I don’t think you can absorb this essay unchanged. It should alter not only how you think, but how you move.
It will elevate your awareness of the motion you create. I realized actionable things about myself while writing it. It’s engineered to reconfigure how you perceive the interface between words and atoms. Let’s map the asymmetry between thought and thing.
Inside this essay there are two wolves: empirical verdicts and rational vantage points. We begin with abstraction — like architects who sketch before pouring foundation — establishing theoretical scaffolding that later bears empirical weight. The empirical is non-negotiable; theory is a lens through which we squint at truth, not a throne for decreeing it.
This is Applied Biofoundationalism: it takes the physics-and-biology-based framework (rational) and applies it in physical reality (empirical). You can read this piece standalone, with Chapter IV, Chapter V, and War is How a Nation Eats augmenting it. All chapters and related works are linked at the end.
I listened to this song on loop while writing. Enjoy.
Side note: I kept recalling a moment from one of my favorite films while writing this essay. If you’ve seen Meet Joe Black you’ll appreciate this scene in the context of the journey you’re about to take. And if you haven’t watched it, you should, it’s excellent.
An abstraction requires a physical form… “I needed a body, Bill.”
Outline:
I. Prelude
Truth has a body. Reality speaks through displacement.
II. Empirical Atoms, Rational Thoughts
The dyad of observation and theory
III. Empirical Because You Have To, Rational Because You Get To
The hierarchy of necessity
IV. Floating Rationalists, Fossilized Empiricists
Ant-workers & butterfly-minds: building without vision, floating without building
V. The World Belongs to Those Who Move
The kinetic is the supreme authority through which all other authority flows
VI. Embodied Empiricism, Verbal Rationalism
What you know is revealed by how you move
VII. AGI & Embodiment
To have a body is to ‘know’
VIII. Human LLMs & Inert Philosophy
Chaos philosophy and its identification
IX. To Move is to “Know”: Top-down Meets Bottom-up
AGI and rational-empirical convergence
X. Sacred Motion
Kinetic prayers. Different grammars, same lifeforce
XI. Concluding
I. Prelude
Truth has a body. Every claim that matters must demonstrate itself by reshuffling atoms, consuming energy, shifting mass. Reality doesn’t yield to slogans or syllogisms: it speaks in displacement and force. Language may aim motion, but motion alone validates language.
This essay enacts its own thesis. It anchors its principles in event, not abstraction. It points empirically because truth demands it and speaks rationally because language permits it.
Definitions
Kinetic: Energy of motion. Whenever atoms are displaced, any physical state is altered — be it mechanical movement, chemical reaction, heat flow, diffusion, shifts, or transitions — it qualifies as kinetic.
Inert: Currently not producing change or motion. At human/animal/survival scale a rock sitting on a table is inert. Something is functionally inert when its motion is contained or balanced in a way that doesn’t propagate outward to affect anything else. If it’s not moving in a way that changes the world around it, it’s inert.
Empirical: Knowledge obtained through observation or measurement of physical change. When something is kinetic it impacts realty and is also empirical. Throughout this essay I’ll use “empirical” and “kinetic” interchangeably.
Rational: Logical, symbolic, or cognitive structures that are inert beyond the substrate (skull/silicon). Thoughts in a brain or symbols in a machine are rational and inert until they elicit action externally.
A dyad is a pair of oppositional and interdependent elements, each identified in reference to the other. E.g. day is undefined without night; left is unknown without right.
‘Chaos’ and ‘entropy’ have close but not identical meanings: entropy is the formal thermodynamic measure; chaos is a lived correlate. I use them interchangeably.
Entropy increases until equilibrium is reached: the state of maximal disorder
A species that mistakes the map for the cliff either falls or never climbs. Survival selects not for clever ideas, but ones that successfully actuate. Symbols misjudged as substance dissolve under natural law. The rules of existence — physics and biology — determine what’s viable. Mankind operates within these rules, not above them. Submission is not optional; you either comply or cease to exist.
Outcomes, not intentions, are the ultimate verdict. Actions determine results. Results determine existence. Truth may only be unearthed through surviving and prospering. To survive is to move. To prosper is to move well.
Thought extends credit forever, and motion settles the bill. Truth is observed when an idea departs the head and displaces matter. The gap between imagination’s infinite printing and reality’s finite currency forms the fault line where ambition either fractures against physical law or flourishes within it. The healthy mind and society dwell somewhere in the tension between these poles.
Pure empiricism: you only walk because you never ask “What if?”
Pure rationalism: you only float because you never touch “What is”
Only by combining both do we conceptualize an airplane and give it flight.
This principle carries implications for everything from AGI to scaled human coordination. This essay explains why truth is known through motion.
If it doesn’t move, it doesn’t matter.
II. Empirical Atoms, Rational Thoughts
The empirical and rational form an irreducible dyad, requiring mutual tension to produce survival and meaning. The rational remains a ghost without empirical flesh; the empirical is stagnant, hollow data without rational interpretation.
A dyad exists when one is undefined without the other: what’s rational cannot be determined without contacting the empirical; what’s empirical can only be navigated with the rational. What’s conservative is indeterminate without liberal. Masculine has no point of reference absent feminine.
Empiricism is rooted in physical reality, producing conclusions drawn from bottom-up observation. It’s borne of inductive thinking. It inhabits the domain of atoms and describes “What is” under constraint. It’s where things move.
Induction: Specific observations → general pattern (swans I’ve seen are white → all swans are white)
Rationalism perceives through top-down theory, conclusions derived should these assumptions hold. This is typically achieved via deductive thinking. Deduction can’t find truth without empirically correct premises. It inhabits the domain of bits (digital) or cognition (brain), asking “What if?” under assumption. It does not move.
Deduction: General rules → specific conclusion (all swans are white, this is a swan → it’s white). Deduction alone cannot test whether its starting assumptions correspond to reality.
Nearly all great achievements require conceptualization — modeling, planning, even daydreaming — before enactment. Rooted rationalism touches reality by leading to productive motion or inspiring it.
What never leaves the mind, or dies upon exit, is by definition a fantasy.
Postulates are rational, not delusional, if they find physical correspondence. This is discovered through kinetic mandate: subject it to falsifiability and observe whether it facilitates intended motion.
Without action, truth cannot be known. If it matters, it moves; if it never moves, it never matters.
Objection: Plenty “matters” without visible motion - potentials, stored energy, information states, money.
Yes. But the only reason they’re relevant is they’re expected to eventually manifest in external movement. At some point, it has to move or it remains abstraction. Money that never shifts physical resources around is database candy looping in a digital circle. You store and covet energy so you can use it: because it lets you move.
What creates inflation? Too much money chasing too few resources, yes, but why? Money is an abstraction to coordinate the consumption and production of physical goods. Resources are finite reality; database entries are infinite fictions. Empirical scarcity anchors rational infinity, or economies collapse into the void where too many symbols chase too little substance.
IMPORTANT: You cannot eat computer. You cannot live inside computer. If computer’s bits never alter your atoms, then computer just shuffles infinite symbols inside itself, changing nothing about physical reality. This is no different from a human thought that never departs the mind. If it only resides in CPU or skull, it’s indistinguishable from fantasy. It’s real when it rearranges reality. What remains motionless remains hypothetical.
Philosophical objections are offered a simple test to determine your commitment: buy a Virtual Reality Headset and refer to it as your Reality Headset. If you believe it can reside solely in the mind or database — never manifesting outside it — and be real, you should take no issue with this categorization.
I invite you to take any stance you hold and ask: can it move? Has it moved as described elsewhere? Does it result in coherent, intentional, structured motion? Can it rotate, accelerate, or coordinate in practice? If unclear, reconsider how you know.
Societies and minds that worship a single cognitive pole — empiricism’s “What is” or rationalism’s “What if?” — either suffer in static misery or perish in fantasy. Same as if one is all order, or pure chaos: one is death by crystallization, the other death by dissolution. The optimum emerges in interplay, not in overwhelming.
Consider the surgeon: years of anatomy collapse into muscle memory, as theoretical knowledge submits to tactile truth. The scalpel cares not for citations; it demands your hands know the difference between fascia and fat by feel alone. Every medical student discovers the transition from textbook to skin, where memorized procedures meet the unforgiving particularities of meat. Manipulating tissue, visible contusions, the kinetic dance of practiced hands. The surgery succeeds not through theory but theory’s palpation of flesh. Truth is known by the hands.
The hierarchy of necessity: you theorize because you can, you cut because you must. Life is an oscillation between obligations and options.
Reality because you have to, creativity because you get to.
III. Empirical Because You Have To, Rational Because You Get To
The Biofoundationalist have-to/get-to hierarchy reveals itself fractally across scales. The business owner theorizes new products in prosperity but strips to unit economics in crisis. The artist experiments with passion projects when fed but paints what sells when hungry. A society adopts conservative authority and standards because it has to; it drifts toward liberal freedoms and fairness because it gets to.
Maslow sketched a pyramid at the individual level unaware it applies to nations all the same. Physics poured these foundations; biology iterates within them.
When poverty gnaws or conflict knocks, rationalistic frameworks become fatal indulgences. There is no luxury of “What if?” when existence is uncertain. The starving philosopher contemplating the nature of bread but refusing to bake it will not examine his navel for long. Reality has no patience for those who confuse the menu with the meal. Pragmatic induction navigates a famine you may not endure. Because you must.
Self-preservation in scarcity and strife demands abiding by kinetic, corporeal edicts: the empirical’s purview. “What is” governs when failure means tragedy, not lesson. Judged by actions (outcomes), not intentions (potential).
Hardship intensifies empirical constraint and adherence to observable boundaries. The empirical is not discretionary, because survival is not optional. When defeat means catastrophe, “What is” leads you toward the light.
Empirical because you have to
As you approach peace, stability, air-conditioned comfort, only then can you ruminate and reflect. Theorize. When failure represents inconvenience, not calamity — when survival is assumed, not tentative — then we can begin to think “What if...?”.
“It’s not an experiment if you know it’s going to work.” — Jeff Bezos
In abundance and safety, the rational is ascendant. Options invite exploration. Judged by intention, not action. Because you may.
Rationalism thrives against backdrops of security and prosperity. A well-to-do life grants the benefit of envisioning new realms. Extrapolate. Ideate. Be creative.
Rational because you get to
Empiricism’s obligations allow rationalism’s options.
There are no theorists in foxholes, but neither are there foxholes without theorists. Someone had to imagine entrenchment’s tactical advantage before the first shovel hit earth. The soldier digs because the strategist dreamed. Survival and prosperity depend on both vision and spade.
We’ve examined the necessity–possibility hierarchy. Now, the pathologies of imbalance: the danger of rationalism untethered and empiricism ossified.
IV. Floating Rationalists, Fossilized Empiricists
The most elegant equation remains hypothesis until reality grants it citizenship. Survive contact with measurement and it graduates from symbol to substance. What makes a math equation “true”? It aligns with how things move.
If it cannot dwell outside the mind, cannot align with what shifts, it is necessarily an illusion.
If it produces movement or motivates movement elsewhere, then it touches the kinetic: subject to empiricism, falsifiable, real, influencing reality. Roses must root in soil or wither; we are subject to this too. Empirical iron is the stem for all rose-colored rationalism, as survival stipulates a clear-eyed relationship with atoms. Rationality untethered from empirics metastasizes into grandiose, delusional nonsense.
The Floating Rationalist is adrift from reality’s gravity. She writes dissertations on justice but has never experienced legal proceedings. Theorizes on community while eating alone. She drifts in balloons of the brain, refusing to descend where atoms and consequences collide. Attempted landing creates incoherent motion and sophisticated-sounding justifications for failure. She feeds you a word salad that rearranges thoughts, not reality’s beef.
The Fossilized Empiricist perfects the plow while others envision a tractor. Optimizes the candle instead of conceiving electricity. He’s so engrossed in what moves now that he forgets to ask what could move better. His competence becomes his cage: mastery of the known preventing exploration of the unknown. He builds only what’s been built before: each iteration slightly refined but never reimagined.
The Fossil polishes yesterday’s solutions until they gleam with irrelevance. The Floater crafts tomorrow’s fake problems and even faker solutions from today’s comfort. Ant-workers vs butterfly-minds: one builds without vision, one flutters without building.
“The intellect is a great servant, but a terrible master.” — David Foster Wallace
As you may have guessed, a balanced dose of both is ideal (name of the blog checks out). All empirics and you occupy a landscape of stultifying strife; all rationality, decadent excess. Extreme beliefs arise in extreme environments. Pronounced adversity or indulgence elevates either empiricism or rationalism to dominance; neither makes an ideal compass.
It’s not about choosing sides but remembering the dance. Don’t tribalize and mistake complementary tension for competitive elimination. One’s not better or worse, both are needed, with circumstance determining utility. Every invention and beautiful cathedral began as brainwaves, but crucially none remained there. The thought appeared in blood and struggle; imagination summoned bricks and sweat. This is the harmonious choreography of Rooted Rationalism and Evolving Empiricism.
While rationalism and empiricism require one another to excel (just like masculine and feminine, conservative and liberal, interesting…), it’s the empirical that ultimately casts the deciding vote. Not per any decree of man, but of physics.
All life submits to kinetic finality: no exceptions. To believe you exist outside The Rules is to live only in your mind… a delusion.
V. The World Belongs to Those Who Move
Motion is the grammar of truth. Movement allows one to know. Superior movement allows one to reign.
The universe’s laws — physics — constitute a kinetic dictator requiring neither consent nor comprehension. You kneel or suffer. Every derivative rule, from cellular respiration to constitutional democracy, ultimately traces its authority back to this universal substrate. Abstraction ceases being abstract by bowing to this authority: touching atoms, consuming energy, generating consequences.
Laws that shape stars and snowflakes fractally shape societies. We are not outside this system; we are of it.
Something is either kinetic or inert. This means it’s either in service of order or chaos.
It’s axiomatic that order emerges only through action, and chaos necessarily exists in its absence. Entropy rises by default when nothing works to resist it. In each case energy is being spent and atoms displaced to foster structure. The moment motion stops, the structure starts to degrade. There is no order without motion at some scale.
Not all movement is orderly, but lack of movement (inertia) is always ultimately disorderly.
Objection: A crystal is highly orderly yet inert.
Yes, but concentrated motion formed it. Absent further motion, it will eventually turn to dust. Same for a building, or any structure.
The physics of motion vs inertia, order vs entropy, governs everything. Muscles atrophy without tension. Machines rust without maintenance. Societies decay without duty. In every case, stillness is rot. Motion is redemption.
Inaction facilitates chaos not because it intends harm, but because entropy exists through its omission. Akin to how roses bloom from effortful gardening, and weeds sprout from simple neglect. Without pushback, gravity wins. Without motion, structure cannot be generated or sustained.
An aversion to motion, or inability to inspire it, renders one irrelevant: not disparagingly so, but practically so. What matters must mobilize.
You are a meaty, corporeal being occupying physical reality. If what you espouse only floats in theoretical clouds and never blooms in the garden of atoms alongside you, what you believe is fundamentally irrelevant. Intelligence means nothing without application. A belief that alters no behavior is indistinguishable from a belief never held.
If people are metaphorically moved by what you say, then they should physically move. Words must guide actions, or they guide nothing.
If it doesn’t move, it doesn’t matter.
Kinetic Kings
What your teacher soothingly called “social constructs” rest on kinetic principles. The notion of property was not created but discovered; enshrined by force in the same manner across human societies and animal species alike. Might makes right not as moral category, but mechanically. The kinetic (empirical) is the binding arbiter when words (rational) cannot rectify disputes.
I’ve found when people encounter this ancient truth, they often perceive “right” as a moral claim. They struggle to disentangle their top-down, human-readable opinion of what “right” should be from the cold, clinical bottom-up reality of The Way of The World that this statement lays bare. This is not a matter of opinion.
When abstractions fail, capacity to act is the court of outcomes. You think you are “right”; he thinks he is “right”. He says you are “immoral” and you reciprocate that assertion. Okay. Cool. So what next? Who is “right”? Who owns the property? Who gets the land? Alas. This is settled by wolf, wasp, and man in the same way.
Not all that is kinetic is violent, but all that is violent is kinetic. The world is dominated by those who move.
The kinetic does not ponder the rational; violence makes decisions reason has demonstrated it cannot resolve. Empirical thrust has the final say because rational keyboards do not move.
Might determines property. Might establishes borders. Might writes societal rules. The victors of wars author the history books, and the good guys always win! Violence is the supreme authority from which all other authority flows. What’s the pinnacle kinetic mechanism mankind deploys to adjudicate disagreements when diplomacy (rational) fails? A military. What about domestically? A cop physically sticks you in a cage. There is no escaping this. These are not man’s rules. Man simply must follow The Rules.
Crypto guys who think they’re getting crypto states better be prepared to fund and organize a crypto military. Why? Digital entries in distributed databases don’t delineate borders and protect physical land, silly! Only men with guns do that. The tokens live on a blockchain, you do not. The cypherpunk’s romanticism approaches Floating Rationalism when he waxes poetic about how his tokens have solved the burden of motion.
Those who object are welcome to do something about it. However before getting bold behind a screen, reflect on what “do something about it” logistically means... You’ll soon realize you’re ruminating on how to summon — and submit to — the kinetic. I’m sure soldiers will accept payment in Bitcoin; this is a prime example of how the digital makes contact with physical. Now there’s a crypto token that moves!
Decadent societies forget this authoritative father figure. Lessons buried by comfort are often unearthed through crisis. Hidden behind pieces of paper (abstractions) with words written on them, as if paper enforces anything. A law is only as good as its enforcement. Consider what “enforcement” means. The answer is eternally the same: the paper is only relevant because someone with a gun says it is.
Minds that don’t guide bodies through thermodynamics’ iron gates are ruled by minds that do. Whoever most competently embraces the kinetic, conquers. As they always will. It’s not a matter of opinionated right or wrong, just or fair, but simply the nature of existence.
Kinetic tycoons like Bezos and Musk — those who have mastered supply chains, rockets, shipping, heavy objects, and orbit — preach similar creeds. Physics alone establishes rules; everything else is suggestion.
VI. Embodied Empiricism, Verbal Rationalism
An embodied understanding is revealed in what you do. It’s empirical.
A verbal understanding is conveyed by what you say. It’s rational.
These aren’t mutually exclusive but certainly not always aligned. When verbal contradicts embodied, the latter supersedes. If you say “I’m not scared” then shriek in fear and run away, heart racing 150 bpm, you are scared. Your words are confirmed as false, because reality is found in what it does, not says.
Fight or flight runs on autopilot. We know deep in our bones what constitutes reality when life and limb are at stake. The amygdala cares not for Kant; it always knows what you “ought” to do: you ought to survive. If your ancestors didn’t submit to these directives, they didn’t propagate. Truth is extracted through action because that’s how existence is earned. Body must collide with consequences to know reality.
We are slowly learning this applies to more than just man; it also applies to machine.
If our minds require flesh to escape delusion and know truth, what does this suggest about the disembodied minds we’re building in silicon?
What’s the definition of a fantasy again? Something that only lives in the mind or behind a screen.
If the verbal speaks without a physical form, it has no way of understanding anything. It’s just saying things. All words, no motion. The verbal is rational, the embodied is empirical.
Which brings us to AI.
VII. AGI & Embodiment
The question of artificial general intelligence (AGI) and what it takes to achieve it exposes a lack of awareness of the empirical-rational dyad; it completely ignores the kinetic requirements.
We built a digital mind of pure rationalist symbols and wonder why it doesn’t “understand”. But how could it? It’s Plato’s cave in a computer. We show AI shadows of reality through text while expecting it to comprehend what casts those shadows.
The following comment is an intelligent representation of the “it doesn’t understand” stance I often see. Made in response to my essay Cognitive Scion.
This kind of math-style reductionism is true, but uninformative. We can reduce human thoughts and feelings to electrochemical signals just as easily as we can reduce LLMs to bit flips and calculations; at some level, everything is “just computation”. We need to recalibrate the resolution.
What’s functionally being described is an embodied computer (a human) versus a disembodied one (an LLM). When critics say AI “doesn’t understand physics”, they’re right, but unwittingly sharing a truism. Of course it can’t apprehend kinetic laws, it lacks a body! It never taps reality. You couldn’t comprehend anything either without your glorious meat vehicle. This isn’t a criticism unique to LLMs; it’s universal for all intelligence.
Humans are equipped with sensory systems supplying palpable feedback that grounds pattern recognition and learning in the physical world. How can AI know if it failed? Delusion is what festers in the mind with no bearing outside it; the LLM is only a mind. Without embodied feedback or external evaluators hooked to consequences, it has no native channel for registering failure.
The LLM inhabits a rational universe of pure semiotics: symbols gesturing toward reality but incapable of feeling it; every word pointing to experiences it cannot have, maps of territories it cannot walk.
It knows “fire” can describe destruction and warmth, passion and light, but has never endured heat. Reciting a hundred synonyms for “pain” but never winced, describing orbital mechanics but has never held weight. It cannot move, so it cannot know. No other species gets away with this, so why would a digitally native one?
This is an LLM “flaw” in the same way a blueprint is flawed for not being a building: a category error. Why would you expect a model of a building to perform like a building?
The LLM is solely rationalist verbal awareness, zero empirical embodied understanding. A cognitive rose devoid of empirical stem. It’s the difference between recalling the chemical formula for adrenaline and having it flood your system as you avoid a car accident. Only the empirical body knows the metallic taste of near-death, trembling aftermath, and updates its priors and behaviors to avoid it in the future.
One is information that cannot update on its own (words); the other is knowledge that updates as reality informs. One can genuinely learn (embodied); the other only be told what is so (verbal). To move is to know.
VIII. Human LLMs & Inert Philosophy
I find these structural shortcomings remarkably similar to how philosophy without accompanying experience — i.e. movement in the world — is tantamount to describing a symphony. You cannot know these things by language and thought alone. You cannot articulate Mozart, you must hear it.
My documented disdain for philosophy as a discipline stems from seeing its lack of coherent application: a luxury good for minds that refuse to mobilize. Cathartic cigar shop pontifications that sound lovely while seated in leather chairs, but bear no relevance for navigating atoms. I hear a grandiloquent theory of swimming that doesn’t get wet. Ancient, applied philosophy with motion-instructing utility emerged from men who fought wars and built cities.
Aurelius wrote Meditations between military campaigns; Socrates fought in the Peloponnesian War. Modern philosophy surfaces from skinny-fat tenured faculty who can’t believe the Door Dash guy forgot their Diet Dr. Pepper again. One speaks of shifting matter, the other pontificates on shifting definitions. “But what do you mean by meaning? The ontological epistemics of the metaphy… ” Stop. That’s enough. Go generate motion.
The world unveils itself better when you operate within it rather than shuffling symbols so abstract you get vertigo encountering them. Inactionable words belie a disorderly mode of being. To live in your head is to live in a dream.
A philosophy is impotent and entropic by nature if it touts inertia or results in it.
A chaotic mind is swiftly identified when you notice its incoherent language puzzles have no relevance to motion.
If thoughts cannot elicit action, they are chaotic by default, as order is exclusively found through structured movement. Physics determines it so, no pile of words absolves anyone from its dictates.
If you don’t displace atoms, you cannot authentically understand, and you cannot produce order. Not all that moves is orderly, but what’s orderly always comes from what moves.
The LLM suffers from this, as does the “phenomenology”-touting Hegelian deconstructionist post-structural postmodern “you can just say things” jiggly mind. It confuses itself with pseudo-sophisticated recursive thoughtslop while its body sits, muscles waste, and mind races. You can’t just say things, you need to do things. Prove things. Earn things. The things you do need to align with reality. If you cannot foster structure outside yourself, you cannot foster it within.
“But what is reality? “Is structure not a normative axiological assumption?” These are questions the motionless ponder. Love handles of the brain.
LLMs and unlived philosophy are both forms of Floating Rationalism. No empirical anchoring. They do not “know” as they have not moved within what they speak of. They are Virtual Reality that fancy themselves Reality Reality.
A preponderance of philosophers succumb to the LLM’s exact flaw: they lack embodiment.
They speak of the cold from climate-controlled rooms. They describe struggle while undergoing little. Bemoaning the weight of existence without knowing the weight of a barbell. They rearrange phrases behind screens without expending energy on surfaces. If your body is calibrated for motion, it’s illuminated in your words. The software whispers the hardware. Your mind processes reality differently when you regularly move within it.
Motionless philosophy is tantamount to a human LLM. The LLM predicts the next token; the philosopher predicts the next symbol.
Symbols are orderly and useful as compressions of reality; they’re chaotic and deceptive as substitutes for reality.
Unembodied philosophy is terminally sterile; a chaotic playground of cerebral Skittles and word games designed to escape reality, not impact it.
Next time you consume a piece of philosophy, ask this while reading it… “How does this help me move? Does it encourage motion? Is reality made clearer by these words such that it can show up in my behaviors?” A philosophy of inertia is a philosophy of chaos: not all motion is orderly; but all order is produced by motion. Philosophy that renders one inert exports entropy into its surroundings.
When critics say “LLMs don’t understand things” they’re highlighting top-down what Biofoundationalism unearths bottom-up: symbolic reasoning alone is insufficient for authentic intelligence. This is true, but it’s true of anything!
The mind cannot reference itself to know what is real. Math can’t look only to its symbols to know what is true. Actuation is prerequisite for generalized intelligence as well as authentic philosophy. To live in the mind is to dwell in a dream. To mobilize is to realize.
IX. To Move is to “Know”: Top-down Meets Bottom-up
I wrote the first drafts of Empirical Because You Have To, Rational Because You Get To in November 2024; Verbal and Embodied Understandings in December 2023; and The World Belongs to Those Who Move on September 16th 2025. This essay is a culmination of observations and realizations that have been gestating for a while.
On September 26th 2025, Dwarkesh Patel released a podcast with Richard Sutton regarding LLM shortcomings. I’d never heard of him before.
Who’s Richard Sutton?
Here’s Sutton’s framework for what AGI requires. He refers to LLMs in their current state as a “dead end”. Why?
When I saw this not only did it make me smile, but it was apparent to me Richard was gesturing at the same thing I’m describing, with AI-specific framing.
I’m assessing from generalizable first principles how the rational (words, symbols, inert) must connect with the empirical (observable, atoms, kinetic) to know truth. These principles apply to AI, because they apply to everything.
When I say “kinetic feedback” and he says “interaction with its environment”; when I say “empirical” and he says “testable”, we’re functionally articulating the same thing with different grammars.
The Biofoundationalist gets there bottom-up via dyadic understanding of physical and biological laws; Sutton gets there top-down by engineering, testing, and seeing where the deficiencies lie. Deduction converging with induction.
His Rooted Rationalism is touching empiricism, updating, and iterating. My Evolving Empiricism is observing the LLM’s design, noting how biological life and truth (reality) emerge, and identifying a structural deficiency for “knowing”. If something can’t connect to the empirical, then by default it’s exclusively rational, which means it only lives in the mind. It cannot comprehend what’s real or fantasy. It floats.
Different paths aligning on the same conclusion: the physical world cannot be denied.
AGI will not emerge from more tokens, cleverer algorithms, or larger context windows, but when we start building entities that can stub their toe, burn their hand, and learn from kinetic curriculum the world teaches all its students.
X. Sacred Motion
The empirical illuminates the transcendent; there’s no contradiction between them. What believers call God and physicists call fundamental forces materialize in the same architecture, described in different dialects. The faithful and the empirical are measuring the same mountain from different valleys.
Religious depictions of God are that of an omnipresent being. One of omniscience, unforgiving wrath, love, and presence. Through his will, you’re granted life. He’s everywhere, in all things, sustaining every breath, watching over you. He cannot be bargained with or fooled. He meets the faithful where they are. His laws are unquestionable; mercy lives within obedience to them.
Now look around you. Why is your body intact, lungs breathing, life able to exist? What force both crucifies and enables? What power hormetically breaks you down only to rebuild you stronger? What presence both giveth and taketh? What law writes itself into DNA and galaxy alike, molding and birthing everything? The Rules permeate each fiber of our being. Allowing cells to form, pairs to bond, and children to run outside.
Thermodynamics, gravity, and entropy are everywhere, in all things, sustaining each structured moment. They cannot be negotiated with or deceived. They’re unforgiving to hubristic denial, and generative to those who work within their constraints. Their laws are immutable; flourishing lives within submission to them.
The grammar differs. The function does not.
Gravity is only theory, but its ubiquitous signature is felt in all things. A force that bestows burden is understood as a blessing when you recognize life could not exist without its frictions. The faithful call this providence when it lifts them, and judgment when it crushes them.
Physics demands every action have an equal and opposite reaction, and religion’s human-readable translation is “you reap what you sow”. Stories that endure over time do so because they depict and align with physical reality, embedding useful behaviors through transcendent narratives in service of existence. A story that doesn’t reflect reality and fails to inspire productive human coordination, doesn’t propagate, and dies with its adherents.
The top-down must touch the bottom-up.
Christianity
New Testament
“Be doers of the word, and not hearers only, deceiving yourselves” — James 1:22
“In the same way, faith by itself, if it is not accompanied by action, is dead.” — James 2:17
“You see that a person is justified by works and not by faith alone” — James 2:24
“For it is not the hearers of the law who are righteous before God, but the doers of the law who will be justified.” — Romans 2:13
“By their fruits you will know them” — Matthew 7:16
“Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only the one who does the will of my Father who is in heaven” — Matthew 7:21
Old Testament
“Whoever watches the wind will not sow; whoever looks at the clouds will not reap.” — Ecclesiastes 11:4
“In all hard work there is profit, but mere talk leads only to poverty.” — Proverbs 14:23.
Judaism
“Not study is the main thing, but action.” — Pirkei Avot 1:17.
“The ‘deed’ is more important than the ‘creed’” — core Jewish tenet of orthopraxy (emphasis on correct conduct) over orthodoxy (emphasis on correct belief)
Hinduism
“Perform your prescribed duty, for action is better than inaction. A man cannot even maintain his physical body without work.” — Bhagavad Gītā 3:8
“He who controls the senses with the mind and engages in action without attachment is superior.” — Bhagavad Gītā 3:7
“Indeed, no one can ever remain actionless even for a moment.” — Bhagavad Gītā 3:5
“Therefore, without being attached to the fruits of activities, one should act as a matter of duty, for by working without attachment one attains the Supreme” — Bhagavad Gita 3:19
Islam
“Indeed, mankind is in loss, Except for those who have believed and done righteous deeds” — Quran 103:2-3
“To whoever, male or female, does good deeds and is a believer, we shall give a good life and reward them according to the best of their actions”— Quran 16:97
Buddhism
“Like a beautiful flower, full of color but without fragrance, even so, fruitless are the fair words of one who does not practice them.” — Dhammapada 51
“Beings are the owners of their actions, the heirs of their actions; they spring from their actions, are bound to their actions, and are supported by their actions. Whatever deeds they do, good or bad, of those they shall be heirs” — Karma (Pali: Kamma)
Confucianism
“The superior man is modest in his speech, but exceeds in his actions.” — Analects 14.29.
The theist struggling to reconcile this essay’s seemingly cold empirics with faith need not struggle at all. When scripture says “faith without works is dead” it’s articulating the same principle: belief divorced from motion is fantasy.
The skeptic who thinks this reduces the sacred to the mechanical has it backwards: this elevates the mechanical to the sacred. It reveals that every act of compassion, every structure built to shelter, every noble deed, is participating in the same act of resisting entropy and furthering life.
Biofoundationalism’s recognizes the rational must manifest in the empirical to know, be real, and prosper. The Christian concurs, with different cosmic syntax… “Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven”.
Heaven represents the ideal, the planned, the rational; earth is the actual, the enacted, the empirical. The invocation requests that abstraction become concretized. It petitions for embodiment, for the top-down to touch the bottom-up. Kinetic prayers.
You may swap “gravity” with “God’s love” and “kinetic” with “God’s will” and find little functional difference. The spiritual and the scientific use different language to point towards the same wonder. What’s rational is known only if it aligns with the way things move. What’s supernatural is known by how it makes things move in beautiful ways.
To move is to know truth; if you’d like to transpose “truth” with “God”, I have no objections. Because it doesn’t really matter what you say, so long as it productively shows up in what you do.
The path you take to get there is the path that’s right for you.
XI. Concluding
The kinetic reigns sovereign, yet even kings require poets to tell their stories. The empirical issues the unassailable substrate, but only through rational imagination does survival transcend into civilization and purpose.
It’s never a question of absolute preference for dyadic poles, but an acknowledgement of their dance: the empirical disciplines dreams, the rational elevates matter. The wealth of societies and success of a species ultimately hinge not on the beauty of their theories but on those theories’ ability to move atoms in effective ways.
A complete love story involves both flesh and feelings, mind and body. Try loving without touching. Try learning without failing. Even the loftiest of Floaters require glucose and blood flow to exist. We are orderly patterns, dissipative structures, temporarily organized against entropy. Our ability to approach truth can be no greater than our capacity to act to find it.
Whether you name the all-powerful force Physics or Providence, whether you call the inviolable rules Natural Law or Divine Will, the conclusion remains: you must touch them to know them. The saint discovers God not through theology but by service. The scientist discovers truth not through equations but by experiment. Both pilgrimage and particle accelerator serve the same purpose: they make the seeker move through the world to find what’s real.
The universe has a straightforward rubric: what moves matters, and what matters moves. Everything else is commentary, literally, mere words otherwise. The empirical world doesn’t care about your philosophy, it only knows you through demonstration. In that lies an incontrovertible canon governing existence: it can only be known by what it does, not what it says.
Truth is found through motion.
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Biofoundationalism Chapters:
Biofoundationalism I: Moral Foundations Utility Theory & Hypermoralization
Biofoundationalism III: Verbal Intelligence & Factual Sediment
Biofoundationalism IV: Masculine Because You Have To, Feminine Because You Get To
One of the best posts i have ever read on substack. Excellent job!
many of the external comments/DMs I've received on this essay have been really rewarding, I appreciate them. if you have something to say please don't hesitate. thank you to all that do so. don't be shy about commenting in here.