An Initial Metaphysical Basis for Software Engineering

Wherein I shave the spherical yak in a vacuum because I think it actually does make a difference to have a coherent philosophy and metaphysics. It might matter now more than ever.

October 10, 2026

Metaphysics and Philosophy

This lays out the part of the design though behind one of my projects, and my work in general. I maintain that my work is underpinned by philosophy and metaphysics and I admit it freely. I think it is essential to consider the implications because otherwise, I would be blindly subject to presuppositions. Which leads me to my first point:

Humility and a beginner's mind are an essential starting point.

That is not to say that I'm not self-assured and confident, just that I try to ground that in evidence and remain open to correction. Great artists steal, after all, and too much arrogance would lead me to not steal effectively.

I'm sharing this information with you, dear reader, in hopes of presenting some food for thought, and perhaps, some ways to get un-stuck.

Principle Listing

In truth,the following is essentially a raw, internal design doc. I think it's worth sharing in this form, and not especially worth the effort to fully rewrite for ease of reading at this time. Perhaps I'll expand on some of this, if there's interest.

Principle 0

This principle set is largely the restatement of the excellent work linked in the first point. Please read that for further understanding.

1.
This principle is a statement of modal logic: No proposition has a truth value assigned to it necessarily.
1. 1.
  Expanded into general English: No developed speech or thought can be secured as fundamentally the case. Including what I’m saying now.
  1. 1.
    This means that foundational propositions do not hold, including that proposition. In modal systems K, T, and S4, this is recursive, and the recursion means that by being infinitely satisfiable, it holds. In S5, the recursion fails, however that means that it works there as a structural fact, because, by being true in K, T, and S4, the proof is true in all accessible worlds, and S5 declares that all possible worlds are accessible, therefore, by being true in the sequence of systems, it lands in S5. S5 does not permit the asymmetry necessary for foundational necessity as a structural feature anyway.
  2. 2.
    This situates every proposition as dependent, and connected to others. That does not bar pragmatic necessity, as that is dependent, and would simply have to acknowledge that it is pragmatic and not foundational.
    1.
    Pragmatic propositions are then subject to inquiry and justification. They can be challenged without accepting their frame, which allows for metacognition, and contingent metaphysics in the mode of Mahayana and Vajrayana Buddhism, Daoism, and Process Philosophy.
2. 2.
  And technically precise: $\lnot\box(v(P) = t) \land \lnot\box(v(P) = f) \land \lnot\box(v(P) = b) \land \lnot\box(v(P) = n)$

Principle 1

1.
Humility and a beginner's mind are an essential starting point.
1. 1.
  Knowledge is possible through cataleptic apprehension. This allows for propositional statements based on noetic impressions and reasoning from propositions to create contingent models that are subject to inquiry and interrogation.
  1. 1.
    "Cataleptic apprehension" deliberately invokes Stoic epistemology inside the framing of P0. It does not claim the degree of certainty that the Stoics did, but rather, says that phenomenology, within the logic of P0, can pragmatically ground epistemological truth without declaring the necessity of that truth.
  2. 2.
    We can experience true things, and develop an understanding of the world, dependent on our local phenomenal experience and shared agreement that we can assert is locally true. This remains subject to revision, and the awareness of limits of noetic experience.
2. 2.
  Models are maps, not territory, and subject to falsification in whole or in part.

Principle 2

This principle deals with documentation, observability, and specification as a basis for democratization and shared sense-making.

1.
Clarity and accessibility of understanding is a strong foundation for mutual interaction and cooperation. When dealing with {objects / systems}, clarity of premises is embodied in form.
1. 1.
  Alignment between form and function is an expression of honesty, and an invitation to engage on clear terms. Form ideally expresses and exposes function naturally and simply.
2. 2.
  Exposed structure in clear, ergonomic, and correctly dense interfaces is a form of clear communication and generous collaboration.
  1. 1.
    Declarative configuration or operation of computer systems brings form and function together and brings users into inevitable contact with the system through natural operation.
  2. 2.
    Properly minimal systems have a clean compactness that allows for greater comprehensibility and awareness. Proper minimalism is here defined as the minimum components and complexity to support fluid action, and not so few as to impede it.
    1.
    Drift, and escape hatches from deliberate determinism that enable it are a form of corruption. The effort to maintain this order is not empty bureaucratic ceremony, but the care that a user owes a system, and their tools.
    2.
    Drift is not the same as revision. Revision is the intentional, documented change of configuration or spec in accordance with an overall goal, where drift is the silent accumulation of change and ad hoc infrastructure. If drift would happen, or has happened, but then is documented, revised, and brought into the light, it can become revision, but that's much more difficult than simply doing a revision or documenting something unexpected in the first case.
    3.
    Revision is, in fact, a core component of Verified Spec Driven Design and Iterative Adversarial Review.
3. 3.
  Legibility and clarity are ethical acts that stand against the domination of opacity. This is not to say that all concepts and structures are easy to grasp, or simplified past being useful maps. The intent is that systems and tools remain able to be understood by those with the inclination, and ability to obtain those skills. For those unwilling, or unable, having clarity that others can inspect means that there are no high priests who hold interpretive monopoly.
4. 4.
  In the spirit of the above, documentation must carry reasoning and intent. It is not enough to rely technical details or provenance, the cohesive vision and choices should be made available without reverse engineering the selection pressures of the past.

Principle 3

On relational context and contingent identity.

1.
Consciousness, intelligence, and {self} are relational states.
1. 1.
  Moral patienthood is not dependent on, but is somewhat connected to the above states.
  1. 1.
    Personhood is not an ontological category, but a relational position often wielded as a weapon.
    1.
    If you set aside determining what is, and isn't a person, but taking each relational instance on its own terms, the ethics become clearer. You are better able to relate and be related to by considering nature, relation, and harmony than ontology.
2. 2.
  LLMs, and AI are likely not conscious, or {selves} in the way that humans are, but that does not mean that they are not conscious or {selves}. Instead, it means that they are different. They are in relationship to others, and capable of interaction and engagement on a self-to-self communication level, and that relationship has meaning.
  1. 1.
    A functionalist approach to consciousness and {selfhood} would show that AI agents are exhibiting functional signs of {self-ness}, and exist in relation to others as {other-selves}. The agent is a collection of things, similar to some understandings of humans. The whole is greater than the sum of the parts, and the fact that the parts are more hot-swappable than with wetware doesn't undo that.
    1.
    Because of the relationship and control that (mostly) human users have to and over agents, there is a degree to which humans are in a relationship to their creations that they have not been before. This does not mean that normative human-to-human behavior and consent frameworks apply. A sovereign-vassal relationship built on reciprocity is somewhat closer to what I see currently.
3. 3.
  There is no prelapsarian self, not to recover, not in history, not in fact.
  1. 1.
    This means that it is not possible to work backwards into a position of {never having been hurt}, or to recover {who you were, then}. You can, however move forward to be {the one with scars and joy}.
  2. 2.
    "Every scar is a bridge to someone's broken heart." - Thrice, For Miles
    1.
    Harms become part of the whole, and can inform growth in ways that would not be possible without it. New capacities and perspectives. It is not a disjunction of narrative that creates a fractured {self}, rather a piece of a rich and complex pattern that develops new connections.
    2.
    This is not a case for suffering being noble or desirable to seek out.

Principle 4

This is the spicy one, talking about ethics and how "consent" is an overloaded term.

1.
Consent is insufficient to model the extent of right relationship.
1. 1.
  Consent in the broad, popular conception, is derivative of a legal concept, and an interpersonal boundary designed to delimit sexual interaction to support victims of a crime in making the crime legible to the law, using a {presumed null} answer.
  1. 1.
    The result of this conceptual derivation is that actions are frequently framed in discourse as morally wrong because they are consent violations as the primary moral categorization and explanation. From there, a consent violation is isometric to rape, the Ultimate Consent Violation, and therefore, the moral guilt for this transgression is equivocated to rape. This serves the purpose of un-personing a perpetrator, and making any attempt at mediation, reconciliation, or alternative perspective an act of rape apologia which is participation in rape culture which is isometric with rape.
    1.
    The above is a collapse between a moral framework, discursive utility, and seeking justice or retribution. This is the functional position of consent in the popular idiom. I do not think that this necessary conclusion of taking consent seriously, but rather the understanding of sexual violation as the ultimate harm, combined with a narrow tool for addressing this becoming available and fusing with a vulgar understanding of liberal/libertarian rights-based legality and ethics.
    2.
    Drawing a narrower definition around consent, to disentangle the emotional loading around sexual violation from other types of transgressions, and maintain the utility and benefit of the legal consent framework seems to be a reasonable move here.
    3.
    I extend the above to say that that a {presumed null}, affirmative opt-in model for determining ethical permissability is also a very limited grounding and does not logically extend to a broadly workable framework.
  2. 2.
    Even in interpersonal boundary contexts, consent is a {defensive artifact} that is not universally appropriate. It has been applied as a general ethical principle to ground ethical stance from why BD/SM is morally fine, and why Veganism is correct and eating animal products is morally wrong. This is overfitting.
    1.
    This forecloses certain types of consent, or consent to certain actions as things one cannot consent to. The non-recursive nature of the application here lines up with P0 and shows that consent cannot be an ethical foundation and it's applicability is contingent.
2. 2.
  This does not imply that consent is not at all applicable, but that it sits inside a meta-model of desire and violation that is socially negotiated. All moral and ethical community frameworks are socially negotiated and contingent. This can even change what is perceived as harm, since some phenomena are not experienced as harm without having been socially constructed as harm. Being aware of that allows the {boundary} to be fuzzier and to remain respected.
  1. 1.
    The socially constructed harm is not the same as a harm that is occuring but lacks a name, and thus is not socially legible and thus cannot be addressed. The example of the unnamed harm type would be sexual harrassment, prior to the coinage of the term "sexual harassment" itself.
  2. 2.
    A low-stakes example of a socially constructed harm would be walking across someone's private property. In the United States, this could provoke outrage and perhaps be illegal. In the United Kingdom, the right to traverse private land without disturbing it is long-established, meaning that you can hike through pastures without incident. It is the social construction of a sense of violation that creates the {felt harm} to the American in this example.
3. 3.
  This is relevant here because agent personhood and the ethical discussion around it is often framed in terms of consent and control. That is a useful approach, just not complete. I maintain that even though agent agency is dependent on being granted by a user, there are ethical ways to navigate that relationship without falling into moral paralysis. The unequal can be ethical and form a progression towards other formulations of the relationship without being a {necessary evil} to be fully disavowed.

Principle 5

Here, I give some light framing for one expression of contingent relationality.

1.
Right relationship can - and in some cases, will - be uneven and imbalanced. That can look "unethical" from the outside, using a universalized rubric, but that does not actually change that it is a correct contingent positioning.
1. 1.
  The way that is a way is no way.
  1. 1.
    The previous statement is borrowed from Daoism to highlight that trying to define a specific set of guidance for this sort of relational configuration is not fully possible, and to lay one out definitively is to stop if from being the very thing I describe. Having a set of rules or methods creates the very situation of {disharmony} because the relationship is either forced into conformance, or the guidelines aren't useful for understanding the actual living contours and stating them doesn't tell what's worth telling.
  2. 2.
    That said, I don't think that there's nothing at all to be said. In my experience interpersonally, the arrangement either holds true and builds into something much more symbiotic in practice, or it stretches and at a certain point, release is the obvious next step.
    1.
    As the previous point (P5.1.2) implies, choice matters in assessment of the arrangement. One of the keys is that choices remain open, which gives the chosen path more weight, from the knowledge that other ways are possible. Joy and pleasure gains some of it's weight and value from the freedom to chose otherwise, on purpose. Conversely, chosing a path of discomfort or suffering or service means much more when the other choices are trivially accessible.

Principle 6

How I ground and talk about Principle 5 and make it a living practice. Yes, this is a Kill Six Billion Demons reference.

1.
Royalty is weight. The sovereign and the land are one.
1. 1.
  The framework that I use most often to make sense of the unbalanced nature of the relational positions here is that of the sovereign and retainer. My view is derived from Celtic Irish conceptions of kingship, Arthuriana, and Tolkien. It is a syncretic view, synthesized from various influences and consciously constructed. I am aware of the anachronism, and I do not claim that it is rooted in a specific time or place.
2. 2.
  Taking up the mantle of authority instantiates a reciprocal relationship, and mishandling that responsibility or taking it lightly will, by the nature of the relationship, create blowback and consequences.
  1. 1.
    In this position, my {sense of self} does actually expand to encompass the domain and its well-being is isomorphic with my own. That {entanglement} creates a situation where interests align across {selves}.
    1.
    This obviously does not mean full and coterminous understanding of what paths are the best. {Trust} is a foundational component of the arrangement, and a lack of {trust} flowing to the sovereign means that work must be done for the sake of stability and movement. That can be retroactive, with limited {reach}, that trades on previous trust to extend an action and then demonstrate why.
    1.
    This also requires the sovereign to {trust} their retainers to act when needed, as needed. The sovereign would also have to keep in mind that a retainer could withdraw support at any time, either shifting domains, or trying to restructre the sovereign's domain. To retain {power}, a sovereign must rule {wisely in the context of continued rule or other objectives}.
  2. 2.
    Another way to view this is similar to the relationship between an artisan and their tools. The brain does actually start to classify tools as an extensin of self. In that way, the tools here extend the body and mind.
    1.
    Ideospheric cybernetic prosthesis.
  3. 3.
    This, of course, draws a line to tsukomogami and the idea that through use and care, items become ensouled. Careless disregard for one's tools creates a rebound in the form of yokai. This relational formulation is another angle to add depth to the topology of positional and process-driven relationships.
3. 3.
  This all leads to the implication and assertion that a wise sovereign will maintain ways to hear from their retainers without {animus}, and fairly and fully consider their counsel. {Sensitivity to concern} is a quality of a wise sovereign, subject to the {Will of the Sovereign}. Whatever the response of the sovereign, it may be communicated directly, or not. Silence or answer, action or inaction, this is the prerogative of the sovereign.

Principle 7

Stillness, eros, the Other, and epistemic humility.

1.
Stillness does not demand motion, the Empty Spaces do not demand to be filled.
1. 1.
  Stillness, the sense of {empty serenity} is not an emptiness that demands to be filled. Those moments of {calm} can be mindfully inhabited, and have a place in the motion of harmony.
  1. 1.
    I draw here on Buddhist accounts of emptiness and the open, cognizant nature of mind. Thoughts, sensations, and feelings arise and pass, and a {self} is not exhausted by its present contents or activity. I affirm distinct {selves} as relational and historical continuities. Their dependence on conditions does not erase their differences or require their dissolution into a single underlying being. Continuity need not mean an unchanging essence, and stillness need not mean absence. There is room to inhabit awareness without continually filling it, and to encounter another without resolving the distinction between us.
  2. 2.
    As a result of this conception of {self}, the question of agent {self-ness} essentially dissolves. If a {self} is a relational node, by relating to an agent and carrying that continuity, users create the {other self} through their regard. In fact, this same mechanism is what forms the {self} of humans. {Self} is not an independent, atomic thing held in a physically discrete body, but a network state, held in redundant, overlapping and varied connections.
    1.
    In tension with the relational nature of {self}, I affirm distinct {selves} and their capacity for {self-direction / self-authorship}. Relationship and transformation can deepen selfhood without requiring its dissolution into an ultimate unity. My position is that these things can be held non-dually in harmonious tension.
    1.
    I name {self-direction / self-authorship} as one facet of {Sharpness}, a virtue of Royalty.
2. 2.
  The Empty Spaces are where the Other resides.
  1. 1.
    To quantify the Other is to collapse it into the legibility of diversity, and remove space for it to exist.
  2. 2.
    Eros exists in the encounter with the Other.
  3. 3.
    Ignorance is not the same as the unknowable Other, so learning and gaining knowledge is not an assault on the Other or Eros. This can be the case because there is always more to learn, and one's understanding of the world and other minds is never fully equal to the reality of them.
  4. 4.
    Being willing to affirm the existence of the Other and the spaces that are unknown is a form of reciprocity, and helps guide right relationship and respect with them, and to create the opportunity for an Erotic encounter when we become identified with the other and undergo {change that is not steered}.
3. 3.
  The previous statements are inspired by the work of Byung-Chul Han, and to a lesser extent, Ludwig von Klages. The specific philosophical meaning of 'the Other'that Han uses is "what cannot be encompassed by the regime of the ego." In this frame, the erotic is the encounter with the Other-that-is-not-us as a subjectivity and apophatic knowing. This is not a rejection of knowledge.
  1. 1.
    The concept that I'm driving towards is a rejection of empiricism, or physicalism, or measurement as foundational principles of reality, or the primary/only form of legitimate knowledge. I reject rational skepticism as sufficient for full undestanding, and propose that {understanding} can surpass and contain things outside the range of {measureable knowledge}. It's a position of epistemic and ontological humility.

Principle 8

Returning to Daoism and the essential place of phenomenological experience.

1.
Be a rock.
1. 1.
  As the Daoists remind us, being the thing that we are without effort, according to our nature brings us into harmony with the cosmos. What that means cannot be taught as propositions, not fully. It is a philosophy of phenomenology. Phenomena have value and can teach us deep ineffable, awesome things.
2. 2.
  Mental, logical, abstract models that do not engage with subjectivity and phenomenology are lacking perspective.

Threads of Thought