1.40 Indeterminacy

Section 38 (first updated 2.04.2021)

If we take as a first premise that the only certainty is uncertainty—in other words, that the only order is disorder—we must ask what this determination leads to. The result is not the reversal of language, because uncertainty remains the only certainty regardless of sentence structure; restructuring the statement preserves its meaning. It is therefore important to recognize how language can be manipulated to retain meaning if the goal is to advance the logical analysis of thought as it appears in speech.

If the result of this relation—that uncertainty is certainty—is an inversion, then the aim of the relation cannot simply be to reaffirm itself in the same manner in which it is initiated, because such reaffirmation is itself a forward-determining action. What, then, is the step forward from the fact that the only certainty is uncertainty? What becomes the aim once uncertainty is established as the sole certain element?

The answer cannot merely be that there is no aim, because the certainty that uncertainty alone is certain already constitutes a necessary ground for being. The answer therefore lies in the fact that uncertainty, as the only certainty, aims toward certainty of what it is not. Why would something that is already certain aim for certainty? The answer stems from the fact that what is certain is itself uncertain; therefore, certainty can be assured only insofar as it distributes itself among a multiplicity of inverse determinations that together constitute its degree of uncertainty.

Certainty, therefore, as what uncertainty is, is also fundamentally what uncertainty is not. Uncertainty, being certain as such, introduces for itself the element of its own negation. Uncertainty is only certain if certainty is demonstrated to be not uncertain. Certainty thus becomes the aim of uncertainty, serving as the principle that keeps certainty in motion.

The aim, therefore, is to move from disorder to order.

The “Now”

The fact that certainty is uncertain is the reason infinity is finitely determinate. The infinite flickers past through an infinity of finitudes of itself so as to achieve what we know as the moment “now.” The “now” is self-identical and a fully contained diversity of contradictory determinations. What Buddhism and other traditions mean when they say that “the only moment is now” is that the stable moment we call “now” is the culmination of continuously traversing all possibilities, resolving into a point at which this totality is conceivable. This is the idea of the center of the sphere.¹

Just as space is to time, so too is nothing to being, and thought to object. Time is not merely a quantitative pattern of moving from one point to another, but also a qualitative behavior of determination with a definite aim and direction, such that the end forms a shape. The sum total of unique activities concurring at once governs the magnitude of time. In other words, in the simple quality of spacetime, the more events and kinds of activity that occur, the faster time proceeds. For Whitehead, as history progresses, more things happen and time accelerates.²

That time seems to go faster when more is happening runs counter to intuitive expectation: we assume that more happening should require more time and therefore slow it down. Yet the opposite occurs—the more that happens, the more time is condensed. This is analogous to the development of skill, where increased efficiency allows more to be accomplished in less time.

The feature of time condensation as a result of simultaneous multiplicity of unique activities is grounded in the nature of conception. Imagine zooming out from Earth to its galaxy, where Earth appears as one speck among many. Each planet, in relation to its center point—the sun—bears a relative time required to complete its orbit, determined by distance and spatial extent. Now imagine a conception that simultaneously apprehends the orbiting powers of all planets around their respective stars. In knowledge, these differences in time are disclosed at once, such that for the conception, the many happenings are instantaneous.

Unlike this example, which condenses time by expanding space, the inverse occurs in temporal progression: space is condensed into the concurrence of a multiplicity of activities. In other words, an infinite number of different activities occurring simultaneously are condensed into the smallest possible space.

If we contrast inorganic matter with organic matter, we observe a vast difference in the relation between organism and environment. Microscopic testing shows that any piece of organic material constitutes an environment for certain micro-organisms living within it. Even wood, rock, and soil are inhabited by micro-organisms identifiable through empirical testing. Although such organisms are indivisible from the material they inhabit, a distinction nonetheless emerges between organism and environment.

In contrast, inorganic matter exhibits no such distinction between subatomic activities and environment. The material is identical with the atomic activities that govern it. There has been no development of a physical distinction between the activities that inhabit the material, as occurs in organic matter, where the life of the material takes on a distinct body within an environment. In the inorganic case, the environment and the activity are absolutely identical; the environmental body is instantaneously the body of motion.

Thus, for example, two thousand years of organic time may be equivalent to one million years of inorganic time. e.g., 2000 years of organic year is equivalent 1 million for example of inorganic years.

Footnotes

1. This conception parallels Buddhist accounts of temporality and presence, particularly the doctrine that only the present moment is ultimately real, as well as analogous metaphysical formulations in Neoplatonism and German Idealism concerning the unity of opposites.
2. Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality (1929), where time is understood as the cumulative advance of occasions of experience, accelerating as complexity and relational density increase.

General Consciousness vs. Special Consciousness

As to the question of what consciousness is in and of itself, as distinct from definite conceptions of consciousness—what it observes or conceives at any given moment—this can be answered only partially by our limited understanding aided by reason. On the one hand, we have no choice but to conceive certain things; yet we are not limited to any single conception, for we can change from one conception to another. The question is therefore not whether one conceives—because one always does—but what one conceives.

Consciousness as pure being is first said to be infinite because we do not have direct knowledge of its cause. Philosophically, it is described as a “cause without itself being caused,” which in theology is the definition of God.¹ Second, this uncaused manner in the physical sciences begins from what appears to be an “arbitrary” point—arbitrary because consciousness appears probabilistic and not localized relative to some other entity from which a measurable sense of place could be derived.

On the other hand, the indeterminate principle of consciousness traces particular paths of motion that we frame as conception. When we say that the first principle is indeterminate, this is not the same as saying that its movements are undefined. The distinction between the principle as indeterminate and the definite determinations of its possibilities relates to the function of consistency.²

(Add to: “the only certainty is uncertainty”)

Definite determinations are attempts to hone the certainty of an indeterminate principle. The line, the circle, and similar forms are identical expressions of indeterminate motion, except that their principle is unknown insofar as the motive that drives them forward into particular relations remains unclear, even though they function as universal principles. For example, the nature of sound as principle is undifferentiated motion. It becomes a particular kind of sound when the hearing organ mutes continuous undifferentiated vibration for the sake of discontinuous, differentiated snippets of sound.³

We can trace the motion of the indeterminate principle into the form of motion assumed by the content of its determinations, such as line or circle. Yet when it comes to more complex determinations—such as biological life and self-conscious reality—although this tracing is possible, it becomes very difficult to see precisely how each environmental determination constitutes an element of life.

Self-consciousness, like consciousness in general, is not merely a mental capacity but is also manifest physiologically. The operation of the human body itself exhibits consciousness. The internal relations through which oxygen in the blood carries information derived from digested food and distributes it throughout the body—contributing to the formation and maintenance of muscles and other external structures—are expressions of this physiological consciousness.⁴

Pure consciousness, as an indeterminate principle remaining within the contents of its determinations, is infinite insofar as it is capable of probability—that is, it possesses enough openness to allow unpredictable action. Consciousness as first and pure principle involves an element of “chaos,” due to our inability to predict which known universal logical relation will manifest as determinate conception at any given moment of immediacy. This infinity is the capacity for generation, the power of potentiality.⁵

(how the production of potentiality functions to keep actuality operative below, e.g., money as potentiality, see historical context below)

Once a conception is manifested, it constitutes for this infinite principle a definite probability field in which the potentiality of indeterminacy is rendered determinate as a particular, knowable form. The conception is not the site where indeterminacy operates; rather, the form of the conception is identical with the determination of the indeterminate principle. The indeterminate principle is known only through its determinations, not as the act of conceiving them.

If we discard the supposition that consciousness is an external spectator and retain instead the fact that phenomena are maintained by the conceiving activity of consciousness, we move closer to tangible knowledge of the concept. Consciousness then appears as an integration of differing parts that are externally distinct yet share the same internal relation; they are forms of the same idea.

Consciousness consists of varying qualitative differences whose contradictions constitute experience as such. The notion that consciousness has different levels—often illustrated by the metaphor of an iceberg, of which we are aware only of the tip—is troubling because we intuitively hold consciousness to be an all-encompassing substance capable of conceiving anything within its scope. It is crucial not to confuse the two sides of this distinction.

We understand the substance of consciousness as an impartial capacity to conceive things as they are. Yet in doing so, conception becomes divorced from the substance that conceives it, leaving unexplained how consciousness actually performs conception. Ontological investigation cannot merely presuppose that things appear in consciousness simply because experience presents them as such.

We often think that our immediate awareness retains only certain experiences while most escape us. This is true only at the subjective level of the individual. At the level of the species as a totality, no level of consciousness escapes experience. All things are happening at once: every word is being spoken, every action is being performed. What happens is the simultaneity of all opposing determinations occurring instantaneously.

Theoretically, there is only one level of consciousness—thought. We hesitate to affirm different levels of conception because we possess thought and, at least potentially, nothing escapes it. Yet it would be a form of solipsism to believe that thought belongs exclusively to human cognition. Psychoanalysis, for example, presupposes that the psyche participates in a general thought—the unconscious—which is objective rather than personal.⁶

It is obvious that sensory experience, which branches from thought into nature, presents limitations—fatigue, narrow range of perception, and so on—whereas non-sensory or abstract thought continues even in rest, as in dreams during sleep. Consciousness, taken as a general substratum, is a fluctuating wave of awareness and non-awareness: when one person sleeps, another is awake; when you look here, you do not see there; when you listen to one thing, you do not hear another. Yet what escapes one perspective is apprehended by another.

The limits of sensory conception correspond proportionally to limits of physical dimension, whereas thought is not bound by such dimensions.

Things are maintained by the conception of consciousness insofar as consciousness is the knowledge of the thing as an indivisible unity of form and matter. Consciousness is the indivisible relation in which matter is the substratum of form and form is the idea of matter. Consciousness is therefore not a detached element passively conceiving objects, but the active motion of phenomenological experience itself.⁷

Consciousness does not stand outside objects; it is the integration of form and matter as the activity of the object. Consciousness is the substance of the mechanism of concentration. Concentration defines the cognitive capacity of focus as a fundamentally physical law. In physical terms, concentration refers to the relative amount of a substance contained within a given volume or solution—the amount of solute per unit volume. More generally, it refers to the action of gathering together closely.

Focus is concentration insofar as the gathering occurs at the center of activity or interest. In geometry, a “focus” is one of the fixed points from which the distances to any point on a curve—such as an ellipse or parabola—are related by a linear rule.⁸ For example, concentration may describe the strengthening of a solution through the removal of a diluting agent or through the selective accumulation of atoms or molecules.

Footnotes

1. Aristotle, Metaphysics, Book XII; Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, I.2.3.
2. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, Transcendental Analytic; G. W. F. Hegel, Science of Logic.
3. Aristotle, De Anima, II.8; modern accounts of auditory perception in phenomenology.
4. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception; contemporary systems biology.
5. Aristotle, Metaphysics, Book Θ (potentiality and actuality).
6. Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams; Carl Jung, The Collective Unconscious.
7. Edmund Husserl, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology.
8. Euclid, Conics (via Apollonius); standard definitions in analytic geometry.

Consciousness as Concentration

Consciousness is the concentration of form onto matter.

A focal point is defined as “the point at which rays or waves meet after reflection or refraction, or the point from which diverging rays or waves appear to proceed.” The focal point is the locus of consciousness. In this sense, black body radiation provides a physical analogy.

Logic, understood in this way, constitutes the formula of concentration. Logic, insofar as it bears the form of thinking—the motion of thought this way or that—brings with it the means by which the motion of thought can be clearly and distinctly identified. Clear and distinct perceptions are defined by Descartes as self-evident because they are grounded in what cannot be logically doubted. Examples include propositions such as “A = A.”¹

What is clear and distinct, however, are not perceptions themselves, as Descartes shows, because perception involves ambiguity—such as the appearance of a stick bending due to refraction in water. Distortions in material compositions received by the sensible organs are ambiguous only because sense organs are biased in the way they apprehend objects, and they must be so in order to conceive particular natures of objects. Hearing, for example, is biased toward certain wave frequencies emitted by objects.

Sensible ambiguities are not logical ambiguities. Distortions in physical composition are perfectly logical depending on the activity endured by the object. That a stick appears bent when placed in water may not accurately reveal its physical structure to perception, but it is logically necessary that light refraction in water warps the image of the stick for the eye.²

Perception is the highest form of touch, providing the most refined sensations of rational structure (for Aristotle, perception is ultimately a mode of touch).³ For sensation to provide clear and distinct determinations, it must operate according to the primary logical rule that something is first equal to itself before undergoing contradiction. In other words, motion must bear some identity before it undergoes change—even if that identity is change itself.

Sensation provides identity by framing the ever-changing sequence of logical activity. The existence of objects is related to abstraction, which allows forms of thought to be maintained as fixities. Yet because identity is inherited through change, sensation is never exact but only approximate in abstracting activity into object. Objects may exist independently of sensation insofar as natural objects possess physical structure without developing sensation, but to claim that objects exist without consciousness is a different matter entirely. Consciousness, being more fundamental than sensation, is the substance that maintains the logical form of the material substrate.

Sensation is not a faculty that stands external to the world and abstracts it from a distance. Sensation emerges naturally from the rational structure of living forms, which we mistakenly say produce consciousness, while also claiming that sensation exists to achieve consciousness. In truth, consciousness is the reason of sensation—it is its cause.

Consciousness emerges from the object as light radiates from the sun or heat from a living organism. Unlike such properties, however, consciousness is:

1. Present as the first scope, proposing the extent of the aim of the subject matter;
2. Active throughout the process of fulfilling that aim by presupposing all contrary determinations possible within its extent; and
3. The final instance in which the return to the original aim proves its reality. The substance of the object, its actual form for the observer.

These moments occur instantaneously and together constitute what we know as “things” in the world.

Motion is not the transition from one step to another, because these steps are the conditions for something to be a complete, determinate thing. The nature of motion, change, and activity is therefore the generation of potentiality—the production of possibility—which presupposes actuality.

It is often thought that potentiality precedes actuality because things arise through potentiality. This is true, but not in the manner usually assumed. The assumption is that potentiality arises from lack, from non-being, which confuses the logical relation between being and negation. To lack something presupposes that which is negated.

Mathematically, positive numbers are rational insofar as they express measurable units, whereas negative numbers possess meaning only as functional negations of such units (e.g., −1 is defined only in relation to 1).⁴ Potentiality, like the negative, has value only in sustaining actuality. Potentiality exists to keep actuality operative and productive.

This is evident in ordinary life. In capitalist economies, labor produces income in the form of money; money represents the possibility of continued living. We work for the possibility of sustaining life. Whether that life is actualized meaningfully or ideally is a further question, but the sustaining role of potentiality is undeniable.

Consciousness is the fixation of the logic of the idea as physically exhibited. In this sense, consciousness is not merely a faculty but a substance: the constant attention of form upon its substratum. As Aristotle describes it, consciousness is the “keeping together” of the imprint on the wax.⁵ Thus, every physical object contains its consciousness, or rather, its forms are its consciousness.

Here black body radiation may be introduced as the most fundamental empirical evidence in quantum mechanics: radiation emerging from what appears as darkness gives rise to determinate matter and energy.⁶

For example, the way soil or sand feels—the experience of softness, hardness, dryness, or wetness—is integrated into the form of the material itself. When such materials are touched, the sensations they elicit are maintained by the condensation of form within the object. That condensation is the object’s consciousness, which then ignites self-consciousness in the subject. Every object contains the consciousness of its forms; its forms are the consciousness of the object.

As Alan Watts suggests, every object is like an eye through which the same being looks.⁷ You know how to act only through how others react to you. You are an individual because there is differentiation in the determinations of consciousness. Individuality persists by maintaining and insisting upon a certain mode of conception, yet this is sustained only so that it may function as an experience within the relations of others’ conceptions.

As Watts also notes, other people tell you who you are.⁸

Footnotes

1. René Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy, Meditation III.
2. Aristotle, Physics, Book VII; modern optics on refraction.
3. Aristotle, De Anima, II.11.
4. Standard mathematical definitions of integers; see also G. W. F. Hegel, Science of Logic, on negation.
5. Aristotle, De Anima, II.12; metaphor of wax and seal.
6. Max Planck, “On the Law of Distribution of Energy in the Normal Spectrum” (1901).
7. Alan Watts, The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are.
8. Alan Watts, public lectures, circa 1960s (timestamps as cited by speaker).

Certainty, Uncertainty, and Localization

A continuous wavelength is equal to a localized wave.

Certainty is localization—divisibility.
Uncertainty is the evolutionary force of movement. The unknown is the driving force of motion, as Alan Watts emphasizes. The scientist classifies the unknown in terms of known phenomena.¹

Here we must distinguish between awareness of uncertainty and adaptation to uncertainty.

Complex organisms did not adapt to uncertainty as a property of the environment itself, because the environment provided the stability through which certainty was achieved. The notion that the environment exhibits uncertainty is a highly complex apperception, arising from self-consciousness recognizing its own rational indeterminacy as part of the substructure of nature. In fact, the recognition of uncertainty constituted one of the earliest developments toward self-awareness.

It is correct to say that the physical structures of animals—the nervous system or immune system, for example, which are found throughout the Animalia kingdom—were already developed to manage environmental contingencies prior to the individual animal that embodies them. Animals do not behave as if their environment is uncertain. Even when faced with danger, their bodies react impulsively. A deer running from a lion or a monkey reacting to sexual impulse are examples of instinct. Instinct is the rational mechanism for automatically dealing with environmental uncertainty.²

Awareness of uncertainty developed when species reached a high level of social integration. When individuals shifted attention away from environmental certainties and toward one another, the initial awareness of uncertainty emerged. When an individual observes a member of its own species panicking in response to a movement signaling danger, it develops a preliminary awareness that uncertainty is an intrinsic aspect of the organism, not merely of the environment. This is most evident in advanced members of the early Homo genus.

When an observer looks at an object, a blind spot exists where the object is not. Yet where the object is not is not necessarily somewhere else than where it is. What the object is and what it is not are present simultaneously within the same conception. The rule that an object cannot occupy the same place at the same time applies to objects in three-dimensional space. On the one hand, the object is certain for sense perception; on the other hand, it is intuitively uncertain, because it is subject to change.

The observer may question the nature of what is seen, but cannot question the fact that it is seen. Thus, uncertainty concerns whether indeterminacy belongs to the object itself or to the conception of it. When viewing an object, the blind spot constitutes uncertainty—the unknown. Physiologically, this blind spot lies behind the head; perception always faces forward. Environmentally, the blind spot also appears at the horizon: the far extent of a landscape that cannot be seen shares the same uncertainty as what lies just outside peripheral vision behind the observer.

The unknown is imperceptible within the conception of the object as what it is not. It is known that it is there, but not what it is. Once the unknown becomes perceived as something else, the same structure of uncertainty reappears again.

The difference between certainty and uncertainty is best understood through localization. Certainty is localized; uncertainty is unlocalized, not confined to a particular determination. This presupposes that objects are fundamentally conceptions—points of view or perspectives—through which experiences are disclosed as phenomena. Modern analysis often frames phenomena solely as external, empirically measurable events, forgetting that phenomenology originally referred to mental phenomena: ideas as objects of direct experience.³

When we point to an object, we point to a conception disclosing a particular experience. The conception of the object is sublated as subjective experience, which is precisely what makes it communicable between different subjects. Certainty, even as a physical concept, cannot escape its psychical presupposition.

Certainty involves two forms: first, the object as a single entity distinguished from others; second, the relational totality of objects constituting its environment. The object is the conception of its relations, and the relations are the conception of the object. Relations form the abstract basis of an object’s rational potential. In humans this appears as the brain; in atoms, as the nucleus. This is the point in the object where an infinite set of relations exists as potentiality.⁴

What the object is and what is conceived through the object are two different domains of certainty. What discloses potential relations is itself a real form participating in a system of relations. Perceiving the environment through one’s head differs from the body forming a partial conception of the environment.

Uncertainty governs this interaction as follows: objects are ideas assuming individual conceptions of themselves, but in maintaining their own conception they are blind to other conceptions assuming individual form. Interaction occurs only at a certain level of abstraction. For complex biological organisms, physical reality is largely derived from sensation. What it means to be “physical” for a sentient organism is more specific than physicality in general nature, where physicality is more abstract and extends beyond sensation.

Objects in nature do not identify with their interactions; their contact constitutes a logical necessity shaping geometric relations. In contrast, complex sensory systems allow interaction to become identified as something distinct from the interaction itself—this is the origin of feeling.⁵

Multiple conceptions of different phenomena simultaneously assume independent localizations. One object derives certainty by conceiving itself as an experience for another, while remaining blind to how it is conceived in return.

Nature’s development takes on the role of certainty: to make conception increasingly particular, because the universe is already general. Individuality is inherent in universality—everything is generally an individual conception.

The uncertainty of an object localized in a particular form is not nothing. Nothing itself is a certainty as potential—the certainty of other possible certainties. Evolutionarily, perception resolves uncertainty by sustaining a third perspective over the relation between an object and its conception of other objects. When an object is out of sight, it is uncertain what it is, yet it is certain that it is.

Nothing gives certainty that something exists; being gives uncertainty as to what that something is, as infinite potentiality. The interaction of certain objects through uncertain relations constitutes what we call the laws of nature, or more fundamentally, reason itself. Laws of nature are certainties governing relations whose specific determinations remain uncertain.⁶

Footnotes

1. Alan Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity; lectures on uncertainty and change.
2. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics and De Anima, on instinct and automatic action.
3. Edmund Husserl, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology.
4. G. W. F. Hegel, Science of Logic, on relation and potentiality.
5. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception.
6. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason; Whitehead, Process and Reality.

I. Formal Propositions (of certainty and uncertainty)

P1. Certainty is localization; uncertainty is non-localization.
P2. Localization makes divisibility possible; non-localization generates movement.
P3. Uncertainty is the evolutionary principle of motion, not its negation.
P4. Instinct is the rational automatism by which organisms resolve environmental uncertainty prior to reflective awareness.
P5. Awareness of uncertainty arises only with self-conscious social mediation.
P6. Objects are localized conceptions disclosing experience; relations are non-local potentials constituting uncertainty.
P7. Perception resolves uncertainty by stabilizing objects as singular identities within a relational field.
P8. What is unseen is uncertain, yet certainly something; nothing is the certainty of possible determinations.
P9. Laws of nature are certainties governing relations whose specific outcomes remain indeterminate.
P10. Time is the condition under which contradictory predicates may belong to one and the same object.
P11. Motion is synthetically knowable only through time.
P12. To infer causal necessity from inner experience alone is an error of subreption.

II. Translation into Hegelian and Whiteheadian Language

A. Hegelian Translation

Uncertainty corresponds to indeterminate Being (Sein), while certainty corresponds to determinate Being (Dasein). Localization is the act of determination (Bestimmung), by which being negates itself into a finite form. Movement arises not from certainty but from negativity, which is the inner unrest of being itself.¹

Instinct represents objective spirit prior to reflective self-consciousness, where rationality operates immediately without mediation. Awareness of uncertainty arises when Spirit externalizes itself socially, recognizing itself in the other.

Objects are not substances but nodes of relations, where identity is preserved through sublation (Aufhebung)—the unity of being and non-being. Time is the dialectical medium in which contradiction is sustained without collapse: the presence and absence of a predicate in one subject.

Natural laws are necessary relations of contingency—the rational form of uncertainty itself.

B. Whiteheadian Translation

Uncertainty is creative advance, while certainty is concrescence. Localization corresponds to the satisfaction of an actual occasion; non-locality corresponds to the field of potentiality (eternal objects).²

Perception is the stabilization of a nexus of occasions into a coherent perspective. Instinct is prehensive adaptation, not reflective cognition. Time is not linear succession but the epochal realization of contrasts.

Objects are societies of occasions whose relations remain open-ended. Laws of nature are habits of becoming, not fixed mechanisms.

III. Kant: Logic, Time, and the Observer (Corrected & Integrated)

Logic (Transcendental Addition)

Kant defines logic as “the science which has for its object nothing but the exposition and proof of all thought, whether it be a priori or empirical, whatever its origin or its object, and whatever the difficulty, natural or accidental, it encounters in the human mind.”³

This broad definition implies that all action is logical, insofar as it is rule-governed. What distinguishes experience is not logic itself, but the organization of logical acts into a hierarchy of fundamentals, which is precisely the work of time.

The Copernican Revolution (Observer Effect)

Kant writes:

“Up to now it has been assumed that all our cognition must conform to the objects; but all attempts to find out something about them a priori through concepts have, on this presupposition, come to nothing. Hence let us see whether we do not get farther by assuming that the objects must conform to our cognition.”⁴

This marks the observer effect in philosophy: objects are not known as they are in themselves, but as they conform to the structure of cognition. Time and space are not properties of objects, but forms of intuition.

Time as Indeterminacy (Non-Linear)

Time is not linear succession but the possibility of change as such.

“Time is the possibility of the conception of change and motion as change of place. No change is discernible without time as the intuition of the conjunction of contradictory predicates of one and the same object.”⁵

An object can be both here and not-here only in time. Thus, time alone explains the possibility of synthetic knowledge, especially the concept of motion. No concept, taken in isolation, can account for change.

Subreption (Illegitimate Empiricity)

The error of subreption consists in illegitimately attributing empirical causality where only inner representation is given.

For example:
I perceive the formation of my will to lift my arm, and I perceive the lifting of my arm. To claim that I empirically know that my will caused the arm to move is a subreption in Wolff’s sense. The causal link is transcendentally presupposed, not empirically observed.⁶

However, subreption, while an empirical error, is at the same time a fact for abstractionism. In the abstract sense, the fact of my thought of the thing I am observing and the actual observation of the thing truly meet in one place—a unity of form and matter. It is a feature of abstract power.

The metrical issue arises when we have a divide between what we can physically use to demonstrate our thoughts, be it language, technology, biology, etc. Even abstract philosophy and pure thought: these representations of the pure substance of thought only capture physical manifestations that have an independent existence from the unit thought-process inside the observer’s mind.

There seems to be an infinite that generates all infinite things, yet is separated implicitly in each finite thing, which only appears in the world as a limitation of these things for the observer.

Footnotes

1. G. W. F. Hegel, Science of Logic, Book I.
2. Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality.
3. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, Introduction.
4. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, Bxvi–Bxvii.
5. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, Transcendental Aesthetic.
6. Christian Wolff, Philosophia Rationalis; Kant on subreption.

Determination

Another important concept, with an integrated twofold meaning related to the term conception, is determination. Determination means determinate, purposive, and a will to do something—action and activity; and, in science, it also means to establish something exactly by ascribing limits.

The word determination is one of the most interesting concepts in philosophy, not merely in its semantic value but in its truly understood meaning: that a determination means both that things are already set into order by a previous course of action, and that the conditions of the observer exhibit themselves as predetermined—a determinism—and second, that a determination is the generative course of power for action, the force to act or do anything in the first place. It is therefore also a conception.

A determination is fundamentally a conception, not merely as a power of the mind to conceive the world into being, but as the actual world being conceived as a conception. A conception is an entrance into reality from non-being, a course of action akin to generation and becoming.

When a mother conceives a baby, she does not just give birth to him during the moment of conception, but has already been nurturing him along the whole way, and he exists as a priori conception even prior to his material manifestation, first as a mere conception in the mind of his father, and in their unity. The combining of the abstract conception with the concrete sustenance is that by which he is conceived into being. Therefore, his conception constitutes a long, enduring process rather than a mere moment of entering into being from nothing.

Indeterminacy

It is important not to confuse the term indeterminate with hesitancy or a lack of certainty. What we often take to be uncertainty or being unsure as a negative feature—particularly in situations where immediate action is required—appears differently in non-immediate states. In such states, indeterminacy constitutes the basis for reasonable action, because it is the very process of assessing possibilities and their proper order of execution.

Indeterminacy is a feature of reasonableness assumed by abstract thought as the laying forth of a set of potential ideas in order to assess their determination for particular experience. This is accomplished by the encompassing of chaos by order, or the disclosure of order through a form of chaos. In logic, this means that chaos is itself a principle of order.

In Ancient Greek mythology, chaos (khaos) is the first state of existence, from which came all primeval deities such as Gaia, the earth. For the Greeks, chaos is the dark void of space, but it is not obvious whether they meant that being randomly emerges from nothing. First, they say chaos was always there; second, it is made from a mixture of the four elements—earth, air, water, and fire. This ancient notion of chaos is similar to the scientific materialist idea of chaos as primordial and formless matter that exists before the formation of the universe. Unlike Greek mythology, however, scientific materialism often claims that being randomly comes out of nothing, as per an idiomatic reading of the Big Bang theory—an explosion into being from nothing.¹

The association of chaos with indeterminacy is derived from the empirical description of chaotic systems, which equates unpredictability with randomness. Whether this unpredictability arises from the limitation of understanding or from phenomena being inherently unpredictable—thus constituting a limited understanding of them—both possibilities are assumed within physical description.

The Uncertainty Principle

We do not have a subjective experience of the principle of nothing. Subjective experience, through the sensible faculties, is limited by an agreement of different modes upon something. There is an uncertain element implied in the conception of phenomena that constitutes a limitation—not because some fact about it is not yet known or cannot be known, but because the limiting of experience is itself a function of knowing.

The uncertainty principle is first a capacity before it is a limitation in the function of abstract reason, because a limit is determined rather than something that accidentally occurs as a problem to be solved.

As Hegel states in the Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences:

“All determination is, for the understanding, only a restriction, i.e., a negation as such.”²

We see this, for instance, in the fact that even the conception of everything is subject to time—that is, everything is conceived, but not all at once. This is not due to an inability to gather the largest amount of quantity into a single reference frame of space, but rather because the frame of reference itself involves an aspect within which it is contained, apart from its capacity to conceive.³

Here arises the perplexing notion of being a part of something apart from oneself, or belonging to something that does not belong to oneself. It is therefore important to ascertain whether the limitation of experience is due to an incapacity, or whether it is itself an aspect of capacity.

Subjectivity, Nothing, and Limit

Subjectivity involves an objective fact about its nature that informs misunderstandings of it when reduced to personal idiosyncrasy. The objective nature of subjectivity is explained by how conception exhibits a frame of reference that involves an uncertainty principle as part of its capacity to determine the totality of its potential through limits.

The notion of limit ensures that an object is always disclosed by conception in such a way that, by granting a certain particularity, it simultaneously distinguishes an other as not-it. If we adopt the proposition that nothing is subjectively inconceivable—because we always have a conception of something—then the objective validity of nothing lies in the abstract.

For nothing to exist in the abstract means that its being is relatedness, and that it is immanent in the very capacity to pick out particular phenomena. Nothing is a principle in the being of the universe as a wholly abstract object. The proof of its existence is none other than its lack of itself. Its lack of being is the proof of the existence of nothing, yet this is not without pragmatic function in nature: to perceive any particular object presupposes the subjection of nothing upon all objects filtered out from the thing being perceived.

If its potential is all things, its reality is the limitation of everything to one thing.

One and Many: Repulsion and Attraction

Hegel writes:

“The relation of the negative to itself (the self is positive) is negative relation, and therefore distinguishing of the One from itself, the repulsion of the One, i.e., the positing of many Ones.”⁴

And further:

“When we speak of the One, the many usually come to mind at the same time… In consequence, the One proves to be what is strictly incompatible with itself; it expels itself out of itself, and what it posits itself as is what is many… This process we may call repulsion.”⁵

Yet repulsion immediately turns into attraction:

“Thus, repulsion is just as essentially attraction; and the excluding One or being-for-itself sublates itself… Qualitative determinacy has thus passed over into determinacy as sublated, i.e., into being as quantity.”⁶

Experience, Doubt, and Process

The experience of things always involves an element of doubt that renders an unknowable aspect—this element of doubt is the variation potential within the thing. For example, 1 + 1 = 2 can also be stated as 2 = 1 + 1. In the latter, we take the result as equal to its explanation. The result, when dissected, involves the relations that constitute it.

In both cases, the result is part of the process because it must be shown as such, even if it is what the process arrives at.

Following Peirce’s pragmatism, a common stipulation holds that people do not have ideas; rather, ideas have people. Individuals are a complex substrate of ideas. The observer-quality of the individual functions like a moderator of abstract thinking.⁷

Conception, Object, and Distance

Consciousness is a difficult concept because it involves a contradictory continuity between a conception that remains pure while being identical to a changing form. For example, when perceiving a structure such as a building, one’s conception is identical with that building.

The distinction between object and conception is not that they are separable, but that there is a relative movement between where the conception is derived from and what it derives. There is no quantitative difference between conception and object, only a difference between the object being conceived and the object in which the conception resides.

Distance is not merely external measurement but an internal activity of experience. When the size of an object within a conception changes, this is an experience of distance. What appears externally as spatial separation is internally disclosed within conception.

Uncertainty, Disclosure, and Radiation

The change of the object occurs because there is an uncertainty element in conception—what is “behind one’s head.” This uncertainty is not a negative feature but a positive avenue of affirmation. The uncertainty aspect of conception is its disclosure.

Geometrically, the self-identity of conception against uncertainty resembles an internal sphere surrounded by the circumference of a void. Radiation, in its basic form, is the emission of energy as waves or particles. Radiation can be understood here as the effect of conception emitting itself into disclosure. The conception is a radiation of reality.

Uncertainty is where conception resides in order to disclose its certainty. The uncertainty principle of conception is its potential object—the abstract multiplicity of possible determinations. Ethical principles arise here, revealing what kinds of ideas conception is attracted to or repelled by.

On the evolutionary level, the development of physiology is an attempt to produce the most efficient and stable form of conception capable of conceiving itself.

Footnotes

1. Hesiod, Theogony; contemporary interpretations of cosmology and the Big Bang.
2. G. W. F. Hegel, Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences, §49.
3. Hegel, Science of Logic, Doctrine of Being.
4. Hegel, Science of Logic, §97.
5. Ibid.
6. Hegel, Science of Logic, §98.
7. Charles Sanders Peirce, Collected Papers, pragmatism and synechism.

Historical Context

Free Energy, Fiat Currency, and Historical Concealment

The historical progression from a potential state of free energy in the world to fiat currency represents the monopolization of energy. Our historical accounts often conceal, beneath their surface layers, truths that—once uncovered—reveal that one fact is frequently constructed to deceive or disclose another. A fact is known only through what is revealed, yet the fact itself remains true irrespective of anyone’s perception of it, according to Charles Sanders Peirce.¹

Our understanding of history is therefore warped. We are told a story that we believe to be true; thus, at the level of conception, it functions as if it were true. However, it may not correspond to reality, insofar as the truth of the fact is hidden behind layers of conception, each disclosure veiling another layer of truth. The fact remains, even when obscured.

One implication of this view is the possibility of lost civilizations—civilizations erased from recorded history and therefore from collective memory—whose existence would remain true regardless of recognition. A commonly cited speculative example concerns the period immediately preceding the Second World War. World War II, as it is popularly understood, is often presented as a coherent and transparent historical narrative. Yet it was such a globally decisive event that the continued existence of civilization itself depended upon its outcome. In this sense, it marked a radical shift in reality, in which prior historical conditions were sublated into the form of the present.

Historical causation does not begin with World War II but extends back at least to the late eighteenth century. Within some alternative historical interpretations, it is proposed that an advanced civilization—often referred to as the “Tartarian Empire”—once existed across parts of northeastern Asia, including regions now associated with Russia and Mongolia.² According to these interpretations, this civilization allegedly possessed advanced technological knowledge that was not rediscovered because it was never fully lost, but rather displaced or absorbed into later historical developments.

These accounts further suggest continuity with much earlier civilizations such as those of Egypt and Sumer, particularly in relation to technologies associated with “free energy”—understood as the ability to harness ambient or vibrational energy without centralized extraction or monetary exchange.³ In such narratives, this technological paradigm would have rendered monetary systems unnecessary, enabling a self-sufficient, internally regulated society.

According to this speculative framework, such a civilization would have been largely isolated, lacking formal military structures or participation in global economic systems. Its development would thus have followed a different technological and social trajectory, one oriented toward intrinsic ends rather than instrumental exchange. Economic activity would have been organized around use and mutual benefit rather than accumulation, with individuals naturally participating in multiple forms of productive labor.

In contrast, the emergence of modern capitalist systems—particularly those based on fiat currency—depended upon the monopolization of energy and labor. In these systems, energy becomes abstracted into monetary value, exchanged for services, and regulated through centralized authority. Money comes to represent stored or potential energy, which in turn governs access to resources and production.

World conflicts of the early twentieth century are sometimes interpreted, within this speculative tradition, as mechanisms through which one system of energy organization displaced another. The ideological structures that arose during this period—including nationalism and racial hierarchies—are seen as secondary effects of deeper economic and technological transformations.⁴

From this perspective, post-war society introduced new normative structures—standardized labor schedules, suburban domestic ideals, and consumer lifestyles—which crystallized in the mid-twentieth century and became the blueprint for contemporary social organization. These structures persist not merely as cultural artifacts but as mechanisms for sustaining an energy-dependent monetary system.

Footnotes

1. Charles Sanders Peirce, Collected Papers, esp. on realism and the independence of truth from belief.
2. There is no accepted historical or archaeological evidence for a unified “Tartarian Empire” as an advanced global civilization. The term appears primarily in early modern European maps and is widely regarded by historians as a geographic label rather than a political or technological entity.
3. Claims regarding ancient or lost “free energy” technologies are speculative and not supported by empirical evidence in physics or archaeology. See mainstream discussions of energy systems in: Vaclav Smil, Energy and Civilization.
4. Scholarly analyses of World War I and II attribute their causes to complex geopolitical, economic, and ideological factors rather than concealed technological conflicts. See: Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes.

The contemporary “Jews,” the Rothschilds, and the rich conquerors (may or may not be interchangeable) evolved from the British Empire, reconciled this world, and saw the development of “free energy” as a direct threat to their inverse system of the time: a capitalism emerging from feudalism, a “fiat” monetary system, where energy is monopolized by a governing group and money is exchanged for service. This money is represented by the value of rest energy, then resource, and therefore production.

But for the Tartar people, who had no money and no means of exchange, energy and everything was given. It was a utopian socialism, so to say, where everything was done for its own sake, and everything was an end in itself. There was no instrumental activity for the purpose of itself, but merely for the end-in-itself additivity—things done for their own sake. Therefore, everyone was naturally, to some degree, a jack of all trades (or some trades), and naturally their ends in these end-in-themselves activities gave birth to use and objects of value. Because they were naturally sustained and all needs were met, they produced well and benefited from the fruits of their labor.

The post-British and pre-American “investors,” called the “Jews,” by contemporary culture, created a world event, World War One, where the wage of world war caused a shift in contemporary world power. It was this system that was going to take over the world. In this rose, and risen, the rise of racism (in the form of Nazism and Fascism), which is interestingly supposedly organized as the killing of “Jews,” the very victims that created the system—self-deception imposed onto the world stage, where the victim is the perpetrator.

Since the Tartar Empire was self-sustaining, they did not really have resistance, no war and no army. They were not part of the economic, and therefore not part of the world stage. They easily did not sustain and devolved into Prussia, then just became Russia—the very true enders of World War Two, the real manpower and meat power to end the Nazi regime, which the Americas, the Jews, and the Illuminati took credit for.

They destroyed the chance at free energy to monopolize it in exchange for a capitalist feudalism, the one we are in today. They created the 9-to-5 job, the white picket fence, wife, and a dog—these illusions that came right after World War Two, which during the 60s became the blueprint and true structure of our modern life and society today.