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operations resulting in the surety of proofs. The unresolved tension about what I believed from intuitive experience and what I was allowed to believe from the logic of theorem and proof, perhaps not unlike my belief in the transcendent experience over logical theological argument as Reality, continued throughout my life. For example, many decades later at IHES, I saw the world class dynamical systems theorist and differential geometer-topologist, Dennis Sullivan, use a projector to display a computer-generated, intricate and beautiful, mathematical object, the well known, computer screen saver, Mandelbrot set. It represents the control parameter plane of the well studied complex analytic map, z → z² + c. Sullivan, pointing to a small, discrete complicated little part of it that looked like a little version of the whole of it, from a distance looking like a point, said, “An important Ph.D. dissertation is waiting to be done on the question: is this (pointing to the little object) really there?” In the audience of about a hundred professional mathematicians and one amateur, I was the only one that laughed.

Historians of mathematics point to the successful generalization of Euclidian geometry via its abstract axioms, postulates and logical operations to a new, not naturally intuitable, almost nonvisualizable, non-Euclidean geometry (with the new geometric axiom, parallel lines do meet at infinity), as evidence against the Kantian idea of the intuitively accessible, a priori status of geometry. This served as an example of where mathematics naturally resides, and argues in favor of the thought control imposed by the modern set theoretic and logical rituals of mathematical theorem and proof. Thom, in a hereditary-evolutionary biological argument developed in Semiophysics, said “Objections raised to the Kantian apriority of Euclidean geometry after the discovery of non-Euclidean geometries, and the theories of twentieth century physics (restricted and general relativity, quantum mechanics) appear to me to be irrelevant…they deal with …the infinitely small and infinitely large…which lies outside the usual cognitive activity of ancient man.”

In my discussions with him, Thom found equivalence relations between mental and real world objects and their behaviors. He described what he called an abstract physicalist truth that describes a psychic universe, which, in turn, simulates outside things and processes. Much like the transcendent experiential God I have

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