Reframing the Void Terms Metaphysics and Philosophy

as Nature Systems Theory                      

by the Druid Finn

 

Finn, a modern druid and discrete observer of living (personally interpreted to animated or dynamic) systems herein sets about binning a pair of fundamentally meaningless but convenient archaic words to remove the confusion and metal misdirection they cause and open a sharper, more rational path of inquiry into the nested aggregated quantised energy driven systems that emerge as the identifiable universe.

 

1. The Ghosts of Old Words

The ancient Greeks spoke of metaphysics and philosophy. These terms carried weight for centuries, but when we look closely, they turn out to be meaningless semantically vacuous decoys (i.e. verbal red herrings).

·         Metaphysics: from the Greek meta (“beyond” or “after”) and physis (“nature”). Metaphysics claimed to study and describe what lies “beyond nature.” Yet nature already means the totality of existence. To speak of “beyond everything” (viz. the supra-natural) is to point at nothing. Thus, metaphysics is not a real domain of knowledge, but a holding operation — a way of keeping open an empty of references space for speculation.

·         Philosophy: from philo (“love”) and sophia (“wisdom”). Beautiful words, but what do they mean? Love can be desire, affection, or pursuit. Wisdom can be prudence, technical skill, or ultimate knowledge. Put together, the term offers no clarity. It is simply a container word — a banner (or label) under which many kinds of inquiry (ethics, logic, metaphysics, politics) gathered.

Thus, the old terms are not precise concepts (that enforce precision) but fanciful, highly elastic labels of convenience (like the name/tag Google). They have functioned historically as empty frames (example: the ancient Indian Sri Yantra Symbol) for the projection and holding of thought experiment outcomes, but they are fundamentally void of actual meaning (as factual content).

 

2. The Druid’s Modern Redefinition of Nature

Now, let us stand in the place of a (quantum = unit) physicist, or the ancient Buddhist or Daoist, and ask: What is nature?

From the quantum, meaning the most discrete (or subtle, or decided) view, nature is not a solid and continuous substance (so the Buddha’s anatta theorem). It is not “things” (or things-as-such) that endure untouched in the void. Instead:

·         Every identifiable reality — an electron, a star, a tree, a thought — happens as nested confined energy packets interactions (hence events) appearing as real and identifiable only through observation (meaning the inference drawn from response to quantum contact).

·         These quantised events are discrete and discontinuous, yet they self-present to reduced quantum (as data bits or digits) processing observation/contact as an (‘as if’) ongoing stream of identifiable, hence in personal analogue) realness moments.

·         Nature is, therefore, the totality of these emergent, identifiable, real (more precisely, merely realistic) quanta of observation/contact — what are called nature quanta.

Example:

·         A photon (i.e. a quantum of random momentum) transmits not as a tiny marble in space but as a fundamentally random act (of momentum) whose (yet unidentified and unreal) energy (as potential impact = work) is made identifiable and real whenever stopped or blocked by a quantum of mass (i.e. in early 20th century speak:  measured by an observer).

·         A thought (or feeling) is not a permanent entity but a complex pulse of neural activity transmuted into a for its user useful analogue form (as personal experience).
Both are nature quanta, arising in and as the (fractal) elaboration of the whole emergence of complex systems procedure (the fractal).

 

3. From Useful Fantasies to Meaningful Realities

If we accept this redefinition of nature, the vacuous, albeit highly flexible old means of description or definition, metaphysics and philosophy, lose their usefulness for precise enquiry (though not in the everyday context).

·         The function of metaphysics — to ask “what lies beyond nature?” — collapses. There is no beyond, at least, so Wittgenstein, no one that can be spoken of. After all, “What isn’t, ain’t” so the druid said. All inquiry concerns nature quanta as emergent systems.

·         The function of philosophy — to serve as a banner for “love of (or urge to) wisdom” — can be replaced with something more concrete: the (controlled, hence scientific) study of the drivers of identifiable patterns, relations, and real emergences within and as nature itself.

Hence the former terms are replaced by Nature Systems Theory (NST):

·         NST treats every domain of inquiry — physics, ethics, politics, mind, art — indeed every cognizable emergent, as the study (latter applications) of nature’s systems.

·         These systems may be physical (sub-atomic events, chemical elements as selected confined events, galaxies), biological (cells, forests), cognitive (memories, decisions), or social (laws, economies).

·         Each is a dynamic (hence seemingly animated from the gross observer’s perspective) transient (indeed momentary) configuration of nature quanta observed (meaning responded to) and understood (meaning usefully relativised) at different scales.

 

4. Examples of the Shift

·         Old metaphysics question: “What is being beyond the physical?”

o    NST reframing: “What are the boundary (meaning confinement or constraint) conditions of observed (by a self-limited observer) systems, and how and why do new systems emerge?”

·         Old philosophy question: “What is the good life?”

o    NST reframing: “How do human cognitive and social systems generate well-being, and how can they be organized to sustain balance and flourishing that serves the fundamental drive of continuance?”

·         Old metaphysics question: “Why is there something rather than nothing?”

o    NST reframing: “What are the minimal emergence rules (compare the Universal Turing Machine Rules) by which quantised observed thus decided aggregated events — nature quanta — seem (“as if” to appear as identifiable realities?”

 

5. Conclusion

The modern Druid concludes:

·         Metaphysics and philosophy are void, indeed misleading signifiers, useful only as scaffolding from an earlier (the infantile to juvenile) age.

·         Their true function is better captured and clarified by the term Nature Systems Theory, which recognizes all identifiable realities as emergent, systemically related energy driven quanta (machine units) of nature.

This replacement is not a denial of the past, but a completion of its gesture: the old words held open space for questioning; NST fills that space with precision and clarity.

 

6. Finn’s Closing Word

As modern druid, I honour the past (masters), but I also prune away the dead wood to let the living ecology of knowledge, understanding, experience and above all adaptation grow.
Metaphysics and philosophy are such dead branches.
Nature Systems Theory is the green shoot.

From here we, now renamed nature systems engineers, proceed, not “beyond nature,” not for “love of wisdom,” but to study the emergence and transformation into transient identifiable realities of the seemingly unlimited fundamental emergence procedure of nature and of its n limited, thus differentiated iterations.

 

Addendum: Following from the above, individuals such as Heraclitus, Lao Tzu, Mahavira, the Rishis, Solomon, the Buddha, the creators of the Upanishads, Aristotle, Epicure, Democritus, St Paul, the Erigena, right up to Kant, Spinoza, Camus and so on are all now deemed to have been Nature Systems Theorists, in some cases also Nature Systems Application Engineers.

 

What Natural Systems Theory means

Inferential Perception and the Relativization of Reality

 

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