Groundwork ii-iii

19 Mar, 2026

From before, there are three parts of philosophy: logic, physics, and ethics.

Logic is made of only fundamental principles that apply universally. It's important that Kant believes in the existence of these universal principles. Kant firmly believes there is a rational structure to everything. He thinks we can understand the world through reason. (Maybe that's what he did in the Critique of Pure Reason?) He envisions all of philosophy as having a pure framework.

In addition there are pure principles that apply just to the physical world and define our experiences of objects in the world. Also there are pure principles that apply just to the human interactions and through living we find that these principles control our experiences of actions in the world.

The physical principles are many, most of which Kant couldn't have known 230 years ago, comprising mathematical structures and scientific properties (such as causation or equivalence or, if I remember correctly, the things that Aristotle discusses in his book Metaphysics, I just didn't appreciate it at the time). These principles govern the empirical framework.

The ethical principles comprise just a few principles (perhaps only one) the existence of which form the basis of this book. Practical anthropology is a study of how humans actually behave, apart from the ethical principles. Human actions are governed by the ethical principles (to be discovered in this book) just as our application of physics in the world is governed by the physical principles of mathematical systems and scientific relationships.

Conscious Permanence ties in here. I'm establishing a rational structure, based on neuroscience, spacetime physics, and complex systems theory, that holds independently of experience. This structure happened to be discovered through experience, thinking about the Replay Thought Experiment.

As an analogy, Newtonian physics uncovered the mathematical relationship of gravity. This math system holds for all large bodies in the universe. The empirical structure of objects falling toward earth wouldn't make a solid rule that applies everywhere. The rational part is necessary to make the concept universal. Imagine standing on a meteor and being able to throw an object into space, that wouldn't align with our empirical understanding of gravity, but the math of velocities and gravitational pull would correctly predict the outcome. I use my experience of living to uncover this rational structure of spacetime and distributed authorship. And just as gravitational theory applies to large bodies all over the universe, the rational structure of agency within spacetime and determinism will form a universal principle we can apply to broader problems of existence, behavior, and societal relations. This is ultimately what Kant was after, too: a rational structure that governs human freedom.