The Five Forces are about how we know. They are the lenses through which we read the world. Pulling them apart and naming them is useful work. It helps explain why intelligent people, looking at the same facts, can arrive at completely different conclusions. It clarifies your own blind spots. It teaches you to listen to people you would otherwise dismiss.
But the lenses are not the whole picture. Lenses look at something. And the question that eventually has to be asked is: at what? What is the thing the lenses are revealing? When the lenses disagree, which of them is closer to the truth? Behind the question of how we know there is the older, harder question of what is actually there.
This second layer of the framework is what I call the First Principles of Reality. There are three of them. Cause and Effect. Free Will. Uncertainty. These essays walk through each one in turn, but before that work begins, it is worth saying what First Principles are, how I arrived at these three, and why I think they belong together.
What a First Principle Is
A first principle is a starting truth. Something so foundational that everything else you might want to know rests on top of it.
The phrase comes from Aristotle, who used it to mean the unprovable, undeniable bedrock from which all reasoning has to begin. You cannot prove a first principle, because there is nothing more foundational to prove it from. You can only notice that every attempt to argue against it ends up using it. That circularity is not a weakness. It is the test. A first principle is what you cannot reason your way past, because reasoning itself depends on it.
Modern philosophers and scientists have continued using the phrase, sometimes loosely. Engineers talk about “reasoning from first principles” when they mean stripping a problem down to its underlying physics. Mathematicians work from axioms, which are first principles in disguise. Even people who would not recognize the phrase live by them. The assumption that other people are conscious is a first principle. The assumption that the past actually happened is a first principle. The assumption that words can mean things is a first principle. Every system of human thought rests on a small number of bedrock convictions it cannot itself justify.
The First Principles I am proposing here are not original to me. They are what I have found, after years of looking, to be the smallest set of convictions that nearly every serious worldview either accepts directly or quietly relies on. Strip any of the three out, and most of what we do as humans stops making sense.
How I Arrived at These Three
I did not start by looking for first principles. I started by trying to figure out which of my own beliefs would hold up.
I had gone through several rounds of losing and rebuilding. I was raised as a Christian. Then in young adulthood I became a certain kind of cultural Christian. Then spiritual but not religious. Then a Buddhist-adjacent meditator. Then someone who thought the answer was probably in some integration of all of it. Each time I rebuilt, I was looking for the convictions that survived the rebuild. The beliefs I had to keep, no matter what else I let go of, because life would not work without them.
Three convictions kept surviving every rebuild.
The first was that the world is structured. That there is a real connection between what I do and what happens next. That causes are real. That effects are real. That this is not just a story I tell myself but something I am embedded in.
The second was that I am genuinely choosing. That my agency is not an illusion the brain produces to keep me motivated. That when I forgive someone I had every reason to resent, I am doing something, not just being done. That responsibility is real, in the deepest sense.
The third was that I see through a lens. That however clear my conviction, my view is partial. That somewhere in the things I am most sure about, I am probably also wrong. That arrogance about any single conclusion is a kind of dishonesty about the human condition.
These three survived every rebuild because every rebuild needed them to even start. You cannot rebuild a worldview without believing your effort can have effects (Cause and Effect). You cannot rebuild a worldview without believing the choice to rebuild is genuinely yours (Free Will). You cannot rebuild a worldview without admitting that the previous version was wrong about something, and the new version probably is too (Uncertainty). The rebuilding itself was using these principles. I just had not noticed.
Once I saw them, I started noticing them everywhere. In every philosophical tradition I read. In every functioning legal system. In every moral framework. In every honest science. Even the worldviews that explicitly denied them (hard determinism denying Free Will, postmodern relativism denying any non-partial truth, mystical traditions denying ordinary causation) had to use them to make their case.
That is the test. A first principle is what you cannot dismantle without using.
Why These Three Belong Together
These three are not just a list. They form a structure.
Cause and Effect is about the world. It says that reality is ordered, that actions ripple forward, that what you do matters because consequence is real. It is the bedrock that makes science, ethics, history, and choice itself possible.
Free Will is about you, the agent inside that ordered world. It says that you are not just a node in the chain. You are an active part of it. Your choices introduce something new. Your responsibility is real because your agency is real.
Uncertainty is about your access to all of this. It says that even though the world is structured and you are choosing inside it, your understanding of both is partial. You see truly, but not completely. You can act with conviction, but not with certainty.
Take Cause and Effect alone, without Free Will, and you have determinism. Reality becomes a chain of events with no genuine actor inside it.
Take Free Will alone, without Cause and Effect, and you have whimsy. You become a free agent in a world where your choices have no real grip on what happens next.
Take Cause and Effect and Free Will, but drop Uncertainty, and you get a dangerous kind of confidence. You become an agent in a structured world who believes he knows exactly what the structure is and exactly what to do about it. History is littered with people who held the first two principles without the third, and most of the worst chapters were written by them.
The three principles only work together. Each one corrects what the others, alone, would distort. They are the geometry of an honest life: structured, free, and held with humble hands.
The Posture Each One Demands
These principles are not abstractions. Each one carries a posture, an actual way of carrying yourself through ordinary days.
Cause and Effect demands Presence. If actions have real consequences, then the only place where your agency is real is right here, in this moment, where the next cause begins. Living in past regret or future anxiety is not where your power is. Your power is in the present, where the chain actually turns.
Free Will demands Responsibility. If you are genuinely choosing, then you are answerable for what you choose. Not as guilt-bearing burden, but as authorship. You are writing the story whether you pay attention or not. Responsibility is just the discipline of paying attention.
Uncertainty demands Humility. If your view is partial, then conviction has to be held with care. You can believe things, even believe them deeply, but you have to be willing to revise. Humility is not the absence of conviction. It is conviction held with open hands.
Present. Responsible. Humble. That is the full posture. Not three abstract principles, but three habits of being.
How to Read From Here
The next three essays walk through the principles one at a time.
Everything Was Set in Motion (Cause and Effect). The principle that the world is structured, that you did not start your story, and that you are nonetheless one of the active causes in it.
You Are Not a Passenger (Free Will). The principle that you are a genuine agent inside the chain, and that your choices carry real moral weight.
You Might Be Wrong (Uncertainty). The principle that even your truest convictions are seen through a partial lens, and that humility is the posture honest knowing requires.
Each essay also returns, in its last section, to the relationship between the principles. By the end of the third one, the full triad should be visible. Present, Responsible, Humble. The posture I am trying to live inside.
These are the three truths I could not abstract away. They are the floor under everything else I believe. The Library closing essay, Where I Stand, is what I have built on top of this floor, in case you are curious where someone honestly working from these principles ended up. But that is for later.
For now, the floor.