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On the Dimensionality of Reality

Paul Kotschy

12 August 2016

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What is reality? What is physical? What is metaphysical? Does an ineffable supernature exist such that it extends beyond the reach of our empirical and rational faculties? If so, then all is sorted, and we can happily bathe in the warm limpid water of our ignorance. But if not so, then all is not sorted, and an icy uncertainty impels us to observe and contemplate reality more seriously, without recourse to putative spirit-world material-world dualisms.

This work, then, derives from three interrelated convictions:

  1. that dualism is, well, false.
  2. that the physical world we experience day to day in a mundane sort of way is not the full picture of reality, although it is an important picture.
  3. that our naturalistic gazes are sufficient for a much deeper insight into reality, provided we look carefully, perhaps more carefully than is comfortable.
In this work I mull the abovementioned questions. I begin by contemplating a most basic notion of reality, namely, the notion of dimension. I then appeal to an empirical and rational mindset to motivate for the existence of some such reality much richer than what we may easily intuit. But no less real.

By exploring the notion of dimension in this manner, I offer an epistemologically rigorous pathway to help discover such possible metaphysical realities. I argue that these realities have as much right to existence as our own physical reality even though they are in principle orthogonal to our own. And importantly, it this orthogonality, not duality, which distinguishes our physical reality from any metaphysical ones. It is a distinction without boundary.

Download PDF dimensionality-of-reality.pdf (678 KB)