I am a Nominalist Determinist. This is a declaration of war against "ghostly concepts" that have haunted biology and physics for a century. While the scientific consensus has drifted toward believing that the universe is made of "information" or "mathematical fields", I hold that the universe is a silent, deterministic machine made of matter, and nothing else.
The Semantic Audit: Matter vs. Names
To navigate the world effectively, we must first define what is “real.” In my framework, “real” is restricted to objective, tangible stuff that exists independently of any observing mind. This list is absolute:
Real Matter: This includes protons, neutrons, electrons, and photons, as well as the broader array of subatomic particles that constitute the material world.
The Vacuum (Space): This is the tangible, mind-independent stage. It is not “nothingness”; it is a physical substrate with measurable properties, such as permittivity (ϵ0) and permeability (µ0). These properties act as the “hardware constraints” of the universe, dictating the maximum speed of causality (c).
Everything else we talk about in science is a nominal—a name we give to a state, a ratio, or a persistent habit of matter and the vacuum.
Time: A nominal for the “spatial latency” or “processing delay” of the vacuum. It is the metric of how physical processes occur in relation to each other.
Fields: Mathematical descriptions used to model the physical state of the vacuum at specific coordinates. They are tools of “theoretical parsimony,” not independent entities.
Energy: A nominal for the “state-change capacity” of a system. It is the metric of the relative configuration and potential for displacement of matter and the vacuum.
When we treat these names as physical entities, we commit what the physicist E.T. Jaynes called the Mind Projection Fallacy (MPF): the mistake of confusing our internal knowledge—our mental models—with the external reality.
To be clear: information, time, energy, and entropy are not "real". They are mathematical formulations used to describe the configuration and flow of matter. They have no more tangible existence than momentum, temperature, or pressure. You cannot hand me a bucket of "energy" any more than you can hand me a bucket of "velocity". It is strictly a scalar property of a system's state.
Entropy, in particular, is often treated as a mystical guiding law, but it is merely a description of statistics. Matter tends to move towards equilibrium simply because particles—in a gas, for example—move independently. This movement results in states that are statistically predictable, not because of a "law" forcing them there, but because of the sheer number of ways matter can be distributed.
The Actors: Proximity and Force
Matter interacts via exactly four fundamental forces: electromagnetism, gravity, the strong nuclear force, and the weak nuclear force. Even at the quantum level, there are only electromagnetic shapes attracting or repelling one another. We see this in van der Waals forces, hydrogen bonding, and electronic state transitions. These are not "magic"; they are the geometric and electromagnetic consequences of material proximity—the physical distance between particles. When atoms get close enough, their electromagnetic fields overlap and interact; when they are far apart, they do not. Everything we call "chemistry" or "biology" is just the result of matter being close enough to push or pull on other matter.
While the modern consensus is that gravity is "geometry" rather than a force, it is completely consistent to describe it as a force. The mathematics remains functional, and the physical description holds. Whether we map it as a "curvature" or a "pull”, the territory—the external world—remains the same: matter moving in relation to matter.
Persistence of Matter and the Fine-Tuning Myth
There is a vacuous urge in the evolution/creationism debate to explain "fine-tuning", as if a deity had to set the physical constants to "just the right value" for life to exist. This is a non-problem; it gets causality wrong. Nothing needs to be fine-tuned because nothing can be fine-tuned. Matter interacts the way it does, and we create "laws" to describe that regularity. The physical constants, G, c, h, are merely our measurements of those interactions—they are no more "tuneable" by a deity than the value of π could be "tuned" to make circles different.
Furthermore, the persistence of stable matter requires no explanation. It is simply the matter that hasn't fallen apart yet. If this configuration was not stable, it would fall into another stable configuration, and we could ask the same question again. We do not ask why a proton persists; we should stop asking why a genome persists. It is simply the "match" that hasn't hit enough friction to dissolve.
The Semantic Bridge: Match-Predict-Act
Semantics is the key to understanding not just the 'mind', but the true nature of every word we use, without resorting to dualism. Names are just labels for material states. We must dissect our words to realize that intelligence is not a ghostly substance, but a structural relationship.
Definition: Intelligence is the match of mental models to the external world. It is measured by the accuracy of the predictions those models generate, observing the actions of the system.
The external world of facts is objective and independent of observers. Our mental models are abducing models (per C.S. Peirce) of that reality. Because these models are internal configurations of matter attempting to represent an external territory, our "knowledge" of that world necessarily remains forever uncertain. Intelligence is the quality of that match—the physical alignment between the matter in our heads and the matter in the world.
Free Will and the Epistemic Gap
In a world of Nominalist Determinism, every state of matter is the inevitable result of its previous state. Matter interacts, and we make "laws" to describe the regularity of that. Because the causal chain is closed, free will is an illusion. It is a functional label for a complex material entity (the brain) processing its own internal state.
Similarly, "randomness" is not a property of the world. I am agnostic on truly random quantum reality, but at any level above that, randomness is purely a label for our epistemic ignorance. We call a process "random" when we lack the resolution to see the deterministic gears.
The Foundation of Form: Why Logic Precedes Math
Finally, we must correct the error regarding the origin of math. C.S. Peirce argued that logic was derived from mathematics (Math → Logic)—a view I find impossible to square with reality. The hierarchy is:
Matter Interacts → Logic → Mathematics.
Math is not a law that matter follows; it is just the recording of how matter already "logically" behaves. Logic is the structural result of material identity and interaction. Mathematics is the symbolic language we invented to track that logic. Math is the map; matter is the territory. To suggest that math is "real" is to suggest that the ink on a map is the road itself. It is time we stop worshipping the ink and return to the road.
Bjørn Østman, Strynø, March 2026.
Randomness in the mental map
