- The three worlds are physical, mental, and abstract.
- World 1: the world of physical objects and events, including biological entities. World 2: the world of individual mental processes. World 3: the world of abstractions that emerge from and affect world 2 through their representations in world 1.
- World 3 contains the products of thought. This includes abstract objects such as scientific theories, stories, myths, and works of art. A world three object is something like a meta-object ( meaning after or beyond) or being. Metaphysics is the branch of philosophy that studies the first principles of being, identity and change, space and time, causality, necessity, and possibility.
- The subject of metaphysics is the first causes of things and that which does not change.
- World 3 is not to be conceived as a Platonic realm. But, Platonism affirms the existence of abstract objects, which are asserted to exist in a third realm distinct from both the sensible external world and from the internal world of consciousness, and is the opposite of nominalism because unlike the Platonic world of records, which is non-changing and exists independently of human beings. World 3 is created by human beings and is not fixed. It corresponds to the current state of our knowledge and culture.
- We live in three realms: Earth, atmosphere, and Biosphere.
- Knowledge is a tested, evaluated, and surviving structure of information (e.g., DNA instructions, synaptic structures, beliefs, or claims) developed by a living system to help itself solve problems and help it adapt.
- World 1: tested, evaluated, and surviving structures of information in physical systems that may allow them to adapt to their environment (e.g., genetic and synaptic knowledge composed of biological structures used in developmental and learning processes).
- World 2: tested, evaluated, and surviving beliefs and belief predispositions in minds about the world (subjective, or non-shareable, mental knowledge composed of cognitive structures used in learning, thinking, and acting).
- World 3: Tested, evaluated, and surviving, sharable (aim), linguistic formulations about the world, i.e., claims and meta-claims that are spoken, or artifact-based or cultural knowledge used in learning, thinking, and acting.
- Being First Causes, Unchanging Things:
- Essence precedes existence. Existence is perfection. Being is a logical, not a fundamental, predicate. To be is to be the value of a bound variable. Universals do not exist but subsist or have been. Affirmation of existence is, in fact, nothing but denial of the number zero.
- The four classification explanatory conditions are an object’s form, matter, efficient cause, and teleology. The difference between metaphysical realism and scientific realism is the scientific realist adopts its claims about the structure of these interactions wholesale from the scientific description of these interactions. The metaphysical realist posits a system that is more than these interactions.
- Plausible reasoning is a method of deriving new conclusions from given known premises, a method different from the classical syllogistic argumentation methods of Aristotelian two-valued logic. Ethics is necessary, not contingent.
- Free will is a sometime thing: Free will, in humans, is the power or capacity to choose among alternatives or to act in certain situations independently of natural, social, or divine restraints. Free will might be an illusion created by our brains, scientists might have proved. Humans are convinced that they make conscious choices as they live their lives. But maybe the brain just convinces itself that it made a free choice from the options after the decision has made. Or maybe not.
