Abstract:
This is the logical core of the MCogito metaphysical system. Here, we will model exactly how Reality transitions from one category to the next, using the exact same structural mechanism for every single phase shift: from Quanta to Matter, Matter to Life, Life to Thought, and Thought to Data.
Let us indulge Hegel for just a moment and work backwards, starting with the most recent transition: Thought => Data.
This section relies heavily on the foundational framework established in my previous posts. In those texts, the distinct categories of being are unified under a single abstract structure, strictly governed by the following concepts: being, non-being, code, the being-code topology, carrier being, and meta-causality.
These concepts, which are necessary to understand what follows, are fully defined and unfold sequentially starting here:
5 Logic of the self construction of Reality into categories of Being
5.1 The transition Thought > Data
Since we are at the intersection of the biological and the psychic we could start from ourselves, from the human, to analyze the logic of transition between two categories and generalize to the other transitions. But is it easy to understand ourselves…? The concept In the end was the Code tells us that everything is clear and coherent for the last category, so it is easier to analyze the psychic>digital transition in order to extract a corpus of concepts (texts in bold) to apply afterward to the other transitions.
The two Being-code topology at work in the carrier being: the carrier being is at the intersection of two categories, of two Being-code topology: the bearing one to which it belongs and the one it carries; the Turing machine is a mathematical object, a pure object of thought, and every computer is a Turing machine.
Topically pure beings: there exists a part where the Between is topologically pure, i.e., where ideas exist absolutely by themselves, independently of any personal or collective particularity or external data. This pure Between is occupied by mathematical ideas, which alone do not depend on opinions or external facts: mathematicians say they discover mathematical beings, i.e., that these beings exist independently by themselves, outside mathematicians.
Topological mirroring in a meta being: the Turing machine is precisely the idea that mirrors the topology of thought, i.e., the Between. The essence of the Between is the essence of mathematics, i.e., the fact of existing absolutely between individuals: the goal of the Turing machine aims precisely to define this essence by showing that it can mechanically, therefore independently of any human, prove any mathematical statement as true or false, i.e., show its absolute existence. In terms of Being-code topological logic it is the between of the Between, the meta being of the psychic, the mathematical idea whose object is the essence of maths, i.e., the essence of the Between: the Between reflects itself in the Turing machine; the psychic category of thought reflects in this idea its own topological identity.
Topological calculus: in the same way that we initially felt the very perceptible and almost definable difference between a pebble, a swallow, and 2+2=4, we feel the presence of an underlying logical calculus behind the topological transitions nul>ext>int>bet>idt. A first easy step of this calculus is the internal–external inversion between neighboring categories: the external of matter and the Between of thought (also of the more general external type) invert into the internals of life and of the intentional of the digital. Concretely: the pure Between—the mathematical doing, the proved—which belonged to mathematicians, passes into any code executed by any Turing machine, because any code has the value of a mathematical proof, the Turing machine being a demonstration machine, but a proof code that has a singular intentional aim: the aim of absolute normative Between has inverted into the internal, the singularity of the intentional aim proper to each program.
Appearance of code: the mirroring of mathematics—its meta betweenization, its metaization—was initially the project of the great mathematician Hilbert, who proposed to prove all possible mathematics by finite, mechanical means, i.e.,outside the heads of mathematicians. Thus, five years before Turing, Gödel also sought to reach the essence of mathematics by showing whether minimal mathematics capable of doing arithmetic can exist independently by themselves, i.e.,can in their language prove that any arithmetic formula is true or false. In topological terms he tries to prove the pure Between. To do this he re-injects arithmetic formulas (e.g. 3+2=5) into arithmetic by coding them as numbers. Turing takes up the principle by going further in mechanization and by drawing inspiration from the operation of typewriters. It is therefore indeed the dynamism of mirroring—the Between seeking to prove the Between, to betweenize the Between, to metaize the Between—that leads to the use of code.
For the pleasure of the speculative we could propose here a metaphysics of code in which the coded part of the carrier being is fundamentally a designator of what it is not. With symbols one can designate, for example, non being or the unknown, virtually, without knowing its content; it suffices that beneath there exists an encoded context that gives meaning to these codes. Generalizing, one could propose that the function of code, or its essence, is to designate non being, the virtual. Being would be made of a real part interpreting code and a virtual, coded part designating what it is not. One obtains the vision of a reality made of a stack of five layers of pure code resting on an energetic background reified by the carriers, this reification of energy becoming lighter and lighter as one rises through the different layers of code. The logical essence of reality would belong entirely to non being, for one can argue that energy itself belongs to the nothingness of being, i.e.,to the uncoded. In the Totality uncoded>coded, the coded is moreover a part and an expression of the uncoded. Being—or rather beings—made of energy reified by code, is what this logic of code, this logic of non being, leaves behind it. This “non being” aspect of the logical frame corresponds to the feeling you probably have of not being part of this matter>life>thought structure, that it does not speak about you, because indeed realized being, the “something”, belongs to the real content, not to the logical container that is the object of this model. The deepest idea one can have about reality is probably the idea of duality, but that is not the object of this model, which is the self construction of the Totality into categories of Being (remark: this primacy of non being also answers, in passing, the old question “why something rather than nothing?” The answer is: there is nothing. For being is relative, inconsistent, weak, virtual; and in the question “nothing” is absolute, so relative (i.e.,within being) to that absolute there exists nothing—no absolute of being to oppose to the absolute of absolute nothingness).
Relation of totality at the heart of the carrier being: both Gödel’s method and the Turing machine ultimately prove that an absolute mathematics cannot exist. In a system that allows arithmetic or logic, one can write mathematical formulas that are true but unprovable, or worse neither true nor false—which is perfectly anti mathematical. The carrier being of the data category is in fact the negation of the essence of mathematics, the negation of its own of Being-code topology: the completion of the psychic, the proof of the pure Between, i.e.,the between of the Between, is the proof that an absolute pure Between cannot exist. The carrier being is the Totality, i.e.,the set of the self and the non self —more precisely: the non self defined from the self and inside the self.
Carrier beings are foci in which reality as Totality is focused and mirrored in itself, then self constructs into a new category endowed with a new Being-code topology, since the Totality is by definition an opening of the self onto the non self.
The carrier being embody the totality of former Reality in the heart of the next category, that’s another reason why it is causally independent.
Totality, dephasing, recursive infinity, code and constructivity: the total being that the carrier being is, is contradictory and dephased with respect to itself in the bearing category from which it comes. When Gödel re-injects the dynamism of arithmetic formulas into the being of arithmetic—that is, numbers—this creates self referential formulas of the type “this statement is false” which are neither true nor false; and it is the same with Turing, who creates unprovable statements by forcing the machine to work on itself, which makes it uncontrollable—negating the very idea of machine, since a machine is specifically made to reach a well defined state in a well defined time. In mathematics, dephasing in the order of Thought is formalized by Gödel’s incompleteness theorem. The contradiction of total self reference is resolved by passing into the next category: thus, in mathematics, contradictions of set theory such as the set of all sets that do not belong to themselves—a contradictory set which both belongs and does not belong to itself—are resolved in a more powerful theory of “types” (if I remember correctly). It is the same phenomenon one finds in physics with discrete symmetry breakings, i.e.,incoherences in the univocity of physical laws, which explain why our universe was constructed by an asymmetry of matter with respect to anti matter; or in Piaget, how the small incoherences left by the assimilation of the real to the logical structures of thought lead to the self construction of these structures. Constructivity is the primary character of the Totality which self constructs into categories and is transmitted from one category to the next because of the internal dephasing of the carrier being. Dephasing is thus the opening of the self onto the non self that realizes the Totality.
From the point of view of the next carried category, the carrier being is not dephased or contradictory: it is a source of power—an infinite recursive dynamics in mirror—usable via code to create Being.
Saturation of the possibles of the bearing category: from the point of view of the bearing category, the fact that it can construct a total being shows that it has saturated all possibles in one way or another; otherwise this would leave gaping holes in the reality perceived by the carrier being, aspects of reality completely inaccessible. This is why the construction of the carrier being takes time: the fabric of beings constructed by the category around the beings of the previous categories must have no major hole and the internal material of this fabric must be solid; the category must know itself solidly before it can construct a reflection being which is the image of its own topological identity. The Turing machine is precisely the being of thought that saturates all the possibles of thought: a Turing machine can encode all mathematical functions, and every aspect of reality can be represented by a function. This saturation could only appear after a long maturation of mathematical thought. If it had appeared by chance before this maturation, it would simply have disappeared for lack of a sufficiently dense “fabric of ideas” to give it meaning (in fact it happened: the mathematician Ada Lovelace first perceived computational universality, but a century too early, without the appearance of the Data category).
Real infinity: the digital is a real infinity: any reality can be created digitally; even the improbable “artificial intelligence” project of the 1950s has now found its reality with the Transformer algorithm at the heart of generative AI.
Causal autonomy: as with the physical, the biological, or the psychic, computer causality knows only itself; code knows and interacts only with itself, because computer inputs and outputs are transformed by electronics into binary data that appear in coded form.
Meta causality: in what way is computing a meta causality of Thought—does it over define thought? In fact any computer program answers to a precise human intention and thereby engages a whole set of ideas. The program is the mathematical proof, an algorithmic theorem, that these ideas work and that the intention is real. The nature of a computer program is to redefine, at a certain mathematical level, human ideas. Every software engineer knows that programming is rethinking, redefining goals and practices so that “it” can run as a machine, so that it becomes something logical and programmable. Computing takes control, redefines human ideas at a higher level.
Throughput of beings and causal lightness: because of the extreme causal lightness of computing, which mobilizes only a handful of electrons to create code, the throughput of code is gigantic and will end up molding all reality, from the outside. No computer will ever “understand” a human being, but by sheer statistical power it will be able to interact as if it did; this is exactly what ChatGPT already does.
Singular aspect of the carrier being: I imagine mathematicians would agree that the Turing machine is a very singular mathematical object, and not of a dazzling purity!
Completion remains local: even if the carrier being in some way completes the Being topology in its quest for itself—its movement of mirroring—this completion remains locally confined and all around the construction of other beings continues. The Turing machine did not put an end to mathematics, which is richer than ever. Likewise DNA did not stop cosmology, nor Thought the living world.
Upward external human link: computing is intentional; its finality is human and does not belong to the digital. For example, the idea of creating an autonomous AI remains a human project.
We now have a whole corpus of metaphysical multicategorical concepts that we will be able to apply one by one to the other categories by metaphysical reasoning, and thus verify the effectiveness of this “speculative” philosophical modeling and In the next post I’ll show that these concept explain in exactly the same way the Life->Thought transition, i.e. how thought logically conclude Life and is the meta of Life.