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 generalisation of “wave function space realism” in quantum physicsibid., 186. . It can be stated more technically that what we refer to when we point to, describe or otherwise identify a system, i.e. the “real” system, is actually a pattern in a state space.
The world of our experience doesn’t emerges from state spaces through a complicated set of operations between different abstract spaces, i.e. mathematical objects, as Deleuze positsDeLanda (2002) . It is ==a Model of our actual Environment== that tracks more or less accurately attractor states of the systems inside und around us. Any forms that exist in this world of our experience are to by explained empirically, by showing how the model that contains them arises.
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”