We should Use a parsimonious and productive ontology.
The most radical interpretation of parsimony is to “infer just that
fundamental structure and ontology that is required by the dynamical
laws”North 2013, 188
we postulate to describe reality.
Our view that The world is a hierarchy of systems means we have a minimal Ontological Commitment to the existence of Systems that change over time. So the most parsimoniuos ontology for us is one that just infers what our mathematical description of Dynamical Systems requires.
The evolution functions we use to describe these systems require only that their states exist as points in their respective State Space, which is structured by the relations between those points as described by the functions.
So if we want to be maximally parsimonious, we should treat a
system’s state space and and its structure as real, not any physical or
four-dimensional space. In this view, reality consists of a hierarchy
of systems that live in a hierarchical state space.This ontological position can be called “state space
realism”, analogous to and as a generalistion of “wave function space
realism” (North 2013, 186) in quantum physics.
The challenge then becomes to show How the world of our experience emerges from state spaces.
References
- DeLanda (2002): Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy
- North (2013): “The Structure of a Quantum World”
- Friston (2019): A free energy principle for a particular physics
- Palmer (2016): “p-adic Distance, Finite Precision and Emergent Superdeterminism: A Number-Theoretic Consistent-Histories Approach to Local Quantum Realism”
- Quine (1948): “On What There Is”