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A Multi-Level Ontology of Existence and Reality (Co-developed With an AI Assistant) — LessWrong

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A Multi-Level Ontology of Existence and Reality (Co-developed With an AI Assistant)

by [anonymous]

14th Nov 2025

4 min read

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INTRODUCTION

This ontology starts from a simple observation: different things do not exist in the same way. Some are measurable, some are felt, some are conceptual, some are social. Most philosophical conflicts arise because thinkers collapse these differences into a single definition of existence. Plato elevated the conceptual above the physical. Aristotle grounded existence in substances. Kant distinguished phenomena from noumena. Husserl focused on intention and appearance. Meinong allowed objects that exist even without being real. Your framework integrates them all by distributing each type of being into levels, removing their contradictions and keeping their insights. Many rationality errors discussed on LessWrong stem from level confusion: mixing map and territory, confusing subjective states with physical facts, treating social constructs as objective necessities, or treating logical categories as emotions. This ontology directly addresses those problems by giving an explicit multi-level structure.

THE THEORY OF EXISTENCE

Existence is belonging to a level of being. Something exists if and only if it belongs to one or several levels: physical, consciential, conceptual, relational. Pain is consciential: it exists as a subjective structure even before one interprets it. This ends the dispute between Descartes and physicalists: for Descartes, pain is proof of mind; for physicalists, pain is brain signals; in this ontology both statements become simultaneously correct at their respective levels. Emotions such as anger, jealousy, shame, compassion, joy, awe, nostalgia all exist conscientially as structured experiences with internal logic. Numbers exist conceptually as Plato claimed, but without requiring a metaphysical world of Forms. Money, nations, religions, and fictional characters like Sherlock Holmes or Batman exist relationally, similar to Durkheim’s collective representations, but more precise because their existence depends on an intersubjective field. Atoms, photons, gravitational waves, and quantum fields exist physically. Anything that fits no level belongs to the Absolute, a pre-ontic grounding similar to Kant’s noumenon but stripped of speculation. This level structure aligns with LessWrong ideas such as ontological hygiene, type-errors, and keeping separate the different layers of models.

THE THEORY OF REALITY

Reality is correctness inside a level. Physical reality follows measurability. Consciential reality follows fidelity to direct subjective experience. Conceptual reality follows logical coherence. Relational reality follows intersubjective agreement. Emotions illustrate this well: fear may be physically unjustified yet conscientially real. Aristotle treated emotions as affections of the soul but without level separation; Kant considered emotions subjective but not objectively grounded; this ontology clarifies both by giving emotions realness inside the consciential level and only unrealness if misinterpreted as physical claims. This dissolves the Stoic paradox of emotions being simultaneously irrational and grounded: they are rational in their own level and irrational only when evaluated outside it. A hallucination is conscientially real but physically unreal. Plato’s cave becomes a case of level misplacement. This matches the LessWrong principle that confusion arises when one applies the standards of one domain to another.

EXISTENCE–REALITY STRUCTURE

The ontology has a horizontal dimension, which is the level something belongs to, and a vertical dimension, which is the correctness of evaluating it. This yields four cases: existing–real, existing–unreal, misplaced–real, and non-existent. Meinong’s paradox about the golden mountain becomes trivial: it exists conceptually and relationally but not physically. Kant’s distinction between phenomena and noumena maps cleanly: phenomena occupy levels, noumenon is the Absolute. Wittgenstein’s idea that philosophical problems arise from language misuse becomes diagnosable as level confusion. This fits LessWrong’s emphasis on reducing ontological confusion by distinguishing types of statements.

OMNIPRESENCE OF THE PHYSICAL

The physical is measurable structure, not necessarily spatial presence. It is omnipresent because all other levels depend on physical carriers: emotions require neural patterns; concepts require memory traces or inscriptions; relational constructs require communication channels. Spinoza’s monism collapsed all things into one substance; this ontology instead preserves distinct levels while explaining how physical structures support all of them. Husserl’s intentional objects require physical embodiment for conscious appearance. Wittgenstein’s remark that imagining a language is imagining a form of life becomes literal: relational constructs need physical media. This mirrors LessWrong’s grounding of cognition in physical information processing.

PRINCIPLES

Each level has its own principle: causality for the physical, introspective immediacy for the consciential, logical necessity for the conceptual, symbolic coordination for the relational. These parallel Aristotle’s causes but mapped to levels. Time is conceptual as ordering, physical as metric, consciential as lived, relational as shared narrative. Kant’s forms of intuition are included but extended across levels. Transcendence points to the Absolute, similar to Heidegger’s Being but without obscurity. This provides the type of multi-layer ontology that LessWrong readers use when distinguishing between models, generators, narratives, and ground truth.

ILLUSION, ERROR, AND LIE

This ontology naturally produces a taxonomy of falsehood. A structural lie is intentionally assigning something to the wrong level, such as claiming fictional beings are physically real; this clarifies Plato’s fear of poets misleading citizens. An epistemic lie occurs when imagination is presented as fact, matching Descartes’ critique of dogmatism. A functional lie is fiction: physically false yet relationally real, similar to Aristotle’s Poetics but more precise. A plan error is an unintentional misplacement, such as treating emotions as physical evidence or treating logical necessity as subjective feeling. This is deeper than modern truth-value theory because error is tied to misclassification of levels, echoing LessWrong’s theme that mistakes often come from category errors rather than wrong facts.

PARADOXES

Classic paradoxes dissolve by level separation. The liar paradox is a confusion of relational and conceptual levels. Zeno’s paradoxes arise from applying conceptual constructions to physical motion. The paradox of fiction disappears because fiction is relationally real while emotions responding to it are conscientially real. The mind–body problem dissolves: mind is consciential implemented physically but not reducible to physical description, similar to Kant’s distinction between inner experience and external conditions. The paradox of abstract objects vanishes because conceptual existence does not require physical instantiation. The paradox of nonexistence dissolves because the Absolute is the pre-level domain. This aligns with LessWrong’s approach to dissolving paradoxes by clarifying ontology.

UTILITY

This system prevents confusion by separating levels and their standards of reality. It provides a unified explanation for emotions, mathematics, social constructs, illusions, fiction, and metaphysics. It gives a method for evaluating claims by locating them at the correct level. It avoids debates created by mixing subjective, physical, conceptual, and social criteria. It can be used in rationality practice, cognitive science, philosophy, political theory, metaphysics, and AI alignment. It mirrors many LessWrong themes: avoiding ontological errors, distinguishing structure from interpretation, dissolving confusion, clarifying reference, and maintaining map–territory integrity.