Metaphysics, Actually
A guide for metaphysicians and scientists, too.
Metaphysics is important. IMO, as ever. Though I wouldn’t have an opinion to begin with if it weren’t for the metaphysical. Nor an “I” from which to opine. Nor meaning. Nor language. I wouldn’t even have nothing. (All is lost if you don’t have a little bit of nothing to powder the edges of your somethings). Metaphysics is important. It’s the grounding for every category of thought, every domain of knowledge. Yet for even the bookish, “metaphysics” remains a crisp mush; a notion that rarely enjoys clarification because it seems to ooze clarification’s opposite—to be “metaphysical” is to be willfully obscure, to grope at “the mysteries” with poetic vagaries, to lick at them in stoned tongue. It’s the easiest of the intellectual sports to fake, and the quickest to annoy.
Over the past century or more, metaphysics has lent itself so readily to charlatanism that the very category “metaphysics” triggers real scientists (or anyone precious about their mortal time) to run. Or shoot. If you’re
, former chairman of the science-y , “Whenever anyone brings up metaphysics, I reach for my pistol”. Fair. But at the risk of being killed by Jim, that’s what I’m going to do. Actually, it was Jim who recently prodded me to lay out the basics of metaphysics on a google group we participate in—and the outline you’re about to read was my response.A disclaimer of neutrality. There are lots of well-intentioned thinkers out there who will tell you we “need” a “new metaphysics” because The Meaning Crisis! I personally wouldn’t trust such intentional white knighting. Intentional philosophies too easily find the means to ends they too eagerly imagine, sending them sliding the way of instrumental falsity. What I present here are more findings, less wishes, and as such may feel less convenient than the average metaphysical bear.
The following is my guide to metaphysics generally—I’ll be leaving my own freQ theoretical speculations out of this.
…The following is/isn’t format includes a bonus section with examples of dreaded category errors. This is wonk stuff, and probably only serious fun to those seriously inclined—but I’ll try (and probably fail) to pepper in some descriptive levity to ferry the less-inclined along…
If some of this stuff doesn’t click immediately, let it not click immediately!
Bathe and let ripen.
Metaphysics Is:
The study of absence as a condition of presence—how what is not (voids, gaps, negations) conditions what is1.
Example: You cannot tell a cheeseburger from a cheshire cat without there being a difference between them.
For a difference to exist between things, we must have 2 conditions met:
A “gap” or “void” between the two things and…
A “boundary” or “limit” that “constrains” each object unto itself, affording identifiability.
Keep in mind that “meta” = “between”.
The formation of difference and the dissolution of it:
How objects come to occupy unique schematic space.
Example: For a cheeseburger and a cheshire cat to appear different, they must occupy their own schematic (mental or categorical) spaces.
How objects cease to occupy unique schematic space or become absent.
Example: If a cheeseburger and a cheshire cat share the exact same schematic space, the difference between them vanishes, and they become one object. (A cheeseshiger? A catburger? Dunno. Not hungry enough).
The relationship between excess and absence.
Salience mapping.
How the presence of different objects is weighted. What is “more present” and why?
The study of given constraints:
Constraints are the most central concept to metaphysics and its most complex, endowing metaphysics with its infamous “opacity”. Here’s simple way to begin thinking about constraints at the highest metaphysical level…
Recall the common phrase “necessity is the mother of invention”.
Remember that a “new invention” has its own distinct identity—its own “difference”.
Example: You are cooking a meal but you’re missing a number of the required ingredients. Your are constrained by what you have available to you—so you have to improvise a new recipe which yields a dish which is different than the original dish. Your constraints have facilitated a betweenness; a gap between the original dish and the newly invented dish.
Metaphysics is the study of constraints that facilitate difference generally—differences of identity, invention, food, art, technology, consciousness, experience, etc., sure… But more importantly, the study of difference as such.
The study of constraints as such; how constraints between presence and absence arise, persist, interact, and shape existence at the most fundamental levels:
The ways in which constraints organize systemic interiority (how a system self-relates) and external relationality (how a system interacts with its environment).
The study of Saturation, Dissipation, Excess, and Absence.
The formation and relational constitution of interiors (interiority).
The formation and relational constitution of exteriors (exteriority).
How constraints function across different scales—how micro-level constraints (such as thermodynamic limitations) structure macro-level phenomena (such as self-organization in living systems).
The study of object-specific constraints; the effect of a given constraint on a system's interiority and its set of external relations, etc..
The behavior of constraints as an expression of interiority: membranics2.
Study of boundary formation as a function of an embedded constraint on self-organization (autocatalytic saturation, excess, etc.).
The life of membranes; the active role of membranic necessity, negentropy, and order formation as fundamental to a structuring of reality - as opposed to membranic contingency or physical determinism.
Study of membrane formation within a boundary.
Study of identification and difference as a function of boundary formation.
Metaphysics is the study of relation as such:
The study of betweeness as the study of relation.
How the gaps between constrained objects (relata) afford relation.
How the production of gaps produce relation.
How the collapse of gaps collapse of relation.
The constraints of phenomenology and consciousness.
The extent to which constraints are mediated by the limits of human phenomenology, shaping what can and cannot appear as reality.
The production of intelligibility—how constraints define what can be thought, perceived, or expressed.
The constraints that afford phenomenology and consciousness.
The production of conscious interiors.
The interior’s experience of exteriority.
The production of qualitative experience.
Study of the ontological ordering effect of constraints.
The conditions under which informational constraints generate ontology itself.
The distinction between ontological necessity and ontological contingency—whether constraints are given or if different configurations of constraints could produce alternative ontologies.
The genesis of physical lawfulness—not what physical laws are, but how lawfulness as a structuring principle comes to be.
Metaphysics Isn’t:
Questions of empirical fact—e.g., whether dark matter exists or whether the gravitational constant changes over time.
Scientific efforts to describe universal laws rather than question their basis in constraint formation.
The mechanics of how physical laws operate rather than the metaphysical status of lawfulness itself.
The classification of conscious entities (e.g., whether certain animals have self-consciousness) rather than the conditions that make consciousness intelligible.
Debates over whether a particular theory of physics is correct rather than the metaphysical grounds of physical theory itself.
Computation, AI, and information processing as technical matters rather than inquiries into what constraints allow meaning and agency to emerge—including AI blackbox formation, etc..
Any domain where the question is “what is X?” rather than “how does the condition for X’s intelligibility arise.
Category Errors
Treating ontology as given rather than emergent from constraints.
Assuming phenomenology is an ontological category.
Reducing metaphysics to logic or science rather than recognizing that both logic and science presuppose a framework of constraints.
Treating negation as mere absence rather than recognizing its constitutive role in structuring presence.
I hope this can serve as a decent ongoing reference for any and all—I wager I’ll be hyperlinking to this list in the future, so if the relevance of these delineations are not clicking just yet, more context is on its way.
Cheers,
Alexander Ebert
We can then see how things like religion or spirituality (drawing on the presence of the physically absent), psychoanalysis (the presence of the “absent” unconscious), and mathematics (the “hidden” language of the universe), etc., are often categorized as metaphysical concepts.
Credit Alexander Bard with “Membranics”.
Metaphysics isnt completely divorced from empiricism, since space, time, identity and difference are all evident, not derived apriori.
Great, but I think you have been better elsewhere at mentioning the recursivity, and irony, in the project of human construction of the metaphysical. (This is freQ territory?).
When I contemplate constraints, what are the constraints of that endeavour? Is there a special metaphysical status tied to this recursivity? What happens when have, as it were, an infinite regress. Not of "why's" but of operators like "what is this relation like?". Whereupon there is a relation established between thought and the relation, which can grow ad infinitum. The exciting thing here is not the accumulation but the "looking along", to paraphrase C.S. Lewis. After all, an infinite sum (or series of operators) behaves very differently from a finite one. I think the questions of "looking along" in this conceptual fashion is indeed core metaphysics.