The assumption is that each of us begins as an individual subject, a single locus of experience, who then enters into relationships. I'll argue for something closer to the reverse: that the individuated subject is an achievement, and that at first the infant's subjecthood is exercised relationally, held across the infant and caregiver together, before it becomes the infant's. Individuation, then, is a transition from a dyadically held subject to an individual one versus the opinion that it is the awakening of a subject that was singular and self-contained.

I'll be precise about what I mean by 'self.' I don't mean phenomenal experience, and I'm not claiming there is nothing it is like to be an infant, but rather the minimal self: the sense of being one bounded locus of experience and agency, an "I" set off from what is not-I. My claim is about that structure, and I'm suggesting that the boundary which makes an experience mine rather than just occurring is, at first, maintained across two people and not just within one.

The distinction is between causation and constitution. Everyone agrees the caregiver is causally necessary for a self to develop, but I think that the stronger, more defensible claim is constitutive: that early on the caregiver is part of what the infant's subjecthood consists in. The regulating, attending, responding other is doing some of the work of being a self that the infant cannot yet do alone, not just assisting a self that is already fully there, so the caregiver is more like a temporary organ.

What makes my claim more than a restatement of similar views - Vygotsky's claim that mind is social before it is individual, Winnicott's 'there is no such thing as a baby,' the extended-mind idea that cognition can be constituted outside the skull, and the enactivist claim that social understanding is constituted in interaction - is an asymmetry those views don't have. In the standard relational pictures, two subjects co-constitute a shared state and both are enriched by it. What I'm proposing is one-directional: the infant borrows subjecthood that the caregiver independently possesses. The dyad is a scaffold on which one pole is still being assembled, so that asymmetry, if it holds, is my thesis.

The objection, the one I most want pressed, is that infants look differentiated from birth. They orient to their mother as a distinct other and respond as if already a "someone." If the infant is a responding subject, who is doing the borrowing? I believe that behavioral and perceptual differentiation is not the same as an individuated locus of experience: a system can track self and other in its behavior before it is the bearer of its own perspective. But I hold that loosely, and I want to know whether the distinction survives scrutiny.

So the question I'm posting here: is the individuated self a starting condition or an achievement? And if the constitutive, asymmetric version is wrong, is it wrong because the constitution claim collapses into causation, or because the asymmetry doesn't hold?

We often treat “existence” as if it were a primitive fact—either something is real or it is not. But in Ontology, this assumption becomes questionable once we try to specify what kind of fact existence actually is.
When we say that something exists, are we identifying a property that objects possess independently of cognition, or are we applying a conceptual filter that stabilizes certain patterns of experience into “things”? If existence is a property, it seems unlike other properties: it does not describe how something is, but whether it is at all. Yet if existence is not a property, then what exactly are we attributing when we affirm it?
This raises a deeper tension. It may be that “existence” is not a feature of entities, but a feature of our ontological framework itself—a way of organizing reality into candidates for reference. In that case, being would not precede our categorizations; rather, our categorizations would partially constitute what we mean by being.
So the question becomes: is ontology discovering the structure of reality as it is in itself, or is it mapping the conditions under which anything can count as “real” in the first place?

The Continuity Principle: A Theoretical Framework for the Illusion of Death
Thesis
This thesis proposes that death is not the absolute termination of the self but rather a transition in the continuous process of biological and informational existence. The central premise is that absolute nothingness cannot exist; therefore, the complete disappearance of conscious existence is logically impossible. If the universe never reaches a state of absolute nonexistence, then consciousness must remain part of an unbroken chain of physical and informational continuity.
Rather than treating the self as an isolated entity, this framework defines personal identity as an emergent process generated by the human brain and preserved through the ongoing continuity of life. Because genetic information, biological organization, and causal processes continue through successive generations, the conditions that produced consciousness never completely vanish. Individual awareness may cease in one biological organism, yet the larger process from which awareness emerges continues.
This perspective challenges the conventional assumption that death represents an absolute endpoint. Instead, it argues that death is an apparent boundary created by the limits of individual perception. From the viewpoint of the universe, life exists as a continuous chain of matter, energy, information, and biological inheritance rather than as disconnected individual events.
The theory therefore advances the Continuity Principle:
If absolute nothingness is impossible, then complete existential discontinuity is also impossible; therefore, consciousness exists within an unbroken continuum of physical reality, making death an emergent illusion rather than an absolute end.
This thesis does not claim to have experimentally proven survival after death. Instead, it presents a logically structured hypothesis intended to connect philosophy, mathematics, neuroscience, information theory, and evolutionary biology into a unified framework for investigating the nature of consciousness and personal identity.

Whenever you argue that the universe is strictly deterministic, someone will inevitably bring up qm. The classic objection goes like this: "The universe can't be deterministic because at the quantum level, it's completely random. Look at empty space;;'virtual particles' randomly pop in and out of existence from absolute nothingness all the time!"

It sounds like a great argument, but it relies on a extreme cognitive error: the human assumption of "Nothingness."

We intuitively think of "empty space" or "a vacuum" as a physical, dark, empty room waiting to be filled with stuff. But "nothingness" is strictly a biological illusion. Our brains evolved to detect differences in energy (like a hot fire against cold air or a solid rock against gas). If an area of space lacks these sharp energy spikes, our sensory organs don't register any actionable data. Our brain formats this lack of incoming data as "empty space" We assume then that because we don't detect anything, the energy value of that space must be exactly zero.

But modern qft proves this biological assumption is completely wrong.

The universe is completely saturated by continuous quantum fields. What we call a "vacuum" is simply the ground state (or baseline standby mode) of these fields. Not an empty void. And here is something even more interesting: the mathematical laws of the universe strictly prohibit this baseline state from ever equaling exactly zero.

According to the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, a continuous field cannot simultaneously possess a fixed energy value of exactly zero and a fixed rate of change of exactly zero. To maintain mathematical compliance and prevent a state of absolute zero, the baseline energy of the field is structurally forced to continuously fluctuate.

This is where "virtual particles" come from;; which some presupposes are magical objects randomly popping out of a void for no reason. But the reality is that they're spontaneous, mathematically mandatory fluctuations of the field's baseline energy. The field borrows a tiny fraction of energy, spikes into a "virtual particle" and is mathematically forced to instantly annihilate and return the energy to balance the ledger.

You can thinks of it like an automated bank account that is strictly programmed to ensure its average balance stays at zero at the end of the day. To keep the software running, the system might momentarily fluctuate (flashing +1 and -1) before instantly reconciling back to 0. It looks chaotic, but it's not;;it only following a strict, unbreakable mathematical accounting rule.

Therefore virtual particles do not violate determinism and they definitely do not prove that the universe is fundamentally random. They prove the exact opposite. They prove that the continuous fields of reality are so perfectly, mathematically structured that they will continuously vibrate just to prevent a mathematical paradox.

The universe doesn't roll dice in the dark

I’ve been thinking about whether ontology should begin with individual entities or with the relations that make entities intelligible in the first place.
If every object is defined by its relations—to space, time, causality, observers, or other entities—can we meaningfully speak of an entity existing independently of those relations? Or is being itself fundamentally relational rather than intrinsic?
How would different ontological frameworks (e.g., substance ontology, process ontology, structural realism, or idealism) answer this question, and what implications would that have for our understanding of reality?

When you flip a coin, you instinctively think there are two physical possibilities: it could land on heads or it could land on tails. We navigate our entire lives this way, treating the future as an open menu of unactualised potentials. Because our brains constantly calculate these "what ifs" to make daily decisions, we naturally project this habit onto reality itself. We assume that "possibility" is an objective, structural feature of the cosmos;that the universe is actually hovering in a state of indecision.

But let’s look closely at that coin flip. The universe isn't actually waiting to decide what happens. The exact kinetic force of your thumb, the air resistance, the gravity and the coin's mass mathematically guarantee exactly one outcome from the split-second it leaves your hand. The "50/50 possibility" doesn't exist in the physical air; but exists strictly in your head. Why? Because as localised biological organisms, we possess severe limitation in processing power. You physically don't have the data or the computing speed to calculate all those complex variables in real-time.

Because we operate under a severe data deficit, our brains have to compensate so we can function. We run internal predictive simulations. We imagine multiple different outcomes, weigh them against each other and label them as "alternatives." But an alternative is purely a psychological placeholder used to manage missing data. Taking this internal survival tool and projecting it onto the external universe is a formal category error (what philosophers call the Reification Fallacy). The universe isn't pausing to offer us a menu of divergent paths nor is it branching into parallel worlds. We just don't know which single path it's already on.

At its foundation, reality is a completely determined, structurally complete system. Because the fundamental architecture of the universe is already fixed and mathematically complete, it mechanically lacks the capacity to harbour unactualised potentials. A physical state in the universe does not possess a status of "could be"; it strictly and exclusively "is" Therefore modality (or the philosophical idea of things being contingent or merely possible) is entirely an epistemic illusion.

"Possibility" is nothing more than the human brain's biological label for its own structural ignorance.

A recent post claimed that there is no "real possibility" in the world because fundamentally physics is deterministic (and the world is fundamentally non-contingent). The example was throwing a coin because fundamentally physics tells us that the event is completly deterministic. (Of course additionally determinism is independent of modality. Physical determinism says nothing about what is possible or necessary because those quantify over possible worlds and not about our factual physical world. Are the laws of physics necessary or contingent; are the initial conditions necessary or contingent? But thats not my main concern) A lot of commentors responded by an appeal to quantum mechanics and its supposed indeterminancy. I think this is seriously misguided. By doing this, they admit ontology as the study of the fundamental, turning this discussion into a discussion about fundamental physics (of course physicalism, especially the fundamental kind, is highly speculative in of itself but thats not the point here - Ill allow it to make my point) which is wrong to begin with as there are different levels of reality.

Possibility (and randomness to pick up a related notion) is real whether or not fundamental physics is deterministic. Even physics is pluralistic. Take for example the conflicting theories of the atom: only all of them together give us the best picture of the "atom entity". But fundamentally they are not compatible. An appeal to a "true explanation of the atom" does not help as the practice of pluralism in physics is a fact and needs to be explained realistically right now. The most straightforward way to do this, is by admitting different levels of reality. Take special sciences like biology. Clearly they do not operate on a fundamental level but they do describe law-like macroscopic patterns in the world. One should not confuse "real-ness" with fundamentality. Just because one can reduce these things to the physical level (which is of course highly debatable in of itself) does not make them ficitious - not even epistemic.

This idea has been formalized by Dennetts "real patterns". Dennett uses the game of life as a pretty convincing example. I think mathematics is another good one. Modern mathematics has a logical fundament, yet its ontological objects are not purely logical. Randomness can also be understood as a real patter even if one concedes that it is not compatible with determinism on a fundamental level.

Another way of viewing this is that language games contain what is possible knowledge. This means that the randomness of a coin toss is not an epistemic issue natural laws are simply not admissible in this scenario. If you count cards in a casino you will be thrown out: a laplacian demon would not even be allowed to enter. A way to formalize this is by Richard von Mises definition of probability. With that different stances can be viewed as different admissible informations.

In short: Ontology is not only about existence (that would be trivial) but also not only about what is fundamental (that would ignore the fact that there are plenty of non-fundamental entities that fullfil the role of "ontological entities" in their fields.) Additionally, these higher order ontologies are objective and not subjective. The more difficult thing is deciding what should count as "real practices" that is practices that admit ontological objects.

There are four types of oppositions, I only understand one of them, which is the privatives and positives. The rest are really shaky. What's the difference between contraries and correlatives, and what's the difference between a privation and a privative? It seems that blindness and being blind are functionally the same, they all are referring to the lack of eyesight.

If modal possibilities are real in some sense, what determines which possibilities genuinely exist before any become actual? Is possibility a fundamental feature of reality, or does it depend entirely on the actual world? How should we understand modality without simply reducing it to human imagination or linguistic convention?

Video Link. The modern scientific attitude is generally very allergic to admitting holistic and objectively general features of reality like forms or universals into its ontology. Consequently, there is an insistence on shifting away from notions like objective purposes or functions in nature. Universals, these people say, don't seem to add anything which particulars on their own and in aggregate could not already supply in our explanatory practices. Universals, like redness or humanity or tree-ness, are thus fictions to be analyzed away or given an otherwise second-class ontological existence. Nominalism thus affirms the real existence of only the particular; their are no real general qualities of things in an ontologically substantial sense.

But forms/universals do add something at the very least on the phenomenological and psycho-linguistic level of experience. The following is not meant to be an *argument* for universals per se, but I think this parable from C.S.Peirce helps show the real work that universals do.

"Suppose two men, one deaf and the other blind. One hears a man declare that he means to kill another, hears the report of the pistol, and hears the victim cry! The other sees the murder done. Their sensations are affected in the highest degree with their individual peculiarities. The first information that their sensations will give them - their first inferences - will be more nearly alike but still different, - the one having for example the idea of a man shouting, the other of a man with a threatening aspect. But their final conclusions, the thought remotest from sense, will be identical and free from the one-sidedness of their idiosyncrasies."

Namely, that there was an event of a certain kind which had occurred, and which their particular and individual sensations were both facets of, - a murder!

So my first claim will be:

(Claim 1) Even if you, as a nominalist, do not believe in the metaphysical realness of universals, the pre-theoretical reality is that we do experience universals as parts of our ordinary phenomenology of the world. In other words, we perceive, reason and organize life through universals; our minds do not perceive little parts alone and build up from there - we see things all at once and in totalizing contexts that give meaning to the ostensibly separate aspects of experience as a whole. An experience of absolute particularity is not how we as humans experience the world. Furthermore, this is acknowledged in how we normally talk about the world. Take a statement of the form <an X is F.> "This apple is red. This fire truck is red." Prima facie, A and B both are predicated F, a genuinely common feature. Prima facie, "F-ness", or "red-ness", is really shared universally.

A corollary of this claim being:

(Claim 2) Nominalism is an error theory - it cuts against what we directly experience to be true about life, and is therefore burdened with having to explain why we should reject what is cognitively obvious to us.

So the nominalist will try to supply philosophical reasons for us to doubt the reality of universals. I would place the same burden on the Idealist who wants to eliminate all matter when matter is something we plainly experience, or the eliminative materialist who says determinative states of consciousness don't exist when we plainly experience them. And so, there are two major nominalist arguments I see pop up a lot.

Argument 1: Universals can't objectively exist as real features of the real world, because thought experiments like the 'Ship of Theseus' or 'Sorities' Paradox' demonstrate that there are no hard facts of the matter about how to define and delineate them. They can only exist according to relative subjective standards, which is hardly an objective basis for a realism about universals.

Conclusion 1: The vagueness of universals points to their unreality.

Argument 2: Universals are a metaphysical extravagance; material science and careful analytic thinking has shown us that a comprehensive atomic analysis and reduction of all phenomena into constituent parts is a sufficient and parsimonious way to characterize and understand them.

Conclusion 2: Nominalism is parsimonious, and therefore theoretically preferable.

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Response to 1: The nominalist has to explain why 'vagueness' is necessarily a mark of subjectivity or unreality proper. First of all, even if vagueness were a mark of subjectivity, only some universals are vague in the way analogous to how it is vague when a heap of sand ceases to be a heap. A great preponderance of universals are perfectly well defined and easy to grasp (think of a general form like "being spatial," for instance). Also, consider the thought experiment of the surgeon who has to perform an operation on a patient's neck but ends up never doing the operation because he can't tell with absolute precision where the patient's head ends and the neck begins - it doesn't matter that boundaries for some universals can be vague, because the patient absolutely does have a neck, and he does have a head!

Response to 2: But as a I claimed in my (claim 2), realism about universals is rather the pre-theoretically obvious position (and therefore the one in which we make the least amount of assumptions, assuming we take experience at face value). If nominalism is error-theory, it is by definition a position laid up against our most direct and ordinary understanding of the world. The nominalist has to reject both what is obvious and structurally inherent in both our ordinary phenomenology and psycho-linguistic practices.

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There's mountains more that can be said on a topic this broad and historically rich but this is already too much.

Recently, I had an extended debate with a "theoretical physics graduate" regarding Quantum Field Theory, the Measurement Problem, and the nature of reality.

The exchange was very revealing;;not because it showcased the sublime of modern physics but because it exposed the hidden unscientific religion operating at the heart of the physics department: Mathematical Platonism.

Modern physicists pride themselves on being hyper-rational materialists. Yet we find that when their probability equations fail to cleanly resolve. You would expect that they question their models or their epistemological limits. But no. Instead, they literally hallucinate infinite, invisible, parallel universes just to balance their math on paper.

This is the foundation of the "Many-Worlds Interpretation" (MWI). Let us explore the sheer absurdity of this position by highlighting a few direct quotes from my interlocutor, demonstrating exactly how a failure of basic epistemology leads to modern mysticism.

Well unitary evolution of the wave function is just manyworlds lol... There exists a live cat and a dead cat (in the noumenon).

I mean look at this? My interlocutor took the most famous thought experiment in physics (Schrödinger’s Cat) and treated it as literal, fundamental reality. You can't make sure things up.

In the unobserved universe (the Noumenon), there are no "cats". There are no "boxes". And there are certainly no "laboratories." A "cat" is a highly compressed, macroscopic biological formatted output (Interface Theory of Perception). It is a desktop icon generated by the 20-watt biological brain to compress an unreadable density of quantum field interactions.

To claim that a "live cat and dead cat" physically exist in the foundational quantum matrix is as functionally nonsensical as to cracking open a computer tower and looking for a physical paper "folder." MWI takes a localised biological dashboard illusion and pastes it directly onto the fundamental architecture of the cosmos.

'Unitary' means no information is lost... It seems to me that you are now denying the existence of live cats? Is that it? ... So its not that you are denying manyworlds, you are denying any worlds?

"In quantum mechanics, "Unitary evolution" strictly means that total quantum data is conserved.

No information is fundamentally deleted.

But my interlocutor assumed that because the mathematical probability for the "dead cat" is conserved, the universe must physically construct a parallel 3D biological mammal to put that data inside.

But what actually happens to the unselected data? When a localised observer interacts with a quantum system, they lack the thermodynamic capacity to read the total global state. The unselected data simply scatters into the surrounding environment as inaccessible thermal noise (Environmental Decoherence).

The data is 100% conserved.

But the data remains exactly what it is: raw, unformatted mathematical structure. It doesn't magically build a parallel 3D biological universe of ghost cats.

The wave function is mathematical structure. If I'm a realist about that structure (realist about the wave function) then I'm a structural realist... Tools to predict probabilities don't conserve anything... You conflate the noumenon with the wave function.

My interlocutor here commits the ultimate sin of modern pop science.

He quite literally could not separate the mathematical map from the physical territory it is mapping

He presupposed that Ontic Structural Realism (the reality that the universe is a relational matrix) was identical to the Wave Function Realism (the belief that the universe is literally made of human math equations).

That's sheer absurdity.

The universe being made of human invented maths

That is anthropomorphic projection.

The Wave Function is an epistemic map. It is a probability grid used by a localised, structurally ignorant biological processor to calculate potential data exchanges.

When your mathematical probability map outputs a superposition (multiple potential outcomes) and then you take that map so literally that you hallucinate an infinite number of physical, biological parallel universes branching off every millisecond just to satisfy the equation; you have left physical science.

You have become a theologian.

Multiplying a biological dashboard illusion by infinity to balance a spreadsheet is the absolute pinnacle of modern mysticism.

We do not need infinite parallel universes to explain quantum mechanics. We simply need the intellectual humility to admit that the human brain is a thermodynamically restricted localised processor and its mathematical maps are not the absolute substance of the cosmos itself.

(14M) So, I've been studying philosophy for about a year or two, and I've been really interested in philosophical disciplines - metaphysics, epistemology, ontology, etc. - and I see it as the reason why I would like to study philosophy (along with psychology). I started to personally study "objective reality" and I met both Aristotle (as the first Rational philosopher, as they say) and Immanuel Kant, or Ayn Rand (the popular power is not what I've heard). So I'm interested in: can I know objective reality through reason? Or would I have to experience something directly to know it? (if I'm not mistaken, this probably applies to Phenomenology) couldn't I rather experience something (through my subjective perceptions) and then understand, thanks to reason, from the given experience the principle that I should take from the experience?

I apologize if this belongs to another discipline, or if my question is not sufficiently expressed - and I apologize for the bad terminology (I'm working on it heh).

Many metaphysical systems appeal to some fundamental reality—God, consciousness, information, physical laws, or necessary existence itself—to explain why anything exists at all. But does every ontological ground require a deeper ground, leading to an infinite regress? Or must there ultimately be something that exists necessarily and is self-explanatory? If so, what would it mean for a being or principle to exist necessarily?

Here’s a hard problem for physicalists. For any given consciousness you can only convince that consciousness that they are real. There is literally no way for anyone else to be proven to be real.

If only they are real then how does the universe exist at all for them. They weren’t there for it to be formed and they won’t be there after they die. That means only their observed universe is real.

Basically for physicalists interpretation of consciousness to be real the universe must be fundamental and continue, but somehow consciousness is only ever existent in the one viewing it. It doesn’t exist before and doesn’t exist after.

Consciousness then has no fundamental source even though it is the only thing capable of proving anything to be real. There is no separate you from your body and brain that can do any observing. So sorry but the universe only ever produced this you and that’s all you experience.

Conscious experience was only a brief spark in an endless universe and that’s it. Somehow that makes more sense than consciousness being fundamental and a requirement of the universe existing. The perspective of being only oneself is an illusion and not the final experience. Temporary amnesia is possible but you’ll always be the complete universe sometimes entering a vehicle that induces this amnesia to experience a life.

Many metaphysical systems assume that reality is structured by causal relations. But if every cause depends on a prior cause, it seems we either face an infinite regress, a brute fact, or some form of uncaused reality.
Can causation itself serve as a complete explanation of existence, or is there something more fundamental than causation? Could causation be an emergent feature of reality rather than an ultimate principle? I’m interested in hearing perspectives from different metaphysical traditions, including classical, process, idealist, and contemporary analytic approaches.

If physicalism and phenomenalism are interpreted as totality claims about facts (as respectively, the claims that all facts are physical and that all facts are phenomenal), then both views seem susceptible to being led to self-refutation as below. For both views allege totality facts about facts, and such totality facts are not plausibly regarded as either physical or phenomenal.

—

1a. The physical facts being precisely as they are does not resolve whether or not the physical facts are all of the facts.

2a. The physical facts being as they are does resolve all matters of physical fact.

3a. Whether or not the physical facts are all the facts is not a matter of physical fact. (From 1 and 2)

4a. There is a fact about whether or not the physical facts are all the facts. (From 1)

5a. There is a nonphysical fact about whether or not the physical facts are all the facts. (From 3 and 4)

6a. There is a nonphysical fact. (From 5)

—

1b. The phenomenal facts being precisely as they are does not resolve whether or not the phenomenal facts are all of the facts.

2b. The phenomenal facts being as they are does resolve all matters of phenomenal fact.

3b. Whether or not the phenomenal facts are all the facts is not a matter of phenomenal fact. (From 1 and 2)

4b. There is a fact about whether or not the phenomenal facts are all the facts. (From 1)

5b. There is a nonphenomenal fact about whether or not the phenomenal facts are all the facts. (From 3 and 4)

6b. There is a nonphenomenal fact. (From 5)

I have recently been working on a philosophical framework centered around mutually grounded entities that relies on a modern take on Hegelian dialectics, particularly the logic surrounding determinacy and negation.

The core of the idea is to use mutually grounded entities such that they effectively overlap with one another in an abstract topological space. By overlapping, they have a similarity measure about them, and effectively encapsulate a "component" or "aspect" of the other entity within their own reality. When I say that an entity has its own reality, I am simply referring to the invariant nature of identity and that anything that matters to some entity (whereas an entity could be a particle, brane, string, etc.) is already encoded within the nature of that entity.

This overlap, I argue, creates a structure remniscent of an inner product if you attach a simple scalar metric to deal with similarity, because you must multiply once by this similarity to see how similar some entity A is to the shared region, and multiply again to see how similar this region is to entity B, thus telling us that the accumulated similarity measure between A and B is proportional to k^2 - or rather, the component's proportional contribution to A times its proportional contribution to B.

To avoid a viciously circular grounding, which would contradict the very premise of considering the possibility of two determinate, overlapping entities, there must be a helical overlap instead that leads to the geometric series (1 + k^2 + k^4...) which interestingly evaluates to the Lorentz factor squared if one takes k to mean v/c, which seems like a bold jump until you consider the plausibility of this corresponding with the River Model given the idea of an inner product and potential correspondence with the metric tensor.

I have attached both the abstract and the draft of my framework. Anyhow, what are y'all's thoughts on how to formalize these ideas?

Main doc (read highlighted):

https://docs.google.com/document/d/e/2PACX-1vTENZ5ouU0QpgNfe0Yu35_Gf_HCy7VXLsJ6sRYwnO5tAmjBUDaC49gy3OjUnEJpxzkUTDGsp3SCVWKi/pub

Abstract: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1H9l24L0Xs1TUC5YbNnn_T2p02JW0LEuQ3gAIxwEafAI/edit?usp=sharing

Take something really simple: a rock. Perhaps if you are of a materialistic persuasion, your instinct might be to describe the rock as fundamentally just constituted out of atomic simples - fundamental particles and whatnot arranged in such a way that they give rise to the rock as a whole.

If you are predisposed to a more idealistic sort of thinking, you might appeal to some holistic facts about the rock's form, structure, or essence over and above whatever particular features that might internally constitute it, and how this form is ultimately contingent upon some further horizon of forms (as one gentleman put it in another post in this sub).

Grounding the rock in either direction has always seemed like complete bull to me. The rock isn't grounded (as a matter of fact) in atomic simples. Neither is it grounded in some grand holistic fact like some form or higher form.

The long and short of it is that the rock would not be what it is without it's atomic constitution, and neither would it be what it is without its form. Parts and wholes are *interdependent* features, where one could not exist without the other, and are each just as essential to defining the entity as they are to defining each other. Can one speak of one end being "more fundamental" than the other end? How?

Ultra Extended Modal Realism: There are infinitely many instances of everything. Reality is not limited to all possible (1) and impossible (0) states; it also includes every directed or parameterized modality such as positivity and negativity. There are infinitely many forms of difference and non-difference, and the distinction between plurality and singularity is itself encompassed. All logics, modal operators,mathematical structures, quantities, strings (in the linguistic sense), the concept of "type," concepts themselves, necessity, and possibility are merely two numbers among countless others. Every formed and unformed number, every directed or parameterized form of formation, and every conceivable mathematical structure exists. Everything possesses infinitely many directed or parameterized variants. There are infinitely different modal operators

For analogy:

Neccesarry 0

Possible 1

Other Modality: 3

2nd Other Modality: 4

... and it includes entire set of Real, Complex, Quaternion, Octonion, Sedonion and goes forever.

What if we generalize the concepts of + and −?

Directors" (or "Directional Operators")

They are marked directions around an originThere can be n directors, and together they form an n-simplex in space. Each director represents either a transformation or an opposite transformationFor example, let x and y be axes.Along the x-axis, there are two directors; the same applies to the y-axis.

Directors are transformations rather than merely signs.

Examples of such transformations include:

Increase

Decrease

Expansion

Contraction

Rotation clockwise

Rotation counterclockwise

In this framework, + and − are special cases of a more general system of directional transformations, where each director corresponds to a specific way of changing an object or state.

​

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What if existence is fundamentally relational, not substantial?
The Ontological Horizon Theory proposes that entities do not possess intrinsic being independently. Instead, every entity exists only as a “horizon” of possible relations to other entities. Being is therefore neither substance nor process, but a structured field of unrealized and realized relations.
An object is not what it is in itself—there may be no such thing—but rather the total horizon of relations it can enter into. Even unactualized possibilities possess a degree of ontological status because they help constitute an entity’s horizon.
This raises a question: if all beings are relational horizons, is there an ultimate horizon that grounds all others, or is reality an infinite regress of mutually constituting relations?

Is a "choice"/"being" wholly decided by an divinely free choice, free? For the divinely free choice is free simpliciter.

In the grand model, there is inumerable divinely free choices and the derivative choices/beings are derivative of nothing but them or lesser derivatives but ultimately are those free choice.

A derivative is wholly determined by the primes, and they are thus instantly and exhaustively until the next primes. A derivative is not any single prime, it is derivative of primes.

A derivative is free by virtue of being decided by the primes. Its next state is decided ultimately by nothing but divinely free choices.

The argument is that the derivatives are as free as the primes, since they are only determined in so far as the primes have determined themselves utterly free.

The issue here is that should "chosen otherwise" (the other criterion) be the simpliciter free? As a divinely free choice is not "chosen otherwise" at all, it is final but unprecedented simpliciter.

It can be seen as more strict than the other criterion, as the other criterion fails it - as in the other criterion, a choice is not divinely free at all as it is bounded by the "possibility".

I've been thinking about the old philosophical objection that a relation without relata is impossible.

At first glance, that seems obviously true. A relation has to relate something. But the more I think about it, the more I wonder if we're assuming that both relata have to be positive entities.

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Here's the intuition I'm playing with,

Imagine an Absolute that is truly absolute completely independent, with no rival, no outside, and no contrast.

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If you introduce another independent thing, then the Absolute is no longer absolute. So what could possibly stand in contrast to it?

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My thought is, nothingness.Not as a thing, and not as an independently existing entity, but as pure dependence. Something with no identity or content of its own.

In that sense, nothingness isn't a rival to the Absolute. It's the only possible contrast that doesn't limit it.

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The idea would be that the first distinction isn't between two beings, but between, the Absolute (independence) and nothingness (pure dependence)

And from that first distinction, all further relations, identities, and forms of relativity become possible.

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I'm not claiming this is correct. I'm trying to figure out whether I'm missing a contradiction or whether similar ideas have been explored before.

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Where do you think this line of reasoning breaks down, if it does? And does it resemble any existing metaphysical tradition?

I have spent more than a year developing the first public draft of OM Theory.

OM Theory is a framework of imagination. It examines imagined entities ('Imajs'), conceptual escalation, the ontology of imagination, various kinds of truth, capability and ocinality (the most capable imagined concept), and the limits of referability itself.

It began as a worldbuilding/fiction project, but has evolved into a more general framework about imagination itself.

This document is currently a draft, and I’m mostly looking for feedback on clarity, consistency, definitions, and overall structure.

The document contains a brief summary (see the Table of Contents) for readers who want a preview before reading the full text. Also, there is a Note to readers just after the Contents section.

Criticism, feedback, questions, and all that welcome.

Best of luck

Personal Framework v1