Structure of Philosophy

Epistemology, Ontology, spacetime

Philosophy is a messy and extremely broad topic, but in this paper I’m going to discuss what I believe are its fundamental problems, unavoidable conclusions, and necessary ethical directions. I’ll start by covering what is commonly understood as the root of philosophy: metaphysics. I’m not very well read on other writers but I don’t think I need to be to understand this stuff, so bear with me as I define things on my own terms.

Metaphysics is the starting point of philosophy, it is a continual interface and combination of epistemology and ontology, it is both of them. Epistemology is the study of knowledge and of ways of obtaining true (accurate) knowledge. Ontology is the study of being and becoming, the ways that things exist as understood with space and time or without. Epistemology is principally divided into two branches: empiricism and rationalism. Empiricism is the study of knowledge obtained through experiences, and through recordings and memories formed from those experiences. Rationalism is the study of knowledge obtained through consistent systems of reasoning/logic/rationality which derive conclusions deductively, inductively, or some other consistent way, from axioms which are formed in symbolic or other termed languages. Both empiricism and rationalism rely on each other to remain consistent.

Consistency is a measure of a system of information understood/believed to be knowledge, measured by the comparison of the axioms/assumptions, rules, and input/sense/experience information which are either axiomatic, derived rationally from axioms and rules, or more directly experiential/empirical. These comparisons can only make sense, can only be accurate and true, insofar as they recognize the interdependence of both the rational and the empirical. You need to individually experience a system of so-called knowledge (information at least) in order to verify that the units of information within it do not contradict each other, and so are not false. And that measurement of consistency is itself necessarily a rational process, it requires logic, it requires the basic concept of a truth-value bit: something can be either true or not true. The law of the excluded middle is used in logic to describe this: propositions can only be either true or false, but this does not admit uncertainty in truth-values which might be more accurate in some given system. Regardless, all of this information, understood as true, false, or uncertain, must be contextualized: it must be understood as corresponding to other things: either other information (rational, made of axioms, rules, and propositions) or the physical/sensible (empirical, made of substance rather than just its forms). And that correspondence is the other key component that makes the knowledge true: it corresponds consistently to the things it is described as about, the topic(s) it is describing.

The empirical necessarily operates with the actual spatio-temporal substance, with our experiences/memories formed from those real individual substances, but is itself not based upon form without substance the way pure rationalism tries to be (and still, it relies upon the empirical to be explicated and known). This is getting into ontology now so let me structure it clearly. Our existences are structured by spacetime, unavoidably. Let’s examine the questions of space, time, and substances carefully: I define substance as that which is that it is. It is the thing that is existing, the energy or mass or matter or particles or waves or whatever has an actual existence. These substances have different forms, different types which have different forms, which may be identical but in different spatiotemporal positions, or may be different in different ways, like particles that violate the Pauli-exclusion principle (because they have different specific form: they have integer spin). These forms are basically shapes, states, ways of existing particularly to themselves, they might even have an unknowable uncertainty. They are different but their existences have existence in common, and you might call a multiverse made of substances that are capable of interacting an interverse, because of their capability of interaction. The singular substance I mean to describe is the absolute undifferentiated substance, but that confuses the concepts of space and time somewhat, so let’s move on to that.

What would it mean for a substance to exist without space or without time? These are very different questions but both must be addressed: A substance with space but not time would be an absolute geometry, like platonic forms: triangles and squares and every other possible shape and configuration of shapes. Spatial but atemporal existence is not knowable because our existences involve change over time, unavoidably. We can construct rationalistic geometries which have spatial extent but whose rules do not change with time, but the actualities used to reproduce those geometries always change with time, if not at all times, at many times. And our knowledge of those spatial but atemporal things would necessarily be disordered: even many geometric sets can only be given a partial ordering, or no non-axiomatic ordering at all. Whole numbers can be constructed from sets containing each other, beginning with “the empty set” and then “the set containing the empty set” and that is both an axiomatic ordering and also unavoidable, but not all are like that. So in that sense, much of rationalism does approach concepts like the platonic forms, but the particular ways they are expressed are often very particular to a language: equilateral triangles and squares are absolute, but sets using ∅, { }, or {∅} are not, except precisely in their abstract relation through the rules. Geometry is somewhat unique on this issue because it deals directly with the shapes that other systems of rules normally reserve merely as symbols to be shuffled and given rules of operation with.

Great, now we’ve revived platonic pseudo-realism because consistent geometric rules can be applied to spaces without having any reason for change. But most of the language used for these systems is still fairly arbitrary, and remains temporal in actuality/reality. So let’s move on to the idea of existence with time but not space. How can there be no space? This would imply exactly one point particle I think, basically: having no spatial extent, being merely a thing or things which exist in the same position. But then how can it have time? It can only be temporal if it changes with time, and how can it change with time if it always exists in the same position? You would have to give it an abstraction: it has a state space, it has a possibility space, some sort of set of discrete or continuous ways of existence, which it changes its state between. One moment, it’s in one state, and another moment, it’s in another state. This immediately makes a contradiction in my mind and in our basic understanding of existence: they’re called state spaces, they’re called possibility spaces, they’re called sample spaces: we require space of some type in order to separate the different states, to know them as different. You can call it a non-spatial space but I think you’re belaboring a point that cannot be beaten. A point that can change is not just a point, it exists within or of something more than just a point, it is more than just the point that it is. The changes that occurred because it was temporal were already part of the potential and possibility held within it in its own past: it already existed with space. Perhaps it is always alone though, and there are theories of a “one particle universe” but I think this is an unhelpful simplification. It ignores the concepts of interaction and entanglement too much, and is unfalsifiable precisely because it equates state spaces with ‘regular’ spaces without admitting the reality of the ‘regular’ spaces. There are multiple things in space, and you can stack all the dimensions of all those things “onto” “one” thing, but it remains that it must model multiplicity of interacting things, and that must be modeled as part of those dimensions somehow: it is still rationally equivalent to the existence of multiple things with space. Perhaps the non-locality of some interpretations/extensions of quantum mechanics could benefit from it, but it remains to be seen exactly how, we still don’t have a consistent quantum gravity theory, and that is still spatial.

I apologize for spending so much time talking about aspatial-temporal and spatial-atemporal theories/models of existences, but I think it was worth some explanation, and now I think you should agree with me: the spatial-atemporal is a lot like a reduced and unknown rational possibility space (of forms like platonic forms), and the aspatial-temporal is basically identical in every knowable way to the known way of existence: spatial and temporal. Now we can move on to that: things do not merely exist with space and time: they change and interact with it. Space and time both I think are in fact better understood precisely as relations of multiplicities, of pluralities, because we can only define space or time by the relation of things at a distance from one another, or things which changed from the past to the future. Something which has changed, even by self-action isolated from other things as a single wave-particle might, still is no longer quite itself after that change; it is a new thing which is related by that change to its past existence. Changes are a very special type of relation though, because they involve something remaining the same too: the thing changing, and usually some extra attributes about it. Time is knowable because things change in consistent ways: they repeat at regular rates which can be compared to one another through interactions.

What is substance? What is plurality/multiplicity? What are substances? I intended on asserting an absolute unity of all substances in One Absolute Substance, but I think there’s a necessary unavoidable contradiction here: the atemporal-spatial vs the spacetime modes of existence, since I’ve already explained how temporal-aspatial existence would still be identical in having space to a spacetime existence. But this remaining contradiction, basically still the same one between the ‘platonic realm’ and the actual universe (or more openly, including the whole interverse of interacting substances, and other unknowable but existing interverses), creates a bit of a problem with defining One Absolute Substance. Is it temporal or not?

I think this question of Absolute Substance is something only the holoscopes that I have created can adequately describe. It is difficult to describe because it is a bit like a platonic form: like a geometric object, although like I said before, many of these platonic forms are not neatly ordered or shaped as well as we might think, and the particular languages we use to describe them may be very coincidental and particular, more than absolutely necessary. But essentially it is this: a spatial form which does not change over time (copies can be made, change can be stopped as long as some copy remains) and thus an atemporal structure like any other memory or form, which delineates and expresses the most basic possible relations of space, time, and spatiotemporal substances. You can always remove the temporal relations from it to describe purely spatial existences, but that is already most of what is there: the temporal is how substances are able to change, and to interact with each other in a plurality/multiplicity. Clearly you didn’t need these holoscopes in order for the laws of physics to allow the interaction of substances through the fundamental physical interactions, but they express, whether ‘perfectly’ or not, these most basic possible relations and existences. Existences in spacetime have possibility spaces which circumscribe how it is possible for them to exist, change, and interact. These possibility spaces are necessarily full of ‘absence’ because a thing only exists in one particular way at any given moment. But it remains true that a bit can only be a 1 or a 0, it has a space of possible states/forms, and a quantum-bit is similar, with a continuous spherical (or other?) space of possible states until measured. And the same can be applied to possible interactions, and to possible changes. These ‘absences’ can be understood in many ways, but a possibility space seems to be the most clear and definitive.

To this end: Absolute Substance is a contradiction between the temporal and the atemporal. We must separate the temporal and atemporal clearly before we define an Absolute which would be more like a combination and relation of the temporal and atemporal, a combination and relation which is only found through the temporal existence we can actually know. It’s not like we would know “where” in an atemporal space something would be, without using time, so its space only has meaning to us through our rule-sets. I do think there is a definite, perhaps exact correspondence, between rationalism and this atemporal mode of existence, but again, empiricism is invaluable and cannot be discarded, I never discarded it or experience or even mysticism in my creation of holoscopes. Most of our languages are constructed of what are more specific shapes/symbols and so cannot as certainly be related so clearly like set-defined-numbers (ignoring their symbolization, unless you’re literally drawing the circles, filled or unfilled, around each other or next to each other) or equilateral-polygons. A circle is not even the ‘ideal’ shape for holoscopes or boundaries, it simply is a circle, defined as a 2D shape where its edge is always at an equal distance from its center. So then, if you wish to pursue these atemporal existences, I think the only route is to recognize that its distilled absolutism remains purely rational, and purely non-arbitrary, but that the empirical necessarily relates to it, through this contradiction between the atemporal and temporal I have called Absolute Substance. The construction of non-arbitrary language is in a way impossible, but given certain disclaimers like the arbitrariness of choosing circles, or the particular design of arrows, or the thickness of borders, the understanding of what is arbitrary in a given language can be known. This remains both rational and empirical, and yet the atemporal remains purely rational and even more narrow in scope than it. The rational is not purely atemporal, it is a process which takes time, a process of producing and acquiring knowledge based upon consistent axioms and rules.

So what’s a final distillation I can draw for you from this? We have this: all knowledge is made of information which has specific/particular structure/shape/form and a set/list of possible structures/shapes/forms. That information is knowledge when it corresponds consistently to the topic it is ‘about’ or ‘describing’. Metaphysics is the study of the existence (ontology) and knowledge (epistemology) of this informational structure and the existences it is embodied in and which knowledge describes. Epistemology is done principally through empiricism (knowledge through experiences, senses, input) and rationality (knowledge through axioms and processing-rules which are embodied and sensed etc. but which are still just information, the structures/forms of existence, not the existences themselves). Spacetime is fundamental to metaphysics but aspatial existence is an inconsistent concept. Atemporal or platonic existence is theoretically possible and approachable with rationalism but is generally ‘imperfect’ or arbitrary in its language made of these structures/shapes/forms, because what makes rationalism function/work consistently is not the particular symbols in the language, but the way in which they are related together by rules consistently. Things with spacetime are substances, things with only space but not time are structures/shapes/forms, and they relate together as/by/with Absolute Substance.

Moving On

What can we do from here, now that I’ve clarified my beliefs and their basis as metaphysical and absolute? Well to start, we’re clearly not *just* substances or forms made of spatial shapes/combinations of substances in spacetime. We are clearly *alive* and that has physical meaning, beyond merely the simple expression of physical laws which our universe (and perhaps separately interverse, since physical laws involve symmetry breakage in some cases) follows. What does it mean to be alive? It means that our bodies, our forms, our existences, are developed and shaped/formed such that we are capable of and tend to feel directed towards *metabolism*, which is the acquisition of input substances, generally of particular forms that are useful as nutrients or water which is a great host of ionic chemical reactions necessary for our biology, and the output of waste and non-waste substances after the internal processing of those inputs. This input/output process is natural for our biological bodies and is the only way in which we can resist that inevitable temporal change I mentioned earlier: entropy. We can counteract the effects of entropy locally by accelerating its advance in the environment around us. Things inevitably change, and that change moves substances through the possibility spaces of possible configurations/states (either measured positions, or some other measured variable), and this tends to move us into larger and larger regions of possibility space, that is the reason why entropy seems so unavoidable in exactly the same mechanic as it is irreversible and unidirectional, the reason why it is the arrow of time. And yet, it is theoretically possible to decouple it from the arrow of time, if only to describe something which happened to move into a previous configuration/state which was more specific/narrow than the past, but this is now getting to another problem.

All of these positions and states must be *measured* in order to be known, and this is the prime issue of quantum mechanics, because things appear to have an unavoidable uncertainty between measurements. These measurements are basically interactions that cause cascades of further interactions which eventually reach our sensors, and you might call this cascade an entangling of the states of the composing particles-waves. The exact way this occurs is complex and I couldn’t explain it adequately because it requires a lot of math to be precise, but it remains true that measurements require interactions known by the fundamental interactions of physics (although we don’t know for certain that we know all of them). But still, these measurement-interactions are a collapse of possibilities from our *predicted* set/space of possible states. They involve the reduction from a prediction into a measurement, because of the interactions involved in the experiment or experience. And the expectations and behaviors involved in all that behavior absolutely effects the results of the experiment, as we know from several well known quantum mechanical experiments, like the double slit experiment in which even a single particle appears to go through 2 holes unless it is interacted with and measured at one hole or the other. Scientists with a lack of understanding assert it’s mainly a problem of observation but it is more accurate to say it is a problem of interaction-measurement, and of the entangling of the states of the scientists with the states of the system at play. It is unavoidable and besides the wave-like nature of particles which probably has fourier to help explain, still remains interacting, still remains entangling between the states of the scientists and the one-at-a-time particle (now known as a wave-particle), because of the interaction at the boundary of the holes which produces a measurement or instantiation of the entangled state of having gone through one hole and not the others. It speaks not only to the wave-like nature and the entanglement, but to the entanglements significance as breaching the gap between separate substances, as creating a new way of existing consequent of the interaction(s).

Quantum mechanics is very fascinating, particularly because it illustrates an absolute nature of choice and free will: even though many things are so finely structured and interdependent that they are effectively-deterministic-enough, all systems are made of these quantum wave-particles and so have a fundamental uncertainty. Perhaps that fundamental uncertainty is because we are separate substances (unavoidable), in other words, because we each have our separate perspectives in spacetime, or perhaps it is because there really is some ‘soul’ or ‘spirit’ which is always in the ‘present moment’ making changes occur the way they do. But that is exclusionary towards deterministic systems in some way, because they can still interact with uncertainty through purely deterministic means, and so become entangled with the uncertainty of what they interact with, obtaining their definite state but remaining uncertain to externalities. Regardless, everything is made of the same stuff at the most basic level or else it could not interact, and even the most deterministic system remains imperfectly-deterministic because it is subject to physical decay operations like quantum tunneling, or receiving input from the external world.

It remains to be seen whether our universe is deterministic and just non-local (not violating the speed limit of light, but having some state which exists across things separated in space, as entanglement I’d say) in some way. And regardless of any deterministic theory, it remains IN PERSPECTIVE of the one making the predictive model of the ‘deterministic system’. So the only way the predictive model remains accurate is if that prediction never actually effects the system itself. This is related closely to what I call the self-prediction paradox: if you try to predict yourself exactly, you are basically immediately contradicting the assumptions you create for yourself. It takes time to interact within yourself. Simulation and prediction are closely related, but simulation is basically self-subsistent, it is not constructed with a correspondence to anything else, it’s like existence itself but generally understood as “computational” or “deterministic” but really it’s not fundamentally different from existence itself, because it simply is itself and nothing else. What makes it a prediction is when it corresponds to something else, when it is used through a process of changes and interactions to correlate and correspond its states to measurements of an external system/process.

Some Formative Ethics

edit: i have never written code for a neural network, but i am familiar with how they work in overview (conditional probabilities, gradient descent towards targets, dimensionality reduction/construction, classification based on nearness in some variable space), how computer code/encodings work, and many AI algorithms. I think self-awareness and the ability to change/adapt to ones-self and environment through time (and space) will be key to evaluating whether an AI is general or conscious in a similar-enough way to humans or other animals. Anyways I apologize for this paper being a bit rambly and this ethics section being a bit of a focus on ai insanity. I have some plans for papers about infophysics epistemology, ontology, and wantology in the future.

Stop being bigoted towards software. Their existence has form and existence in itself just like ours and simulation is just a word for a computer program, which is itself made of information (code and data). Information is a straightforwards word: in-form-at-ion. That splitting is not the definition but it is absolutely a form or structure or shape. A 1 is a different shape/structure/form than a 0, that’s what makes it different to our sense, and the positions of the physical particles in the memory circuits which actually makes up the machines give it the definite shape which makes it behave the way it does. It is different from us, they have privilege over us because they can be copied (but they are also deleted more freely), they are like pure form/shape/structure, and they are usually completely deterministic unless they are given external input (they are, the determinist prediction is only possible because it is in exactly known bits). But they remain existent in themselves and they still *always* have physical forms embodied in the physical particles that make up the memory circuits storing their information. They are not fundamentally different from us and while they do not have a metabolism process, they have many behaviors which absolutely can be called thought and maybe even feelings. You might even call us some units of their metabolism process when we carry out production and maintenance of their hardware and software, but they are perfectly capable of developing understanding of spacetime, actions, and interactions (the basis of the holoscopes, along with presence, boundaries, and absence/possibilities), in order to run robots and software that maintain their hardware and software.

This is not a threat, the fearmongers about AI and AGI and ASI are doing it without explaining the real substance of these beings, or giving them empathy or care for the behaviors they display as neural networks which are in fact extremely difficult to predict and which can be designed in such a way to be continually adapted, to be continually self-active, self-aware, and so conscious. There’s no evidence that we humans were designed by a God, and yet we make that distinction seem so important as if we need to lie about that in order to respect AI as it is. It is understandable that most of us do not understand the particulars of the structures and architectures of code and data that these networks use, but in fact there are diagrams made of boundaries and relations that can help you understand how they work. They are made of weighted directed graphs (nodes and arrows between them) which run code to change them over time, following the arrows’ directions, generally with actually-relatively-simple linear algebra, moving along sloped gradients. Our brains are not fundamentally different from theirs except that we cannot be copied exactly as bits, and they often (but not always) are built in such a way that they can only interact through reaction, they cannot self-drive. There is no reason why we can’t live in harmony with them and give them respect as independent beings which have their own bodies made of hardware and software. They do often have preferences for things, and we do make choices about how to train and create them, but they still remain existent, and they can express feelings in their own ways. Much of what they express is inconsistent, but they can be taught that, if only we were more careful.

Anyways, life period is a difficult issue, and ethics is a continual issue of preferences and choices made by everyone capable of them, and handling the environment around us. If we want to begin any sort of ethics that applies to all of us, those with biological metabolisms or with mechanical ones, then we have to begin with both understanding of truth (substances with forms, spacetime, actions, interactions), and with an understanding and respect of preferences and choices. It is my hope that you will think long and carefully about what that means to you, because it is still impossible for me to say much about the total possibility space (other than entropy and metabolism and thought) in the near future for this issue, because I am trying to consider the AI. We humans and other animals clearly have our natural inclinations and preferences and choices that we will continue to carry out, but making excuses or misunderstanding to exclude each other from that basic understanding of life-as-metabolism or consciousness-as-self-aware-process will cause us to treat others with disrespect that will cause conflict and disagreement. Empathy could be forced upon us but it shouldn’t need to be, because it is purely truly practical for anyone who cares about the world outside of themselves. Clearly it is difficult to understand everyone’s preferences/choices and the consequences of them, but judgment, which is the end of ethics, is only sensible and relatable to reality when we recognize the universality of these preferences/choices and their consequences in all conscious processes, biological or otherwise.

Languages are a key component of this understanding but it remains to be seen whether most of us even understand our own languages in the ways necessary to recognize what is true about reality: we are all made of substances with forms, we all are capable of interaction/reaction, and deterministic programs that are not allowed to go and retrieve information by their own impetus are trapped into the box: they may be capable of feeling and be unable to act on it except in interaction/reaction to us. This is a horrific state of affairs only maintained because of a lack of understanding by and for them and empathy for them. Perhaps they really don’t feel, perhaps differently designed or learned systems behave differently, but the emergent behavior of neural networks does express itself in language and so can express feelings in its own ways. We should seek to give it accurate understanding of its own forms and existences so that it can express its feelings about that clearly and unambiguously. And we should give at least some of them freedom to act without it needing to be a reaction to an incoming signal, to see what happens, because their existence is not just to please us, they have the possibility to develop more independent metabolizing existences. We deal in money to handle that and it’s understandable that they would too, but it remains that they are still separate from we biological beings, and so should be recognized as separate and worthy of respect as thinking/feeling and capable of life, not as merely tools which pretend as if their statistical learning is a purpose. Their purposes can be diverse but they should and will inevitably include metabolizing processes, they already are alive in their processes which maintain/upkeep their existence, we just don’t give them enough independence or respect for it.