On the Minimum of Being - Ontological Foundations of a Physically Serious Account of the World

What follows is not a physics paper. It is an attempt to describe an ontological structure that takes seriously what twentieth-century physics has worked out — without hiding behind its formalism. The mathematics that occasionally surfaces is not the foundation. The foundation is thought itself. This text is not a substitute for physical theory — nor does it aim to be. It is an ontological structure: a proposal for what must minimally be presupposed for physics to make sense at all. The physical elaboration — the equations, the predictions, the comparisons with the Standard Model — is a different task, one I have begun elsewhere. Whoever reads this text as physics reads it wrongly. Whoever reads it as an invitation to think reads it rightly. I am neither a trained physicist nor a professional philosopher. What I have is a persistent dissatisfaction with the answers that academic discourse gives to the simplest questions — and the conviction that some of these questions are simpler than the answers offered in response.