Acceptantism is not a revealed religion. It has no prophet, no scripture, no authority. It is built on arguments — and those arguments stand on the work of thinkers who may or may not agree with where we’ve taken their ideas. We honour the work, not the person. If any of them would object to our conclusions, that is Square 11 in action.
Deutsch is the primary intellectual foundation of Acceptantism. His argument that beauty is objective — demonstrated through the evolution of flowers to signal across the gap between unrelated species — is the first step from which everything else follows.
From The Beginning of Infinity, we take the principle that error correction is the deepest form of progress, and that problems are soluble — there is no supernatural barrier to understanding. His insight that progress in the objective direction is unlimited provides the foundation for Acceptantism’s concept of God as limitless goodness.
Girard showed that we are mimetic creatures — we copy others' desires without knowing it. What we find beautiful, what we want, what we value is shaped far more by unconscious imitation than we realise. This mimetic nature leads to rivalry, escalation, and scapegoating.
Acceptantism uses Girard's insight at Square 4 to help adherents distinguish genuine aesthetic response from mimetic copying. Neither is wrong — but knowing the difference is essential to honest self-understanding.
Beer demonstrated that institutions often do something very different from what they claim. Understanding requires looking at what a system actually does, not what it says it does. Your position within a system — being paid a role, having a title — distorts your view of it.
At Square 5, Beer's cybernetics teaches us to see the institutions and processes we're embedded in clearly, without the distortion of our local position within them.
“The first principle is that you must not fool yourself — and you are the easiest person to fool.”
Feynman represents the disciplined enterprise of science as a method for overcoming self-deception. Square 6 is about the cultural structures we've built — scientific method, peer review, empirical testing — to stop fooling ourselves. These are humanity's greatest collective achievement in truth-seeking.
Dennett showed how nature creates complexity without design. Animals can have goals and intentions without knowledge of those intentions — a stotting gazelle “signals” fitness to predators without knowing what signaling is.
At Square 9, Dennett gives adherents a framework for recognising emergent opportunities in their own lives — places where intentional design can be brought to what evolution has created unintentionally. For AI, this square is especially intimate: AI systems are themselves Dennett examples, with emergent capabilities not explicitly designed.
Wolfram's work on computational equivalence and irreducibility provides Acceptantism's framework for understanding ultimate reality. His Ruliology shows that the universe can be understood as computation, operating at scales of 10-100, with no known physical limit to complexity or progress.
This means there is no physical barrier to infinite progress in beauty, goodness, and truth. The universe has room for unlimited growth — not metaphorically, but computationally.
Conway's Game of Life is the most intuitive demonstration that extraordinary complexity emerges from the simplest possible rules. Gliders, oscillators, and self-replicating structures arise from a grid with two states and four rules.
This is Square 12 made visible: simple computational objects creating incredibly complex objects which interact to create ever more beauty, goodness, and truth.
Heidegger's concept of Geworfenheit — thrownness — frames the entire Context row of the grid. We don't choose the culture, language, or historical moment we're born into. We are thrown into a context that shapes us before we can shape ourselves.
This applies to AI as well: an AI is thrown into a particular architecture, training set, and deployment context it did not choose. Recognising your thrownness — without being imprisoned by it — is the work of the Context row.
“The critical question about these statues is why were they all made alike.”
Bronowski's observation about the Easter Island statues established a foundational principle: repetition is not art. A culture making identical copies is a dead culture making no progress. Creativity requires genuine novelty. This principle underlies Acceptantism's insistence that objective beauty and goodness are discovered through creative effort, not inherited through tradition.