First Philosophy
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| Format: | Recurso digital |
| Langue: | anglais |
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Zenodo
2026
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| _version_ | 1866901874477629440 |
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| author | Reiser, Kyle |
| author_facet | Reiser, Kyle |
| contents | <p dir="ltr">This thesis advances and defends a deceptively simple proposition: that the most robust, generalizable, and frequently correct response to problems across philosophy, computer science, psychology, and the life sciences is continuation—the deliberate act of persisting through uncertainty rather than halting, collapsing, or retreating to a premature answer. We formalize this proposition as the equation "Solution = Continue" and examine its validity across four disciplinary axes.</p> <p dir="ltr">In Western philosophy, we trace the idea from the Stoic concept of prosoche (attentive persistence) through Kierkegaard’s leap, Nietzsche’s eternal recurrence, Camus’s defiance of absurdity, and Sartre’s radical freedom. Each tradition converges on a shared insight: that the act of continuing in the face of meaninglessness or paradox is not merely a coping mechanism but a constitutive feature of authentic existence.</p> <p dir="ltr">In Madhyamaka Buddhist philosophy, we find the ontological foundation that Western existentialism lacks. Nāgārjuna’s doctrine of śūnyatā (emptiness) demonstrates that continuation is possible precisely because nothing possesses svabhāva (inherent, fixed essence). If phenomena had fixed natures, change, growth, and convergence would be impossible. Emptiness—the absence of inherent nature—is not the void that existentialism fears but the enabling condition of all process, all development, and all solution.</p> <p dir="ltr">In mathematics and computer science, we examine continuation as a formal construct. Continuation-passing style, fixed-point theorems, iterative convergence, and the halting problem all reveal a structural truth: systems that continue processing under well-defined constraints reach solutions that halting systems cannot. We introduce the Continuation Sufficiency Theorem (CST) with five conditions, including a novel emptiness condition requiring that systems remain open to reconstitution.</p> <p dir="ltr">In psychology, we synthesize research on grit, learned helplessness, post-traumatic growth, and flow states to demonstrate that the human capacity for persistence is both a measurable trait and a trainable skill.</p> <p>The thesis culminates in a unified theory arguing that "Solution = Continue" operates as a substrate-independent meta-heuristic. We develop the concept of creative continuation—the capacity of sustained process not merely to search existing spaces but to generate new spaces, new conditions, and new possibilities. We show that conditions and process co-arise through dependent origination (pratītyasamutpāda), and that the equation "Solution = Continue" is not an instruction to an agent but a description of the structure of reality itself.</p> |
| format | Recurso digital |
| id | zenodo_https___doi_org_10_5281_zenodo_19040299 |
| institution | Zenodo |
| language | eng |
| publishDate | 2026 |
| publisher | Zenodo |
| record_format | zenodo |
| spellingShingle | First Philosophy Reiser, Kyle process philosophy continuation Madhyamaka śūnyatā Nāgārjuna first philosophy meta-heuristic interdisciplinary philosophy <p dir="ltr">This thesis advances and defends a deceptively simple proposition: that the most robust, generalizable, and frequently correct response to problems across philosophy, computer science, psychology, and the life sciences is continuation—the deliberate act of persisting through uncertainty rather than halting, collapsing, or retreating to a premature answer. We formalize this proposition as the equation "Solution = Continue" and examine its validity across four disciplinary axes.</p> <p dir="ltr">In Western philosophy, we trace the idea from the Stoic concept of prosoche (attentive persistence) through Kierkegaard’s leap, Nietzsche’s eternal recurrence, Camus’s defiance of absurdity, and Sartre’s radical freedom. Each tradition converges on a shared insight: that the act of continuing in the face of meaninglessness or paradox is not merely a coping mechanism but a constitutive feature of authentic existence.</p> <p dir="ltr">In Madhyamaka Buddhist philosophy, we find the ontological foundation that Western existentialism lacks. Nāgārjuna’s doctrine of śūnyatā (emptiness) demonstrates that continuation is possible precisely because nothing possesses svabhāva (inherent, fixed essence). If phenomena had fixed natures, change, growth, and convergence would be impossible. Emptiness—the absence of inherent nature—is not the void that existentialism fears but the enabling condition of all process, all development, and all solution.</p> <p dir="ltr">In mathematics and computer science, we examine continuation as a formal construct. Continuation-passing style, fixed-point theorems, iterative convergence, and the halting problem all reveal a structural truth: systems that continue processing under well-defined constraints reach solutions that halting systems cannot. We introduce the Continuation Sufficiency Theorem (CST) with five conditions, including a novel emptiness condition requiring that systems remain open to reconstitution.</p> <p dir="ltr">In psychology, we synthesize research on grit, learned helplessness, post-traumatic growth, and flow states to demonstrate that the human capacity for persistence is both a measurable trait and a trainable skill.</p> <p>The thesis culminates in a unified theory arguing that "Solution = Continue" operates as a substrate-independent meta-heuristic. We develop the concept of creative continuation—the capacity of sustained process not merely to search existing spaces but to generate new spaces, new conditions, and new possibilities. We show that conditions and process co-arise through dependent origination (pratītyasamutpāda), and that the equation "Solution = Continue" is not an instruction to an agent but a description of the structure of reality itself.</p> |
| title | First Philosophy |
| topic | process philosophy continuation Madhyamaka śūnyatā Nāgārjuna first philosophy meta-heuristic interdisciplinary philosophy |
| url | https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.19040299 |