to what the situation is telling you beyond what the logic can capture — is something that develops over time, through practice, through engagement with difficult questions, and through the integration of all your faculties. That integration is what this book is designed to cultivate.
Practice Exercises
1. Identify the premises and conclusion in the following argument: "Social media causes depression. My friend uses social media a lot and is depressed. Therefore, social media caused my friend's depression." Is this argument valid? Is it sound? What fallacy might be present? 2. Find a recent opinion piece or social media post about a topic you care about. Identify the argument (premises and conclusion). Is it deductive, inductive, or abductive? Are there any fallacies? 3. Construct a valid argument with false premises and a true conclusion. Then construct a valid argument with true premises and a true conclusion. What does this show about the relationship between validity and truth? 4. Think of a recent decision you made that "felt right" but you couldn't fully justify logically. Looking back, was the feeling tracking something real? Can you now articulate what your intuition was detecting?
Chapter Three
The Immanent Metaphysics — A First
What Kind of Thing Is This?
Before we get into content, let's be clear about what we're looking at. The Immanent Metaphysics — developed by the philosopher Forrest Landry over several decades — is not a set of opinions about the world. It's not a religion, not a self-help framework, not a political ideology. It is a metaphysics : a foundational inquiry into the nature of reality, knowledge, and value. In Chapter 2, we saw that metaphysics asks the most basic possible questions: What is real? What can be known? What ultimately matters? In the Western tradition, these questions have generated centuries of debate without resolution. The Immanent Metaphysics (which we'll call the IDM, or sometimes just "the metaphysics") proposes something unusual: that the reason these debates remain unresolved is not that the questions are too hard, but that the framework in which they've been posed is too narrow. Specifically, the Western tradition has tried to understand reality primarily through pairs of opposing concepts — mind versus body, subject versus object, fact versus value, reason versus emotion — and this binary habit of thought systematically prevents resolution. The IDM's central move is to replace binary thinking with triplicate thinking. Not as an arbitrary choice, but as a discovery about how the foundations of any domain are actually structured. This chapter introduces the core ideas. Later chapters will apply them to specific philosophical debates. For now, the goal is just to see the framework and understand why it works the way it does.
Starting with What You Already Know
Let's begin not with abstract definitions but with something concrete: your own experience. Right now, you are reading this book. That involves three things that are obviously different from each other:
There is you — the one doing the reading. The subject. The experiencer. Whatever "I" refers to when you say "I am reading."
There is the book — the thing being read. The object. The words on the page or screen. Whatever is being perceived.
And there is the reading itself — the process of perception that connects you to the book. The interaction. The event of meaning flowing from the page into your understanding. Notice that these three are genuinely distinct. You are not the book. The book is not the act of reading. The act of reading is not you. You can distinguish them clearly. Notice also that they are inseparable. You can't have reading without a reader and something being read. You can't have a reader (in the act of reading) without something being read and the process of reading. Take any one of the three away and the whole situation dissolves. And notice that they are non-interchangeable. You can't substitute the reader for the book, or the process for the reader. Each plays a role that the others cannot fill. Distinct. Inseparable. Non-interchangeable.
Hold onto that phrase. It's going to recur throughout this book, because it describes a pattern that appears everywhere — not just in reading, but in the foundations of every domain of thought and experience.
Foundational Triplication
The first core idea of the IDM is called foundational triplication . It says: Every domain of thought — every topic, every field, every area of experience — has at its foundation exactly three concepts that together span and support everything else in that domain. These three foundational concepts are like the three axes of a coordinate system. In three-dimensional space, you need exactly three perpendicular directions (up- down, left-right, forward-back) to locate any point. You can't do it with two — you'd be stuck on a flat plane. You don't need four — the fourth would be
redundant. Three is the number that works. The IDM claims that something analogous is true for the foundations of any domain of understanding. This is a hypothesis, and it needs to be tested by example. So let's look at some domains and see whether the pattern holds.
The Universe
To understand the universe completely, you would need to understand three things: creation (how things come into being), existence (that things are, and what they are), and interaction (how things relate to and affect each other). These three concepts together span everything that can happen in the universe. And they are distinct, inseparable, and non-interchangeable: creation is not existence, existence is not interaction, and you can't have any one of them without the other two.
Metaphysics
The fundamental questions of metaphysics — the ones that generate all the others — are:
What is?
(ontology — the study of being),
How do we know?
(epistemology — the study of knowledge), and
What matters?
(axiology — the study of value). These three are distinct, inseparable, and non-interchangeable. You can't study what exists without some method of knowing, and you can't have a method of knowing without some sense of why knowing matters — what makes one kind of knowledge more important than another.
Reality (as Process)
As we saw in Chapter 1: every real process involves choice (genuine openness, degrees of freedom), change (something actually happening, dynamism), and causation (regularity, distinguishability, pattern). Remove any one of these and you no longer have a real process. A "process" with no change isn't a process at all — it's a static state. A "process" with no causation is pure randomness — you can't even identify it as a process. A "process" with no choice is a mechanism — it has no genuine openness to the future.
Experience
Every experience has three aspects: thought (form, pattern, structure — the melody), feeling (quality, texture, character — the timbre of the instrument), and emotion (energy, intensity, movement — the volume). These are distinguishable but always co-present. A thought with no emotional energy behind it never enters awareness. A feeling with no form is just vague sensation. An emotion with no quality is undifferentiated agitation.
Human Drives
Human behaviour is organised around three fundamental instinctive bases: survival (the drive to continue existing), sociality (the drive to connect, belong, cooperate), and sexuality (the drive to create, reproduce, generate newness). These correspond to three core values: safety , belonging , and dignity . Each is distinct, each is essential, and none can substitute for the others.
Choice-Making
Every meaningful choice involves three dimensions: goodness (is it aligned with genuine values?), truth (does it accurately represent the way the world actually works?), and beauty (is it fitting, appropriate, elegant — locally and culturally right in ways that logic alone can't predict?). This is an ancient triad — the Greeks recognised it — but the IDM gives it structural grounding rather than treating it as a vague aspiration. You could go on. Money functions as a unit of accounting, a medium of exchange, and a store of value. Relationships between people can be care-based, transaction- based, or power-based. Perception involves subject, object, and the interaction between them. Governance falls into three archetypes: meritocracy, democracy, and consensus. Desires can originate inside the self (needs), outside the self (wants), or at the boundary between self and world (desires proper). In domain after domain, when you dig down to the foundations, you find three — not two, not four, but three — irreducible concepts that together span the whole space. This is foundational triplication. The IDM's claim is that this pattern is not coincidence. It reflects something about the structure of reality itself.
Type Isomorphism: The Same Pattern Everywhere Foundational triplication says that every domain has a foundational triple. But the
IDM goes further. It says that the pattern of relationships among the three foundational concepts is the same pattern in every domain.
This is called type isomorphism . ("Isomorphism" means "same shape." "Type" means "the kind of role a concept plays.") The claim is that each of the three foundational concepts in any domain can be identified as one of three types — called immanent , omniscient , and transcendent — and that the relationships among these types follow the same structural pattern regardless of which domain you're in.
Think of it this way. In music, you have melody, harmony, and rhythm. In painting, you have line, colour, and composition. In cooking, you have ingredient, technique, and presentation. These are obviously different domains with different content. But in each case, there's a structural similarity: one element provides the form , another provides the quality , and the third provides the dynamic . The specific content changes; the pattern of roles stays the same. The IDM gives these roles precise names: Immanent: The concept that is most fundamental, most immediate, most "here and now." It's the interaction itself, the relation, the process as directly experienced. Think of it as first-person: what it's like from the inside. In the reading example, it's the act of reading — the immediate experience. In the universe triple, it's interaction. In metaphysics, it's axiology (value, care — why anything matters). In reality-as-process, it's choice. Omniscient: The concept that has structure, form, fixity. It's the thing seen from outside, all at once, as a static whole. Think of it as third-person: what it looks like from the outside. In the reading example, it's the book — the fixed object. In the universe triple, it's existence. In metaphysics, it's epistemology (knowledge — what can be described and known from the outside). In reality-as-process, it's causation. Transcendent: The concept that is beyond any particular instance, that generates newness, that can't be captured from either inside or outside any single frame. Think of it as the creative or generative element. In the reading example, it's the reader — the subjective being whose understanding transcends what's on the page. In the universe triple, it's creation. In metaphysics, it's ontology (being — what ultimately is, beyond what any particular knowledge can capture). In reality- as-process, it's change. A caution: the names "immanent," "omniscient," and "transcendent" are suggestive — they carry useful connotations — but they are technically defined only by the pattern of relationships among them, not by their dictionary definitions. Don't get hung up on the religious overtones of the words. They're structural labels, like "x-axis" and "y-axis" — useful for keeping track of which role is which, not intended to invoke any theology.
The Three Axioms
Now we arrive at the core of the IDM: three statements — called the
Axioms
— that describe the pattern of relationships among the three modalities. Everything else in the framework follows from these.
Axiom III — The Axiom of Identity
In all contexts: the immanent, the omniscient, and the transcendent are distinct , inseparable , and non-interchangeable . This is the axiom you already know from the examples above. The three foundational concepts in any domain are genuinely different from each other (you can tell them apart), you always find them together (you can't remove one without losing the whole domain), and you can't swap one for another (each plays a role the others can't fill). This axiom establishes the basic fact that reality is triplicate at its foundations. Why is this numbered III rather than I? Historical convention — the axioms were discovered in a different order from the one in which they're most naturally presented. But there's also a structural reason: Axiom III is the most encompassing, setting the stage for everything else. It applies "in all contexts" — it's the broadest claim.
Axiom I — The Axiom of Fundamentality
In a context of theory: the immanent is more fundamental than the omniscient or the transcendent. The omniscient and the transcendent are conjugate to each other.
This axiom makes a claim about the theoretical relationships among the three modalities. The immanent — the immediate, the relational, the interactive — is foundational. The omniscient and the transcendent depend on it, not the other way around. And the omniscient and transcendent are "conjugate" — paired with each other in a specific way that we'll explore. In concrete terms: interaction is more fundamental than either existence or creation. You can't have existence without interaction (an entity that interacts with nothing — not even itself — in what sense does it exist?). You can't have creation without interaction (to create is to bring something into relation). But interaction is the bedrock on which both existence and creation depend. Similarly: choice is more fundamental than either causation or change. Causation is a pattern we extract from interactions; change is what happens through interactions. But the interaction — the point where something genuinely meets something else, where the undetermined becomes determined — is primary.
This has profound philosophical implications, which we'll encounter in later chapters. For now, just notice: this axiom says that relationship is more fundamental than substance . Western philosophy has spent centuries debating whether mind or matter is primary (substance thinking). The IDM says: neither. Interaction is primary. This is a process metaphysics, not a substance metaphysics.
Axiom II — The Axiom of Precedence
In a context of practice: a class of the transcendent precedes an instance of the immanent. A class of the immanent precedes an instance of the omniscient. A class of the omniscient precedes an instance of the transcendent. This is the most subtle axiom, and the one that does the most work. It describes a sequence — a directed cycle — in how things unfold in practice. Let's unpack it carefully. "A class of X precedes an instance of Y" means: for any particular instance of Y to occur, it must be preceded by the general possibility (class) of X. The axiom says these precedences form a ring: Transcendent (as class) → Immanent (as instance) → Omniscient (as instance) → Transcendent (as instance) → ... Let's make this concrete with the universe triple (creation, interaction, existence):
A general possibility of creation (transcendent-class) must exist before any specific interaction (immanent-instance) can occur. — You can only interact with something that has been created; the possibility of creation must precede actual interaction.
A general capacity for interaction (immanent-class) must exist before any specific existence (omniscient-instance) can be established. — Something exists (is distinguishable, describable, knowable) only insofar as it interacts; the capacity for interaction must precede the fact of determinate existence.
A general possibility of existence (omniscient-class) must hold before any specific creation (transcendent-instance) can occur. — To create something new, there must already be an existing context into which it is created; the prior existence of a domain is the precondition for new creation within it. The ring closes. Each precedes each, in a cycle. This isn't circular reasoning — it's describing a real feature of how processes unfold: they are self-sustaining loops, not linear chains with a beginning and an end. The universe doesn't start from existence, proceed through interaction, and arrive at creation. It is all three, always, in ongoing cyclic relationship.
One crucial consequence of Axiom II is that infinite regress closes at three levels . In standard philosophy, many arguments collapse into infinite regress — "but what caused that ? and what caused that ?" The cyclic structure of Axiom II means that after three levels of precedence, you return to where you started. The regress doesn't go on forever; it closes into a self-supporting triad. This is one of the reasons the IDM can resolve debates that other frameworks can't: it doesn't get trapped in infinite regress because its foundational structure is a loop, not a line.
What the Axioms Give You
Three axioms. That's it. Everything else in the IDM — its positions on epistemology, ethics, consciousness, God, civilisation, desire, governance, and more — is derived from or informed by these three statements. The axioms function like the axioms of geometry: a small number of foundational claims from which an enormous range of specific results can be generated. Here is a preview of what they give you. Each of these will be developed in full in the chapters ahead.
In Epistemology
The IDM distinguishes between knowing and understanding as two irreducible processes — one more omniscient-modal (knowledge as structure, description, third-person), one more immanent-modal (understanding as participation, first- person insight). This distinction dissolves the Gettier problem, because Gettier cases arise from confusing these two modes of epistemic relation. It also reframes the rationalism-vs-empiricism debate: the IDM recognises not two but six paths to knowledge (three modes of knowing times two directions — perception and expression), rendering the binary debate obsolete.
In Ethics
The IDM grounds ethics in the nature of choice itself, yielding what Landry calls a non-relativistic ethics — principles of effective choice that hold in every context, not just particular situations. The two core principles are symmetry (sameness of content across difference of context — the generalised form of the Golden Rule) and continuity (proportional change — no abrupt discontinuities in relational
process). These principles are not "rules" imposed from outside but structural features of the interaction between self and world. Breaking them doesn't violate a command; it damages the integrity of the interaction itself, in the same way that cutting a wire damages the integrity of a circuit.
In Philosophy of Mind
The IDM treats consciousness not as a substance (mental or physical) but as interaction — the process by which self and world are in mutual relation. This dissolves the "hard problem" by rejecting the assumption that generates it: the assumption that consciousness must be either a physical thing (neurons firing) or a non-physical thing (soul-stuff), with no way to bridge the gap. In the IDM, consciousness is the bridge — it's the relational process itself, neither reducible to the physical nor separable from it.
In Philosophy of God
The classical concept of God combines attributes — omniscience, omnipotence, omnibenevolence — that correspond to the three modalities. The problem of evil arises from conflating these into a single entity and then finding them to be mutually contradictory. The IDM recognises that the three modalities are distinct, inseparable, and non-interchangeable — they cannot be projected onto a single unified being without generating paradoxes. This doesn't "disprove God" but fundamentally reframes the theological questions.
In Civilisation Design
The three governance archetypes — meritocracy (omniscient-modal: top-down, structural), democracy (transcendent-modal: bottom-up, generative), and consensus (immanent-modal: relational, participatory) — each fail individually for structurally predictable reasons. But Axiom II provides a pattern for how they can be combined into a checks-and-balances system where each corrects the deficiencies of the others. Similarly, the dependency chain — ecology is more fundamental than culture, culture than infrastructure, infrastructure than economy — follows directly from Axiom I's claim about what is more fundamental than what.
Why Threes and Not Twos
You might be wondering: why is triplicate thinking better than binary thinking? What's actually wrong with the pairs that Western philosophy has worked with for centuries — mind/body, subject/object, reason/emotion, fact/value? The problem with binary frameworks is structural. When you divide a domain into two opposing categories, you create three positions: one pole, the other pole, and some unspecified "middle" or "both" or "neither." But that middle is always under- theorised. It's the place where all the interesting questions get pushed — and all the unresolved debates live. Is the mind physical or non-physical? Dualists say non-physical. Physicalists say physical. And the actual phenomenon — the lived experience of consciousness — sits awkwardly in neither camp. The debate has been going for 400 years without resolution because the framework doesn't have room for the answer. Are moral values objective facts or subjective attitudes? Moral realists say facts. Anti-realists say attitudes. And the actual phenomenon — the way values function in human life — fits neither description. Values clearly aren't just personal preferences (they feel binding, obligatory), but they also aren't like facts about rocks or numbers (they're connected to care, to what matters, to lived engagement). In each case, the binary framework forces a choice between two options, neither of which is adequate, because the thing you're trying to understand is inherently triplicate . Consciousness isn't mind or body — it's the interaction between them. Values aren't objective or subjective — they're axiomatic, belonging to the relational domain that the subject-object binary can't express. The IDM doesn't add a third option to a binary choice. It replaces the binary choice with a triplicate structure from the start, so the question "which of the two is it?" never arises. The answer is always: it's a specific interrelation among three distinct, inseparable, and non-interchangeable elements — and you need all three to understand it.
Why This Matters to You
This might seem abstract. Here's how it connects to the questions from Chapter 1.
"Does life have inherent meaning, or do I have to create all of it myself?" — This is a binary framing: meaning is either given (from outside) or constructed (from inside). The IDM says: meaning lives in the interaction — in the relationship between self and world, which is neither purely given nor purely constructed but something irreducible to either pole. You don't just "find" meaning, and you don't just "make" it. You participate in it through the quality of your engagement with reality. "Why am I so lonely when I'm more connected than any generation in history?" — Because the technology mediating your "connections" operates in the omniscient mode: it gives you information about other people (their profiles, their posts, their images) without giving you genuine interaction with them. Knowledge about someone and relationship with someone are different modalities. Social media provides the former and calls it the latter. "Is my anxiety a medical condition or a rational response to an irrational world?" — Another binary framing that the IDM dissolves. The medical model treats anxiety as a malfunction inside the individual (omniscient-modal: structural, diagnostic). The sociopolitical model treats it as a rational signal about the environment (transcendent-modal: pointing beyond the individual to systemic conditions). The IDM recognises both and adds the immanent-modal dimension: anxiety is also a relational phenomenon — it tells you something about the quality of your interaction with the world, which is neither purely internal nor purely external but located in the between-space where care and perception meet. "Can my individual choices actually change anything?" — This question assumes a binary: either individual choices matter or systemic forces determine everything. The IDM's process ontology says that reality is composed of interactions at every scale. Individual choices are systemic forces — they compose the system. The question isn't whether your choices matter but whether you're making them with adequate understanding of the relational context in which they operate. A single person's choice, made with full engagement in the relational dynamics (immanent- modal), propagates differently from the same action performed mechanically (omniscient-modal) or impulsively (transcendent-modal without grounding).
The Programme: How the IDM Is Tested
A framework this ambitious needs a method of verification. The IDM is tested by what Landry calls "the programme" — a systematic process of checking whether the pattern of the axioms actually holds in specific domains. For each domain, the test involves three steps. First, can we identify a foundational triple — three concepts that span and support the domain? Second, can each of these three concepts be consistently matched to one of the three modalities (immanent, omniscient, transcendent)? Third, does the pattern described by the axioms — the identity relations (Axiom III), the fundamentality claims (Axiom I), and the precedence cycles (Axiom II) — actually correspond to the observed relationships among those concepts? For well-understood domains — mathematics, physics, biology, music theory, linguistics — the programme has been carried out extensively. The pattern holds. For less-well-understood domains — consciousness, governance, aesthetics — the programme sometimes requires experimenting with how the foundational concepts are defined. When the right definitions are found, the pattern illuminates the domain in ways that existing frameworks don't. When they can't be found, that's a signal that the domain isn't yet well enough understood — or, potentially, a disconfirmation of the IDM. This means the IDM is testable. It makes specific, falsifiable predictions about the structure of any domain you care to examine. If you find a domain where no foundational triple can be identified, or where the axioms' pattern doesn't hold, that's a problem for the IDM. The fact that this hasn't happened after examination of hundreds of domains is the basis for taking the framework seriously — not as proven truth, but as a hypothesis with extraordinary supporting evidence.
What Comes Next
This chapter has given you the scaffolding. The three core ideas are: Foundational triplication:
Every domain has three foundational concepts that span it. Type isomorphism:
The pattern of relationships among the foundational concepts is the same across all domains, and the three types are called immanent, omniscient, and transcendent.
The three axioms: The specific relationships among the modalities — identity (III), fundamentality (I), and precedence (II) — which together constitute the "operating system" from which everything else is derived. In the chapters that follow, we'll put this framework to work. Chapters 4–7 take on epistemology: what is knowledge, how does perception work, what can reason and experience tell us, and where are the genuine limits of what we can know? In each case, we'll first present the standard Western positions — the debates that have run for centuries — and then show how the IDM reframes or resolves them. But the framework is not just for academic philosophy. The final part of the book — Living Philosophy — will bring it directly to bear on the questions you're actually living with: how to make choices when all paths seem closed, how to build genuine community in an age of algorithmic isolation, how to navigate desire and emotion with clarity rather than confusion, and how to live a life that is not just endured but genuinely inhabited. The tools are in your hands now. Let's see what they can do.