Definitions and Premises

I find it appropriate to start up with some definitions because, as we saw, language can be tricky, and I know many nasty debates can be traced back to hermeneutics and ambiguous or imprecise speech, so I’d like to avoid going down that path. Here’s what I understand, in the plainest sense I can think of, from the widely known terms which I shall use as atomic components:

• Subject: for all intents and purposes, myself. The only thing I can be sure of at any given time (the cogito); whatever it is that’s going through a conscious experience at this exact moment. Perhaps you are one as well, but I can only ever speculate. Anyway, if you are, read it as yourself and not me;
• Interaction: anything at all involving the exchange of something between two or more parties;
• Real: that which has, in any form or intensity, the ability to interact/interfere with the subject, even if only by merit of its absence. The set of all things endowed with this property is what we call reality;
• Being (or entity): that which possesses some degree of reality.

I know they may seem a bit circular, but that’s because they are. In all the above definitions I tried to define a single thing (which is ‘reality’), but the definition which I have is bit different from most, so I tried to bridge my concept to some you might be more familiarized with. After we’ve been exposed to them, we can summarize everything as:

Reality is the set of all things which have the potential to alter the state of any other thing under its domain.

Clearer now, huh? Though I know, there are some issues with this definition, which the most analytically-oriented of you may find unsettling:

Second-order definition? Really?

Yes, I know. But remember we are only just scratching the surface at this point. Reality is perhaps the most central concept not just here but to anyone, and it can be defined first-orderly in our framework, but to do so will require more familiarity with the notions we’re developing.

Do I smell solipsism?

Up to a degree, yes. But if you follow the reasoning, you’ll see that “conscious solipsism” will lead to inconsistencies, and a more open definition that allows the separation between the subject and his environment (like the one we’ll follow) actually ends up being indistinguishable from realism.

Continuing with our definitions, now let’s delve into particulars:

• Semon (or monad, plural sema): like the name indicates, the ‘unit’. It’s not a unit of anything in particular, but rather an elementary form of thing-ness. A semon is what encases a quantifiable portion of reality in its purest, simplest state, such that it is otherwise entirely featureless. Sema (it’s plural form) don’t have properties inherent to themselves, but rather properties are the things that emerge from a particular arrangement of sema. The only thing a semon can do is break itself (here is where we depart from Leibniz’s monadology), a process we shall call partition. That makes them the germ by excellence; every semon can partition itself indefinitely and, by doing so, create endless and diverse beings. Needless to say, every being resulted in the partition of a semon will itself be a semon (but the converse is not true, since we can define beings which do not abide by the definition of a semon). When we single out a particular semon to consider the relation to its offspring, we call it a ‘synod’. Therefore;
• Synod: a “mother-semon” (one with offspring);
• Anad: an irreducible semon, one that cannot be sliced further — atomic semon, if you will. Though every monad contains in itself the germ of endless new sema within, it may be the case that, due to some factor (usually extraneous, like an environmental pressure), it will no longer partition, even though it still could, in principle;
• Order: by this we’ll understand “position of a semon in respect to a synod”, and we’ll sketch it using trees. Imagine we start with a semon and partition sequentially from it in a binary fashion three times. We should have something like this as a result -

- every node or vertex in the tree is a semon and edges (links) can only exist between a synod and its offspring. The original semon will be called “zeroth-order”, and all sibling sema share a same order (so in this scenario there are two “first-order” sema, four “second-order” ones, and so on). An order is the dimension by which sema are partitioned with respect to a given synod, so first-order sema are one edge away from their synod of reference;

(Some more useful terminology before we continue: consider any semon on a worldtree; as we already know, its position relative to other sema is called its order, but the absolute position in the worldtree is the sema or entity’s locus. The total amount of sema of any such order in a given system is referred to as its size, the number of equally-ordered entities in which it’s distributed its module, and the particular way sema and their synnections are arranged an entity’s setup or scheme.)

You might be tempted to think that monads are the chief element of all this, yet this is not a materialistic framework but rather a structuralist one, and the entire focus of it lies not on the nodes but the edges, or how we’ll call them:

• Synex (or synnection, plural syneces): the synex is what enables reality as according to our definition, the backbone behind beings’ entailment. When two entities are synnected, part of what constitutes each one’s being overlaps; but they aren’t merely weaved together by it, like a bridge might link two shores, they are effectively ONE (under such aspect), more like the underlying crust uniting two parcels of earth beneath the surface. It’s a a priori connection and can only exist as such, so therefore it’s only ever effected through their common ancestry (ie, a synod having both as its offspring, or a semon in the case of a single entity), that acts as a conduit through which influences can be transmitted between them. Hence, between any given beings, there is a single synex that links them all simultaneously, but they are each synnected in myriad ways to every other being (thus is the very definition of reality we’ve employed). Two or more beings are said to be maximally-synnected when they share all their synnections with one another, in which case it cannot be said of them to be two distinct beings, but rather a single one: a semon. I know this is a tough one to wrap your head around due to its abstract nature, but it is THE essence of the entire thing, the killer app if you will.We’ll see more on it later on, where we will explore how that manifests over the natural world, by which point it should become a more intuitive concept;

Ok, so once we have a semon and its link structure, what does it get us?

• (Semonic) Value, or molarity: the weighted correspondence of a being relative to another. A semon in relation to itself always has molarity one, while its two first-order offspring will each be 1/2 mol in relation to it and one to each other. A system (see below), being equivalent to a semon, has overall molarity one, and any configuration it takes must preserve this. It is important to keep in mind that, although just like currency there is fungibility between equivalently-valued entities (say,a zeroth-order semon can become two first-order sema, which in turn can become eight third-order sema, and so on and vice-versa with absolutely no impediment),there is NO such thing as commutativity between them — that is, two first-order sema are NOT the same as one zeroth-order one, as both don’t share the same mappings and properties, such that although they may be equivalent they are not equal! This distinction may seem like a moot one, but it’s vital for the consistency of the entire framework;
• System (or worldtree): the ensemble composed of a synod, its offspring and their linkages. A system is basically an environment taken as a single entity, under which every being is free to interact with every other and mols are exchanged. An alternate way to define a system is as an equivalence class of all possible configurations of a semon and its partitions; if such an equivalence class is in its ground or identity state (ie, zeroth-order) it becomes a plain semon. Now, I call it a ‘tree’ here and will represent it with the usual image of one, but it should be made clear that this is not your usual tree as in the mathematical sense of word. It would be more appropriately referred to as a semilattice, not only because all the nodes — or sema — exist in a simultaneous fashion (we’ll understand why soon), but because that’s only a pictorial representation of a dynamic entity, in which cycles can occur — like going from a semon to an offspring and back again -, which, usually, defies the rigorous definition of a tree as a mathematical entity;
• Signature: think of it as the essence (or quiddity), that which unambiguously identifies each strata of being. A being’s signature is the pathway laid out from a synod to itself in a worldtree. If we’re dealing with a binary tree, such as the one in the example above, we could write a being’s signature as a binary string of size 2^n (n being the order of the semon up to a synod), with 0 representing one direction and 1 the other (this notion will be helpful later on). No two sema can ever be identical, because that’d imply they’re the same (since sema don’t have intrinsic features, they can only be assorted by their relative position to one another in the worldtree; such position is expressed by their unique signature, for which there can’t be two alike).

With the benefit of hindsight, I suppose we can refine some of our common-sense terms from the beginning in order to be more in line with the current state of our knowledge. Let us call then:

• Real: everything of some semonic value;
• Interaction: any event in which a semonic quantity undergoes a transformation;
• Entity: any mapping of (ie, selection of elements contained in) a worldtree — not necessarily contiguous or even finite, the only constraint being that it must be well-defined.

Now that we’ve established the means of communication, let’s see where this all takes us.