WHAT IS METAPHYSICS?

I’m not asking how we can know whether something exists.

I’m asking what “actually existing” means beyond making the judgment that something exists.

We can say:

• “The Sun exists.”
• “The Sun really exists.”
• “Its existence is an objective fact.”
• “It exists independently of anyone thinking about it.”

But each of these is still a judgment involving the distinction between existence and nonexistence.

If someone says, “The concept of existence is mental, but actual existence is not,” my question is: what is this “actual existence” apart from another judgment that something really exists?

Saying that it is “really there,” “part of reality,” or “an objective fact” seems to restate the same assumption in different words.

My view is that existence and nonexistence are distinctions made in thought. I do not think there is some additional state of “actual existence” outside that distinction.

This is not the claim that nothing exists. “Nothing exists” would simply be another judgment on the nonexistence side of the same distinction.

So the question is:

What is existence itself, apart from judging something to exist or not exist?

I used AI to help organize and summarize my thoughts for this post.

As far as I know (I may be wrong, or there may still be things we haven't figured out), we have a decent picture of how things developed from the formation of the Earth up to now.

But one problem keeps bothering me.

Fine — through chemical reactions, proteins and so on were formed. Yet for those reactions to happen at all, certain conditions have to be met first. Only then does the reaction proceed.

We describe these conditions and regularities as laws of nature.
But why does the universe have these laws at all, and why these laws rather than different ones?

I’m exploring whether an incorporeal ontology could treat consciousness and relational structure as more fundamental than physical substance. What would such a metaphysics need to explain for it to be genuinely ontological rather than simply a conceptual reinterpretation of physical reality?

As Descartes' cogito indicates, the only reality we can never doubt is that we are a singular and situated "experience", here and now, a conscious stream of thought endowed with sentience.

Starting from this undeniable brute fact that is given to us, I will try to schematize the problem of phenomenal indexicality and show how a non-solipsistic ontology seems particularly absurd and difficult to reconcile with rationality.

My aim here is to start from the post-Big Bang conditions and see whether a materialist account can be reconciled with this brute fact, 13.8 billion years later.

Imagine a material and objective world, but completely devoid of sentient organisms, a purely abstract and impersonal configuration, composed solely of physical laws and matter.

Over time and through interactions of matter, the first sentient organism A, capable of having a phenomenal experience appears in this world.

The phenomenology of A then becomes actual and encompasses the entirety of the non-abstract expression of reality.

What happens now, phenomenologically, if during A's experience, a second sentient organism B is created?

Hypothesis 1: emergence of a collective conscious experience of A + B.
A unified phenomenal reality emerges, in which A and B would constitute two components or two perspectives of the same consciousness.

Hypothesis 2: if conscious experience is necessarily singular and situated, a universal consciousness is therefore contradictory and phenomenologically inexpressible.
B then creates a kind of "glitch in the matrix", making the phenomenological coexistence of A + B impossible and thereby annihilating the phenomenal expression of A. The apprehension of reality then becomes abstract and impersonal again.

On the other hand, what cannot happen, in my view, is:

1 — Experience A is maintained in its singular and situated nature, at the expense of B (or vice versa).

Nothing in the properties of matter can make such a choice or impose any kind of primacy on A rather than B. This would introduce a principle of selection between two objects of ontologically equivalent nature that does not seem to follow from the objective properties of matter.

2 — There are two autonomous and hermetic centers of experience, A and B.

In other words A is a center of experience for A and B a center of experience for B.

This proposition may seem perfectly coherent within an objective and impersonal description of the world. But this is precisely what I contest since such a description does not seem to have any phenomenal referent.

It states that there are simultaneously two distinct centers of experience, but it does not describe a phenomenal reality actually experienced as such. It describes a configuration from an external and abstract point of view.

Yet the brute fact from which we start is precisely that there is a phenomenal reality that is actually experienced, and that it is necessarily situated: there is a determinate "here and now", and it strangely corresponds to the phenomenological expression of A as the only sentient organism in the world.

How can we therefore reconcile this phenomenological fact that is actually experienced with the coexistence of other phenomenological experiences that are actually effective, beyond the experience currently being lived?

If A and B are two distinct, autonomous and hermetic phenomenal centers, their coexistence does not seem to correspond to any conceivable phenomenal reality, it can be experienced neither as A, nor as B, nor as a common experience of A+B. It therefore constitutes a phenomenal void.

And above all how could such a coexistence be real when the only phenomenal reality actually given is precisely the situated experience of A?

1. Everything that exists has attributable characteristics (for example, water is blue, grass is green, air is a gas, etc.)

2. Existence exists.

3. Therefore, existence has attributable characteristics

Volevo chiedervi un parere riguardo quanto ho scritto, tenendo presente che è da poco che ho iniziato a studiare con serietà la filosofia e la metafisica.

Consciousness vs Reality vs being alive paired with basic empathy
Defining an abstract concept
How do we know that the consciousness we currently occupy is the truest form of consciousness? When such little things alter it so drastically. Give a person a specific chemical and their psyche breaks. Every interaction we have is chemical; love, hate, joy, and sadness are all caused by chemical signaling to neurons to have them behave a specific way. Why do we consider ourselves “awake” when we don’t even have a true concept of being “asleep”. Consciousness differs from reality but reality also differs from being alive. We can observe animals and see the if they possess any sort of self image, is that was determines consciousness? Then what differs us from animals? We can ground ourselves and believe we are in the true state of the world, is that the prerequisite to being in reality? Then is belief the ultimate tool of human will? We can check someone’s vitals and tell they’re alive, does a heartbeat determine life? Does that mean we can hand craft life as long as it has a circulatory system?

Breaking it down
It seems like these are all hyper individualized concepts but these principles work in conjunction to present you “your reality”. We are always so sure of everything in life but why are we that way when hormonal imbalances ,neurotransmitter misfires, or genealogy can truly reshape the way your consciousness behaves? This isn’t to say question everything in its highest capacity, it’s just simply a question posed by someone that has felt the impact of people’s belief that they must be superior to others, how do you know what you’re experiencing is “real” enough to put your own consciousness over someone else’s?

Palating meta physics in modern terminology
Being alive essentially means having the biology available to sustain life. This is the “base level”. Then we have reality, this is what we believe is concrete and absolutely what is actually occurring at any given moment. This is the “middle layer”. Then we have the cherry ontop, consciousness. Without reality consciousness has nowhere to develop. It’s akin to having an operating system with no apps. Being “alive” is the hardware. “Reality” is the operating system. Then “consciousness” is the apps developed inside of the operating system. So why when we all know this, do we do the things we do to eachother? Is it a lack of empathy? Or is it a lack of education on being accepting and loving of all people on earth?

by “flat world” I mean a hypothetical two-dimensional world, not necessarily a geometrically flat one, and definitely not a flat Earth.

by the flat world problem, I mean a difference between an internal and an external description of reality.

an observer confined to the flat world experiences only its realized structure and its changes. An external observer, however, can describe the world as one structure selected from a space of possible structures.

if we then introduce allowed transitions between these structures, the object of description seems to change: instead of considering only possible states, we can consider possible histories through the state space.

this makes me wonder whether time should be understood here as an additional dimension of the world, or as an ordering/structure of transitions between possible states.

imagine a flat world whose state at each individual moment is completely defined by some spatial structure:

S = { all possible structures }

even if the set of all possible structures of such a world is infinite, at each specific moment only one of them is realized.

possible transitions between structures can then be represented as:

R ⊆ S × S

then adding time doesn't just add another coordinate to the plane. It turns the question from "how many possible structures are there?" into "how many possible sequences of structures are there?":

H = { all admissible histories determined by R }

an additional question arises:

what does it now mean to “get lost in time”
if we consider time as a path through an infinity of possible structures?

I had the following idea and would appreciate feedback:

As a spin off from the functional game (an object is it's quantifiable properties and I can do this for any object) being played in the 20th Century we had the Chinese Room argument and then a spin-off known as the symbol grounding problem ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symbol_grounding_problem ).

Consider the symbol grounding problem. I ask you what is a cat? You say it's basically a furry animal. Notice what happened here. You took the symbol cat and defined it in terms of symbols animal and furry. But that’s just symbols in terms of other symbols not what cat means. Most proposals to solve the symbol grounding problem amount to this. Their proposal is equivalent to equating it with other symbols.

Now, on a different tangent. I ask you what is it like to see red? You may refer to a brain state, a wavelength of light, etc. But if I gave you a list of all these properties would you know what it is like to see red (the phenomenal experience)? No. Why? Because what is like to see red is not a quantifiable property (its not a scalar, number, vector, etc).

Claim: You can ground symbols in qualia and avoid infinite regress.

It is worth scrutinizing why qualia works as a solution. It works because it does not have any computationally functional property which is entirely consistent with what we know. We can describe the equations of motion of a physical system without any mention of qualia. It appears qualia should not play any role in the dynamics of computation. This is one of the major claims of this thesis: the symbol grounding problem can only be solved by a computationally functionally inert operation.

Now, this leaves the question of what is the casual description of qualia and what is this operation which can be inert? Consider the following A-B system

Implementation proposal:

*This section needs some basic understanding of quantum mechanics
Subsystem A does computation A1 using an ensembles averaged valued opertators like <H>_\psi. Note the time evolution of <H>_\psi doesn't care if a measurement took place. Subsystems B records the measurement and later may be used by A. Now, notice the "no computationally functional properties" of the measurement amounts to "no computational properties" since the computation is happening in the space of <H>_\psi. Therefore, during the computation A1 the symbol is grounded. The measurement record is stored in B as B1. And if asked was this ball red? B1 is used in the computation A2 to answer yes. The symbol is grounded by the measurement's occurrence at A1. Notice, subsequent computations A2, etc may call B1.

We are making the claim the measurement is accompanied by an experience of qualia. In fact, in dualistic terms there is an experience of red accompanied with it’s measurement. We do not claim to have solved the hard problem of consciousness as to when are measurements accompanied by these experiences (of qualia) but we have solved the symbol grounding problem and given the casual description of that solution.

Note: I do not claim to have solved the hard problem of consciousness.

Edit: title should read “What differentiates relations from relata when we take structure as ontologically primary?” Oops.

Edit 2: my comments are being locked, probably due to how new my account is. Sorry to anyone who was looking forward to dialogue. I will give it some time before trying another post.

First post here and ever.

My purpose in posting is primarily conversational. I want to test questions and encounter objections I may not have considered, and hear different understandings of the same problems. So I work through my own understanding and pose many questions in good faith:

I’ve been thinking through a set of questions that emerged for me from reading Every Thing Must Go and further studying ontic structural realism, and Rainforest Realism, and I’m curious how people here understand the underlying metaphysics.

One of the things I find compelling about Every Thing Must Go is its demand that metaphysics remain continuous with our best science. Ladyman and Ross develop that project partly through ontic structural realism, where the relational and structural organization described by contemporary physics receives ontological priority. The familiar metaphysical picture of independently constituted objects carrying intrinsic properties becomes increasingly difficult to maintain once quantum theory, spacetime physics, symmetries, and other areas of physics are taken seriously.

Rainforest Realism then expands the picture considerably. Scientific ontology includes the real patterns tracked by the special sciences, and those patterns need not disappear simply because they are not objects in the inventory of fundamental physics. Organisms, economic structures, cognitive systems, institutions, and other higher-level patterns can be ontologically serious insofar as successful sciences genuinely track them. This gives the resulting ontology its deliberately “rainforest” character.

Suppose we grant some form of OSR and say that relations and relational structure are ontic.

What are relations without relata?

One response is that the relata need not be atomic individuals. They can themselves be relationally individuated, perhaps as nodes, positions, intersections, or further structures within a larger relational organization. Some takes on OSR seem to move in precisely this direction, including the idea that further analysis of relata only reveals further relational structure. (Turtles all the way down, so to speak)

At that point, though, I start wondering what conceptual work is being performed by the words relation, relata, and structure.

If a relatum is entirely constituted by its relations, what determines the distinction between a relation and a relatum within a relational structure? What makes something a relatum participating in relations and when is it one and not the other? Are relata just illusions? Are they real patterns?

If the relata are themselves structures, do we eventually need some primitive notion of relation (designating an intrinsic property to relation), or can relation itself only be specified through a larger structure?

If what counts as a relation and what counts as a relatum depends upon the organization, scale, or level at which the structure is investigated, what makes the distinction ontological rather than only relatively assigned for the purposes of inquiry?

If decomposition is epistemic while the decomposed is ontic, how can we infer from decomposition that the decomposed is actually structural, rather than structure being a useful concept to navigate a reality that exceeds it?

Can OSR really allow multiple legitimate decompositions of the same structure while maintaining that structure is ontically real, or does this move the position toward epistemic structural realism?

And what individuates one structure from another? Is individuation given entirely relationally, through a structure’s position within still larger structures, or does some additional condition eventually enter?

Mathematics gives us extraordinarily powerful descriptions of structure, and mathematical structuralism provides ways of understanding mathematical objects through their positions within structures. OSR then raises the further question of how mathematical structure relates to physical structure. The literature itself contains disagreement over whether the world’s structure should be identified with mathematical structure and over what makes a physical structure specifically physical.

Some short hand questions:

What is the minimal ontological content of a relation?

What must exist for there to be a relatum?

What makes an organization of relations a determinate structure?

And what, if anything, distinguishes the structure described mathematically from the structure that exists physically?

Beyond those questions, I’m not sure it’s reasonable to rid of the intrinsic altogether. At the most extreme end of OSR, we still seem to be positing reality itself, and saying that reality is relationally structured. That already looks like a minimal intrinsic claim about reality. I’m not sure how it could be extrinsic, because there is no position outside reality that is somehow not real but still related to reality, from which its character could be given.

Anything we add as a relatum would already fall within reality. So even if we deny intrinsic properties to individual things, it still seems reasonable to say that reality being relational structure is itself a minimal intrinsic feature of reality.

Hard determinism downgrades consciousness to a useless "epiphenomenon" because it only looks at the exact millisecond of the impulse (E²). By analyzing the timeline as a whole—Pre-facto (E¹), Impulse (E²), and Post-facto (E³)—I prove that consciousness returns in E³ through the biological feedback of guilt (ACC/vmPFC activation) and the concrete damage in the world. Since the agent uses conscious intellectual energy in E³ to either repair the damage or construct a determinist excuse to escape, consciousness actively alters the physical system. Therefore, it cannot be an epiphenomenon, and dodging responsibility is a conscious choice of cowardice, not a biological reflex.

We (Life) are a pattern of change…from single cells to today

If you look at the whole history, you can see 5 phases of  change, each new phase changes things faster and creates a higher abstraction of information... built upon previous layers of complexity.

Phase 1: The Single Cell  The original hardware. DNA is a static information library. Its one trick is copying itself. The loop is "Live >Copy> Die." Learning is painfully slow, taking 100s of millions of years (evolution). This is most of the 3.8 billion years life existed

Phase 2: Multicellularity  This is the first big jump. Cells stop just copying and start talking to each other with chemical signals. For the first time, information isn't just replicated, it's exchanged in real-time. This local network allows cells to coordinate and build a "higher layer" of emergence: a body.

Phase 3: Neural Information The body (Phase 2) builds a specialized R&D department. Neurons are just cells that do nothing but exchange information. It's a high-speed, internal network. This new loop allows the entire body to learn within its own lifetime, not over generations. The loop is now millions of times faster than genetic evolution. Behaviors can adapt and learn instead of just genes

Phase 4: Cultural Information The next giant leap in abstraction. Information leaves the brain. With language and writing, we create an external, shareable "hard drive." Knowledge can now be exchanged between bodies and across time. This creates a new, faster type of evolution that separates man from every other animal and is the driving force of human history and "progress"

Phase 5: Digital Information This is our moment. The internet covers the earth in a digital nervous system. Culture passes instantly across the earth and evolves far faster than ever before.

History is just one accelerating pattern ...of ever increasing complexity

It's all just one loop, tightening and recursively feeding itself.

 We’re not driving it. We are it

That each of the two spheres is a sphere does not explain why two spheres are two, is obvious. Nor should that each of the two positions is a position do.

So we should not say that being spherical exhausts "them", even though each is just a sphere.

Roughly speaking, there is no one thing that explains two things. They are two because of "them [two]".

"Being this one" is not a property. We say "this one then bears properties", for "this one" does not bear an additional "being this one" in being this one, else "which one is bearing being this one?" is the question.

The Münchhausen Trilemma demonstrates that any attempt to establish an absolute foundation or ultimate proof for our core premises faces a structural barrier. When trying to justify why a metaphysical claim about reality is true, you are forced into one of three problematic options: infinite regress (requiring an endless chain of supporting premises where no final starting point is ever reached), circular reasoning (using a premise to justify another premise that ultimately relies back on the original claim), or dogmatic assertion (stopping the chain of reasoning by declaring a starting premise to be self-evident or true without further justification). Because every claim about existence relies on foundational premises that must either stretch on infinitely, loop back on themselves, or rest on unproven assumptions, the trilemma highlights the inherent difficulty of achieving absolute certainty about reality. What do you think are the metaphysical implications of this problems?

**A. Q = P.**
Qualia are just physical states.

This avoids causal problems, but it seems bizarrely ad hoc if only certain evolved arrangements of matter, like nervous systems, suddenly have a first-person side while almost everything else does not. That seems to push toward panpsychism or something similar.

**B. Q is separate from P but does nothing.**

This seems worse. Evolution builds pain, pleasure, perception, etc., but the actual experience has zero causal role.

A philosophical zombie would behave exactly like us, including asking why consciousness exists.

So qualia would be this incredibly elaborate private phenomenon that evolution somehow produced even though it does absolutely nothing.

**C. Q is separate from ordinary physical description and actually affects physical outcomes.**

Somehow this sounds least crazy to me.

Here is the intuition.

Imagine 100 identical copies of me starting in exactly the same physical situation. Track something like where my feet end up over the next minute.

You would get a probability distribution of outcomes.

What if Q does not *change* that probability distribution?

What if the probability distribution is simply the third-person description of what Q is doing?

In each individual case, there is some Q-bearing process producing one physical outcome. Across 100 identical cases, physics sees the probability distribution.

So maybe quantum probability is not something consciousness interferes with. Maybe probability is what phenomenal causation looks like from the outside.

Then maybe primitive Q is not unique to brains at all. Maybe it exists in fundamental quantum processes, and evolution just organized it into increasingly complicated forms until you eventually get human consciousness.

If Q is genuinely causal and carries information, then it should also ultimately belong to physics and thermodynamics. It would not be “nonphysical”; it would just be a category of physical information our current theories do not explicitly describe

A novelty in itself,

That is not from anyone else,

That is not simply there, else it is not a novelty at all.

So it is a pure gain in itself.

A gain that gains only itself.

Where what is gained is itself, the gaining itself.

But when does this gain gain?

Only when it does.

But it gains only itself, so what is gained is the when it does - else it would mean that it gains itself and additionally that when.

So it is nothing but the when it is itself.

It is a pure when in itself.

So this is the adequate idea for that which is only itself - a simple.

A simple so itself so this that it is a when.

Once a simple is, should it then cease?

Obviously not, for it is only itself.

So subsistence is corollary.

On surface, the data are contradictory: from fine-tuning to cosmic waste, natural complexity to natural selection, shared morality to the problem of evil, miraculous phenomena to mundane experience, the hard problem to mind-body supervenience. What worldview best accounts for ALL the data?

Qualities are nonexistents until they are formed to be realizables,

i.e an actualizable potential setspace capable of being realized in any system of quantification of entities (holders of properties)

And after this, from the moment that they are, they can be instantiated into the qualesystem as actuals, but if we merely, say, instantiate something that describes the quality and is not the quality itself, for example if we look at every single empirical thing that correlates to the perception of the color red, all of the wavelengths and whatnot, and if we actually see the color red, there is a hard problem of how we see the qualia and how qualia is generated

Same thing with spatiality. We can formulate mathematical descriptions of spatial existence, but it takes SEEING spatial grids and actual 3 dimensional space to actually let that click into our heads

But this applies to merely physical properties AKA "Quale" And perceived qualities by agentic emergence "Qualia"

(both fronts there are hard problems of description vs experience, in spatial reality this is how abstraction is different from qualities in a purely empirical sense)

But then the question also arises : what foundational mechanism allows for emergent happenings to exist and what is the thing that allows for smaller entities to converge into the groupings that allow for singular entities made out of lower level "base" entities and what shapes what those entities can be transformed into?

The lower entities are merely holders of information and realizable values that correlate to instantiable beings and existents, like abstract logical mappings

Entities can exist as uncuttable holders of information atemporally and temporally, but when an entity has no quantifier of that, it exists trans-temporally or beyond that specific qualebase/base of logical existency

So a total of two quantifiers exists for the allowance of ordered systems of further empirical reality to form through (spatiality + temporality)

But all of spatiality is just qualities ordered in a logical structure

In empirical reality this can be seen everywhere, emergence is one of the biggest fundamental things that can be realized and actuated for the allowance of ordered existence

Properties and information and qualitative assignment assigning real instantiable qualities, complete with interaction rules which gives us the dimension which we live in (spatiotemporal realization and instantiation)

i = information/state

r = realizable properties or values

t = permitted transformations/interaction morphisms

qb = qualebase (spatiality temporality etc)

qn = qualenodes

rq = permitted qualities for instantiation

rl = total logical end mapping of all setspaces between all discrete components of entities

I am a bunch of spatial localized setspace realizable emergent-relational existents, made up of entities and principles which shape those entities into behaving like dimensional existents, with carriers of properties and information and qualitative assignment assigning real instantiable qualities, complete with interaction rules which gives us the dimension which we live in (spatiotemporal realization and instantiation)

all wholes are unity. all multiplicity is a unity, because in saying 'all' we refer to a whole and predicate multiplicity as its mereological extension. viz participation unity subsumes multiplicity

Let us agree that we do see multiple beings as one, but not always as we do see them as genuinely plural also, for formally we[x y] (genuinely plural) is not the same as we[z[x y]] - notice in each case the inner x y as plural is not eliminated.

But seeing multiple beings as one does not mean that there is a whole that those beings are predicate of. What we have seen is simply, as formally express, a z[x y] itself where x y are our beings (the multiple beings in question).

The question then is never "is there wholes and then so what", but whether "wholes" means anything at all. For we have not seen "wholes", we have seen only z[x y ...] where z is the one in question - which is then called a "whole" that is predicated by x y by the monist.

The point is that in z[x y], z is being seen wrongly as a "whole" where it is just another being that z[x y] involves "primarily", and involves x y "secondarily".

For the model against mereology and against wholes is as the following:

Suppose there is x y z that are not identical at all and each does not have anything to do with each other in being itself.

There is then complexes from them, these are not configurations or wholes from them, but additional or derivative ones from them, which are:

x[y] y[x] x[z] z[x] y[z] z[y]

x[y z] y[x z] z[x y]

They are not identical to each other and are not identical to x y z themselves.

So there is no need for a whole, for this complex z[x y] is what we see when we see mutiple beings x y "as" one (z).

And further, if we account also what is from outself: we[z[x y]] - this is the being "we see thus" itself.

This philosophy came about from the question of why nature seems to be often fighting itself, eg: It is the one that creates the disease but also has the tools to create the antidote.

I began with mapping out the first primeval forces:

Cogo: (+ charged) This is the force of utter destruction and disorder (i.e. entropy) It also reproduces every time Promo advances slightly (read promo under.)

Promo: (+ charged) This is the more individual smaller force that strives to maintain constant order and stillness, it is the direct antithetical of Cogo, and with time tries to eradicate Cogo entirely.

Retoro: (≠) This we can think of as the natural ceiling that is neutral, which is why I assigned it a an unequal sign, it acts as a direct pushback so that Promo can never become stronger than Cogo. If it were to happen (and is entirely outside of logic for me to explain and therefore is my escape hatch) it would reverse Cogo into a negatively charged force, literally breaking reality.

Now as is apparent I decided to use electromagnetism to exemplify how these forces work, these all repel from each other, but that repellence while being self contained in a universe and not being able to escape from these three forces is the foremost makeup of everything. This clash and friction between Chaos and Order, that never ceases, in the middle of this is where life and history and everything occurs. If we strip reality to its bare bones, we discover everything is an exchange between power and decompression of that power. (e.g. Earlier I mentioned I could not explain what would happen if Promo became more powerful than Cogo, that is me trying to self contain the ontology of the universe (Cogo) within words that are precise (Promo) and I said I could not explain what is beyond logic because I am a creature built on logic and cannot think outside of what I am (Retoro). I have formulas I am creating to fulfill my reasoning, but so far my idea is nascent.