language in many fields of studies and higher education. To put it simply--maths is considered as the new universal language. And this has elevated mathematics from being just another tool for understanding the World (which all subjects actually are) to a new world view altogether.

In many educated people’s minds, mathematics has literally become ingrained as the ‘correct’ way to think and approach reality. And coupled with the ‘all of existence is just matter’ worldview that modern science continuously propagates, and the fact that mathematics actually makes up the very backbone of mainstream science, maths is widely heralded as the ultimate psychological evaluation tool and the highest yardstick of human understanding. If maths says something, it’s the unquestionable truth. In a nutshell, maths is considered as the most empirical language and the most important subject in human history.

But as Quantum Physics has proved, the world is not matter based at all, it’s actually consciousness based. And here’s the rub--even with all the cosmic praise that maths is equated with, it fails to describe and access reality, every single time.

The fact is that the very basis of mathematics is illusory, which means it doesn’t exist in reality. It’s the numbers and all numbers are merely mental abstractions, a product of human imagination. They aren’t real, just mental labels, just like language.

Let’s take these two numbers--4 and 3. Of course, everyone can tell that 4 is the higher number, by exactly 1. But now here’s the question--what is this ’1’? How do you know that a ’1’ is a ’1’? What does a number really mean? Does numbers have some intrinsic meaning on their own?

Numbers only make sense when they’re compared with other numbers. But if you take them individually, they lose all of their significance. For example, when we say or write ’4’, it means it’s not particularly high. But that also comes from a comparison with all the other numbers in the scale. Without that, what would a ’4’ really be?

As you can see, the numbers do not have any independent existence--whenever you bring out one, you also need to have the whole scale with it. And that’s exactly why the numbers are not real, cause they don’t have an ‘objective reality’ in them. All of their functions and significance lies in comparison with the other numbers. If they just exist by themselves, they become meaningless.

There’s another aspect of mathematics that is completely at odds with reality--in fact, this is the reason why people who use the mathematical approach to solve real life problems end up creating new issues altogether.

The very core of mathematics is to dissect and break things down. The mechanism is--first, analyze the problem and identify all the parts of it that can be broken down/derived into smaller parts or fragments. After that, once all the pieces that can be broken down has been broken down, check the relations between them and find out what operations can be performed on them. And after performing said operations, the original problem gets shorter and compressed. This process is repeated progressively till a point of singularity is reached.

So the fundamentals of mathematics always revolve around breaking down something and reaching a singularity from there. Once a bigger piece has been derived into several smaller pieces, the pieces are used to find/reach something else and that’s pretty much all there is to it.

But when this very approach is applied on real Life, it fails every single time. The reason is that Life flows/works in a completely different way than the world of numbers and abstractions. Even though Life always seems like a bundle of different phenomenons and occurrences, in truth, all of Life is a singularity. It’s in the Now. You cannot, in any way break down the whole of reality into tiny fragments and if you do, all you’re doing is creating a mind-made window out of reality and trying to understand the whole from that fragment.

To put it simply, when you analyze the whole and create a small window out of reality, what you really have is a distortion of reality, cause that window doesn’t really exist in reality and is just a mind-made fragment. And when you work on a distorted version of reality, you’ll end up with more distortions.

Moreover, all that the mathematical models describe, is only a model of reality and not reality itself. And the reason is cause Maths is not really a feature of the Universe but only a creation of the human mind. It requires abstractions to run and runs solely on abstractions. It’s true that mental abstractions are undoubtedly exciting, cause you can have control over them and can play with them at will, but they do not really merge into reality, ever. All abstractions exist in the world of abstractions.

Another false axiom that mathematics has is that somehow it’s possible to figure out the whole by correctly lining up all the smaller pieces. But in reality, if you piece together some fragments, all you have is a large collections of pieces, just stitched together. It does not make the whole cause the stitches, the fragments, the divisions, are still there. And in reality, the whole is always much more than the sum of it’s parts.

To put it simply, the whole is something that can’t be reduced into anything cause it’s already complete. And that’s why the whole can’t be approached with the intellect cause all that intellect does, is cutting things apart, like a scalpel. Of course, the pieces that you get in this way cannot take you back to the whole cause by themselves, they are incomplete and whatever knowledge you can acquire from them will naturally remain incomplete.

Just as you can’t count from 1, 2, 3... and reach Infinity (which is the whole), in the same way, you cannot reach or know the whole with the help of fragments. I agree that this is more philosophical than literal but for the purpose of this article, I think it works.

And this is why Maths fails, simply cause it can only work on fragments and not the whole. All that the numbers are, are fragments, incomplete parts that has no independent existence of their own. And all that maths does and can do, is to operate on those fragments and reach some singularity (or other fragment) from them.

But if mathematics isn’t the best way to access reality, then what else is? The answer is simple, maybe a bit too simple. Just use what you were born with--your five senses, your common sense and intuition. Most other creatures in Nature interact with Life in a very intuitive and spontaneous way and as a result, they are much more harmonious with Life than we humans are, cause we as a species have become trapped in a maze of conceptualizations and abstractions which has led us to become totally disconnected from Life and the Universe at large.

The whole point of this article is to explain that irrespective of what we’ve been taught to believe, there is always a real disconnection between the world of abstractions (where theoretical mathematics operate) and reality--the reality that we see, feel and live every day.

And what is really an abstraction in the first place? They are simply something that we create with our imagination. And that makes them nothing but purely imaginary. They’re not real, just like the numbers and you won’t find them anywhere in reality.

To sum up the essence of this article in a few words--abstractions don’t really apply in reality, simply because reality is not made up of abstractions. The two are literally worlds apart--there’s the world of abstractions that’s composed of theoretical mathematics and all it’s different variations and then there’s reality--formless, shapeless and ever-changing.