Reason-Space

It seems/feels that when humans do something like explicit/symbolic-ish reasoning, they are trying to navigate some "space" where certain "moves" are valid/allowed/justified whereas others are not.

Assume for a moment that the following premise is true.

What is this structure?

A most naive interpretation would probably some version of platonism. There is some abstract realm of all possibilities and our universe is a mere shadow of some of them. Tegmark's mathematical universe goes even further than that, claiming that all mathematical structure that exists instantiates a "universe" (for an extremely broad notion of "universe").

I recently stumbled upon the thoughts of Wilfrid Sellars who conceived of abstract entities as (as far as I understand it) metalinguistic descriptions of the appropriate/valid/well-tested rules of thought and the various laws of nature (and maybe even more broadly, valid mathematical/logical inferences) as "inference tickets".

I am in the process of trying to deconfuse myself about the structure and nature of reason-space, so this page will likely remain quite dynamic over the next few weeks/months.