Thank you for commenting! These are excellent questions, because you are getting underneath the argument and asking what it actually looks like to practice metaphysics rather than simply talk about it. Before I begin I will point out something that is necessary here: ethical metaphysics, like science, must be approached by not trying to control the conclusion, but trying to understand the structure well enough to follow the truth wherever it leads. With that being said, let’s dive in to your questions!
1. How do you develop metaphysical literacy beyond surface-level understanding?
Start by learning to distinguish data from structure.
We naturally experience reality as a collection of things: objects, events, people, measurements, experiences. Examining and building a collection gives us a set to begin with. Metaphysical literacy begins when we ask what must be true for those things to relate coherently at all. That then can be examined using node graphs.
For example, instead of stopping at:
“Gravity causes objects to fall.”
you begin asking:
“What makes that relationship independent of my belief about it?”
Then you start asking:
• What exists? (Build your set)
• What depends upon what? (Determine parent-child hierarchy)
• What changes? (Which nodes on your graph are actually composite? You’ll begin to notice that nothing remains stable across a time-space continuum)
• What remains invariant? (Which nodes are actually worthy of the reflexive property, x=x, and are indeed constant?)
• What is derived? (What requires a dependency and therefore a parent-child relationship?)
• What is independent? (These are parent nodes)
• What applies universally? (Universality on a graph means the child nodes have achieved coherence from the common parent, and the parent, therefore, applies constraint. The children are dependent.)
• What is the subject and what is the object? (Anything that does not meet the six conditions of objectivity is not an ultimate objective, but may be an objective within a smaller context.)
• Am I describing reality, or merely describing my perception of reality? (Is my node graph exhaustive in relation to the context? Is my set complete in relation to a given context? What areas could benefit from further examination?)
• Does my explanation remain coherent when I apply it to itself? (Re-examination of your graph should produce the same structure. If re-examination produces a new structure, it implies dependency on a higher parent node not represented within the context, or that the starting set is incomplete.
That last question is particularly important. A metaphysical structure should be able to survive being turned back upon itself.
This is similar to debugging in computer science. You don't become a better programmer merely by memorizing more terminology. You become better at identifying relationships, dependencies, contradictions, assumptions, and invariants.
The six conditions that I’ve come to recognize as the structural description for objectivity—singularity, externality, independence, invariance, non-derivation, and universality—are useful here as a diagnostic framework. They're not meant to be six words you memorize and place on a shelf. They're questions you can repeatedly apply to any proposed structure.
2. How do we know what reality permits, or what the structure of reality is?
The six conditions that structurally define objectivity is the structure in question, but you don’t have to take my word for it. In fact, I welcome stress testing and peer review. How I came to know this structure, and how anyone else is welcome to peer review this structure is thru the method of debugging.
Now we obviously don't begin with access to reality's "source code." In the absence of any code, we can still infer structure from stable behavior. That's what we do in computing when we don't have access to the underlying source code. We can provide inputs, observe outputs, reproduce behavior, identify dependencies, and infer something about the architecture of the system.
Reality gives us an enormous amount of data. So we can ask:
What remains true regardless of who observes it?
That's invariance.
What cannot be changed merely by changing our beliefs?
That's independence.
What applies regardless of the particular observer or circumstance?
That's universality.
What does everything else depend upon?
That takes us toward ontological dependence and non-derivation.
Can there ultimately be competing standards of truth?
That brings us to singularity.
The important methodological rule is:
Don't make reality conform to your model. Make your model answer to reality.
This is where the programmer analogy becomes useful again. When reality produces an unexpected result, treat the contradiction as a debugging signal.
Don't immediately say:
“Reality must be wrong.”
Ask:
“What assumption in my model produced this contradiction?”
That doesn't mean every apparent contradiction automatically disproves a worldview. It means contradiction is something we investigate rather than something we automatically protect ourselves from.
3. If we conclude there is one ultimate grounding, where do we go from there?
If you reach the conclusion that there is one ultimate ground, congratulations, you have reached the conclusion that reality is objective rather than subjective because you have exhaustively stressed tested and identified stable pattern of reality. If the pattern is not stable and continues to change, or that no conclusion was found, then the conclusion would be that reality is subjective, and would instead remain inconclusive. So congratulations if you have managed to reach bedrock. Notice that I continuously emphasize six conditions, with singularity only being one of them. If you reach the conclusion that there is one ultimate ground, you should keep going.
You shouldn’t stop at:
“There is one ultimate ground.”
The next question should be:
“What keeps that ground stable?”
In fact, singularity might not be the stable condition you reach the first time. Anyone can potentially recognize any of the other six conditions first. The thing to consider is that there may be more conditions to discover, that make the structure even tighter and more concise. While I have managed to discover six conditions, there may be more. So discovering one condition is only the beginning of the next investigation.
Other questions you can then ask that what that ground must be like are:
Is it dependent or independent? Derived or non-derived? Contingent or necessary? Singular or multiple? Invariant? Universal? Can it be affected by the things it grounds? Can the dependent system modify its ground? Does the proposed ground explain objective coherence without itself becoming dependent upon the subjects it is supposed to ground?
If reality has an objective structure, then our epistemology should answer to that structure. Science, and alongside that, technology, should both answer to it (This is worthy of an entire essay on its own). Our ethics should answer to it. Our institutions should answer to it. Our governance should answer to it. Even our understanding of human rights should answer to it.
You’ll notice at this point I’m making normative claims, statements that say “should” as an ought, but while that “ought” is a choice because we don’t have to be scientific if we don’t want to, failure to fulfill that “ought” slowly deteriorates our ability to collectively reason over time. Epistemology, science and technology are perhaps the clearest in displaying the consequences of our failure to remain faithful to objective structure.
So the question becomes:
If reality has an objective structure, what does faithful participation in that structure require of us?
That's where metaphysics stops being an abstract intellectual exercise and becomes practically consequential. And this leads us to your last question.
I think an important distinction needs to be maintained here:
Metaphysics and theology are not the same thing.
Metaphysics asks:
What is ultimately real? What exists? What is fundamental? What does everything depend upon? What makes objective truth possible? What must an ultimate ground be like?
Theology begins when a particular religious tradition makes specific claims about that ultimate reality—revelation, scripture, prophecy, divine attributes, worship, religious law, historical events, and so forth.
You cannot make an intelligent decision about a religious tradition without metaphysical literacy. Without metaphysical literacy, you are grasping at straws. The entire premise of metaphysical illiteracy in a secular landscape while sanctioning theology from epistemological discourse is fundamentally duplicative in my opinion.
Going back to your question, I would think about the relationship this way:
Metaphysics asks: What must ultimately be true?
Theology asks: What does this particular religious tradition claim about that ultimate truth?
That distinction is important because it means we don't have to begin with theology. We can begin with reality. We can investigate objectivity. We can identify the structure required for objective truth. We can investigate whether reality actually exhibits that structure. We can reason toward an ultimate ground. Only then do competing religious descriptions become relevant.
At that point, theology isn't the starting assumption. It becomes a set of proposed descriptions of the metaphysical conclusion you have stress tested.
This also gives us a way to approach religion without beginning with tribalism and identity politics:
Which proposed structure most coherently accounts for the reality we already know? In other words, which religion best describes the schema to our existential set?
If several religions claim to describe ultimate reality, we can translate those descriptions into the underlying ontological structures they imply and stress-test them.
The question isn't simply:
“Which God do you believe in?”
Because belief is a hypothesis and can be wrong. It's more fundamentally:
“What must ultimately be true for truth, coherence, and objectivity to be possible—and which proposed account of ultimate reality actually satisfies those requirements?”
This is where the six conditions that describe the ultimate pattern for truth, coherence and objectivity in node graph terms can now be compared to various religious traditions. That is a very different starting point.
Ultimately, the progression looks something like:
Observe → abstract → identify structure → stress-test the structure → identify the ultimate ground → compare proposed accounts → derive implications for knowledge and action.
The important distinction throughout is that metaphysics isn't about inventing a structure for reality. It's about discovering which structure reality already requires.
If the universe—or reality—is a database, empirical observation is an arbitrary set of data—things that exist. Ultimate reality is the schema, not another piece of data within the table. It does not “exist” if existence implies what can be empirically proven. It is the underlying structure that organizes the data coherently. In other words, it turns arbitrary data from noise into intelligence. Data and schema are not the same. The database can be empty, and the schema still stands. The data needs the schema in order to make sense. That analogy shows the asymmetry of the object-subject relationship. The subject can disappear and the object can remain unaffected, whereas if the object disappears, the subject is affected. Either truth is an illusion, or truth is real. And in case your head is too much in the clouds, jumping off a building will kill you, or injure you in the least. Reality has consequences, so coherence, truth and objectivity are very real.
This is why I think metaphysical literacy is worth developing, and why it is worth investigating why the Enlightenment architecture the world now relies upon meticulously stratified metaphysical awareness across theology, philosophy, epistemology and ontology, with only philosophy and epistemology holding societal legitimacy. And why it prioritizes empiricism as the gatekeeper while running a campaign asking if God exists, as if data and schema are analogous. Contingent reality and ultimate reality are not analogous either.
It's not simply about becoming more "spiritual" or learning philosophical vocabulary. It's learning to distinguish data, relationships, models, consensus, intersubjectivity, and objective reality without confusing one for another.
So thanks again for the opportunity to answer such fascinating questions! These questions are exactly the kind of questions I'd like to explore at greater depth in future essays, but have not yet gained an audience willing to engage. I greatly appreciate your questions.
If you have questions like these, or questions that challenge, clarify, or even disagree with my framework in good faith, I’d encourage you to join my subscriber chat. You can post questions there, and I’ll use them to help shape future essays and develop these ideas beyond the limitations of the comments thread.
I should thank you for such extensive answers. But I must take my time to process and understand all of them. As computer science isn't something I have enough knowledge about. I'm more interested in metaphysics in itself or maybe as a philosophical inquiry but computer science surely makes it more reliable by providing provable data, scientific approach and well tested structure. And, if I have any question in future I'll consider using the subscriber chat. I hope you get an audience that's interested as well as adept enough in this fascinating mathematical approach towards reality and metaphysics so that they can manage to engage. Thanks a lot!
1. How to have the ability to examine or metaphysical literacy? In a deeper level, beyond surface level understanding.
2. How to know what reality permits? Or, the structure of reality?
3. After concluding there's one single grounding, how to approach from then on? Where else to branch out in thought process or actions?
4. When does metaphysics meet theology? or it doesn't?
Thank you for commenting! These are excellent questions, because you are getting underneath the argument and asking what it actually looks like to practice metaphysics rather than simply talk about it. Before I begin I will point out something that is necessary here: ethical metaphysics, like science, must be approached by not trying to control the conclusion, but trying to understand the structure well enough to follow the truth wherever it leads. With that being said, let’s dive in to your questions!
1. How do you develop metaphysical literacy beyond surface-level understanding?
Start by learning to distinguish data from structure.
We naturally experience reality as a collection of things: objects, events, people, measurements, experiences. Examining and building a collection gives us a set to begin with. Metaphysical literacy begins when we ask what must be true for those things to relate coherently at all. That then can be examined using node graphs.
For example, instead of stopping at:
“Gravity causes objects to fall.”
you begin asking:
“What makes that relationship independent of my belief about it?”
Then you start asking:
• What exists? (Build your set)
• What depends upon what? (Determine parent-child hierarchy)
• What changes? (Which nodes on your graph are actually composite? You’ll begin to notice that nothing remains stable across a time-space continuum)
• What remains invariant? (Which nodes are actually worthy of the reflexive property, x=x, and are indeed constant?)
• What is derived? (What requires a dependency and therefore a parent-child relationship?)
• What is independent? (These are parent nodes)
• What applies universally? (Universality on a graph means the child nodes have achieved coherence from the common parent, and the parent, therefore, applies constraint. The children are dependent.)
• What is the subject and what is the object? (Anything that does not meet the six conditions of objectivity is not an ultimate objective, but may be an objective within a smaller context.)
• Am I describing reality, or merely describing my perception of reality? (Is my node graph exhaustive in relation to the context? Is my set complete in relation to a given context? What areas could benefit from further examination?)
• Does my explanation remain coherent when I apply it to itself? (Re-examination of your graph should produce the same structure. If re-examination produces a new structure, it implies dependency on a higher parent node not represented within the context, or that the starting set is incomplete.
That last question is particularly important. A metaphysical structure should be able to survive being turned back upon itself.
This is similar to debugging in computer science. You don't become a better programmer merely by memorizing more terminology. You become better at identifying relationships, dependencies, contradictions, assumptions, and invariants.
The six conditions that I’ve come to recognize as the structural description for objectivity—singularity, externality, independence, invariance, non-derivation, and universality—are useful here as a diagnostic framework. They're not meant to be six words you memorize and place on a shelf. They're questions you can repeatedly apply to any proposed structure.
2. How do we know what reality permits, or what the structure of reality is?
The six conditions that structurally define objectivity is the structure in question, but you don’t have to take my word for it. In fact, I welcome stress testing and peer review. How I came to know this structure, and how anyone else is welcome to peer review this structure is thru the method of debugging.
Now we obviously don't begin with access to reality's "source code." In the absence of any code, we can still infer structure from stable behavior. That's what we do in computing when we don't have access to the underlying source code. We can provide inputs, observe outputs, reproduce behavior, identify dependencies, and infer something about the architecture of the system.
Reality gives us an enormous amount of data. So we can ask:
What remains true regardless of who observes it?
That's invariance.
What cannot be changed merely by changing our beliefs?
That's independence.
What applies regardless of the particular observer or circumstance?
That's universality.
What does everything else depend upon?
That takes us toward ontological dependence and non-derivation.
Can there ultimately be competing standards of truth?
That brings us to singularity.
The important methodological rule is:
Don't make reality conform to your model. Make your model answer to reality.
This is where the programmer analogy becomes useful again. When reality produces an unexpected result, treat the contradiction as a debugging signal.
Don't immediately say:
“Reality must be wrong.”
Ask:
“What assumption in my model produced this contradiction?”
That doesn't mean every apparent contradiction automatically disproves a worldview. It means contradiction is something we investigate rather than something we automatically protect ourselves from.
3. If we conclude there is one ultimate grounding, where do we go from there?
If you reach the conclusion that there is one ultimate ground, congratulations, you have reached the conclusion that reality is objective rather than subjective because you have exhaustively stressed tested and identified stable pattern of reality. If the pattern is not stable and continues to change, or that no conclusion was found, then the conclusion would be that reality is subjective, and would instead remain inconclusive. So congratulations if you have managed to reach bedrock. Notice that I continuously emphasize six conditions, with singularity only being one of them. If you reach the conclusion that there is one ultimate ground, you should keep going.
You shouldn’t stop at:
“There is one ultimate ground.”
The next question should be:
“What keeps that ground stable?”
In fact, singularity might not be the stable condition you reach the first time. Anyone can potentially recognize any of the other six conditions first. The thing to consider is that there may be more conditions to discover, that make the structure even tighter and more concise. While I have managed to discover six conditions, there may be more. So discovering one condition is only the beginning of the next investigation.
Other questions you can then ask that what that ground must be like are:
Is it dependent or independent? Derived or non-derived? Contingent or necessary? Singular or multiple? Invariant? Universal? Can it be affected by the things it grounds? Can the dependent system modify its ground? Does the proposed ground explain objective coherence without itself becoming dependent upon the subjects it is supposed to ground?
Then the implications move downstream:
Ultimate ground → reality → relationships → human beings → knowledge → ethics → action → governance.
If reality has an objective structure, then our epistemology should answer to that structure. Science, and alongside that, technology, should both answer to it (This is worthy of an entire essay on its own). Our ethics should answer to it. Our institutions should answer to it. Our governance should answer to it. Even our understanding of human rights should answer to it.
You’ll notice at this point I’m making normative claims, statements that say “should” as an ought, but while that “ought” is a choice because we don’t have to be scientific if we don’t want to, failure to fulfill that “ought” slowly deteriorates our ability to collectively reason over time. Epistemology, science and technology are perhaps the clearest in displaying the consequences of our failure to remain faithful to objective structure.
So the question becomes:
If reality has an objective structure, what does faithful participation in that structure require of us?
That's where metaphysics stops being an abstract intellectual exercise and becomes practically consequential. And this leads us to your last question.
4. When does metaphysics meet theology?
I think an important distinction needs to be maintained here:
Metaphysics and theology are not the same thing.
Metaphysics asks:
What is ultimately real? What exists? What is fundamental? What does everything depend upon? What makes objective truth possible? What must an ultimate ground be like?
Theology begins when a particular religious tradition makes specific claims about that ultimate reality—revelation, scripture, prophecy, divine attributes, worship, religious law, historical events, and so forth.
You cannot make an intelligent decision about a religious tradition without metaphysical literacy. Without metaphysical literacy, you are grasping at straws. The entire premise of metaphysical illiteracy in a secular landscape while sanctioning theology from epistemological discourse is fundamentally duplicative in my opinion.
Going back to your question, I would think about the relationship this way:
Metaphysics asks: What must ultimately be true?
Theology asks: What does this particular religious tradition claim about that ultimate truth?
That distinction is important because it means we don't have to begin with theology. We can begin with reality. We can investigate objectivity. We can identify the structure required for objective truth. We can investigate whether reality actually exhibits that structure. We can reason toward an ultimate ground. Only then do competing religious descriptions become relevant.
At that point, theology isn't the starting assumption. It becomes a set of proposed descriptions of the metaphysical conclusion you have stress tested.
This also gives us a way to approach religion without beginning with tribalism and identity politics:
Which proposed structure most coherently accounts for the reality we already know? In other words, which religion best describes the schema to our existential set?
If several religions claim to describe ultimate reality, we can translate those descriptions into the underlying ontological structures they imply and stress-test them.
The question isn't simply:
“Which God do you believe in?”
Because belief is a hypothesis and can be wrong. It's more fundamentally:
“What must ultimately be true for truth, coherence, and objectivity to be possible—and which proposed account of ultimate reality actually satisfies those requirements?”
This is where the six conditions that describe the ultimate pattern for truth, coherence and objectivity in node graph terms can now be compared to various religious traditions. That is a very different starting point.
Ultimately, the progression looks something like:
Observe → abstract → identify structure → stress-test the structure → identify the ultimate ground → compare proposed accounts → derive implications for knowledge and action.
Or, using the computing analogy:
Data → relationships → structure → algorithm → debugging → ground/source → implementation.
The important distinction throughout is that metaphysics isn't about inventing a structure for reality. It's about discovering which structure reality already requires.
If the universe—or reality—is a database, empirical observation is an arbitrary set of data—things that exist. Ultimate reality is the schema, not another piece of data within the table. It does not “exist” if existence implies what can be empirically proven. It is the underlying structure that organizes the data coherently. In other words, it turns arbitrary data from noise into intelligence. Data and schema are not the same. The database can be empty, and the schema still stands. The data needs the schema in order to make sense. That analogy shows the asymmetry of the object-subject relationship. The subject can disappear and the object can remain unaffected, whereas if the object disappears, the subject is affected. Either truth is an illusion, or truth is real. And in case your head is too much in the clouds, jumping off a building will kill you, or injure you in the least. Reality has consequences, so coherence, truth and objectivity are very real.
This is why I think metaphysical literacy is worth developing, and why it is worth investigating why the Enlightenment architecture the world now relies upon meticulously stratified metaphysical awareness across theology, philosophy, epistemology and ontology, with only philosophy and epistemology holding societal legitimacy. And why it prioritizes empiricism as the gatekeeper while running a campaign asking if God exists, as if data and schema are analogous. Contingent reality and ultimate reality are not analogous either.
It's not simply about becoming more "spiritual" or learning philosophical vocabulary. It's learning to distinguish data, relationships, models, consensus, intersubjectivity, and objective reality without confusing one for another.
So thanks again for the opportunity to answer such fascinating questions! These questions are exactly the kind of questions I'd like to explore at greater depth in future essays, but have not yet gained an audience willing to engage. I greatly appreciate your questions.
If you have questions like these, or questions that challenge, clarify, or even disagree with my framework in good faith, I’d encourage you to join my subscriber chat. You can post questions there, and I’ll use them to help shape future essays and develop these ideas beyond the limitations of the comments thread.
Thanks again!
I should thank you for such extensive answers. But I must take my time to process and understand all of them. As computer science isn't something I have enough knowledge about. I'm more interested in metaphysics in itself or maybe as a philosophical inquiry but computer science surely makes it more reliable by providing provable data, scientific approach and well tested structure. And, if I have any question in future I'll consider using the subscriber chat. I hope you get an audience that's interested as well as adept enough in this fascinating mathematical approach towards reality and metaphysics so that they can manage to engage. Thanks a lot!