Onto the Next One

April 06, 2026 ·

Been seeing more and more of this word ontology lately. I have never found myself using it, nor been observing it be used that much in the past. A quick Wikipedia scan shows it's a branch of metaphysics discussing general features of reality concerned with articulating basic structure(s) of being. Categorizing particulars and universals seems to be a theme; hey, kinda sounds like NFTs a little bit. In the face of bottomless ridicule, I maintain that the technology underlying NFTs was quite cool even if monkey JPEGs were not. Anyway, like anything interesting, there are a few different schools of thought to subscribe to in this ontology stuff: Plato siding with objective realism, and Wikipedia mentions something called conceptualism that asserts reality only exists in the mind, while nominalism denies its existence altogether. The other day I mentioned Immanuel Kant and learning he criticized both Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and Isaac Newton on their explanations of reality. I'm guessing that was ontology and Kant's somewhere between conceptualism and nominalism? More at 9.

Funnily enough I don't have many of these tensions inside my mind. Of course it could be said that I only need to inspect it further and so on. And while it's true that one can always find more bugs and infinitely improve upon their worldviews via criticism, I find myself enjoying these discussions on the nature of reality more as entertainment than genuine wonder. Same for discussions of free-will or determinism and other similar sounding abstractions. Newer physics presents ways in which these tensions are resolved and dissolved, and while they, too, can be critiqued and proven wrong, the point at large remains that we have made tremendous progress on these debates since their time of origin. In a recent post I mentioned the concept of Git, or version-control in simple English, and I believe that helps massively in structuring topics like ontology; because one is able to put in context what was said when, by who, and where things are today in-comparison by using mental-Git. Otherwise, it's all a big mess of many people saying many things and as an observer one doesn't know where to start or stand with it all.

Been binging David Deutsch lately so I'll mention him again as an example of great mental-version-control, observable in his explanations of different interpretations of quantum mechanics. I deeply appreciate Deutsch for calling out hesitations like if you think you understand quantum mechanics, you don't understand quantum mechanics, often attributed to Richard Feynman. It took me a minute and wasn't on my first try, but dare I say, now I do understand the different interpretations of quantum mechanics thanks to Deutsch; though there forever remain gaps to fill and more to understand. Deutsch's promotion of Hugh Everett's many-worlds interpretation, and separately, Stephen Wolfram's multi-computation in branchial space idea are describing eerily similar explanations, where Wolfram seems to be going one step further in describing quantum mechanics computationally.

There seems to be a general sense of revival in subjects like physics and philosophy, which is great. The source of it all appears technologically-driven on surface, but a better word to use in my opinion is computation; where what's changing and being upgraded are not just surface-level tools via technology, but fundamental assumptions we have of reality via computation. We are very early in the age of computation, and more and more things are sure to become computerized; to the dislike of many no doubt. But the fact that more and more things are increasingly being computerized in our environment leads people back to questioning the basics of reality, I think. Along the way one may get sucked up in one school of thought or the other, start perceiving other schools as enemies, and debate or fight them about these abstractions. In some sense these schools of thought somewhere along the lines start mimicking religions I've observed, which also seems to be reviving itself in popular culture in parallel. Good. More myth-making the merrier.

Onto the next one.