Starting your own metaphysics? Start here

Metaphysics is the general knowledge of general knowledge. Aristotle called it being qua (or as) being. That makes sense if you think of ontology as particular being like this example: cat qua humans = pet so the ontology of a cat in relation to humans is a pet. Metaphysics is what you reduce all beings into like matter for materialism where a material cat in a material relation with material humans grants us some material concept of pet which may be some concept from a material brain or even could be gravity or evolution. If you have your own metaphysics and work on it you can just vibing and guessing based on how information is presented to you and this is what all philosophers do in their fields.

To start thinking like a philosopher here are some categories I used when I was developing my own. They’re a good jumpstart but don’t be afraid to change or drop whatever you want. I’ll give some fun exercises at the end that you can use.

1. Metaphysical structure.

   This just structures how you view things. I think Sider came up with the idea back in the 00’s but I don’t think he gave any structures. The structures I’ll list show up in every field formal or not like math, logic, computer science, linguistics etc.

   Some basic structures include: tree/pyramid/hierarchy/foundationalism or however you visualize it. We’re pretty knowledgeable on this but I wanted to show two variations. Plato starts with the highest good, the form of good as it were, at the top of the tree where Aristotle starts at the pluralist bottom with individual structures. They both have benefits and negatives.

   Another is circle/ring/coherentism. It can be viewed as a web so it’s not necessarily a circle but the point is value circles around. The usual example is a factory where a product increases value around the factory in a circular fashion. It’s a bit more intuitively egalitarian.

   Last I’ll share is line/progressive/infinitist. It can be a forked line like fichte’s dialectics. It’s used in a lot of number theory as people view numbers sort of in a linear way usually. The operations on lines can be creating segments within lines with another line. It has a lot of formal work in it and time seems to be experienced linearly so there’s explanatory power there.

2. Ontological relations.

   This is where you find what ontologies/objects are in your structures, what their relations and what their outputs look like. A few traditional ones are emanationism for trees, emergentism for lines but there are logical relations, epistemic relations and what those are etc. Reading Plato’s dialogues you see him argue dialectically in a few different ways. Aristotle came up with a formal object relation system with his logic and actuality-potentiality relation in his foundationalist structure. Neoplatonists use emanationism. Just pay attention to how philosophers are trying to relate things and you’ll get some ideas and can understand them a bit more. Sometimes philosophers are winging it so it’s good to see where they are.

3. Ontological dimensions.

   I saw on a wikipedia article this phrase being used for the exact reason I was using it but I couldn’t find it again and it was a small section. In any case I think this is a pretty important distinction. Ontological dimensions are how objects are reduced. So if light is dualist it is reduced into two things (e.g. wave and particle). A short list of ontological dimensions: monist, dualist, trialist, tessarist/tetrist/quadrilist, pluralist, nihilist etc. I’ll give examples for the first three to jog some ideas.

   Monist: darkness is the absence of light, cold of temperature, evil of good, zero of number, xy is a derivation of xx, degrees of anything on a continuum. Monism takes many forms like existence monism and priority monism. The relations will differ for monism.

   Dualism: wave-particle interpretations of light, digital computers take a dualist approach in 1 or 0 where zero is an operable choice, male and female, rationalism and epistemology, classical logic. Dualism or binaries are pretty commonly used that most folk wisdom sorta runs in this format (e.g. the government makes decisions based on safety and freedom). The extremes don’t interact directly and they can have continuums as well which mediates their relations.

   Trialism: trinity, (the trifirce), (fire-water-grass types in pokemon), beginning-middle/apex-end in literature or structuring games or training, intuitionist logic. You can test these in different structures like the pokemon types you could see if the types are a type of turing complete and see if the other types go between them or are under them or however.

A fun activity for applying and stress testing your metaphysics is something where there are less roadblocks. Creating your own game or rpg where you relate stats to each other is a good way to test out what you think may work and seeing if it comes out how you imagine. Writing some short stories or even poems can also help you structure ideas.

For developing your metaphysics it helps to read some good philosophers with developed metaphysics like Plato, Confucius, Aristotle, Taoism etc. It shows what they’re doing and how they apply their metaphysics into many fields. It’s just taking notes and maybe writing your own rebuttals. Eventually you’ll want to apply your own into different fields. I’ve found linguistics, psychology, economics to be decent to work into. Don’t worry about getting everything figured out or are about jumping around and having your own projects. After getting your metaphysics a bit more developed then jumping into formal fields like physics or math or chemistry will really stress test your metaphysics on extremely universal grounds. Just have projects and don’t get stuck on one.