Samuel Fernando Faria da Silva

The core unresolved issue in classical liberal theology is not anthropocentrism, but the lack of a formal account of how theological language refers to God after Kant. Thinkers from Schleiermacher to Tillich have tried to speak of God without reducing Him to an object, yet have not fully clarified how this reference works. The text proposes “diaphoric reference” as a model: a form of real reference mediated through finite means, where God is neither identical to the mediation nor hidden behind it as an object. This structure—medium, passage, and terminus—is grounded in Trinitarian theology: the Father as origin, the Son as historical mediation, and the Spirit as the active medium. Thus, the Trinity is not an external addition but the necessary condition for making coherent theological reference within the liberal tradition.

The paper examines the ontological commitments embedded in two canonical frameworks of Artificial General Intelligence: AIXI and the Gödel Machine. Its central aim is to identify which entities, structures, and assumptions each framework must presuppose for its core claims to hold. To do so, it adopts Quine’s criterion of ontological commitment and proposes an ontological signature composed of four dimensions: the presupposed theory of agency, the structure of the domain over which the model quantifies, the ontological status of internal states, and the formal criterion of intelligence.

I argue that a recognisable class of metaphysical posits shares a formal structure with the postulation of a privileged global present in special relativity. In both cases one starts with a genuine invariant partial order—causal precedence for events, metaphysical dependence for entities or facts—and then selects a particular total structure (a foliation, a hierarchy of levels) from among many that are equally compatible with the invariant. By Szpilrajn’s theorem, non-trivial partial orders admit multiple linear extensions; so the selection is strictly additional information. I call a posit foliation-like when it (F1) commits to such a selection, (F2) does so within a domain whose admissible extensions form a non-singleton class, and (F3) cannot be distinguished by any further invariant or by explanatory work unavailable to its rivals. The relativistic case is not an analogy for this diagnostic but an instance of it. I argue that some contemporary uses of “priority”, “fundamentality”, and “levels of reality”—most visibly Schaffer-style priority monism and graded-fundamentality proposals—are foliation-like in precisely this sense, while local dependence relations (constitution, realisation, determinate–determinable, mereological composition) are not. The proposal is diagnostic rather than eliminativist: it identifies a specific argumentative burden that defenders of global stratification must discharge, without requiring anti-realism about grounding, explanation, or asymmetric dependence.