Xiaohai Wei

Western metaphysics has overwhelmingly treated determinacy as the default ontological condition: forms, essences, necessary beings, and brute facts are offered as starting points from which philosophical inquiry proceeds, while indeterminacy is treated as a derivative state requiring explanation. This paper argues that this default rests on an undefended assumption — the symmetry assumption — according to which determinate and indeterminate ontological commitments bear equal justificatory burdens. Against this assumption, the paper establishes an asymmetry principle: any determinate ontological commitment (the claim that some entity exists with determinate properties) requires justification, while the refusal to make such commitments does not. Three arguments — from information theory, from the logic of determination, and from the regress structure of metaphysical explanation — converge on this conclusion. The asymmetry principle yields two meta-ontological consequences. First, maximum indeterminacy (the state carrying zero determinate commitments) uniquely satisfies the terminus condition that the concept of grounding requires: carrying no determinate commitments, it generates no further demand for justification, and is therefore the only legitimate starting point for ontological inquiry. This is a conclusion about what the grounding relation requires of its terminus, not a first-order claim about the ultimate furniture of reality. Second, the concept of maximum indeterminacy is logically incompatible with stasis: a state possessing no determinate properties cannot possess the property of stability. A consistency argument then shows that this conceptual result aligns with well-understood physical dynamics of fluctuation, symmetry-breaking, and self-organisation. The paper thereby dissolves rather than answers Leibniz’s question (“Why is there something rather than nothing?”): both “something” and “nothing” are determinate commitments that require justification; maximum indeterminacy precedes both.

The twelve nidānas of Buddhist dependent origination (paṭicca-samuppāda) describe both the causal mechanism of suffering (dukkha) and the structure whose reversal constitutes liberation. Interpretations remain divided between a cosmological reading (twelve stages across lifetimes) and a psychological reading (twelve moments of a single cognitive episode), with neither achieving full analytical precision. This paper proposes a third reading grounded in contemporary cognitive science: the twelve nidānas map, with systematic structural fidelity, onto the architecture of predictive processing. Avijjā corresponds to structural misrecognition of one's priors as mind-independent reality — the absence of meta-cognitive awareness that priors are model-generated constructs rather than direct apprehensions of the world; saṅkhāra to compulsive volitional formations driven by priors that are not recognized as such; viññāna through saḷāyatana to the construction of a hierarchical generative model; vedanā to valenced prediction error; taṇhā and upādāna to precision-weighted prior consolidation and attractor reification; bhava through jarāmaraṇa to the instantiation and progressive degradation of a system operating under misaligned priors. The correspondence is theoretically productive in both directions: predictive processing provides a mechanistic vocabulary that extends the nidānas beyond Buddhist cosmology; the nidāna chain supplies a diachronic account of why a system already operating under structural misrecognition necessarily perpetuates and deepens that misrecognition toward attractor reification and suffering, rather than correcting itself — a developmental logic that existing diachronic extensions of predictive processing do not address. The paper concludes by marking four limits of the analogy: the rebirth doctrine, the normative weight of nibbāna, the phenomenal character of vedanā, and the relationship to the Madhyamaka reading of dependent origination. A central interpretive claim is that avijjā should be understood not as an information-theoretic blank slate but as structural misrecognition of the conditioned character of one's own cognitive processes — a misrecognition available only to a system that already possesses priors, and that consists in taking those priors as transparent windows onto mind-independent reality rather than as model-generated constructions.

Wang Yangming's ``this flower'' proposition from the Chuanxi lu(傳習錄) --- ``Before you look at these flowers, they and your mind are both in a state of silent vacancy; as you come to look at them, their colors at once show up clearly. From this you know that these flowers are not outside your mind'' --- has long been subject to two opposing misreadings: either assimilated to Berkeleyan subjective idealism, or treated as a mystical intuition beyond the reach of philosophical analysis. This paper argues that both misreadings stem from a common error: interpreting the proposition as an ontological claim about the existence of flowers, thereby obscuring its genuine epistemological core, namely that the manifestation of perceptual objects depends on the mind's active generative activity rather than on a unidirectional projection from the external world onto the mind. Drawing on predictive coding theory, this paper argues for a systematic structural analogy between Wang Yangming's proposition and the predictive coding framework at the level of perceptual mechanism: the mind corresponds to the generative model; ``silent vacancy'' corresponds to the non-activation of the flower-specific prediction loop; sensory contact corresponds to the triggering of prediction error; and ``colors showing up clearly'' corresponds to the stabilization of perceptual representation upon prediction error minimization. The paper also explicitly examines the genuine differences between the two frameworks --- in particular, the fundamental divergence between the innate normativity of liangzhi and the fallible, learnable generative model --- and precisely delimits the scope of the proposed analogy. The central thesis is that Wang Yangming's ``this flower'' proposition describes a perceptual generative mechanism that is coherent and precise within the framework of contemporary cognitive science---a reading that displaces both the idealist and the mystical misreadings and recovers the proposition as a genuine contribution to the epistemology of perception, while pointing toward a structural convergence between two traditions whose ultimate significance remains an open philosophical question.

The Platonic Representation Hypothesis (PRH) reports that independently trained neural networks converge on geometrically similar internal representations---a finding its authors interpret as evidence that learning systems approximate pre-existing, mind-independent abstract structures. This paper argues against that interpretation on two connected levels. First, the Platonic ontology is explanatorily unnecessary: convergence is adequately accounted for by the theory of convergent attractors under shared physical constraints, without positing any independent abstract realm. Second, the paper explains why the Platonic interpretation nevertheless feels compelling: the maximal robustness of certain attractors---their stability across all sufficiently expressive optimization processes---generates a phenomenology of necessity and mind-independence that naturally, but mistakenly, invites an inference to ontological independence. Drawing on structural realism, dynamical systems theory, and naturalist philosophy of mathematics, this paper proposes the Reversed Platonic Representation Hypothesis (RPRH): convergent representations are emergent fixed points produced by optimization under shared constraints, not ontologically prior structures toward which learning approximates; and the intuition that they must exist independently is itself a structurally predictable cognitive consequence of their robustness---inevitable, given the loop structure and the robustness condition, but not a matter of strict logical entailment. Convergent structures are real, but their reality is the reality of attractor patterns, not of a separate ontological realm.

Essentialism rests on two epistemological pillars: a priori arguments for the necessity of essences, and an experiential pathway—the vivid phenomenological sense that things possess necessary, mind-independent, intrinsic natures. Anti-essentialist critiques from Quine and Buddhist śūnyatā doctrine have largely dismantled the first pillar. This paper closes the second. Drawing on the predictive coding framework, we argue that hierarchical generative networks operating under prediction-error minimisation produce high-stability attractors whose functional profile—stability, cross-contextual consistency, independence from will, resistance to revision—matches exactly what the perception of a mind-independent essential nature would produce. From within the network's closed feedback loop, the two are structurally indistinguishable: no internal test can mark the difference. The phenomenological sense of essence therefore provides no independent evidence for the existence of essences. Husserl's Wesensschau, the strongest version of the experiential pathway, is shown to probe attractor-basin boundaries rather than disclose mind-independent essences: its methodological validity is preserved, but its status as an independent source of knowledge about essences is undercut. The experiential pathway from phenomenology to metaphysics is closed.