Groundwork iv-vi

22 Mar, 2026

It's necessary to work out a pure moral philosophy that lacks any empirical contributions. It must be pure reason, universal in scope, applicable without conditions. Kant is implying there exists an absolute principle of duty, which I assume is coming later. We assume a law must have absolute (i.e., unconditional) necessity to be valid morally, to have force as a moral duty. Moral principles must hold for any (unconditional) society or structure of beings, i.e., not just for mankind or a certain society. Every precept derived from mere experience, even if considered universal, is only a practical rule (not a moral law) if the slightest part of it rests on empirical grounds.

How might Conscious Permanence fit into all this? The principle of determinism means any intelligent beings in the universe must operate that way. And for beings with neuron-based brains to have agency in their lives requires distributed authorship: that accumulated constraints on future behavior control life's trajectory. So the principle of distributed authorship, derived from reasoning about agency within determinism, governs how decisions from the past affect the present actions; therefore, this principle belongs to the metaphysic of nature, i.e. the laws of physics. This project gives a way to bridge the metaphysic of nature and human action, which may be significant if Kant doesn't fill this gap later.

It's true that I came up with this arrangement of spacetime, determinism, and distributed authorship to explain how agency could exist in the human mind. Through reasoning, this mechanism (empirical) became a principle (theoretical) that governs how the world operates, rather than coming from observation. That's how I claim that intelligent societies on the other side of the universe must operate this same way.

As a summary: Distributed authorship explains how the mechanism of human agency occurs. Agency is a consequence of complex systems under physical laws and applies universally to any beings with neuron-based brains like us. It's this principle that governs how we have agency in our lives.