User Portlet

Greetings, my name is Matthew! My aim here is to participate in the Wolfram Physics Project.

My current occupation is VP of an executive search firm, however my educational background includes a B.S. in Biology and Philosophy, and a doctorate in Naturopathic Medicine.

My interest in physics began in earnest as a youth when I first read the Capra's The Tao of Physics. I found myself utterly fascinated by the notion that some people from ancient history apparently knew something scientific about the universe, which was later encoded into myths and legends, and passed down to us- albeit in a highly fragmented form- by way of various so-called "spiritual" traditions.

Unfortunately, in the naivete of youth I very wrongly assumed that my teachers and other adults would be equally eager to explore the potential connections between spirituality and science. This inexorably led me into a feedback loop of disappointment and disillusionment as it seemed the more I tried to share these ideas with others (and particularly academic "authorities") the more I was spurned and rejected. This in turn, led me to feel a growing sense of indignance toward the academic community, which only served to further isolate myself from being taken seriously.

Nevertheless, my love of learning led me to continue pursuing a so-called "education" and I was admitted into one of the most prestigious public universities in the U.S., with intentions to pursue a degree in Biophysics. However, my plans were quickly dashed upon the rocks as one of the first things I learned was that it was not "my place" to challenge any cherished ideas of the intellectual establishment, until I spent at least 8 more years cramming orthodoxy into my brain, and then if and only if I managed to get papers published in journals. Well, not just journals, but peer-reviewed journals with high impact factors. Then maybe... maybe... I might have earned a "place" to speak about these so-called "new" ideas.

Well, in the face of all this institutionalized resistance, I decided to abandon Biophysics and instead pursue a degree in Biology with an add-on in Philosophy. Surely, I reasoned, taking coursework in Philosophy would permit me a venue to openly explore ideas in an environment that would be more welcoming to unconventional thinking.

Boy, was I ever wrong!

Over the course of my undergraduate track in Biology and Philosophy, I wrote several papers on topics such as:

Challenging the Law of Excluded Middle: Could a party be both "fun" and "not-fun"?

Freudian Psychology: Specific to Freud, but not generalizable to humanity.

Multilevel Selection Theory: When co-operation overtakes competition as the driver of evolution.

Horizontal Gene Transfer: Could different species of bacteria exchange genes?

The Correspondence Between Astrological Types and Personality Disorders.

Well... you get the picture. And I'm also sure you may have guessed by now that these papers were received with the same sort of disdain and scorn that I had come to expect from the "authorities".

Nevertheless, my youthful exuberance prevailed, and upon graduating I decided to "stick it to the orthodoxy" by pursuing a degree in Naturopathic Medicine. Surely, I reasoned, there would be a home for my "kooky" ideas among a ragtag bunch of medical mavericks.

Again, I was proved quite wrong. Much to my undue surprise, I found the field rife with groupthink, appeal to authority, and an all-around failure to embody the philosophical principles upon which it was supposedly based.

Nevertheless, now armed with a dubious "medical" education and $170K in student loan debt, I decided to venture out on my own as a solo practitioner. I reasoned that it would be well to focus on digestive health, as emerging research at the time seemed to support many of the concepts that were part and parcel of naturopathy, for example the "leaky gut" and the neurological basis for the much maligned "Irritable Bowel Syndrome."

Wrong again. Not only did I continue to be spurned by the medical community at large for not having the "right" degree to offer medical advice, but quite to my shock and bewilderment, found myself also largely shunned by the public who apparently decided in the intervening decade that, while they were very interested in so-called "natural health" were just fine to take it upon themselves to self-diagnose and treat based upon ideas they came across doing "Facebook research" and watching the "Dr. Oz Show."

Anyhow. I'll bring this self-pity party to a close and spare you the story of the last 10 years of my life, which have led me to become the VP of an executive search firm with precisely two employees, and no plans to expand.

More presently, finding myself in the midst of a coronavirus lockdown and assuming the mantle of primary educator for my five-year-old son, I had begun a personal project of construction YouTube playlists of various short instructional videos for kids.

I was not very far into this project before I realized that I didn't really have a great way to organize them, which in turn led me to the realization that I did not have a good mental map of academic disciplines, which in turn led me to construct such a mental map, which after several iterations, emerged as follows:

Upon the construction of this mental model, it seemed to me that the next logical step would be to conduct a comprehensive review of the formal sciences, and so I proceeded to fire up my Kindle and download introductory texts on these topics, with a special emphasis on systemics and network theory. (Yes, this is all leading somewhere...)

I am still in the midst of reading these texts, however am now well past the introductory chapters. As perhaps you might have guessed, while I was taking notes and making more mental models, there were quite a number of intriguing similarities I found among the foundational concepts of these varying fields, which led me to ponder some very interesting conclusions, such as:

A system is a set of elements whose links produce patterns of behavior over time. A world is a set of stocks whose flows produce patterns of growth over time. A problem is an inverse solution. Forgiveness is a function that transforms injury into gratitude. A chance is a change in context that alters the probability of an outcome. Corruption may be defined as: false surprise. Time is a boundary function that separates signals from noise. 42 is, in fact, the answer to "Life, the Universe, and Everything" ... and so on...

But what I really wanted to share with you in this rambling introduction (Are you still there?) is the following table of correspondences:

So. All of this leads me inexorably back to the big "WHAT IF".

WHAT IF somebody, somewhere in the depths of antiquity actually knew all about sytemics and network theory? And WHAT IF this information was INTENTIONALLY encoded in the format of myths and legends, and passed down to us as "spirituality", and more specifically, the so-called "Hermetic" tradition?

Skeptical? Then I would challenge you to first bone up on your systemics, and then read The Emerald Tablet and The Kybalion, and then secondly to engage with me here on the forum.

I'll be waiting... and hoping that this will be the one community that does not reject these ideas out of hand, due to the entrenched belief that our current civilization is the pinnacle and capstone of all that has come before us, and that the origins of our spiritual traditions were "nothing more" than magical thinking and the fanciful notions of simpleton minds "worshiping" forces that they could not possibly understand.

Cheers!