Brian Cameron Taylor

This dissertation posits a metaphysical framework, termed Informational Platonism, that resolves the long-standing schism between the objective, seemingly deterministic world described by physics and the subjective, creative, and meaning-driven world of conscious experience. It argues that this dichotomy is illusory, arising from a misunderstanding of the fundamental nature of reality. The proposed solution is a monistic system in which reality is conceived as a single, complete, and atemporal informational structure of a fundamentally geometric and relational nature. The physical, unfolding universe is an instantiation of a subset of this total potentiality. Within this dynamic instantiation, complexity arises through emergence, culminating in consciousness—a localized pattern that perceives, processes, and thereby actualizes the universe’s latent information. Consciousness is capable of discovering instantiations of the potentiality but also bringing novel, non-geometrical substantiations into reality. This framework is defended by situating it within the current academic landscape, contrasting it with prevailing materialist and idealist philosophies, and engaging with contemporary theories in digital physics, philosophy of mind, and complexity science. Key terms such as "information" and "geometry" are rigorously defined, moving beyond intuitive use to engage with Shannon information, Kolmogorov complexity, and the role of symmetry principles in physics. This dissertation redefines free will not as a contra-causal force but as a navigational capacity for a consciousness to discover and substantiate pre-existing pathways within the informational landscape. A consciousness also has the free will to create the non-geometrical. A consciousness can “think up bad ideas and put them into action in such a way that nature could never.” This framework reconciles determinism and free will, positing a Universe that is predetermined in its potential yet allows for meaningful choice in its actualization. Free will is thus the capacity to select from predetermined possibilities (Discovery) or to formulate non-geometrical errors (Creation). True creation can only be an error in a predetermined Universe of possible options. This model is shown to be compatible with neuroscientific findings often cited as evidence against free will. Furthermore, quantum mechanics, rather than contradicting this model, is presented as its most direct evidence, describing the probabilistic nature of information prior to its actualization. The contextual comprehension exhibited by Large Language Models is argued to be another proof of Geometricity in the Universe. LLMs are “Non-Conscious Operators” which navigate this informational landscape probabilistically. Consciousness gets reduced to Agency and Intentionality. An LLM has no will, free or otherwise, yet, via the geometry of language, it is able to communicate. The implications of this system are then explored, offering an objective basis for morality as a form of "social physics," a teleological vector for the cosmos as a process of self-discovery, and a re-contextualization of all knowledge and art as acts of discovery rather than creation. It concludes by positing that whether we expand our understanding into the microscope or telescope, geometricity is all we will ever find.