karbytes_ontology

This web page outlines karbytes’ conceptualization about how reality works. Those conceptualizations take the form of ontological statements instead of ethical instructions.

NIHILISM: the belief that purpose and ethics are arbitrary thought processes (generated by and subjectively experienced by “sufficiently complex” information processing agents) instead of immutable and ubiquitous properties of nature.

(For contrast, karbytes assumes that mathematical rules describing how one number, X, is related to some other number, Y, are immutable and ubiquitous properties of nature given that they pertain to purely abstract and immutable objects (i.e. numbers)).

karbytes claims to hold a nihilistic worldview (which means that karbytes thinks that purpose and ethics only take place within the context of partial frames of reference (held by material information processing agents) as personal (and mutable) preferences.

SOLIPSISM: the belief that the only knowledge which is available to any information processing agent (whether it observes reality through a partial frame of reference or through an omniscient frame of reference) is what that information processing agent’s constituent physical hardware renders as emergent software.

As a solipsist, karbytes believes that karbytes only knows what occurs inside of karbytes’ own personal frame of reference and that karbytes lacks the means to determine whether phenomena exist beyond that scope which is localized to karbytes present-moment field of awareness.

karbytes refers to itself as a “relative solipsist” instead of an “absolute solipsist”.

If karbytes is an “absolute solipsist”, then karbytes believes that the only phenomena which ever occur throughout all of nature are what occur as qualia inside of karbytes’ own subjective frame of reference and that literally anything else is purely nothingness. Even more precisely, it could be said that, if karbytes is an “absolute solipsist”, then karbytes believes that only the qualia which are currently being observed by karbytes exist and that everything else is literally identical to pure nothingness.

If karbytes is a “relative solipsist”, then karbytes believes that there could be phenomena other than what karbytes experiences (whether in the past, present, or future of karbytes’ experienced timeline) as qualia inside of karbytes’ own subjective frame of reference.

COMPATIBILISM: karbytes believes that free will (i.e. agency) is an emergent property of relatively low-level (i.e. concrete) and deterministic processes rather than merely an illusion.

karbytes refers to itself more as a “compatibilist” than as a “hard determinist”.

If karbytes is a “hard determinist”, then karbytes believes that free will does not exist and that all processes occur in a manner which could be said to be pre-determined (which means that, if it were possible for an information processing agent to know the state of the entire universe at any point in time in the relative past (as an informationally complete snapshot of that universe at that exact point in time), then that information processing agent could infer from that snapshot exactly how that universe would evolve from that point forward in that universe’s evolutionary timeline). That means that all future events would be inextricably controlled by past events (within the respective encompassing universe).

If karbytes is a “compatibilist”, then karbytes believes that free will exists as an emergent property of sufficiently complex information processing systems (and that free will is the ability to intentionally direct the flow of energy within the information processing agent’s internal hardware and in its encompassing environment to some non-trivial degree).

The difference between events which occur as a result of an information processing agent’s “free will”, X, and events which occur as a result of purely deterministic processes, Y, is that X occurs at least partially as a result of the respective information processing agent consciously observing itself exerting effort towards the attainment of some goal that information processing agent has while Y occurs without any consciously felt effort towards Y’s emergence.

This web page was last updated on 14_JULY_2025. The content displayed on this web page is licensed as PUBLIC_DOMAIN intellectual property.