Three structural accounts — of physical reality, of intelligence, of consciousness — each derived from its own commitments.
Vincent Tomann
This is a philosophical framework in three branches. Each starts from a small set of commitments and follows them strictly to where the chain ends.
Reality is what there is to be in contact with. Intelligence is what staying in contact requires. Consciousness is what contact is from inside.
The branches can be read separately.
The three branches⁂
Branch I
The Axioms of Physical Reality
A foundational account of physical reality starting from one commitment — energy as substance rather than as a Noether quantity. From there, consequences follow strictly. The chain derives space, time, and law as structural requirements of distinction; closes propertyless nothing as a state reality could have been in; commits to one reality with no external container; and treats the Big Bang as a configuration transition of substrate-energy that always was.
A structural account of what minds are and what running intelligence requires. Five conditions — accurate perception, interconnection, consequence-tracking, continuous updating, calibrated incompleteness — derived as structural requirements of any system that builds a model of the world and acts from it. The conditions apply at every scale: a person, an institution, a civilization, an artificial mind. The branch develops their consequences for ethics, thriving, governance, capital, freedom, and AI alignment.
A structural account of consciousness — what it is, when systems have it, and how the hard problem and the zombie problem dissolve rather than get solved. The branch extends aspect-identity from the physical reality framework to the level of the running loop, and uses the five conditions of intelligence to specify what running the loop requires. The chain produces graded verdicts on what is conscious — newborns, animals, sleep, current AI, future AI — and an account of personal identity by lineage.
Aspect-identity — the physical reality framework's claim that substance and structure are two grammars of one event — carries over into the consciousness framework, extended to the level of the running loop.
The five conditions of intelligence, derived in the intelligence branch, are used by the consciousness branch to specify what running the loop requires.
You can take one branch without the others. The intelligence framework stands on its own structural arguments — it doesn't require the substrate-energy ontology. The consciousness framework draws on both other branches but can also be read on its own terms by anyone willing to grant aspect-identity and the five as working hypotheses.
A note from Vincent
Whether the work reaches readers is independent of whether it succeeded for me. It's offered to engage with, to push back on, or to find a fragment that opens something different. Continue →