What Happens When Experiences = 1 and Concepts = x?
A thought experiment in primary school maths...
There are only four ways a simple sentence can line up with lived reality. Either the subject is something you directly experience, or the object is, or neither is, or both are. That’s the whole 2×2. Now make one small, ruthless choice:
Let experiences = 1 (a one-off, immediate, indivisible “now”).
Let concepts = x (aboutness: labels, roles, structures).
Do this, and ordinary sentences reveal a crisp little calculus - the maths of everything - showing how experience and concept combine.
1) Subtraction: 1 − x
Example: The sky is blue.
You can experience the sky. You can even experience blueness as a felt quality. But the word blue is a category we impose. Here the subject is lived (1), the predicate is conceptual (x). Strip the overlay and the thing remains: 1 − x.
(Aside: “blueness” can be lived; “blue” is a label. That difference matters.)
2) Division: 1 ÷ x
Example: I desire an apple.
The apple is directly experienced (1). The “I” is not; it’s a conceptual handle that divides the field into seeker and sought. Subject = x, object = 1 → 1 ÷ x. Division is the move that manufactures craving by positing a subject apart from its world.
3) Addition: x + x = 1
Example: He kicked the ball.
You don’t directly experience “he,” nor “the ball,” as such. Both are conceptual placeholders (x + x). What you actually experience is the whole tied together, you see him kicking the ball, (1). So concept + concept = the experience we’re having now: x + x = 1.
Read the “=” here as “collapses into lived experience”: two labels pointing at one happening in the present.
4) Multiplication: 1 × 1 = 1
Example: His good health is because he walks so much.
Both sides can be lived: health has a felt texture; walking certainly does. Linking them doesn’t generate something beyond experience; 1 × 1 still resolves as 1. Multiplication, in this scheme, is how experienced things connect (reasons, regularities) without leaving the plane of experience.
The 2 × 2, stated plainly
Experience in the subject: 1 − x
Experience in the object: 1 ÷ x
Experience in neither (event is what’s lived): x + x = 1
Experience in both (a lived linkage): 1 × 1 = 1
That’s it. Four permutations, four arithmetic moves. The symbols aren’t schoolroom equalities; they’re phenomenological resolutions - how talk of things reduces to what is actually lived.
Why this isn’t word-play
Because it’s testable. Pick any sentence and ask: which parts are actually experienced? Subject, object, neither, or both? It will land in one box of the 2×2 matrix, and the corresponding operation tells you what’s really going on:
Subtract concepts to see the thing (1 − x).
Divide and you mint a subject that craves (1 ÷ x).
Add conceptual roles and they collapse into one happening (x + x = 1).
Multiply lived terms and you still have one indivisible now (1 × 1 = 1).
If you want the broader resonance: Aristotle’s four causes, the Four Noble Truths, and the schoolyard quartet of arithmetic aren’t three unrelated lists; they’re different doors into the same room. But you don’t need those traditions to use this tool. The 1/x calculus is self-contained and empirical in the small-p sense: it’s about what actually shows up when you read a sentence with attention.
The punchline
Experiences are ones. Concepts are x’s. Language constantly blends them. This tiny algebra lets you see the blend - and, crucially, how it resolves: either down to the thing, out into craving, back into a single event, or across a lived linkage. Once you start reading this way, the “maths of everything” isn’t grandiose; it’s practical. It’s what your next sentence is doing to reality.
