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The Modern Druid Finn’s Cataphatic Definition of
“Thing” By Bodhangkur 1. Prelude: The Historical Failure of the Word “Thing” Throughout
the history of Western thought, the word thing has served as
philosophy’s most abused placeholder. From Aristotle’s ousia
to Kant’s Ding-an-sich, the “thing” has
oscillated between the utterly concrete and the utterly ineffable. In each
case, metaphysics began with the assumption that things existed and
then set out to explain their hidden substrate, their substance, or their
relation to thought. The
result was circular: a thing was defined by reference to its thinghood.
Kant’s version, the so-called noumenon or “thing-in-itself,” sealed
the circle with a paradox. For him, a thing was that which could never
appear to us but was somehow required as the hidden cause of appearance. By
defining the “thing” as that which cannot be contacted, Kant performed an
intellectual sleight of hand: he universalised ignorance and called it knowledge. In
procedural terms, Kant’s “thing” was an apophatic artifact—a verbal
remainder left over after the empirical and the conceptual had been
separated. It carried no operational definition and thus no survival value.
As the modern druid Finn observes, the apophatic thing is a non-procedure,
a statement of incapacity disguised as a discovery. The
cataphatic project, by contrast, begins not with absence but with event—with
contact. The thing is what happens when randomness meets constraint
and the collision registers as real. It is this, not that-beyond-knowing. 2. The Cataphatic Turn: From Essence to Event Finn’s
procedure is radically cataphatic because it defines thinghood
positively and operationally, without recourse to hidden substance. A thing
happens when two random energy quanta make finite contact, producing a
measurable informational update (ΔI > 0) in some transducer. This is
not a metaphor. It is a functional restatement of existence itself as event.
The thing is the minimal packet of realness—the discrete,
quantised flash wherein constraint acts upon constraint at finite velocity
(symbolically “@ c”). No
pre-given ontology is assumed. There is no “stuff” behind the collision, no
noumenal hinterland. What is real is the contact and its response,
not any hypothesised substrate. The shift
is decisive. It converts ontology into event-logic: being equals
contacting. 3. Contact and Constraint Every
contact (like the digit 1 rather than 0) expresses constraint.
Constraint is not a substance but a rule-set—the lawful limitation governing
how energy packets can interact. Gravitation, electromagnetism, elasticity,
neural thresholds—all are modes of constraint. The
collision of constraints yields an information increment. A photon
meeting an electron, a hammer striking iron, or a word striking an ear all
produce structured updates in a recipient system. In each case, a random flux
becomes momentarily coherent; stochastic motion is forced to disclose
a rule. This
momentary coherence is what the everyday mind calls a thing. The rock,
the syllable, the memory, the photon—they are all reified responses to
constraint-bearing contact. The thing is not what lies behind
perception but what occurs within the perceptual act as the
stabilisation of contact. 4. The Observer as Transducer In Finn’s
model, observer means any constraint-sensitive transducer—cell,
sensor, neuron, algorithm—that can register a contact as a change of state. Thinghood
is thus observer-dependent but not subjective. Dependence here
means relational: a thing exists as the intersection of constraint and
receiver. It is as real as the interaction that produced it. When
multiple observers converge upon the same constraint signature (for example,
several instruments detecting identical spectral lines), the reification
stabilises as public thinghood. This convergence substitutes
operational consensus for Kantian faith in a hidden “beyond.” 5. Reification as Mutual Pinning Every act
of contact is bi-directional. It not only fixes a constraint pattern
as “that,” it simultaneously pins the observer as “this.” At the
point of contact, the two are indistinguishable. The observer is the
event of contact as much as the photon or the sound wave. Realness, in this
sense, is the mutual self-limitation of random potentials. Once the
event dissolves, differentiation reappears: “I observed that.” But the
realness resided only in the moment of constraint—the flash of mutual
finitude. 6. Two Channels of Contact: Physical and Symbolic Finn
distinguishes two operational channels through which contacts occur: 1. C-contacts
(causal/physical) – photon impacts retina, cell membrane depolarises,
stone strikes water. 2. S-contacts
(symbolic/normative) – a word, image, theorem, or melody strikes an
internal model, producing measurable re-organisation. Both yield quantised informational updates. A mathematical
proof or a musical cadence function as a symbolic constraint—a
procedural impact on the cognitive substrate. Thus even the intangible
acquires thinghood through its contact efficacy. A fantasy or a film
scene is a thing because it momentarily arrests and re-routes the
observer’s processing stream. 7. The Ontology of Being as Response From this
vantage, being is nothing beyond the totality of registered
responses. Existence is procedural, not substantive. To ask
what “exists beyond the observer” is to ask for what cannot, in principle, be
contacted. About that, as Finn insists, nothing positive can be said. At best
we posit minimal constraint realism—the pragmatic assumption that
something constraint-like underwrites the reproducibility of contacts across
observers. This is a methodological economy, not a metaphysical claim. 8. Operational Criteria for Thinghood A
candidate entity X qualifies as a thing if and only if: 1. Information
increment: Contact with X yields ΔI > 0 in a
receiver. 2. Counterfactual
control: Manipulating X predictably alters subsequent
contacts. 3. Cross-transducer
convergence: Independent systems register congruent responses to X. 4. Temporal
stability: The response class persists within an appropriate
temporal window. 5. Causal
separability: X’s effects can be modulated independently of
its context. These
criteria formalise Finn’s cataphatic realism. They replace metaphysical
“being” with empirically testable procedural invariance. 9. Examples Across Scales ·
Photon: A packet of electromagnetic
constraint eliciting quantised detector responses. ·
Cell: A membrane-bounded
processor generating metabolic and sensory responses to molecular contacts. ·
Rock: A macro-stabilised constraint-aggregate
yielding elastic and gravitational responses to impact. ·
Mathematical theorem: An
S-contact—an invariant symbolic structure that, when applied, consistently
reduces uncertainty in predictive systems. ·
Emotion or memory: A
reified neurochemical pattern recurring as a contact within internal symbolic
circuits. Each case
satisfies the operational conditions of thinghood within its channel and
scale. 10. The Rejection of Apophatic “Things” Kant’s Ding-an-sich, like Rudolf Otto’s ‘Idea of the Holy’ remain
the classic apophatic non-definitions: the claim that reality (or holiness)
“in itself” is forever unknowable. Such formulations amount to linguistic
residues of pre-procedural metaphysics. They reify non-contact—that
which cannot, by definition, appear—as the true measure of being. From the
procedural standpoint this is incoherent. A “thing” that can never make
contact cannot be said to exist even hypothetically, for existence is defined
by contact. The Kantian move is thus a category mistake: it
applies the grammar of contact (“thing”) to what is explicitly contactless. Finn’s
cataphatic definition renders such metaphysical abstractions unnecessary. The
so-called noumenon is simply the non-event, the absence of constraint
exchange. It is not hidden; it is null. In this
sense, Finn’s ontology is Occam-clean: it eliminates the infinite
shadow-worlds generated by linguistic negation. The only realness is
procedural realness—realness that happens. 11. Implications and Reach Finn’s
cataphatic turn re-grounds ontology in physics without reductionism and in
phenomenology without solipsism. It offers: ·
A unification of science and experience: Both are
systems of managed contact. ·
A scalable ontology: From
photon to human to idea, the same rule—constraint + contact →
realness—applies. ·
A resolution of the mind–body problem: Mind and
matter are reciprocal modes of contacting; each is real to the degree it
constrains and is constrained. ·
A procedural ethics: Value
attaches to events that increase coherent contact (i.e. that heighten
realness) rather than to abstract commandments. 12. Conclusion: The Realness of the Contacted In Finn’s
modern druidic metaphysics, the world is not a collection of ready-made
things but a continuum of quantised contacts through which reality
continually self-tests its own rules. Every
rock, word, or heartbeat is a momentary crystallisation of the stochastic
field into intelligible constraint. Between contacts lies only potential
randomness—the unformed. Thus the thing is neither
substance nor illusion. It is the event of reciprocal recognition
between randomness and rule, between observer and observed, between this and
this. Or, in
Finn’s minimalist diction: Thing =
quantised reification of constraint through observer response. Anything
beyond that—Kant’s unknowable “in-itself” or any other apophatic
placeholder—is, quite literally, nothing at all. Epilogue (Illustrative Summary) ·
When a photon meets an electron, the world
briefly says this. ·
When a poem meets a mind, the same happens on
another channel. ·
The universe, seen through this druidic lens, is
a self-weaving fabric of such this-moments—each a contact, each a
thing, each a flicker of the one Procedure at play. |