The Nature of Logic

Logic is usually treated as a timeless background structure of the universe. In this paper, we advance a different thesis: logic is an engineered protocol that self-referential organisms construct on top of two more primitive operations—Name (名) and Dao (道)—in order to survive, coordinate, and compress experience. In this framework, an observer first chooses how to name the world (a map from raw states to engineered invariants), then chooses how to walk through those named states (a policy over trajectories). Logic is the meta-level protocol that filters which combinations of naming schemes and policies are admissible, and how strictly they must be enforced.