The Price of Any Reality: A Meta-Metaphysical Calculus from Certainty

This book presents a procedure for pricing worldviews: given a set of commitments, it returns which of them the worldview had to assume before it could say anything at all, which of those assumptions were ever discharged, and which are being carried unpaid. It begins from two retortive certainties — that something is determinate, and that this determinacy occurred — and treats everything above them as purchased, then reconstructs a world one purchase at a time: plurality, temporal order, persistence, memory, other minds, empirical inquiry, value, and inherited social commitment. Each stage prints its ledger. The procedure is total, deterministic, and order-invariant: shuffling the inputs does not move the receipt. It is set out completely in a technical appendix as a constitution of ten courts, eight route types, a five-grade chain, and six inference rules that can be applied by hand, together with an adequacy theorem establishing that hand derivation and fixed-point computation agree, a supervaluational semantics for its refusals, and results on the eliminability, subformula property, height bounds and confluence of the rule system. An implementation runs 56 soundness checks; every figure quoted in the book is produced by a script that ships with it, including the ones that fail. Two limits are stated rather than managed. The comparison relation is a partial order: the procedure eliminates a great deal and frequently declines to rank what survives, and the profile of that refusal is the profile expected of maximisation over a partial rather than complete ordering. And the encoding step — turning a claim into a list of commitments — is judgement, not arithmetic. The engine is deterministic conditional on an encoding, the encoding is at present human, and every encoding here was performed by one person; inter-auditor invariance has not been established. On that basis the correct description is an explicit, reproducible audit procedure conditional on an encoding, not an objective measurement instrument. The final chapter applies the procedure to the author's own previously published book and reports three commitments its hand-built ledger had not recorded, one of which proves more load-bearing than either wager it did declare, together with a defect in the procedure's own encoding of that book. The companion software, including an offline browser tool, is available from the author.