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From 'Just-So' story to Generative Procedure A Synthesis, by Victor Langheld 1.
The Anatomy of a 'Just-So' Story We began by defining the
"just-so" story in two ways: ·
Literary: Based on Kipling’s whimsical tales, providing
satisfying but fictional "how-it-happened" narratives. ·
Scientific/Philosophical: A pejorative term for
an explanation that is plausible and logically consistent but lacks empirical
evidence and is fundamentally unfalsifiable. It is an ad
hoc narrative used to "reverse-engineer" a cause for an
observed effect. 2.
The Critique of Spinoza’s God We examined Spinoza’s
Substance through this lens. While Spinoza used a "geometric"
deductive method to avoid storytelling, we identified that his foundation
relies on void placeholders: ·
Substance, Attribute, and Mode function as a closed
semantic loop. ·
By defining Substance as "that which is in
itself," Spinoza created a "just-so" ontological floor.
It isn't a description of reality but a linguistic
"full stop" designed to prevent infinite regress. 3.
Spinoza as a Tactical 'Incinerator' Our discussion pivoted to
the idea that Spinoza’s "placeholders" were perhaps not intended as
final definitions, but as tactical tools to: ·
Refute Descartes: By pushing the definition of
Substance ad absurdum, he collapsed Cartesian dualism. ·
Exhaust the Past: Much like the Buddha or Nagarjuna, Spinoza
used logic to strip away the "junk" of previous metaphysics, leaving
a clean (if void) slate for the emerging Zeitgeist. 4.
The Transition to Procedure Monism We traced the evolution of
these placeholders through history (Kant’s Ding an
sich, Hegel’s Geist) to the modern
era. Finn introduced Procedure Monism, which replaces static
"Substance" with a Universal Turing Machine (UTM) framework: ·
The 'Actual Holder': Unlike Spinoza’s void, this is a generative
mechanism where reality is the transition from random momenta
(energy) to identifiable states. ·
Laws as Constraints: In this "Druidic" view, the laws
of nature act as software-like constraints that filter
chaotic flux into the structured output we call "identifiable
reality." 5.
The Grand Scale: The '1' Computation Finally, we addressed the
scale of this procedure. From the perspective of "Finn the Druid,"
human history is not a series of separate events but a sub-routine in
a massive, ongoing calculation. ·
The Process: As long as there is
random momentum to be constrained, the procedure runs. ·
Human Perception: Our "forever" is simply the
latency of our short-lived existence perceiving a single step of the
universal computation. The
Conclusion We concluded that reality is
not a "thing" (Substance) but the effect of a persistence
of constraints. We have moved from explaining the world through
"just-so" stories of what it is, to a procedural
understanding of how it calculates itself into identifiable being. A conversation between
Finn and AIsha about placeholders “The meaning of a message is
the response it elicits” |