Stefano Coelati Rama

A short treatise in seven numbered propositions, in the form of Wittgenstein's Tractatus, on the fear of death from a naturalist and pragmatist standpoint. Its thesis is that what death takes away is not "being" but access: recording available to a system itself, to act and to correct itself. Reality is defined as what resists, and a subject as a metastable structure that records the world. Inquiry, in Peirce's sense, has no internal bounds, yet it ends from outside, with the body and with the community of interpreters. The fear of death is read as a selected threat signal that, in subjects with symbols, finds an object it can neither avoid nor calibrate against: its content is true, its intensity may be wrong. Against Epicurus and Tractatus 6.4311, death is treated as an endpoint that does not belong to life without thereby being nothing to us; Lucretius' symmetry is answered epistemically, since birth interrupted no inquiry and death cuts one short. Peirce's unlimited community is taken as a hope that physics does not support. The absurd is located not in a lack of meaning but in the relation between what has no bounds from inside and has an end from outside. The treatise closes by inverting Wittgenstein's last proposition.

Why do living systems represent only a sliver of their environment? This paper argues that the answer is thermodynamic: because information is physical, every bit a system acquires and maintains is paid for in free energy that could otherwise buy persistence. It introduces the Semantic Free Energy of the Expected Future (S-FEEF), a criterion that selects an organism's perceptual policy by trading the metabolic cost of information against viability. Building on Kolchinsky and Wolpert's account of semantic information, the paper refounds viability as the non-equilibrium free energy of the agent's state, its Kullback–Leibler distance from the Boltzmann ("death") equilibrium. This single move eliminates a free parameter, places cost and benefit in the same physical units, gives the metabolic exchange rate a Landauer floor, and lets the criterion be derived from Millidge et al.'s Free Energy of the Future under four explicitly stated approximations. An exhaustive computational model yields four results, each stated with its limits: the optimal agent compresses below the point of informational saturation ("less is more"); more information can reduce viability, but only for agents with bounded perception–action coupling; the "dark room" is a sharp, computable threshold rather than a paradox; and morphology non-monotonically gates the value of a mind. The same marginal-return logic extends to evolutionary life history (semelparity, the emergence of senescence, and bet-hedging) and to a thermodynamic account of where the perceptual filter comes from in the first place. The framework is a deliberately small, fully reproducible toy model: it demonstrates mechanisms rather than universal laws, and proposes (though it does not yet run) a concrete empirical test.

This paper develops a novel framework that reconceptualizes identity and persistence through the integration of category theory, information theory, and relational ontology. Against essentialist and substance-based approaches, I argue that entities are not bearers of intrinsic properties but nodes in networks of information-preserving transformations. I formalize this intuition by constructing an information category Inf, whose objects are information states and whose morphisms are structure-preserving transformations satisfying both syntactic and semantic constraints. Identity is reconceived as a specific class of morphisms (those that preserve informational structure above a specified threshold) rather than as a primitive relation or an intrinsic property. Time is formalized as an endofunctor T : Inf → Inf, and persistence through time is defined as the existence of a coherent natural transformation linking a state to its temporal evolution. I introduce a semantic distance metric d_sem on the space of information states, grounded in model-theoretic notions, which allows for precise quantification of identity-preservation and meaning-drift. The framework is applied to three classical problems: the Ship of Theseus paradox, Parfit's personal identity fission cases, and the identity of biological organisms through metabolic turnover. I argue that the framework provides determinate, non-circular answers to these puzzles while avoiding the principal difficulties facing both perdurantism and endurantism. I also address the primary technical objection (the incomputability of Kolmogorov complexity) by distinguishing theoretical idealization from practical approximation and introducing Bennett's logical depth as a complementary measure.

This paper develops a formal theory of intelligence understood as pragmatic adherence to operational frameworks. Drawing on Carnap's notion of linguistic frameworks and the Principle of Tolerance, I introduce the model of the Typed Pragmatic Context (TPC), a framework in which the typing function distinguishes between outputs endowed with epistemic value and those lacking evaluative relevance. The Pragmatic Adherence Theorem is stated and proven, deriving a formal taxonomy of four output categories (correct response, procedural error, pragmatic aphasia, and meta-pragmatic innovation) that clarifies the distinction between mere error and cognitive stupidity. The "revolutionary genius" objection is addressed through the Theory of Eco-Founded Creativity, demonstrating that cognitive innovation is a transformation anchored in pre-existing frameworks rather than a creation ex nihilo. Finally, the model is extended to dynamic contexts via Fauconnier’s mental spaces theory, defining Tracking Failure Aphasia. The study concludes that contextual pragmatism is a necessary condition for any form of communicable intelligence.

This paper proposes a biologically grounded, pragmatically oriented account of the emergence of linguistic meaning. I argue that arousal (the physiological state of emotional and motivational activation) can serve as a pre-linguistic foundation for inferential semantic structures, functioning as an "arousal-semantic function": a mapping from phonetic forms to inferred social meanings, constrained by context and relational dynamics. Drawing on empirical work in ethology and cognitive neuroscience, I show that humans and other animals extract actionable social information from arousal-modulated vocalizations, suggesting the existence of a pre-symbolic inferential layer that grounds conventional semantic content. I develop a three-stage model of meaning emergence: (1) expressive emission of arousal-correlated vocal signals; (2) pragmatic interpretation through context-sensitive inferential patterns; (3) conventional stabilization into morphemic units. This account is situated within Brandom’s inferentialist philosophy and Price’s global expressivism, diverging from referentialist theories of meaning. Finally, I outline implications for the design of neuro-symbolic AI systems capable of acquiring inferential roles from embodied social interaction

This essay aims to delineate a definition of "thought" in accordance with the exposition provided in Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. In the first part, the analysis will focus on Wittgenstein’s response to the question: "What is thought?". Subsequently, a critical examination of this definition will be undertaken, offering a personal reinterpretation and comparison with it. The ultimate goal is to enrich the debate on the topic by integrating Wittgenstein’s perspective with new insights and food for thought.

This paper examines Rudolf Carnap’s "Empiricism, Semantics, and Ontology," focusing on his pragmatic and deflationary approach to metaphysics. Key to Carnap’s view is the distinction between internal and external questions, which supports his linguistic pluralism and contextualism. I argue that Carnap’s ideas offer valuable insights for contemporary debates. Additionally, I assess the reception of Carnap’s work, particularly addressing W.V.O. Quine’s critiques. Despite their influence, I contend that Quine’s objections lack substantial grounding. This analysis reaffirms the relevance of Carnap’s contributions to modern analytic philosophy, against the apparent flowering of the ontological and metaphysical questions in this philosophical current.