Locke Without Metaphysics: Cognition as Constraints of Complex Systems

Classical epistemology asked "how does the mind acquire knowledge of the world?" and spent three and a half centuries unable to answer, because the question was badly posed. It presupposed a division between mind and world, between subject and object, between inner representation and outer reality — a division that does not exist in nature. This monograph replaces the question. Not "how does the mind know?" but "what constraints must any persistent complex system satisfy in an environment with finite resources?" The answer is a theorem, not a hypothesis. Two logically independent physical facts — finite signal speed (temporal latency) and finite channel capacity (informational complexity) — each independently force any viable adaptive system to maintain internal states carrying information about the future beyond what present observation provides. This is prediction. Not an evolutionary adaptation. Not a property of biological brains. A structural inevitability — a consequence of physical law that would hold in any universe with finite signal speed and finite channel capacity. The Dual-Pressure Convergence Theorem (Kriger & Espesset, 2026) proves this formally: selection is not invoked at any point in the derivation. From this result, the central concepts of classical epistemology are systematically redescribed: Locke's "experience" becomes prediction error minimization; "reflection" becomes hierarchical inference; the rationalists' "innate ideas" become evolutionarily inherited Bayesian priors; causation is shown to be a compression artifact of bounded observers; "ideas" are reinterpreted as states of generative models rather than Platonic forms; and "consciousness," "experience," and "soul" are diagnosed as empty placeholder words conflating multiple distinct processes. The monograph proceeds in four parts. Part I examines Locke's philosophy in its full breadth — epistemology, politics, education, religion — and traces its development through Berkeley, Hume, and Kant, demonstrating via the Reflexive Inference Law and the Formalization Laws that Kant's categories represent one formalization among many rather than the unique necessary structure of all possible cognition. Part II redescribes Locke's key concepts in the language of complex systems theory, including treatments of memory as miscalibrated prior grounded in the atemporality thesis, ideas as generative model states, and political rights as viability constraints on collective systems. Part III presents the formal and biological arguments for the structural inevitability of predictive cognition, including the phase boundary between reactive and predictive regimes, biological evidence from C. elegans through octopuses to echolocating bats, and a reassessment of natural selection's role as conserving rather than creative. Part IV dissolves the classical problems of epistemology — the problem of induction, the external world problem, the rationalist-empiricist debate — and confronts the limits of Locke's own universalism through Marx, feminism, and postcolonial critique. An appendix presents ten case studies demonstrating how different types of knowledge — mathematical certainty, spatial intuition, causal reasoning, object permanence, moral intuition, language acquisition, time perception, color qualia, theory of mind, and scientific discovery — arise from the same dual-pressure constraint-satisfaction architecture. All chapters include systematic counterarguments and responses. Keywords: epistemology; predictive processing; complex systems; Bayesian inference; John Locke; viability constraints; structural inevitability; Dual-Pressure Convergence Theorem; philosophy of mind; naturalized epistemology; free energy principle; generative models; atemporality of memory; philosophy of science Related identifiers: