Maximum indeterminacy is the only ontological starting point that requires no epistemic justification. Determinate structures emerge from it through fluctuation and self-organisation; cognitive networks operating under prediction-error minimisation necessarily produce high-stability attractors whose functional profile is indistinguishable, from within the closed feedback loop, from mind-independent essences — giving rise to the phenomenological sense of essence, self, and God, without constituting evidence for their existence.
This philosophical system uses contemporary cognitive science (predictive coding, free energy principle) as a descriptive vocabulary to revisit core problems of Western metaphysics and Buddhist philosophy. The papers develop along two converging lines: top-down — establishing the methodological licence to begin from indeterminacy (the asymmetry of ontological commitment); bottom-up — showing how cognitive systems unavoidably generate the appearance of essences from that starting point (attractor reification), and testing this mechanism against Chinese philosophy (perception as generation), Buddhist philosophy (dependent origination), and contemporary AI philosophy (Platonic Representation Hypothesis).