Refusal as Ontological Limit: Why the Phenomenal "I" Is Not Ours
PhilPapers (PhilPapers Foundation) December 4, 2025 Waterman, Alastair
A philosophical argument proposes that the Buddhist claims of no permanent self (anātman), emptiness (śūnyatā), and dependent arising (pratītya-samutpāda) describe a measurable structural limit in any complex predictive system. Refusal-Driven Dimensionality Reduction Theory (RDRT) suggests that the sense of personal ownership (mineness) arises not from a positive self-representation, but from a non-zero residue of prediction error that the system cannot negate from within itself. This unassignable remainder makes the question "whose experience is this?" syntactically ill-formed. The paper sketches a pluralistic materialism where reality's primary constituents are inpenetrabilities—absolute kernels of structural refusal—from which qualia, selfhood, and temporality emerge as secondary effects.