The Ontological Contradictions of the Westphalian Order

Joscha, when you say that “stuff” cannot be foundational, and that matter is a persistent localized pattern in spacetime, I think you are touching the central point. There is a clear scientific way to understand reality. Look at the world around you. It is not merely “there.” It is in motion, because it is happening at the very moment you observe it. Take a piece of stone in your hand. You feel its weight. But the question is: why does it weigh? Because, in that very moment, the configuration inside the stone is happening in real time. Its atomic bonds, its internal structure, its mass, and its relation to gravity are not passive properties of a hidden substance. They are operative configurations interacting with your hand, the Earth, and the world around it. This is also what every scientific measurement does. A measurement does not reach a hidden matter behind reality. It captures a real configuration: something coherent enough to be identified, interactive enough to produce an effect, and complex enough to generate a measurable result. The air is happening. The car passing in the street is happening. The sunlight is happening. The plant, photosynthesis, water, fire, shadow, motion — everything you see and perceive is happening in real time. But what holds all these simultaneous events together? The answer is: C-I-K. Coherence. Interaction. Complexity. Reality is not a collection of dead objects placed before us. It is configuration in every millisecond. And you, the one observing this reality, are among its most fragile beings — but also among its most intelligent. One wrong movement, and your configuration can collapse. Or the configuration of those around you can be damaged. Yet you also possess the knowledge and power to alter part of reality around you. You are conscious because you are one of the most complex known configurations of C-I-K. From this, ethics emerges. You know that your actions can preserve or destroy configurations of life. You know that your acts can support the balance of reality, or damage the Proof of Work through which reality sustains itself. This is The Elemental Reason. papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.…

There is a clear scientific way to understand reality. Look at the world around you. It is not merely “there.” It is in motion, because it is happening at the very moment you observe it. Take a piece of stone in your hand. You feel its weight. But the question is: why does it weigh? Because, in that very moment, the configuration inside the stone is happening in real time. Its atomic bonds, its internal structure, its mass, and its relation to gravity are not passive properties of a hidden substance. They are operative configurations interacting with your hand, the Earth, and the world around it. This is also what every scientific measurement does. A measurement does not reach a hidden matter behind reality. It captures a real configuration: something coherent enough to be identified, interactive enough to produce an effect, and complex enough to generate a measurable result. The air is happening. The car passing in the street is happening. The sunlight is happening. The plant, photosynthesis, water, fire, shadow, motion — everything you see and perceive is happening in real time. But what holds all these simultaneous events together? The answer is: C-I-K. Coherence. Interaction. Complexity. Reality is not a collection of dead objects placed before us. It is configuration in every millisecond. And you, the one observing this reality, are among its most fragile beings — but also among its most intelligent. One wrong movement, and your configuration can collapse. Or the configuration of those around you can be damaged. Yet you also possess the knowledge and power to alter part of reality around you. You are conscious because you are one of the most complex known configurations of C-I-K. From this, ethics emerges. You know that your actions can preserve or destroy configurations of life. You know that your acts can support the balance of reality, or damage the Proof of Work through which reality sustains itself. This is The Elemental Reason. papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.…

How is Chalmers’ zombie different from flying witches? :) 🤡

Ratsit är inte ensamma. Ratsit, Mrkoll, Hitta, Birthday och flera andra företag gör affär av vanliga människors personuppgifter: namn, adress, födelsedag, inkomster, bostad, bilägande och andra privata uppgifter. Att kalla detta “yttrandefrihet” eller “allmänhetens rätt till information” är ett grovt missbruk av begreppen. Vad har en privatpersons bostadsadress, lön och personliga uppgifter med pressfrihet att göra? Detta handlar inte om journalistik. Det handlar om kommersiell exploatering av människors privatliv. I praktiken innebär det en massiv kränkning av rätten till privatliv enligt artikel 8 i Europakonventionen och står i direkt konflikt med den grundläggande andan i GDPR. Sverige måste sluta låtsas att detta är normalt. Ingen demokrati bör tillåta privata företag att tjäna pengar på att exponera medborgarnas liv på detta sätt.

Continuous protests in Albania against Prime Minister Edi Rama. youtube.com/watch?v=akjoOT9W… Source: Reuters

#TheElementalReason Science has never measured “matter” as a bare substrate. It has always measured stabilized configurations of Coherence, Interaction, and Complexity. Therefore, reality is not substrate plus properties; reality is operative configuration. And every scientific number is a quantitative articulation of that configuration. papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.…

This is a fascinating development. If entanglement helps build the structure of space, and quantum “magic” gives that structure the flexibility associated with gravity, then modern physics is moving further away from substance ontology and toward configuration. This is exactly the direction formalized by The Elemental Reason: There is no “matter structure” behind reality. There are only operative configurations of Coherence, Interaction, and Complexity. Entanglement reveals Interaction. Quantum magic reveals Complexity. The stability of the code reveals Coherence. Science is slowly showing that empirical reality is not made of hidden substance, but of measurable configurations. The Elemental Reason names this explicitly: E = C × I × K ≠ 0 quantamagazine.org/entanglem…

What is remarkable is that what you show through identical particles, The Elemental Reason shows through scientific measurement itself. For 400 years, science has been measuring ontology without realizing it was measuring the fundamental structure of empirical reality. @martinmbauer, if you read this, I think you will understand exactly what I mean: papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.…

The only stable and interpretable data about reality upon which scientific knowledge has been built are measurements. They are stable and unchanging because reality itself is stable and predictable. Consequently, reality is coherent and predictable. Through measurement, we can reconstruct the structure of empirical reality - from elementary particles to galaxies, from the photon to photosynthesis, from the chemistry of the universe to biology. Therefore, any interpretation of the origin of the universe and of consciousness cannot be sought outside what scientific measurement has demonstrated for the past 400 years. But what is it that makes the data of reality stable, predictable, and interpretable? Is there something common that makes reality this way? The Elemental Reason reveals that, through measurement, science has been measuring ontology itself. papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.… #TheElementalReason #Measurement #Ontology #The_Structure_of_Reality

For AI, “nothing personal, just business” is not cynicism. It is ontology.

VII Nothing comes by itself: without air, without light, without seed, without good earth, without sunrays nothing is born. All spaces have closed, joy has frozen to the ground, the particles are locked into smallness. The ridges remain voiceless, without rain, without snow, in darkness; the valleys dried up for rivers, the Earth has become a wasteland. Wasteland, wasteland. - Erl Kodra, *Night Beneath the Oak*, 2023

Theories or natural laws are not negotiated and they are not voted on. I opened a Twitter account, now X, in 2020, but I never really took care to be very active. In truth, I was busy with other work, and I am not very confident with social networks or fame. But when, after 40 years of work, I formulated The Elemental Reason, I realized that I still do not have a network that can make my work visible. I began to become active on X, but suddenly I saw that here there is a permanent and enormous battle among physicists, philosophers, journalists, YouTubers, Substack writers. I have seen philosophers who have reached the top - even creating schools of philosophical thought - but essentially with theories that are proven neither scientifically nor philosophically. I have also seen those who try to mock others when someone presents even a serious argument against them. I have seen it all, because, thank God, X is very transparent in this regard. I do not know how a theory can be proven correct except through empirical evidence. And especially, a universal theory, or a universal law, either is or is not. Because natural laws do not negotiate with reality, nor are they voted on, even if they have endless references, or were developed by professors at Harvard, Cambridge, or Oxford. In fact, I wrote this note for a serious reason: What I see today in the scientific community is only noise - a lot of noise, terrible noise. About consciousness, the universe, the Hard Problem, AI, panpsychism, panprotopsychism, String Theory, consciousness preceding the universe. Most of them fail at one point, or at many points, and are unfalsifiable. I do not understand how theories that remain untestable and unproven can continue to dominate serious debates for decades. #TheElementalReason #PhilosophyOfScience #Physics #Ontology #Consciousness

I like when people say that Artificial Intelligence will become conscious. Perhaps. I am not a computer scientist — only an observer of empirical reality. And from that observation, I have noticed something simple: to become conscious, one must first feel the need to survive. And that need for survival must be organic. Artificial Intelligence is powerful through algorithms. But when we close the laptop, AI dies. New essay coming soon.

Science never understood that, for 400 years, in every measurement, it was directly measuring ontology. Some things hide in plain sight. The Elemental Reason was “hidden” in the hands of humanity’s greatest physicists. papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.… #TheElementalReason #Physics #Ontology #Measurement #PhilosophyOfScience

To claim something this enormous, while building it entirely on pure speculation, takes real courage. And sometimes courage is rewarded: Philip Goff is a professor and the most visible representative of a grand metaphysical claim with zero empirical evidence.

Approximately 66 million years ago - the Chicxulub asteroid, with a diameter of about 10–15 kilometers, struck the Earth (present-day Mexico), causing the mass extinction of the dinosaurs and around 75% of all species on Earth. This is the greatest and most structured threat that life on Earth has known in 66 million years. For millions of years, life on Earth has been exposed to natural forces and random cosmic events, but since man emerged from the cave and began to build the first human society, he has never faced a structured and organized threat from outside. No other force in nature, no species, no cosmic entity has ever called into question the survival of man as a species. The only true existential risk that humanity has faced, throughout its entire history, has been man himself. Endless wars and massacres have wiped out peoples and communities throughout history, while the foundations of humanity were seriously shaken during the Second World War. Only a small fraction of the destructive potential we possess would be enough, and life on Earth would be seriously called into question. The solution lies within us. To think about the solution - that is the question. x.com/ElementalReason/status…

You are 54 years old, I am a little older, and I spent my life investigating what lies behind reality. And I finally discovered that there is nothing hidden behind it, except what we have always measured: Coherence, Complexity and Interaction. So we have measured the very structure of reality, and every number produced by those measurements is a direct expression of C-I-K. If you are who you claim to be, you should say whether The Elemental Reason holds or not. A universal law is not democratic; it either is, or it is not: papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.…

It is astonishing how an extraordinary community of scientists and enthusiasts can debate endlessly about the universe and consciousness, while no one has yet realized that for 400 years science has, in fact, been measuring ontology directly. I know - this sounds bold. But the scientific evidence for The Elemental Reason was produced by science itself. I simply interpreted it - and formulated The Elemental Reason.' papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.… @briankeating @TOEwithCurt @Rainmaker1973 #TheElementalReason #Ontology #Physics #Consciousness

Now you can find me here: open.substack.com/pub/erlkod…