35 years ago, I developed the “MCogito”, a [matter-life-thought] multi-categorical model of Reality. At the heart of the model is the MCogito itself: the certainty that reality possesses an obvious and intuitive topological structure that applies the exact same way to any category of beings (whereas Descartes’ cogito is merely a mono-categorical psychic certainty).
This model works perfectly where all classical metaphysics (including Hegel’s dialectics) fail, precisely because it breaks free from the aporias linked to the [nature-human] bi-categorical immanent framework of philosophy.
The MCogito deploys its own epistemology and anthropology, which show that philosophy—particularly as idealism—is neurotically linked to the psychic mono-categorical thinking of religion. Philosophy is an endless, continuous questioning neurosis that wants to escape religion without ever straying too far from it. This neurosis makes it entirely blind to the simple, obvious, intuitive, and working logic of the MCogito.
I am sorry to have to say this, but it is my truth. I am completely disillusioned regarding the reception of this model, and I felt the need to state this painful fact upfront.
That being said, I will present the MCogito concept in this post. The next post will outline the structure of the [matter-life-thought] Totality, and the final one will detail the logic of the self-construction of this Totality—i.e., how the Matter category produces Life, and how the Life category ultimately ends up producing the Thought category. From this logic Totality is then completed by the boundary categories of quanta and data.
MCogito: a Model of the [ Quanta > Matter > Life > Thought > Data ] Self-constructed Totality
In the end was the Code
1 Introduction — summary
Religions offer a single category (psychic) explanation: all powerful supernatural psychic entities explain everything. By opposing to religion the non psychic category of Nature, the philosophical explanation becomes two category: at bottom its two categories are Nature–Human, which authors may phrase as physical–psychic, body–mind, sensible–intelligible, matter–form, mass–entelechy, etc., but always with two categories.
The metaphysical system presented here gives a multi category definition of the Totality: starting from the evidence that there are three categories of beings—material, living, and thinking—it shows, through a specific multi category reasoning, that these categories are topological variations of a single structure that weds infinity and code. This structure comes with a deductive logic that shows how and why matter evolves toward life, and life toward thought.
Unlike the two category reasoning of Philosophy, forced by fatigue to abdicate into idealism, this system works perfectly and shows that the Totality is in fact made of five categories of beings. It also allows many predictions and precise definitions of things vaguely perceived as “metaphysical”, and it answers, precisely and in a singular way, the great classical philosophical questions. It allows one to build an anthropology and a politics grounded metaphysically (later communication).
2 Metaphysical epistemology: how and why think the Totality?
2.1 Epistemology
The theory of knowledge underlying this system is extremely simple and rests on the number of categories of beings used to think the Totality. Religions use only one psychic category. Philosophy opposes to them the evidence of the non psychic of Nature, knowable through mathematical modeling verified by experience. But the psychic category, reduced to the human, cannot be known like Nature, from the outside: one would have to extract oneself from thought with thought, which is logically impossible. Within Philosophy’s two category Nature–Human frame it is therefore impossible to think the Totality, which leads Philosophy inexorably, through conceptual fatigue, to abdicate into idealism—i.e., to regress to with the one category psychic solution of religions for totalizing: the ultimate and unifying reality is psychic; it is the Idea, the Concept. This is why Philosophy ends with Hegel in dialectical monism, which fuses philosophy and religion. Wanting to be more formal, metaphysics will turn toward a propositional formalism, because language is thought that can be seen and heard (reassuring), and because it is formalized by propositional logic in mathematics (a guarantee of seriousness).
2.2 Why think the Totality — technical presence in the world
As you will discover, the multi category matter–life–thought modeling is very simple and self evident; it could have been proposed already in Antiquity. Why wasn’t it? What is thinkable—the horizon of the thinkable—is determined by our presence in the world, which is technical in essence. When the relation to the world is given by predatory techniques of hunting and gathering, the thought of the world is shamanic, made of predatory debts toward animal or natural spirits. With agricultural techniques appear stocks, and presence in the world becomes social predation on these stocks, justified by predatory social hierarchies, themselves justified by divinities, i.e., supernatural psychic hierarchies. In this context of social predation on stocks, Greek philosophy is an anomaly—hence the talk of a “Greek miracle”, of something that should never have happened. Moreover, being two category in epistemology, philosophy does not really work, does not allow thinking the Totality, and does not provide the satisfaction given by the psychic projection of religions; hence the horizon of the thinkable, the norm of thought, quickly returned to religion and, by backlash, to the worst of all: some Middle Eastern totalitarian monotheism genocidal toward all ancient European religious lives.
2.3 Computerized presence in the world
From what technical presence in the world does this multi category matter–life–thought model arise? From the computer, which is a machine that proves thought. We change metaphysical era: presence in the world is now a demand for proof, for an algorithm demonstrating that the idea is true. This is how the idea of “artificial intelligence” can appear, i.e., the possibility of algorithms demonstrating the capacities of human intelligence. This idea immediately refers to a very deep metaphysical questioning: if we put thought in the form of words into a machine so that it acts like a human in reality, then to know what we are talking about we need a clear idea of what intelligence is, what thought is, what words are, what the machine is, and what “the outside” is—i.e., everything else: we are doing metaphysics.
2.4 History of the MCogito model
This model aimed to ground artificial intelligence metaphysically and to create an algorithm for the self construction of knowledge. I began by defining intelligence, because no author seemed to have a precise idea of it, which was extremely shocking to me and motivated my decision to enter the AI field: intelligence is the capacity to mentally simulate reality; the more intelligence there is, the more powerful and predictive the simulation is. Then I noticed the regressive character of human modeling of the real, which rests on thousands of years of knowledge evolution. I had the idea of looking at how knowledge is built in the child at the origin, and I discovered that a Swiss psychologist—Jean Piaget—had done all the conceptual work, which had even been transformed into a sublime algorithm, Gary Drescher’s “schema mechanism”, which self constructed the knowledge of a simulated micro universe up to Piaget’s sensorimotor stages. On the other hand, there existed a modeling of the self construction of life forms: genetic algorithms. Since matter itself also has a cosmological evolution described by solving Einstein’s relativity equations, I had the idea of the possibility of an even more general self construction algorithm than a genetic algorithm, covering all categories of beings: material, living, and thinking.
2.5 Entering metaphysics
Entering metaphysics rests on becoming aware of the absence of any prior knowledge concerning the Totality and its self construction in its categories of beings matter–life–thought: real scientific knowledge bears only on physics, matter. For the rest—life and thought—there is no scientific knowledge, i.e., knowledge whose reality is demonstrated by predictive and action capacities incommensurable with non scientific knowledge. I explored philosophy at length, only to finally understand that it had nothing to say either about the matter–life–thought Totality. Everything proposed here is relative to this nothingness: what may seem very approximate to you is precisely meant to approximate the metaphysical unity, i.e., the multi category that unifies matter, life, and thought.
2.6 Metaphysical reasoning and its specificity
Metaphysical reasoning consists in determining concepts that explain Creation—the appearance of Being—in the same way in the three categories, and stopping there. Indeed, these concepts will not appear perfect; they will more or less “rub” depending on the category. But resolving these imperfections will engage mono category thinking and reasonings, i.e., non metaphysical ones. The metaphysical exists: it is the multi category, and the reasoning adapted to it is specific and a bit long to assimilate, because it does not belong to the reasoning modes we already know. It is of course “speculative”, i.e., deductive a priori, but perfectly rational: there are no other worlds in this model. Under the statement of the concepts (texts in bold) you will find little abstraction—most often concrete descriptions showing that reality presents itself in a way consistent with this a priori logic, without adding anything to it.
3 Being-code topology
3.1 Starting intuitive certainty
The starting intuitive certainty is that reality is a phenomenon of self construction in three homogeneous categories nested into one another: we observe that there are three kinds of beings that have a very different global or “metaphysical” identity: purely material beings like a pebble, living beings like a monkey, and beings of thought like 2+2=4; and that these beings are constructed in time: at some moment a material object is constructed—e.g., Earth; a living species is constructed—e.g., chimpanzees; an idea is constructed—e.g., quantum mechanics. There is an evolution of the forms constructed in each category, and at some moment a new category appears within the previous one: thought appears within life, and life within matter.
Now, if we compare the kinds of beings that exist at the beginning and at the end in each category:
| category | beginning | end |
|---|---|---|
| matter | the Big Bang | pre biotic soup on the surface of the Earth |
| life | a primordial cyanobacterium | social relations in a troop of monkeys |
| thought | a shamanic theory of spirits | quantum mechanics |
On the one hand one might be discouraged by the huge difference between the initial and final beings; but on the other hand one clearly feels that there is an almost definable, very strong unity inside each category as soon as one contrasts it with the other two: one clearly feels that between an archaic cyanobacterium and a monkey there is a very perceptible community of being that is not the unity of being shared by a shamanic explanation of the Universe and quantum mechanics, nor the one by which the ocean of particles of the Big Bang and the pre biotic chemical soup have something in common, but of a different nature.
The topo logical essence of reality falls out immediately as soon as we ask the right question: How are beings controlled?
3.2 The moth myth of the cave myth
It is a little scene that will plunge us into reality as it presents itself and allow us to describe its topological structure:
It is Diogenes the Cynic reading Plato’s papyrus about the cave myth. He finds it totally botched—this “true reality” of ideas that seems to him only a shabby abstraction of mathematical reality—and he loathes the philosopher’s position of superiority that Plato grants himself in the whole description. Something suddenly makes him burst out laughing while unrolling the papyrus: a moth has slipped into the scroll and has started to nibble Plato’s superb thought! That is the true reality! Deciding to go and crap on Plato, Diogenes tries to roll the papyrus back up so that the moth may finish its work of truth, but the rain arrives and a drop falls directly on the insect, which flies off with difficulty.
3.3 The topology of beings’ control
Figure 1:
How is the drop of water controlled? The drop of water is entirely defined by the laws of physics, which are outside itself. The reasoning can be extended up to the Universe itself, which does not contain the physical laws and is therefore controlled from its outside (of course physical laws are human models; we assume here that they describe logical regularities arising from a quantum support prior to the Big Bang and topologically outside the material Universe). A material being is always a being under external control, whether it is a drop of water or the entire Universe.
Figure 2:
How is the moth controlled? It is a living being, controlled by its nervous system and ultimately by its DNA, which is inside itself. A living being is always a being under internal control, whether it is a cyanobacterium or a monkey.
Figure 3:
How is the cave myth controlled? A myth is a story, a collection of ideas, that exists between human beings when they tell it to one another. We have been discussing Plato’s cave story among men for more than two thousand years: an idea is always a being under “between” control, whether it is a shamanic theory of spirits or the theory of quantum mechanics (in proper English we should say “shared” rather than “between”, but then the topological unity with the other two categories would be too badly strained).
3.4 The metaphysical essence of code
We continue by noticing something everyone has gotten used to but which is, in itself, among the strangest and most metaphysical things: the Between—the metaphysical place of existence of thought—is structured by human language, but the inside of the living is structured as well by the DNA code, which is intensely metaphysical. Indeed, in our human world, interpreted code inside a material object is the Intel 4004, the first microprocessor that appeared in 1971: it is not a natural molecule like salt in the sea, which appeared three billion years ago; it makes no sense other than this: code is, in itself, intensely metaphysical—multicategorical. We can therefore immediately apply the principle of equivalence and do metaphysical reasoning: the outside of matter is also structured by a code of unknown nature; the ultimate physical theory physicists seek will reveal a quantum object that bears code. Likewise, computer code has an intense metaphysical dimension.
3.5 Being as a Being-code Topology
Given the very metaphysical character of this appearance of code, we can refine the idea of control into that of code, understood as the control structure of Being and thus we can more precisely define the elusive notion of Being : Being is something that has been coded somewhere… and by deduction: non Being is what cannot be coded. The categories of beings are defined by the Being-code topology, which is the relation of Being to its code, defined in a single topological metaphysical space: 1) matter: beings with external coding 2) life: beings with internal coding 3) thought: beings with Between coding.
The heterogeneous matter/life/thought structure of reality becomes
the topological external/internal/between Being-code topology of the matter>life>thought categories
3.6 Metaphysical concluding certainty: the MCogito as a Multicategorical Cogito
This is the metaphysical certainty—the MCogito— functional multicategorical equivalent of Descartes’ idealist monocategorical psychic Cogito, at the heart of this model:
Reality has a very simple and intuitive code controlled topological structure, self evident.
3.7 Metaphysical place of existence of Being
Important remark: the place of code is purely logical. One thing is a bit delicate to understand here, a bit abstract: the labels external/internal/between are not spatial, nor even truly topological, but metaphysical—i.e., thought under the constraint of a single logic that must absolutely run through the totality of phenomena in a neutral and metaphysical way, i.e., without reduction to a category. This metaphysical aspect is very visible in the case of “external” coding, since spatially there is nothing outside the Universe. So we can continue metaphysical reasoning, i.e., apply this very metaphysical aspect of a logical place of metaphysical existence to the definition of living beings: although DNA is spatially inside each living organism, the inside aimed at here is purely logical, just like the Between of ideas: the Between aimed at here is the topological milieu of metaphysical existence of ideas, not the place of their discussion. The thought object 2+2=4 does not exist in people’s “brains” nor in their discussions, which are certainly necessary for its existence, but only as a support.
if you create an “Enformationism” subject I promise to try my best to understand your purpose and effectiveness of your metaphysical solution.
Next will be entitled as “The [Non-Being - Being] logical Totality is the [quanta>matter>life>thought>data] structure of Reality”