Nominalist Determinism II: From Particles to Morality

The Illusion of the Observer

The Copenhagen interpretation of physics introduced a ghostly intruder: the observer. It claimed that the "wave function"—a mathematical ledger of possibilities—collapses into reality only when "observed". This is a monumental mind projection fallacy (per E.T. Jaynes). In a nominalist universe, there is no collapse because there are no possibilities; there is a unitary process where everything that happens is the only thing that could have happened given the prior state. What we call "measurement" is merely a high-energy interaction—matter hitting matter. The machine does not stop grinding because a human looks at the dial; the human is simply a smaller part of the machine hitting a different part.

The Anatomy of the "Ghost"

We can identify three ways humans "hallucinate" entities into existence, mistake labels for substances, and populate the vacuum with ghosts:

• Reification of the Abstract: Treating a relationship as a tangible substance. Example: energy. You can measure kinetic motion, but "energy" itself is not a physical fluid.

• Causal Displacement: Attributing "power" to a mathematical summary. Example: entropy. Particles just move; "entropy" is the name for the statistical likelihood of their positions, not a force that pushes them.

• Non-Material Agency: Invoking an entity with no coordinates in the vacuum. The soul is a nominal placeholder for the recursive self-model—a "user interface" that people mistake for a passenger.

In nominalist determinism, a real thing is a persistent material configuration that exists independently of any observer. This includes tangible objects as well as the habits of matter, such as diffusion or organisms. A "ghost" (like the soul) is "unreal" because it is a label that refers to a non-existent material coordinate. There is no evidence for dualism; since matter and its habits explain all observed behavior, invoking a non-material substrate adds zero explanatory power and is therefore discarded as redundant.

Intelligence: The Match-Predict-Act Cycle

As established in the first essay on nominalist determinism¹, intelligence is not a spark, but a structural relationship. It is the match—the high-fidelity alignment—between an internal material model (the brain’s configuration) and the external territory (the world). While this match is the actual intelligence, the prediction part is what directs action. We can only measure this intelligence by way of the resulting actions, which reflect the quality of the internal predictions. If a system is intelligent, its internal "map" allows it to predict the habits of matter and act accordingly to maintain its own material persistence, or to perform whatever the system was designed to do.

Consciousness: Why the Machine Thinks It is "Someone"

If intelligence is modeling the world, why is there this phenomenon we call consciousness? In nominalist determinism, it is the brain modeling its own modeling process. It is a recursive loop. The self is a label for this internal ledger—a human-made record of a physical state. We feel "aware" because our mental model of the world includes a representation of the "modeler" at the center.

Think of a whirlpool. Before water interacts in a specific geometry, there is no "whirlpool". When the interactions reach a certain complexity, the whirlpool appears. It is not a new substance added to the water; it is a label for what the water is doing. Similarly, "experience" is the name for what neurons are doing during recursive self-modeling. It is an emergent abstraction—a high-level name for a low-level material reality.

Consciousness is thus the proximal solution—the immediate structural mechanism that resolves internal conflicts. In complex organisms, localized reflexes often conflict (e.g., "find food" vs. "avoid predator"). By modeling itself as a unified entity, the brain creates a "global ledger" to synchronize these subsystems. This allows the organism to predict its own internal reactions to future events, enabling integrated action that favors the whole over the part. This recursive loop is what we experience as being self-aware.

Functionalist Nominalism and Identity

Under functionalist nominalism, the "mind" is a label for a function, not a persistent "stuff". Like the Ship of Theseus, if you replace every carbon neuron one-by-one with a functionally identical silicon transistor, the "mind" remains because the material habit continuously remained.

Consequently, identity is a functional fiction. In the Star Trek transporter, neither the "original" nor the "copy" is the "true" Riker, because the "original" changes nature every split second as its matter moves. Identity is just a persistent label we apply to a changing material habit. While it is an incredibly useful concept for tracking a person whose material change is negligible from one moment to the next, it remains a fiction.

The Biological Bridge: A Conflict of Evolved Systems

We bridge the gap from silent physics to felt psychology by observing the biological substrate. We are born with no contract and no duty—no one is absolutely obliged to do what anyone demands. However, we are born with a material history: we are the localized result of a billion-year evolutionary process. Morality is not a choice, but a system of causal morality: the recognition that actions have consequences rooted in physics.

These consequences were observed by our ancestors over eons, and these ancestral strategies are encoded as evolved instincts in our genome. They are physical "pre-settings" in our hardware that trigger our basic feelings. Our matter harbors instinctual messages—hatred, disgust, fear, anger, and anxiety—as well as drives for nourishment, resources, relaxation, safety, sex, and social harmony. These are the internal read-outs that tell the organism whether a situation favors its persistence or threatens it with friction.

The Neuroscience of the Actioner

From the perspective of neuroscience, the machine is a battleground between two distinct physical systems. The limbic system is the ancient, fast-responding "actioner" where our instinctual feelings originate. It is the system that ultimately decides which actions to take based on the emotional "net value" of a situation.

The pre-frontal cortex (PFC) is the more recently evolved, rational system that cogitates and modulates the limbic system. The PFC is effectively a passenger trying to grab the wheel; it uses its predictive power to "brake" or dampen limbic urges before they result in action. However, the PFC does not act directly. The "feeling" that remains after this modulation is what makes the final decision. When we “act morally”, we are either witnessing a direct output of our evolved limbic aversions—such as an instinctual recoil from violence—or we are seeing the PFC successfully predict a future collision with reality and modulate a shorter-term limbic urge to avoid it.

Freedom and Individual Sovereignty

In a deterministic world, freedom is defined as the absence of external constraints on the internal calculation. We are born with no responsibility, no duty, and no requirements, because moral obligations are merely human constructs. No human opinion can impose a "must" that isn't reflected in the physical constraints of reality. Our personal morality is simply our instincts and our opinions.

However, we are "free" because choice is simply the name for our own internal matter performing a calculation. There is no contradiction between "no free will"² and "individual choice." From the outside, you are a unitary causal chain; from the inside, you are a machine authoring its own trajectory. To say "I had no choice" is a hard fiction used to deflect causal responsibility. It is an attempt to pretend the calculation never happened. Even under extreme duress, the internal model weighs the friction of compliance against the alternative. Choice is a fruitful course of action because it represents the moment the machine acknowledges its own agency.

The Semantic Audit of Obligation

We can use rigorous semantic thinking to free ourselves from these ghostly impositions. By asking what the words mean in the vernacular and what they can possibly mean in a world of particles, we strip the mystical authority from our language. We show that the way we speak is actually a way of lying to ourselves. Terms like must, should, and can't are often used as a semantic shield to hide the reality of our own calculations:

• "Must" / "Have to" / "Ought to" / "Should": These represent a prediction of how much trouble we would be in. They are internal calculations that failing to act will result in a consequence (internal or social) that the system currently finds intolerable.

• "Can't": While it can refer to a physical limit of the universe, it is more often used to hide a conflict between desires. By saying "can't," we pretend the choice has been taken out of our hands by an external force. This prevents us from seeing our actual options and obfuscates communication with others.

Once we realize these terms are not external commands but internal predictions of friction, we realize we are always making a choice based on which consequences we can live with.

Justice and the Why of Morality

So why do we invoke morality at all? Unlike many classical philosophers who treat morality as a given, nominalist determinism views it as a system for collective survival. It is a tool used to enable an increase in organization from the individual to the collective, allowing our institutions to function.

Under this framework, "justice" is a method to stop the machine from shaking itself apart. Since we are choiceless in judging, we do not punish because an agent is "evil"; we apply consequences to "obscene criminal acts" to update the predictive models of other machines. Justice is the process of removing or repairing a material system that creates too much friction for the social aggregate to persist.

Conclusion: The Road of the Particles

In a silent, deterministic machine, "meaning" and "purpose" are non-entities. They are labels applied by complex biological systems—or any mind capable of modeling itself—to behaviors that favor their continued existence or design. A genome persists not because it "wants" to, but because it is a material configuration that hasn't hit enough friction to dissolve. We must stop worshipping the "ink" of our emotions and return to the "road" of the particles.

This realization is the only sustainable foundation for a collective that is both effective and non-oppressive. Throughout history, collectivism has often been forcefully imposed under the guise of "duty" or "divine right"—ghostly concepts that eventually trigger the friction of rebellion. A truly stable society must be built on the voluntary recognition of benefit.

We choose to give up some individual freedom to enable collective action not because we must, but because we recognize that solving our collective problems—socioeconomic inequality, war, climate change—creates a world with less friction for everyone. When we replace the "ghosts" of moral obligation with the "math" of mutual persistence, we move from a society of coerced subjects to a society of sovereign individuals who agree to play together because it is the most intelligent path forward.

Bjørn Østman, Strynø, March 2026.

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¹ Reference: Nominalist Determinism and Intelligence.
² Free Will and the Epistemic Gap section of the above essay.

Nominalist Determinism and Intelligence

I am a Nominalist Determinist. This is a declaration of war against "ghostly concepts" that have haunted biology and physics for a century. While the scientific consensus has drifted toward believing that the universe is made of "information" or "mathematical fields", I hold that the universe is a silent, deterministic machine made of matter, and nothing else.

The Semantic Audit: Matter vs. Names

To navigate the world effectively, we must first define what is “real”. In my framework, “real” is restricted to objective, tangible stuff that exists independently of any observing mind. This list is absolute:

1. Real Matter: This includes protons, neutrons, electrons, and photons, as well as the broader array of subatomic particles that constitute the material world.

2. The Vacuum (Space): This is the tangible, mind-independent stage. It is not “nothingness”; it is a physical substrate with measurable properties, such as permittivity (ϵ₀) and permeability (µ₀). These properties act as the “hardware constraints” of the universe, dictating the maximum speed of causality (c).

Everything else we talk about in science is a nominal—a name we give to a state, a ratio, or a persistent habit of matter and the vacuum.

• Time: A nominal for the “spatial latency” or “processing delay” of the vacuum. It is the metric of how physical processes occur in relation to each other.

• Fields: Mathematical descriptions used to model the physical state of the vacuum at specific coordinates. They are tools of “theoretical parsimony,” not independent entities.

• Energy: A nominal for the “state-change capacity” of a system. It is the metric of the relative configuration and potential for displacement of matter and the vacuum.

When we treat these names as physical entities, we commit what the physicist E.T. Jaynes called the Mind Projection Fallacy (MPF): the mistake of confusing our internal knowledge—our mental models—with the external reality.

To be clear: information, time, energy, and entropy are not "real". They are mathematical formulations used to describe the configuration and flow of matter. They have no more tangible existence than momentum, temperature, or pressure. You cannot hand me a bucket of "energy" any more than you can hand me a bucket of "velocity". It is strictly a scalar property of a system's state.

Entropy, in particular, is often treated as a mystical guiding law, but it is merely a description of statistics. Matter tends to move towards equilibrium simply because particles—in a gas, for example—move independently. This movement results in states that are statistically predictable, not because of a "law" forcing them there, but because of the sheer number of ways matter can be distributed.

The Actors: Proximity and Force

Matter interacts via exactly four fundamental forces: electromagnetism, gravity, the strong nuclear force, and the weak nuclear force. Even at the quantum level, there are only electromagnetic shapes attracting or repelling one another. We see this in van der Waals forces, hydrogen bonding, and electronic state transitions. These are not "magic"; they are the geometric and electromagnetic consequences of material proximity—the physical distance between particles. When atoms get close enough, their electromagnetic fields overlap and interact; when they are far apart, they do not. Everything we call "chemistry" or "biology" is just the result of matter being close enough to push or pull on other matter.

While the modern consensus is that gravity is "geometry" rather than a force, it is completely consistent to describe it as a force. The mathematics remains functional, and the physical description holds. Whether we map it as a "curvature" or a "pull”, the territory—the external world—remains the same: matter moving in relation to matter.

Persistence of Matter and the Fine-Tuning Myth

There is a vacuous urge in the evolution/creationism debate to explain "fine-tuning", as if a deity had to set the physical constants to "just the right value" for life to exist. This is a non-problem; it gets causality wrong. Nothing needs to be fine-tuned because nothing can be fine-tuned. Matter interacts the way it does, and we create "laws" to describe that regularity. The physical constants, G, c, h, are merely our measurements of those interactions—they are no more "tuneable" by a deity than the value of π could be "tuned" to make circles different.

Furthermore, the persistence of stable matter requires no explanation. It is simply the matter that hasn't fallen apart yet. If this configuration was not stable, it would fall into another stable configuration, and we could ask the same question again. We do not ask why a proton persists; we should stop asking why a genome persists. It is simply the "match" that hasn't hit enough friction to dissolve.

The Semantic Bridge: Match-Predict-Act

Semantics is the key to understanding not just the 'mind', but the true nature of every word we use, without resorting to dualism. Names are just labels for material states. We must dissect our words to realize that intelligence is not a ghostly substance, but a structural relationship. 

Definition: Intelligence is the match of mental models to the external world. It is measured by the accuracy of the predictions those models generate, observing the actions of the system.

The external world of facts is objective and independent of observers. Our mental models are abducing models (per C.S. Peirce) of that reality. Because these models are internal configurations of matter attempting to represent an external territory, our "knowledge" of that world necessarily remains forever uncertain. Intelligence is the quality of that match—the physical alignment between the matter in our heads and the matter in the world.

Free Will and the Epistemic Gap

In a world of Nominalist Determinism, every state of matter is the inevitable result of its previous state. Matter interacts, and we make "laws" to describe the regularity of that. Because the causal chain is closed, free will is an illusion. It is a functional label for a complex material entity (the brain) processing its own internal state.

Similarly, "randomness" is not a property of the world. I am agnostic on truly random quantum reality, but at any level above that, randomness is purely a label for our epistemic ignorance. We call a process "random" when we lack the resolution to see the deterministic gears.

The Foundation of Form: Why Logic Precedes Math

Finally, we must correct the error regarding the origin of math. C.S. Peirce argued that logic was derived from mathematics (Math → Logic)—a view I find impossible to square with reality. The hierarchy is:

Matter Interacts → Logic → Mathematics.

Math is not a law that matter follows; it is just the recording of how matter already "logically" behaves. Logic is the structural result of material identity and interaction. Mathematics is the symbolic language we invented to track that logic. Math is the map; matter is the territory. To suggest that math is "real" is to suggest that the ink on a map is the road itself. It is time we stop worshipping the ink and return to the road.

Bjørn Østman, Strynø, March 2026.

Randomness in the mental map

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Violence in entertainment begets violence in society

 We live what we have wrought.

Fargo seasons 1-5. Captivating, in excess.

I am compelled to point out that such shows are symptoms of what we bemoan: violence is inherently part of who we are, and we seem to be doing our very best to continue to propagate its ethos in our culture. With every mass shooting we search for answers. The answer lies in you: you will watch this shit, and enjoy it.

Fargo is eminent writing, casting, acting, and directing. It is wildly entertaining, entangling multiple facets and spins of the worst part of human nature. The most entertaining parts of our nature. We revel in the subjugation, the sadism, the corruption, and the death. We hate it, but we love it. That’s who we are.

We have come so far, only a generation our two into mass media that let us explore in exquisite detail the gore that feeds something primal in our primeval, limbic system. The rush is undeniable – if you feel nothing but anguish at violent justified vengeance, then you are perhaps among the few at the evolutionary forefront. The rest of us will watch horror, gore, murder, dominance, power, corruption, crime, evil… any kind of violence you can think of, and thoroughly enjoy it.

Take Keanu Reeves: Sweet, caring, good-looking, cool. Everybody loves him. In that, he has much power. An enormous amount of good-will and status. And what does he do with it? John Wick. A despicable dysentery of films glorifying senseless gun violence, all justified by retribution for the death of his dog. I jab at Keanu, not because he’s unique, but because he sparkles exceptionally. There are countless others who talk a good game in terms of peace in the world, but fail to live it. Think and you’ll know them.

Fargo is one such. You can spin it any way you like. A commentary on the ceaselessness of the human spirit, to conquer, dominate, pervert. We are rescued by the plucky heroine, who goes it alone, defeats the villainous, the evil as a concept itself, even. She justifies spending some 40 hours watching of people shooting each other to bits; we are not them, we just enjoy the bad guys getting theirs. But only after we have watched, and completely salivated over, the crimson means to her end. It is then here we are mistaken, thinking we can justify this pornography of brutality, this endless duress that human put fellow human under. The in-group/out-group dynamic justifies the spectacle. Our evolutionary past explains it, our lust for retribution demands it. Because when we watch it, we enforce it. That is the frightening secret: if we glorify it, we promote and engender it.

Ask in times of ultimate distress how anyone could do this to children, and there is your answer.

The Art in the Random

 The Art in the Random

Art happens in our minds. Creation only requires that we recognize it. Random patterns take shape, and we see an image. The spectator becomes the artist.

The random object becomes art the moment we observe it, as we intend for it to be art. And in that moment the artist emerges.

Our evolved instincts retain the experiences of our ancestors. The problems of survival and reproduction they faced are encoded in us, coming to light every moment of our lives, if only we choose to recognize it. Art is thus an expression of deep roots that connect us to those who came before us.

                         Ø

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Fine-tuning is not a problem

Fine-tuning of the universe is not a cogent objection. It gets causality wrong. The idea of a set of knobs that God tunes to get it just right for life to be possible is wrong. The universe has not been tuned. Rather, matter and the four fundamental force of nature (gravity, electromagnetism, the weak nuclear force, and the strong nuclear force) exist, and we don't know how that came about. Matter interacts the way it does, and that happens to work the way we observe. Measuring G, h, c is just a description of those interactions, and just because we can replace those numbers with other numbers in theory, it doesn't follow that someone set those numbers deliberately. And if that explanation makes you feel unsatisfied or uncomfortable, then you either do something about it, or relegate the that too to the place where you keep all the things you also don't understand. There is no consequence, unless you make a pathetic stink about it.

Calculating the probability that number would be as they are only serves to reveal an absent understanding of how shaky ground the argument for fine-tuning pointing to God (as a general concept) is. The numbers exist on a uniform and otherwise unspecified range, and as such the probability of any set of particular numbers is zero. 

"I'm trying to give you logos here, and you are asking for ethos. Why?! Is it because authority is more persuasive to you? Is that because you fear you won't understand the argument? Or is the topic just boring? Would you prefer pathos because that is the only kind of response you are capable of? Well here it is, my pathos. I weep for us, for our collective, as we are held back this way. We could be really somewhere..." 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fine-tuned_universe