Curious Question: Is someone else working on something like this?

[adam.kulidjian]

Hi folks,

I was wondering if anyone in here could help direct me a little. Any feedback or help would be super appreciated!

@Pascal Hitzler, @Leo Obrst, @Alex Shkotin ... I do appreciate your help from the last post. 🙏

The Motivation

I'm working on a "theory" you could say (more like a logical sequence of building up a picture of reality) based upon my personal meditations / observations of experience and the senses, Mind's Eye ... etc.

This work excites me a lot, but I feel like I'm in a vacuum sometimes. It would be amazing to start interfacing with the world around me, and make Truth-discovery more of a multiplayer game, a collaboration.

My Question

I am wondering ... if there is something similar out there to the work that I am doing, or if someone could guide me towards work that is has been done / is being done that is contending with similar ideas / frameworks / concepts / approaches / modalities , etc.

• (Pssst I don't think this neatly fits under one academic category)

I've attached an 11-page PDF of the latest package of my work ... but in case that is inaccessible, here are a few bullet points of the material to convey the essence of what I am doing:

A Summary of the Work

the starting point:

• What is happening right now? It's the "moment".
• Now there is another moment, another one, another one, etc.
  • I picked the word "moment" to be as neutral as possible. It's not really not about the word. I'm just trying to point to the experience of what is happening right now, the present moment, etc.

an experiment:

• Look at a cup (moment)
• Look at a bird (another moment)
• Look at the cup again (moment)

Now ... notice that there is a visual correspondence between that 1st moment, and that 3rd moment.

• Again, we can use any word (similarity, correlation, repetition, pattern) but the idea is that there is a feeling of "oh, I'm experiencing this again)

next steps / building a picture:

Now ... the idea is that we can start representing this via a picture. We can represent a moment with a dot, and a correspondence with a line.

If you wake up and fall asleep in the same room, then notice that the moment of waking up and the moment of falling asleep have a stronger correspondence because you are in the same bedroom, with similar lighting, with a similar visual gaze.

recursion:

Think about the fact that in the last image you just saw, you were not just looking at pure reality itself. You were looking at a representation of reality, a picture I sketched to convey something.

But here's the thing ... this representation is still within a moment. And therefore it's now a thing to which correspondences can be built upon / between.

(I feel like people don't talk about this often ... usually there is a textbook explaining philosophical concepts, a theory of everything, topics about consciousness, but the fact of that experience of reading text scribbled on a page articulating things ... this itself is part of Reality as well, not an isolated thing that just sits by itself. It needs to be accounted for by that 'theory of everything')

Appreciation for making it this far!

Any advice, ideas, or insights would be immensely appreciated. 🙏

I am not working within academia, but am curious about connecting with like-minded people and branching within people whom this content resonates with.

Sincerely,

Adam

[Alex Shkotin]

Hi Adam,

I haven't looked at the PDF, and I want to point out that your thoughts are similar to a topic I call the phenomenology of matter to humans, but it doesn't feature cups and birds. It's just geometric surfaces glowing in different colors in different places. By shifting our gaze from one place to another and from one object to another, we construct a 3D image in our minds of a piece of present existence. Every philosopher touches on this topic in their theory of existence. Some might recommend Peirce's Phaneroscopy, while I'll recommend Hegel's Science of Logic (doctrine of being).

We can discuss the structure of 3D images and the details of their construction, and then their movement and change of shape. There's a lot of interesting geometry there.

Alex

пн, 24 нояб. 2025 г. в 01:24, adam.kulidjian <adam.ku...@mail.mcgill.ca>:

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[Alex Shkotin]

IN ADDITION: have a look at https://philevents.org/

пн, 24 нояб. 2025 г. в 12:28, Alex Shkotin <alex.s...@gmail.com>:

[adam.kulidjian]

Alex, thanks for your suggestions.

RE https://philevents.org/, is there any particular reason for sharing this? Any events in here that you think dovetails with my work.

Best,

Adam

[James Zaiss]

Hello Adam,

Your approach reminds me of a certain strain of Phenomenalism in philosophy.  You might want to look at:

• Ernst Mach: The Analysis of Sensations and the Relation of the Physical to the Psychical (1886,1900)
• Rudolph Carnap: The Logical Structure of the World (1928)
• Nelson Goodman: The Structure of Appearance (1951)

Best,

Jim Zaiss

https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/ontolog-forum/1358783a-1900-4ee5-99d6-5b4468542b92n%40googlegroups.com

.

[Alex Shkotin]

This resource can be configured to send notifications about interesting philosophical events. Well, that's what I do 🏋️

Alex

вт, 25 нояб. 2025 г. в 22:52, adam.kulidjian <adam.ku...@mail.mcgill.ca>:

To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/ontolog-forum/1358783a-1900-4ee5-99d6-5b4468542b92n%40googlegroups.com.

[Alex Shkotin]

Jim,

Exactly!

Alex

ср, 26 нояб. 2025 г. в 10:27, 'James Zaiss' via ontolog-forum <ontolo...@googlegroups.com>:

To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/ontolog-forum/457093305.732023.1764141931119%40mail.yahoo.com.

[Alex Shkotin]

Hi Jim,

And the question arises: have we formalized this knowledge?

Alex

ср, 26 нояб. 2025 г. в 10:27, 'James Zaiss' via ontolog-forum <ontolo...@googlegroups.com>:

Hello Adam,

To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/ontolog-forum/457093305.732023.1764141931119%40mail.yahoo.com.

[adam.kulidjian]

Jim, thank you for your insights and suggestions.

My reading list just got a little longer. :)

- Adam

[bob...@ontoage.com]

One of my independent study topics in Cognitive Psych in college was ‘similarity’.  It led to the thought that we think in metaphors, little contextual patterns (graphic connections, little ‘ontologies’) that we have stored somewhere, and when we perceive something (in a context), we walk the metaphor graph to the situation most similar in context.

 

Similarity was hard, and led to contextual patterns of thought.  Example:  if you have an orange, a banana, and a tennis ball, which two are most similar?  The answer is contextual – if the context is fruit, then the orange and banana; if the context is shape, then the orange and tennis ball.   

 

I had come to think that thought is metaphoric, involving metaphor in a context.  I don’t recall any work around this, but that was a long time ago.  There might be some…

 

Bobbin Teegarden

CTO/Chief Architect, OntoAge

bob...@ontoage.com

206.979.0196 cell

425.378.0131 home/fax

Bellevue, WA

 

next steps / building a picture:

 

Now ... the idea is that we can start representing this via a picture. We can represent a moment with a dot, and a correspondence with a line.

 

If you wake up and fall asleep in the same room, then notice that the moment of waking up and the moment of falling asleep have a stronger correspondence because you are in the same bedroom, with similar lighting, with a similar visual gaze.

 

 

 

recursion:

Think about the fact that in the last image you just saw, you were not just looking at pure reality itself. You were looking at a representation of reality, a picture I sketched to convey something.

 

But here's the thing ... this representation is still within a moment. And therefore it's now a thing to which correspondences can be built upon / between.

(I feel like people don't talk about this often ... usually there is a textbook explaining philosophical concepts, a theory of everything, topics about consciousness, but the fact of that experience of reading text scribbled on a page articulating things ... this itself is part of Reality as well, not an isolated thing that just sits by itself. It needs to be accounted for by that 'theory of everything')

 

Appreciation for making it this far!

Any advice, ideas, or insights would be immensely appreciated. 🙏

I am not working within academia, but am curious about connecting with like-minded people and branching within people whom this content resonates with.

 

Sincerely,

Adam

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[adam.kulidjian]

Bobbin,

So much of your message resonates with me. I'm very curious about these metaphor thoughts. Did you write any of them down? Any artifacts of these thoughts (eg. documents) lying around somewhere?

Similarity was hard, and led to contextual patterns of thought.  Example:  if you have an orange, a banana, and a tennis ball, which two are most similar?  The answer is contextual – if the context is fruit, then the orange and banana; if the context is shape, then the orange and tennis ball. 

This example resonates a lot with me. It reminds me of part of a brain-dump that I had a while back, thinking about files on a desktop computer and how you organize them.

TLDR The place where the Design School/ sits in the folder structure depends on the context: mood / previous patterns / metaphors you are steeped in, etc

I've imagined that the true nature of relation is some kind of superpositions of relationships, and I have wanted to diagram such a thing, but have not found a way to do it (reminds me a lot of equivalence classes in Math).

[John F Sowa]

Adam.

The subject you're talking about seems to be  phenomenology or the version by C. S. Peirce called phaneroscopy.

You might start with Wikipedia:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phenomenology_(philosophy)

But the version I prefer is by C. S. Peirce, which he called phaneroscopy.   You can start  with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phaneron ,

There is much, much more to say.   But look at those references and check whether they are going in the direction you are working on.

John

 

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From: "adam.kulidjian" <adam.ku...@mail.mcgill.ca>
Sent: 11/23/25 5:25 PM
To: ontolog-forum <ontolo...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: [ontolog-forum] Curious Question: Is someone else working on something like this?

[Alex Shkotin]

You are not alone. We had some topics. Have a look at https://ontologforum.com/index.php?search=metaphor

Alex

ср, 26 нояб. 2025 г. в 22:33, <bob...@ontoage.com>:

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