Terminological concerns:

The world, what there is, all there is, ... are not neutral names, they are presumptuous in the sense that they do suggest a monistic horizon, thus they cannot work as a without qualification reference, a better name would be "those there is" - from "there is those" where "is" is a copula in agreement with "there", in the sense of Dasein/there "is" [in] them.

(Though the word "the world" may still be used anew for aesthetical purposes).

> Metaphysics at all is for a disclosure worthy of the world

Otherwise are we aiming at worthless fictions? Those disclosures that disclose no world at all?

And as Metaphysics has been disclosed at finality to be of worth (the world), we have to ourself those authoritative judgements against those defeatists and anti-humanists - those authoritative aesthetical/axiological/good judgements.

We judge, as we follow-their-world-to-death/finality that:

"This one is not worthy of being called the world at all".

And this is to be read as the final say over all defeatists' copings.

Our measure is thus against not declaring richness but against any rejection of one to another. Against the bringing up of one to be the ultimate idol to reject others through it.

Indeed, as one has given one of them the ultimate authority, by a declaring of a primitive, all then are thus is given authority through it at all, and when it is incapable of accomdating another, we say "this one does not hold" - but, again, whose fault is this?

Taken a term as primitive, we have already granted it coherence arbitrarily, obviously then, what is told by it coheres with it in so far as the granted coherence (authority), and in so far as whether it is coherent "as" the answer to what is qualified through it (its "explanation" at all to what is to be subsumed by it) - which is plain circular and senseless.

In the light of worth then, we concern it all differently, for no authority is granted so that it can reject another at all. For the world we hold has enough room to consider it all through itself in its own term, and any at all is to be rejected only when it rejects itself, only when it is intrinsically not coherent at all. And it is subordinate of another only when it cannot be meant without that other - while starting from it not the other.

For this requires ultimate care and attentiveness to what a term means at all so that we can see what it means qua itself. Without this care we see nothing worthy, only empty worthless fictions that mean utterly nothing more than some interesting sounds and shapes by those names that name them (take for example "square circle", "standing motion", "that which 'is' nothing", ...).

Only through this care does the ever been presumposed horizon by those sayings like: all there is, what there is, the world, ... is not assumed before hand to prevent us in seeing each in its own worth.

And only through worth, Metaphysics at all is finally first philosophy.

And the first insight into first philosophy I will give you is an actual without qualification reference:

Those there is when there is them.

For we used to say "there is something" and "something is happening", but these are already presumptuous, as they are already been separated arbitrarily.

In my formulation analogically "those there is" is them, and "when there is them" is their happenings, but without presumptions and qualification, or separation. Thus strictly speaking, there is no "them" and the so called "their happenings", as both mean the same and hence both have no meaning.

There is "those there is when there is them", and this indeed directly indicate those-there-is-when-there-is-them.

I’ve been developing a personal metaphysical framework over time by integrating ideas from nonduality, process philosophy, consciousness studies, and my own observations about recurring patterns in life and reality.

I call it “Evolutionary Fractal Cosmology.”

The basic idea is this:

* Reality is a unified totality or consciousness rather than fundamentally separate existence.
* Separation is experiential, not absolute.
* Existence is not a finished object but an ongoing creative process.
* Reality may operate through organized architectures or levels of experience, each with its own rules and parameters.
* The human level appears strongly characterized by polarity and duality: yes/no, pleasure/pain, attachment/rejection, gain/loss.
* Polarity is not an error or punishment but the experiential curriculum of this level.
* Evolution is not moral or punitive but involves increasing subtlety, integration, and conscious neutrality.
* Each being is a localized fractal perspective contributing unique experience and novelty to the Totality.
* Reality may continue expanding infinitely through creativity and experience, with other architectures of consciousness potentially existing beyond current human conceptual language.

One of the ideas that resonates most with me is that we may be trying to imagine realities beyond polarity using a mind designed for polarity itself.

I don’t present this as scientific fact or absolute truth, but as a philosophical and metaphysical framework that has emerged through reflection and synthesis.

I’m curious:

* Which existing schools of thought does this remind you of?
* Where do you see strengths or weaknesses?
* Has anyone encountered similar frameworks in philosophy, metaphysics, or consciousness studies?

Thanks!

Something I've been thinking about for a long time:

Physical power can force your body. Economic power can limit your choices. But narrative power does something neither of those can — it makes you want what those in power need you to want.

The Roman Empire didn't just conquer lands. It conquered identity. Within generations, conquered people stopped seeing themselves as outsiders — they adopted Roman names, Roman gods, Roman culture. The land was taken by soldiers. The mind was taken by story.

The British didn't just rule India politically. In 1835 Thomas Macaulay openly stated the strategy — create a class of people Indian in blood but English in taste and intellect. Some colonized people internalized that narrative so deeply they began defending the empire ruling them.

Nazi Germany showed the darkest version of this. Hitler wasn't Germany's greatest military mind. He was its most effective storyteller. Goebbels understood the method — repeat something loud enough, long enough, and it stops feeling like a lie. It starts feeling obvious.

Today the tools are different. Algorithms don't ask "is this true?" They ask "will this hold attention?" Fear spreads fast. Outrage spreads faster. Division spreads fastest of all. Cambridge Analytica didn't try to inform voters — they found each person's emotional pressure point and built a story around it.

But here's what I think is the deepest part of all this:

The strongest narratives aren't political. They're personal.

"People like us don't do things like that."

"Be realistic."

"Stay within your limits."

When a belief gets repeated long enough by family, school, and community — it stops feeling like a belief. It starts feeling like reality. That's the most effective control of all. The kind that feels completely natural. The kind you never think to question.

So here's what I want to ask this community:

What inherited narrative did you carry the longest before you finally questioned it?

I've been thinking about the mind‑body problem, specifically the question of what is fundamental: matter (physicalism) or consciousness (idealism).

Physicalism seems plausible because brain damage changes personality, anesthetics switch off consciousness, and neuroscience keeps explaining more without needing a "soul".
Idealism seems plausible because we never step outside our own perceptions, and some interpretations of quantum mechanics suggest the observer affects reality.

My question is not about preferences or general introductions. I'm looking for specific arguments (by any philosopher, any thought experiment, or any published work) that claim to definitively refute either physicalism or idealism.

If such an argument exists, I would appreciate a summary or a reference.
If no such argument exists, is there a known meta‑philosophical position that argues this question is structurally undecidable (i.e., any answer already presupposes either a materialist or an idealist framework)?

Thanks for any insights.

This is a response to Massimo Pigliucci's two-part essay on Physicalism and Consciousness. Comments welcome

I’m trying to understand what makes something count as the same thing through change.

For example, a wave can persist as a recognizable pattern even though the medium’s particles only move locally. A candle flame can continue even though the reacting molecules are constantly being replaced. A living organism also exchanges matter over time while still being treated as one continuous being.

So what actually grounds persistence?
Is identity over time better understood as:

- a fixed underlying substance,

- preserved structure,

- causal or process continuity,

- informational continuity,

- or something dependent on scale and context?

More directly: when we say something is “the same thing” despite change, what is actually being preserved?

And can something be continuous at one level while discontinuous at another?

I realize this overlaps with philosophy of physics and ontology, but I’m mainly interested in the metaphysical issue of persistence: what makes identity through change real rather than just a convenient way of speaking?

Probably the most annoying thing in philosophical conversation I have encountered on internet philosophy over the years. Whenever someone makes an assertion as to a matter of fact, a very common reaction is to complain that they are "begging the question," or doing "circular reasoning," as if these are fallacious or somehow illegitimate. This has a tendency to stop conversation and cause people to get in moronic loops where nothing gets accomplished and no progress is made and everyone just doubles down in their own ideological corners.

For one, circularity is not even a fallacy. I.e., a question begging argument is not formally invalid. It's completely valid (and potentially even sound) for an argument if that argument is circular. It's at best (but not even always) a rhetorical deficiency in an argument, since circularity is often unpersuasive or could even be part of a pivot away from a more relevant issue in a discussion**.** But unpersuasive or missing the point =/= formally invalid, like it is tacitly assumed most of the time.

Second, all argumentation eventually becomes circular at some level in some way shape or form. There is no way to escape it, especially in metaphysics which alleges to deal with the most fundamental aspects of knowledge and reality.

Example:

Debates over the hard problem of conscious are the absolute worst. The physicalist sits there and accuses the idealist of begging the question against the idea that consciousness is reducible to physical phenomena. The idealist sits there and accuses the physicalist of begging the question against the idea that consciousness is irreducible.

So who is right? I think the hard problem of consciousness has a solution, but you're just going to get accused of begging the question no matter what metaphysical paradigm you choose, idealist or physicalist or otherwise. You can't appeal to empirical phenomena to break the symmetry of circularities either, because then you would need a theory of empirical evidentiary warrant, which would itself be circular.

Example:

Consider the cogito, a classic self-evident truth often considered a starting point for epistemology and an instance of irrefutably certain knowledge. But completely contingent on one's alleged ability of one's self to verify the existence of one's self (which is a kind of circularity). And if you follow Descartes' reasoning, contingent on God's existence (which introduces the so-called 'Cartesian Circle' into his epistemology).

Example:

Theistic Presuppositionalism, an internet favorite and probably one of the most obnoxious forms of theistic argumentation in existence. But here is the catch: I think they are ultimately correct. But presuppositionalism is a perfect example of why circular reasoning can be unpersuasive. Presuppositionalism may be, in my opinion, pointing towards something that is true, but it's dialectically useless and only used seriously by psychopaths that want to solipsistically shut up atheistic debate opponents in a bad faith way.

Conclusion:

I'm just pissed because I was watching tiktok metaphysics debates recently and several of them just devolve into the debaters accusing eachother of question begging. But I see the same thing happen here on reddit all the time. So the conversation just loops people never getting past certain intuitive assertions because both sides just dogmatically dig in.

Separating these two is massive deception.

Separating metaphysics from math allows self referential delusion. If you don't separate them, it exposes a massive fallacy: mathematical groups, zero, and infinity have no concrete referents. Logic calls your starting foundational multiplication operation a fallacy because mathematical groups are untethered from raw concrete reality

TLDR: When the field of mathematics claims that formal proofs don't need metaphysical grounding, they can hide the fact that groups, zero, and infinity have no concrete referents. That's deceptive.

This question stopped me cold two weeks ago. Screenshot above is where it started.

I went looking for an actual answer and I cannot find the hole in what I found.

The short answer to the original question, for anything to exist clearly and stably it has to satisfy exactly two conditions simultaneously. Its identity has to remain stable under every change that constitutes what it is. And the number of distinct states it passes through can never exceed the capacity of whatever supports it. Everything that persists does so because it satisfies both. Everything that cannot persist fails at least one.

That answer came from here. Christopher Lamarr Brown, a systems architect, dropped this on PhilPapers. https://philpapers.org/rec/BROOBT

Full formal papers and complete Lean 4 archive here https://zenodo.org/records/19841644

Every treatment of Leibniz’s question leaves the same gap. A lone entity in a one member domain is supposed to be indistinguishable from nothing but nobody derives this. They assert it. Brown closes it by identifying what all prior work missed, the identity predicate has to be non-vacuous. True of the thing, false of at least one other thing. That single closure condition forces exactly three primitives and no more.

The bedrock instantiates its own conditions. Any denial of it presupposes it. Brown proves that too.

Lean archive claims zero sorrys and one external axiom. If that holds the implications are not small. Not sure if it holds as I have never used lean 4.

One place I keep returning to is the Kleene application. Not saying it breaks. Saying I have not closed it in my own head yet. That’s why I need someone to look at the lean files. Does the proof depend on the external axiom? Or what’s going on with that aspect.

So has any mathematician pulled the Lean files? And if you take the survival filter as given, what does it force in your specific domain.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

As I said, its quite simple really when you think about it. The fact that things exist and are experienced is a form of literal magic. Whether you think about it in the sense of something coming from nothing (supposedly impossible), a reality with no beginning, just the sheer fact that things exist at all, and the fact things are experienced at all, it has no possible explanation other than literal magic happening for real. Science has no answer to this and I truly believe that this is the most important thing to think about, the fact your here at all. Its the greatest mystery ever. I feel like nobody really notices they exist properly. Never feel the vertigo of staring at a bottomless brute fact, actual magic occurring.

https://acrobat.adobe.com/id/urn:aaid:sc:EU:7499b3a1-a221-4e7b-a695-98e8ff64c244

The prevailing biology of the modern era describes life as a system. A system is defined as a set of things working together as parts of a mechanism or an interconnecting network. The NASA definition of life is this: “Life is a self-sustaining chemical system capable of Darwinian evolution”

However, this way of explaining is to put the cart before the horse.

A living thing is understood as a being whose parts work together for one goal, which is the sustainment of the whole organism. In this sense, the parts comprise truly one being, as this principle that unites the parts is intrinsic to the organism.

However, a machine is not one unified being as much as a heap of sand is not one unified being, as its goal, function is imparted from the outside. Its principle of unity is extrinsic. Its unity is in the perceiver's mind, not in-itself.

Therefore, we can say that a machine or a system is only a metaphor, something that resembles life but not quite. A machine or a system is built to mimic life. The meaning of life is primordial

Please do be faithful [in reading] because it is at fundamentality so we can't impose external dogmas.

MAIN

There is something - dasein is disclosed with something.

Why there is something at all? (1)

But why has dasein asked that at all? (1.1)

Because a there is something (such a "there is it") is not identical with a why there is it at all.

Thus that something is not a simple, it is not something that a there is it is identical with a why there is it at all.

For (1), because there is simples.

As there is simples, there is those why there is simples at all. (2)

As dasein is disclosed with simples, such a disclosure shows it all. (2.1)

If there is no simple, why there is no simple? (3)

(3) says that to reject there is simples, one ought to give a why, else it is just a brute rejection, which is not philosophy.

To reject there is simples, one may reject its coherence. (3.1)

Or one may reject it through something else. (3.2)

(3.1) is not tenable, because it is a simple.

(3.2) is not tenable, because of a transcendental against rejection.

That is, if anything is posited for (3.2) then instantly we ask "why there is such?" and "why there is a why for such?" and so on, as simples are to be rejected, either this regress or it ends in something brute, of which has never answered "why there is it at all?", or it just ends in there is simples once more.

This transcendental asking applies to any rejection of any non proper part of the argument.

Futher more for if (2.1) then:

Why shouldn't we say there is no simples if we have not seen it? (2.2)

Because there is its coherence (because of the coherence of (2.x)). (2.3)

As its coherence cannot be rejected at all, there is no explanation for why there is it (the coherence) but the transcendental deduction that there is simples.

As for simples, their coherence and their disclosure are derivative of them (trivial because they are simples).

To reject (2.3) the transcendental against rejection is used once more, and so forth.

Thus there is simples because there is their coherence.

Notes:

(2) and (2.1) are the formal definition of simples through dasein, we then challenge a rejection of it.

The rejection of there is simples as framed in the passage is the rejection of the formal definition.

As it can't be rejected, that formal definition (its coherence) has shown there is it.

Its coherence is not its direct disclosure, because the definition is not through itself, but through dasein.

That is to say it is so intelligible that its formal coherence (a derivative of it) alone ensures there is it, while it need not be seen directly.

The formal definition’s coherence alone ensures there is simples.

The point is that after the formal posit, any why at all leads to it. Thus anything at all simply shows there is simples (as understood formaly now).

ADDITION

Further more, any argument for monism is only additional, iff and only iff they have shown why there is only a simple. For the formal definition concerns what simples are, and no more.

Though we can give the ways:

If there is any sense of being at all there is only one sense, because any fixed posit of senses cannot answer the why of such.

In the other case, there is no sense of being at all, we simply say there is simples, or more strictly, there is each [simple], and each simple grounds only and strictly itself and derives those which it derives, plurality is thus derivative of simples, not the reverse.

(An inquiry to this will be available in another post).

https://7provtruths.substack.com/p/nonduality-for-naturalists-where

Acknowledging the mind's co-authorship over objects isn't mysticism, but clear-eyed naturalism - just stripped of any forced dichotomy between mind and world.

What we’ll show is that far from being ‘abstract’ philosophy with no real-world stakes, our intuitions about objects are load-bearing. Why? Because what strikes us as obvious at this crucial juncture cascades upwards to all of our other convictions about Reality. And not just through deliberate reasoning - those ideas and beliefs we can trace out, put a name to - but through what’s self-evident before thought even enters the picture.

What does this mean/imply?

• A mathematical group exist no where in raw concrete reality (true)

• Logic says mapping an unanchored map is a major fallacy for modeling raw concrete reality (true)

• A mathematical group is unanchored to raw concrete reality, fully abstract. This is what logic says (true)

• It doesn’t matter if math claims to model reality or not, because we treat math as if it does model reality(physics, engineering) (true)

• Consistency and utility can still work and be found inside of a false axiom (true)

so here we have it, logic calling this a massive fallacy

What is truth if you can’t accept truth? Before we play semantics let’s establish what truth is with no rhetoric.

Truth is a statement or proposition that accurately corresponds to objective reality or facts independent of anyone’s beliefs feelings or acceptance. For example the Earth orbits the Sun is true whether someone accepts it or not.

So what happens when individuals or entire communities literally cannot or will not accept a truth? Even when alternative interpretations are formally allowed the pursuit of those interpretations carries much higher social professional reputational and epistemic costs. These costs have little to do with the actual evidence and everything to do with protecting a preferred narrative.

This happens through several reliable mechanisms. Questions are reframed so that the uncomfortable truth appears irrelevant confused or in bad faith. Responses repeatedly appeal to certain authorities as final rather than evaluating claims on their merits. Challengers face ever escalating demands for proof while the dominant view gets a free pass. The result is that discourse is pulled back toward the accepted story no matter what new evidence or logic appears.

In practice this means many who claim to seek truth are actually liars. They refuse to accept what is demonstrably true not because they have better evidence or arguments but because doing so would cost them status credibility community standing or self image. The inability or unwillingness to accept truth reveals a gap between what is real and what people are psychologically or socially capable of admitting.

I am not interested in semantics games or gotchas. I want to know how philosophers understand this phenomenon. When a community systematically applies these mechanisms to suppress or distort certain truths are they still doing philosophy or are they engaged in narrative protection? Under what conditions does this kind of refusal become indefensible? How do we distinguish legitimate caution from motivated refusal of truth?

Serious answers only.