Summary
Reality is fundamentally paradoxical, dynamic, and uncertain, and can be understood through a process-oriented unity that transcends traditional philosophical frameworks, language, and analysis, requiring a nuanced and humble approach to knowledge and action.
Foundational Metaphysics and Reality
Neoplatonism posits a single, ineffable first principle called the One — the ground of all knowing, self-organization, and the source that makes all difference-making and intelligibility possible, beyond concepts and words.
Being and intelligibility are identified through the performative contradiction of trying to think the unintelligible: attempting this means no content of thought and thus no thinking, proving intelligibility is inseparable from existence itself.
Transubjectivity describes the middle way between subject and object, revealing that dichotomies are historically created conceptual schemes that can be deconstructed to show a world where things are communing beneath both relations and relata.
Affordances are neither subjective nor objective but real fittedness between organism and environment, defining possibilities for action where perception is participation in affordances rather than representing objects.
Epistemology and Knowledge Structures
Foundationalism collapses because the statement “foundationalism is true” is neither a tautology nor self-evident truth, and Gödel’s incompleteness theorem proves formal systems are necessarily incomplete and uncertain with truths unprovable from axioms.
Contact epistemology (per Hans Hermann Hoppe) suggests mind and reality meet only through action — the unity prior to subject-object distinction — where action is inherently problem-solving involving both changing the world and being changed by it.
Performative contradictions are more important than propositional ones because they reveal blind spots and presuppose what they deny, establishing presuppositions not by observation but by the impossibility of coherently rejecting them without affirming them.
Socratic humility recognizes our small logical systems are necessarily not the large world, and Reichenbach’s proof demonstrates other small worlds are equally logically valid, requiring self-correction to move the horizon beyond our framing.
Markets as Cognitive Systems
Stable money economies provide clear supply and demand signals, but arbitrary money printing introduces noise and deception that obscures true market dynamics and distorts economic reality.
Markets are self-organizing, multi-levelled complex dynamic systems with feedback cycles where producers introduce variation through new products and consumers select through buying, mirroring evolutionary fittedness without formal definition.
Pricing is compressed, socially generated knowing that reduces uncertainty about scarcity and demand, guides action, is sensitive to error, coordinates perspectives, and tracks reality through voluntary exchange as distributed cognition.
Free markets require accurate price signals (information distribution), tight feedback loops (minimal interference), and private property (real ownership) for price discovery — conditions identical to flow states per cognitive scientist John Vervaeke.
Fiat currency manipulation distorts flow state conditions by introducing noise into price signals, reducing error signals, and violating currency savers’ private property, uncoupling markets from reality.
Cognition and Action
Mises’ praxiology axiom states humans act using objectively available means to pursue subjectively selected ends — foundational to economics, though interaction is more accurate than action because it presupposes transjectivity (reality as both actuality and potentiality).
Embodied cognition (per Merleau-Ponty) emphasizes the co-presence and mutual constraint of realness in touch, where realizing and being realized, touching and being touched, are always intimately connected in our relationship with reality.
Relevance realization lacks formal definition like Darwin’s fittedness but is a dynamic, adaptive process that can’t be captured in static words or formal systems, as noted by Persig’s metaphysics and disciple Civil King.
Transcendentals and Meaning-Making
Beauty, goodness, and truth are transcendentals enabling meaningful interaction: beauty allows discovery (unmapped territory), goodness enables interaction (feedback loop of being for itself and others), and truth provides correction for intelligibility.
Beauty is the unmapped territory — the raw encounter with nature that can be both promising and threatening, like an angel that could kill you but doesn’t (per poet Wilka).
Goodness is the act of mapping, closely aligned to action and the relation between map and territory, enabling interaction and the emergence of meaning through feedback loops.
Truth is correspondence between map and territory — how we correct our understanding of reality through normative processes, where the map must participate in reality to be propositionally truthful in a dynamical complex system.
Social and Cultural Cognition
Wittgenstein shows self-reflection and language use are interdependent, requiring shared meaning and mutual correction, where inner and social worlds are completely interpenetrating — making meaning of life a normative, sharable, mutually correctable concept grounded in social interaction.