For someone too busy dismantling physical empires while being held hostage on remote and hidden locations, writing a considered invocation to an erudite and brittle metaphysics would seem challenging enough, to make matters worse one had to write the work prefaced herein itself in under a month.
Writing a metaphysics is precarious business, no mere jugglery. The intentions behind writing one are always crystal clear and single-pointed - to sharpen the edge of philosophy as a tool. One that is used to challenge assumptions.
Such a diamond-cutter requires an inordinate amount of care and precision in handling, lest one injure oneself in a contextually stupefying reading or writing. In order for the following triumph to echo and reverberate through one’s very being, in order for this milestone to get consumed as intended - a certain disavowval need be occasioned, a certain agency acknowledged.
In order to make any metaphysical testimony credible, one has to treat it as if it were a pathology, the disavowal is the exclusionary principle, not a metaphysics of dogs or fish - but a formal verification of the animating principle - the structure and function at work generally, with particular rigor for the technology that intelligence is.
A metaphysics of machines may also seem unnatural and amoral, but the cold frontier of history that rolls upon living paradigms cannot in earnestness care about the wheelings and dealings of sociological bindings, much less the extant standards of nature or its moral couplings.
A metaphysics is also inescapably an ethical endowment, care has been taken to steer away from prescriptive positions yet a truly judgement-free work of reasoned logic is normally considered incomplete.
A scrupulous reading of the text that follows involves drawing straight lines of judgement suspended in lonely comprehension of the atomic import of each axiom and its parts.
One was put to this task by the revered doctor with the brief of constructing a best-in-class mode of philosophical transport, and while political persecution and paucity of time were certainly prohibitive, one believes to have fared well in arranging a meeting ground for his excellent framework.
Lastly, one begins with thanks and gratitude to Dr. Manhattan for once again giving one the opportunity throw some light on the farthest corners of knowledge.
Atmaram Dutt
Dec ‘66