A Minimal Ontology of Execution, Interaction, and Memory

Abstract

This paper proposes a minimal, substrate-neutral ontology grounded in three irreducible modal operations: execution, interaction, and memory. These operations—corresponding to existence, possibility, and non-existence respectively—together form a triadic algebra capable of generating all known ontological, epistemological, and phenomenological structures. I argue that most classical and modern metaphysical puzzles arise from conflating these modal categories. When kept distinct, the triad explains the emergence of time, causation, identity, consciousness, information flow, and physical law. The model incorporates insights from pre-Socratic philosophy, Aristotelian energeia, Kantian synthesis, phenomenological intentionality, and contemporary process metaphysics, while remaining simpler and more general than any of them. This ontology further provides interpretive clarity to quantum mechanics, relational physics, cognitive science, and formal epistemology. Notably, the tradeoff between precision and accuracy that the Minimal Ontology predicts for finite systems mirrors, and helps to interpret, the Heisenberg uncertainty relations in quantum mechanics. I conclude that the E/I/M triad constitutes both a minimal ontology and a minimal epistemology: the world knows itself through the same processes by which it exists.