Glossary

I'll try not to use too many big or unfamiliar words on this blog. However, what's widely familiar from the domain of metaphysics is pretty limited, and some terminology is just too damn useful. If I should add stuff, please let me know.

Complex: More than just complicated. A thing or system (or a world) that is complex involves emergent properties not reducible to the thing's parts; nonlinearity; volatile or chaotic unpredictability; and uncontrollability. It's a major feature of process-relationality. Map-metaphysics depends on minimizing complexity, which I'll sometimes shorthand as (relative) simplicity even though it can get quite complicated.

Convergence: The principle that when evidence from multiple diverse and not-too-distorted perspectives agrees, the conclusion can be strong even if none of the individual sources of evidence is sufficient on its own. Distinct from consensus. The broadest possible convergence (or consilience) amounts to a sort of baseline or "lowest common denominator" conclusion or truth shared by everything.

Emergence: Basically, when something has properties that aren't entirely reducible to its parts.

Epistemology: The study or a theory of the nature and grounds of knowledge, or how and to what extent humans know reality, as opposed to the nature of reality itself.

Individualism vs individuality (intro page and other blog posts forthcoming): Metaphysical individualism restates the fundamental separateness of things; applied strongly to people and politics, it basically says we're all on our own. However, for the most committed adherents of map-metaphysics, this individualism has little room for individuality, difference and uniqueness that validly deviates from the supposedly universal and timeless ideals or natural kinds that are said to matter most for defining individuals. Liberalism, in a broad sense, can be said to try to promote individuality rights while mostly preserving individualism. Process-relational thought goes further to encourage diverse individuality without atomistic individualism.

Less wrong: A limitless direction that process-relational tools can help point us towards, as opposed to a universal, comprehensive endpoint of absolute truth. Reality is too complex for humans to know so definitively, but we can always get things progressively less wrong. This blog has no affiliation whatsoever with the "rationalist" community at lesswrong.com, which is ...often wrong.

Map(s): Mostly used metaphorically here to refer to (left-brained?) mental models of reality that, while useful, sometimes get confused for the real deal (the "terrain" or "territory"). They are often characterized by simplified, overcommitted analogies and/or static, non-complex, abstracted/idealized, and sharply separated delineations of things, from a "universal" view-from-above. However, process-relational tools can upgrade the accuracy and utility of maps (ground-truthed updates, scale "zoom," systemic integration, etc.). Maps can affect the terrain.

Metaphysics: The domain of philosophy encompassing what kinds of things constitute reality, what it means to exist, what makes a thing what it is, and so on; the most general attempt to make sense of things. Somewhat unconventionally--but correctly!--I also use this term here to refer to the assumptions about these fundamental aspects of existence that all humans apply 100% of the time we think about any thing, usually unconsciously. Since you're never not doing metaphysics, because it's impossible to think about any thing without an implicit framework for what a thing is, understanding the gist of metaphysical possibilities is more useful than often assumed. At least on this blog, metaphysics does not mean this new age woo-woo shit. Grrr.

Ontology: The subdomain of philosophy dealing with how reality fundamentally works, what makes a thing a thing, how things relate, is a hot dog a sandwich, and so on. Sometimes considered basically synonymous with metaphysics, and sometimes a subset of it with epistemology, axiology, etc. You might think of it as involving defining lines around and between things, whether those lines are sharp, absolute, and rigid, or more fuzzy, contextual, and permeable. Some people treat "ontological" as a synonym for hardline map-metaphysical essentialism, however, like with the stupid phrase "ontologically evil," so I'll try to avoid it.

Othering: A set of processes and structures that engender marginality and persistent inequality across any of the full range of human differences based on group identities, including but not limited to class, race, sex, or disability. In other words, defining a disfavored out-group. It contrasts with processes and structures of belonging.

Process: Dynamicity or becoming treated as fundamental to existence, as opposed to the standard Euro-Western philosophical treatment of being as "an assembly of static individuals whose dynamic features are either taken to be mere appearances or ontologically secondary and derivative." This dynamicity is not wholly self-contained or determinate. Rather, it is inherently relational, which is why I like the combined term "process-relational." "Everything flows" - attributed to Heraclitus, ancient Greek pre-Socratic philosopher, c. 500 BC.

Regeneration: Systems or other things are regenerative if they maintain “positive reinforcing cycles of wellbeing within and beyond themselves, especially between humans and wider nature. At its most basic semantic level, something regenerative has a capacity to exist or be created again.... A regenerative dynamic has also been summarized as ‘life creates conditions conducive to life,’ in which humans are ‘participating as nature’ to support continued co-evolution of the biosphere.” Going beyond sustainability, regenerativity respects limitations of real scarcity, but reorients us within them away from destructive hierarchical competition and manufactured scarcity, and toward the abundance of enoughness.

Reification: As used here, mistaking the map for the territory, or abstractions for concrete realities.

Relations: Relationships, interactions, and interconnections or entanglements among people, places, ideas, and other things. In relational thinking, these matter at least as much as the separate things or entities; to approximately restate, context matters as least as much as content. This relationality is not static like a network diagram, but continually unfolding, dynamic or processual, which is why I like the combined term "process-relational." Note the subtlety that relationality doesn't deny the importance of boundaries and distance, which are are forms of relations and not inherently bad.

RIVERS (intro page and other blog posts forthcoming): Relevance, Integration, Verification, Evolution, Regeneration, Stability - a proposed basic heuristic tool for surfacing and aligning hidden assumptions about how reality works, inspired by SMART(IE) goals. "We both step and do not step into the same river" - Heraclitus, ancient Greek pre-Socratic philosopher, c. 500 BC.

Substance: A nuanced philosophical term that generally refers to something like a separate, determinate, self-contained entity or thing-in-itself, like a (pre-quantum-theory) particle. Substance metaphysics frameworks have been largely dominant in Euro-Western cultures for about two and a half millennia. They are wide-ranging but generally assert that such substances or separate entities are what make existence real, with their relations and changes being secondary and derivative. Things, in this map-model, are characterized by having more-or-less constant and inherent defining properties, essences, or membership in natural kinds. Things are also ideally sharply distinguished from what they are not, tying in with binary either-or logic.

Territory (or terrain): Mostly used here to refer to the full, complex, dynamically relational and pluralistic reality that we observe from within, as distinguished from "maps" or models.

Things: Always used here "in the broadest possible sense" as described by philosopher Wilfred Sellers. Cabbages, kings, death, taxes, genders, events, photons, democracy, theories, gravitational waves rippling through spacetime, your mom, etc. "What is a thing?" in this sense is a question of metaphysics. Getting the metaphysics of things at the highest or most general level less wrong is an efficient shortcut to getting more specific things less wrong as well, all the way down to the details.