Both Are Possibility Arguments

15 Mar, 2026

This week I gave a cursory read of Immanuel Kant's Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals with an analysis by H.J. Paton. Now I will study this book closely and blog about insights here. My initial take is:

This book is Kant's first of three major books on ethics.
Kant doesn't build an ethical system in this book, rather he wants to show that ethics can be derived from reason alone.
A supreme principle of morality can be the foundation of an ethical system.
This book aims to show that such supreme principle is possible.

Conscious Permanence has a similar goal. I aim to show that existence of conscious experience in spacetime is possible and coherent. I don't see this project building a complete philosophy. The permanence viewpoint won't be settled fact, as we only experience our current time location in spacetime and do not know what is being experienced throughout a static spacetime. Both the Groundwork and Conscious Permanence offer possibility arguments.

The second book I will study closely in this blog is Alicia Juarrero's Context Changes Everything. I believe Kant searched for the possibility of choice in a deterministic world and that Juarrero holds the answer. Choice doesn't mean free will, an impossibility under determinism, but instead means an idea of distributed authorship for our decisions, as our current neural architecture is composed by all past choices, and the aggregate of those choices defines who we are.

It's enough to show that we do shape our future, despite the fact our brains form present actions based solely on the current neural architecture. I think Juarrero's theories in her career, culminating in this important 2023 book, will propose a credible structure for how human agency works physically in our deterministic brains.

Having agency is crucial for showing how we affect the permanent lives of ourselves and others. Without resolving the agency-despite-determinism paradox, you can't get to permanence, because if there's no genuine authorship then there's nothing meaningful being written into the spacetime record. The goal will be to develop that idea into a new foundation for Kant's principle of morality.

The goal isn't to have eternal experience be a settled fact. I'm hoping to show it's a coherent position given what we know from physics, neuroscience, and complex systems theory. And that's exactly what Kant's Groundwork aimed to do for morality.