Categorizing Reality and Outside Reality
Understanding the nature of reality and its attributes as a category, and how to think about things external to it.
Introduction
Categories are a useful tool for understanding the nature of reality. They allow us to see how things are related to each other as well as what attributes they’re comprised of. Properly grouping attributes allows us to determine which boundaries they lie within, and consequently, what can be determined about them.
In this article, we will also be defining our own categories. Many philosophers before us have created their own in attempts to describe the nature of all things. Our version will be fairly simple.
A Small Example: Tables
To represent a table as its own distinct category, let’s state some attributes about it:
- A table has 4 legs and a surface (Rule, positive attribute)
- A table must be constructed of solid material and not liquid material (Rule, negative attribute)
- A table must allow for items to be placed on it (Rule, positive attribute)
- A table must not have a round surface that causes items to roll off (Rule, negative attribute)
- A table should allow for chairs to sit at it (Relational, positive attribute)
- A table should not be sat on (Relational, negative attribute)
As noted, the attributes we’ve defined here are of only two flavours, rule and relational. We’ve also defined positive and negative variants of each.
- A rule attribute is an attribute that describes a distinct rule or law that it must follow in order to uphold its identity.
- A relational attribute is an attribute that describes its contextual properties and how it might interact or relate with other things.
- A positive attribute is an attribute that describes what something is.
- A negative attribute is an attribute that describes what something is not.
We’re choosing to have our category system to only have rules and relational attributes are they are extremely generic, which is suitable to describing something as fundamental as reality.
The Large Example: Reality
Now, let’s apply our categorization to reality itself. For something so fundamental, it is strangely easy to fit into this sytem as its own name implies one sole rule:
- Reality contains all real things
Truthfully we could stop there, but it’d be more interesting to break this one down a bit. Reality has some particular attributes that are worth discussing:
- Reality contains all laws, and rules, including ones which we may have not yet discovered
- Reality contains logic
These are interesting because they highlight some very important distinctions.
If something did not follow the laws of reality, it would not be considered a real thing nor a part of reality. For the most part, this is an easy thing to reconcile. It becomes tricky if we start talking about what might be considered bizarre occurances. Scientifically, we’ve adopted things that were previously considered bizarre such as the world being round rather than flat. What was previously bizarre is now an attribute of reality. If one day for example we discover a large floating ghost in our sky, one which is visible to the whole world, that too would become an attribute of reality, regardless of how odd it is.
This brings up the question: what laws or rules can truly considered be considered outside of reality if every time we discover something, it becomes a part of reality?
It would seem as if the only option for what can be considered outside of reality is the negation of all laws, or laws that are impossible for us to discover, describe, or experience. It is not something we could reason about. We would not be able to know if that outside of reality, the laws are a superset of our own, or if they are something entirely disjoint (meaning no overlap with reality’s laws).
Similarly with logic, our reality behaves logically, but we cannot know whether our logic applies outside of reality at all. I don’t mean this in a perjorative way. The outside of reality would simply not be guaranteed to be bound by our rules of logic. Just like the laws, it could be a superset of our reality’s logic or it could be something entirely disjoint.
To summarize what something external to reality might be, it would be something that is not bound to our reality’s laws, logic, or rules.
This is important when it comes to brute facts about reality or the universe, or things that are considered fundamental constants. It would seem as if they truly exist within reality and yet not have an answer within reality. Logically these brute facts leave us with two options:
- It might not have an answer at all — it may be genuinely brute
- It might have an answer, but one that lies outside of reality’s own logic
In A Causal Existence, I argue that reality cannot answer this from within itself, thus if there is an answer, it lies outside reality. Whether there truly is such an answer, or whether the fact is simply brute, turns out to rest on a further principle (the Principle of Sufficient Reason) that logic alone cannot settle.