Abstract: Philosophical and contemplative traditions have produced radically different metaphysical vocabularies—emptiness and substance, God and Dao, logos and dependent origination—yet when pushed toward their limits on questions of ultimate explanation, agency, and ethical responsibility, they converge on the same underlying structural constraints. This convergence appears only after substantial refinement: after anthropomorphism is stripped away, voluntarism collapses under its own incoherence, and naïve moralism gives way to structural necessity. The primary constraint is non-arbitrariness: reality exhibits discoverable structure rather than arbitrary will, though this structure permits creative participation rather than demanding determinism. From this follow two further constraints: no absolute exteriority (a final explanatory layer wholly devoid of interiority would be explanatorily vacuous) and asymmetric agency (agents participate in reality's creative advance with varying degrees of reach and depth, and responsibility scales accordingly). These constraints function as stability conditions—frameworks violating them generate predictable instabilities that become catastrophic as power scales. The convergence of independent traditions on the same constraints constitutes evidence that the constraints track features of reality. In an era of artificial intelligence and civilizational leverage, the question of whether such constraints are real is no longer academic. Part of the Return to Consciousness research program—18 philosophical essays exploring consciousness-first metaphysics. Full project: https://brunoton.github.io/return-to-consciousness/
Bruno Tonetto (Thu,) studied this question.