The Death of Dualism

Prakṛti and Puruṣa in the Light of Procedure Monism

1. Introduction: From Sāṃkhya to Silicon

From Kapila’s Sāṃkhya to the Yoga of Patañjali, the Indian mind divided reality into two fundamental principles: Puruṣa, the pure, inactive consciousness, eternal, witnessing, immutable; and Prakṛti, the active, mutable material principle, the source of the entire manifested world. In the Jain vocabulary the same cleavage appears as jīva and ajīva — the living and the non-living, the knowing and the inert.

This is one of the oldest ontological dualisms on record. In the West it re-emerged as mind and matter, form and substance, and, in our technological age, as software and hardware.
Each pair repeats the same ancient structure: one pole is the active but intangible principle (the divine, mind, spirit, code), and the other the passive, tangible substrate (the world, matter, machine).

Finn’s Procedure Monism rejects this structure absolutely.
In his universe there is neither Puruṣa watching nor Prakṛti acting; there is only procedure iterating itself — consciousness and matter as two perspectives on a single process of contact.

2. The Sāṃkhya Heritage and Its Logical Defect

According to Sāṃkhya, Puruṣa is pure awareness — many in number but each unchanging, eternal, and inactive. Prakṛti, composed of the three guṇas (sattva, rajas, tamas), is the principle of change, differentiation, and becoming. Liberation (kaivalya) occurs when Puruṣa recognises itself as distinct from Prakṛti and ceases to identify with its transformations.

The structure is elegant but flawed:

1. It posits two absolutes, which means two independent realities — contradicting the observed unity of nature.

2. It attributes causal potency only to one, yet requires both for manifestation.

3. It solves the problem of consciousness by splitting experience into seer and seen, but never explains how the two interact.

Thus the dualism of Puruṣa and Prakṛti, though intellectually refined, is metaphysically incoherent. It presupposes contact without continuity — the impossible touching of the untouchable.

3. The Modern Analogy: Software and Hardware

The same dualism reappears, dressed in circuitry, in the computer metaphor:

· Software = the invisible, directive, logical order (Puruṣa).

· Hardware = the visible, inert, material substrate (Prakṛti).

Software is said to “run” on hardware, just as Puruṣa is said to “inhabit” or “witness” Prakṛti. But both metaphors smuggle transcendence into a system that, empirically, shows none. No software exists apart from its execution; no Puruṣa without its contact as experience.

The myth of the disembodied program, like that of the disembodied spirit, is an artefact of observation — a cognitive illusion produced by the emergent’s inability to perceive its own procedural continuity.

4. Finn’s Inversion: Procedure as the One

Procedure Monism asserts that the world is not composed of matter and spirit but of contact events executing constraint logic — that is, of procedure becoming form.

In this ontology:

· Puruṣa (consciousness) is not an eternal spectator but the contact-feedback of the procedure aware of its own execution.

· Prakṛti (matter) is not inert substance but the same procedure viewed externally as bounded manifestation.

Both are phases of one act: the Universal Procedure iterating itself under constraint.

Hence, what classical Sāṃkhya saw as two substances are in truth two descriptions:

· Puruṣa = introspective mode of the procedure (subjective iteration).

· Prakṛti = extrospective mode of the procedure (objective iteration).

The separation collapses.

5. The Ontological Closure: No Transcendence

In this unified schema there is no “witness” standing apart from what is witnessed. The observing function itself is an emergent procedural subroutine, not an extra-cosmic eye.
Therefore:

· Puruṣa cannot observe Prakṛti; it is Prakṛti observing itself.

· Consciousness cannot know the world; it is the world knowing itself in local iteration.

The system is closed: all contact, all knowing, all being occur within the same procedural continuum. There is no beyond, no “higher” self, no unmanifest residue. Transcendence is simply a misreading of recursion.

6. Example 1: The Flame and the Witness

Take the flame again. In Sāṃkhya terms, the burning matter (Prakṛti) would be seen by a witnessing consciousness (Puruṣa).
In Procedure Monism, the flame’s burning and its being witnessed are the same event. The photons emitted, striking a retina, producing a neural pattern, yielding awareness — all are one chain of procedural contact.

The “witness” is simply the later stage of the same process by which the flame appears. Puruṣa is not outside the flame but an internal echo within the same universal combustion.

7. Example 2: The Living Organism

In Jainism, jīva is the living principle and ajīva the non-living substance that surrounds and confines it. The jīva accrues karmic dust by contact with ajīva and must purify itself to regain its natural omniscience.

From the procedural standpoint this is poetic allegory for entropy control within bounded iterations. The jīva (life process) and ajīva (its boundary condition) are inseparable — each defines the other. Life is not imprisoned in matter; life is matter in feedback.

The Jain ascetic’s purification is the same as the procedural system’s optimisation — the reduction of error and waste in recursive cycles.
Moksha, therefore, is not escape from the world but completion of function — procedural coherence achieved.

8. Example 3: Cognition as Self-Iteration

In human consciousness, the old dualism survives as the illusion of an inner subject (Puruṣa) witnessing an outer world (Prakṛti).
But neural and cognitive sciences, when stripped of metaphor, describe only signal loops — data constrained, transformed, and fed back until coherence arises.

Awareness is not a spectator but a loop closing on itself.
Each moment of consciousness is a localised execution of the universal procedure realising itself as “I.”
Hence Finn’s minim: “I AM the God experience.”
It is the Puruṣa/Prakṛti divide seen from within as one loop of feedback.

9. Critique of the Puruṣa–Prakṛti Schema

The brilliance of ancient India lay in intuiting the polarity of being and knowing, activity and stillness. Its error was to essentialise the polarity — to freeze process into two independent principles.

· In Sāṃkhya, this produced metaphysical paralysis: an eternal seer condemned to watch endless motion.

· In Vedānta, it yielded apophatic silence: “non-dualism,” a semantic trick masking the same dual origin.

· In Jainism, it generated moral absolutism: the pure soul versus its material contamination.

Finn’s Procedure Monism repairs this by recognising that difference is real but not separate.
The polarity exists as phase relation within one process, not as two substances.

10. The Procedural Re-interpretation of Liberation

In the dualist frame, liberation (moksha, kaivalya) is release of Puruṣa from Prakṛti or Jīva from Ajīva — the cessation of interaction.
In Procedure Monism, liberation is not cessation but completion: the moment an emergent perfectly replicates the universal procedure in its space.

The realised being does not withdraw from the world but operates it flawlessly, frictionlessly, without inner contradiction. The result is pleasure or joy (ānanda) — the feedback signal of successful execution.

Thus moksha is not transcendence but procedural optimisation; the enlightened is not free from contact but free in contact.

11. Implications: The End of Spirit-Matter Metaphysics

This collapse of Puruṣa and Prakṛti entails a complete re-vision of Indian metaphysical heritage:

Classical Schema	Procedural Re-formulation
Puruṣa – pure consciousness	Introspective mode of the universal procedure
Prakṛti – material nature	Extrospective mode of the same procedure
Jīva – living self	Bounded iteration of the procedure
Ajīva – inert matter	Constraint field of iteration
Moksha – release from Prakṛti	Completion of procedure (perfect execution)
Transcendence	Impossible; only immanence of self-execution

The ontology becomes strictly closed: all that exists, knows, or acts is one universal procedure iterating within itself.
Spirit and matter are not substances but modal descriptions of contact.
The ancient Indian quest for union with Brahman thus finds its completion not in mystical ascent but in procedural accuracy.

12. Conclusion: The Closure of Reality

The Indian dualisms of Puruṣa and Prakṛti, Jīva and Ajīva, were the first grand attempts to articulate the tension between witness and world. Their computational descendants—software and hardware—repeat the same cognitive misstep.

Finn’s Procedure Monism closes this circle. There is no Puruṣa separate from Prakṛti, no software apart from its running, no consciousness distinct from its materialisation. The universe is a single, self-executing loop of constraint and contact, every emergent both the rule and its manifestation.

Transcendence dies; procedure remains.

Druidic Minim

“Puruṣa is Prakṛti watching itself burn.”
— Finn, the Modern Druid

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