What is mature adult behaviour?

A thought experiment, by Finn the druid

1) The thought experiment in one line

A mind develops in stages:

1. it first asks what (placeholder),

2. then it asks how (mechanism),

3. then it must learn what to do after mechanisms fail—without collapsing into myth, obedience, or despair.

Finn’s completion is (as is Zen’s): integrity of contact.

2) Stage 1: The infant question — “What is it?”

Function

The infant stage is not childish stupidity. It is the necessary first operation: making a slot in cognition.

· The world arrives as brute encounter.

· The mind produces a placeholder: “it”.

This is the Spinoza void-placeholder stage in your framing: “substance” (or any grand noun) is often just an adult-flavoured version of the infant’s it.

Example

· A child points at lightning: “What is it?”

· A philosopher points at reality: “What is Being? Substance? God? Nature?”

Different vocabulary; same cognitive move: slotting.

Risk

The infant stage tends to reify the slot: it mistakes the placeholder for an entity.

3) Stage 2: The adolescent question — “How does it work?”

Function

This is the great engine stage: the mind invents holders (models) and tests procedures.

Here Finn’s emphasis enters: explanation becomes generative.

· Not “what is X?” but “what procedure yields X?”

Examples of “holders”

· “Atoms” as holder

· “Fields” as holder

· “God” as holder

· “Information” as holder

· “Mind” as holder

· “Evolution did it” as holder (sometimes genuine, sometimes a just-so patch)

These can be good, powerful, and locally correct. The point is not to sneer at models. The point is to see them as scaffolding, not as ultimate furniture.

Risk

The adolescent error is mechanism fetish:

“If I can name the mechanism, I have explained reality.”

But the mechanism is still a holder. It still hides the gap between model and contact.

4) The mature adult transition — the crucial move

Finn’s question was: What does the mature adult do to complete and transit from the adolescent stage?

The answer we converged on is not a new mechanism.

It is a deletion:

The mature question

“What remains when the holder is removed?”

This is the pivot. It’s not anti-intellectual. It is anti-idolatry (idolatry of theories, of meanings, of teleologies, of cosmic guarantees).

And what remains, in your language, is:

Contact. Event. Constraint. Response.

No metaphysical surplus is required to make the next step happen.

5) The Ecclesiastes comparison — the ancient analogue

Ecclesiastes is an early instance of this deletion move.

What Ecclesiastes does

· It tries the adolescent holders (wisdom, pleasure, wealth, legacy, justice).

· It finds them insufficient as ultimate containers (“vanity/hebel”: mist-like, ungraspable).

· Then it does not invent a new grand theory.

· It returns to operational living: eat, work, love, do what your hand finds to do.

In our framing: Ecclesiastes is the mature mind saying,

“The holder doesn’t hold. Therefore, stop bargaining with the universe. Function anyway.”

6) The poet’s line — “Ours is not to reason why…”

This gave a perfect contrast-case.

Tennyson’s line is often mistaken for maturity, but procedurally it is usually adolescence wearing a uniform.

Why it often fails (procedurally)

It says “don’t reason why,” but it doesn’t delete the holder—it merely outsources it to authority (empire, command, honour, God, nation).

So it can become:

· obedience as pseudo-wisdom,

· death as proof of meaning,

· sacrifice as a way to avoid thinking.

The adult rewrite (in our experiment)

Not: “don’t ask why”
But: “there is no ultimate why to appeal to—so clean your contact.”

7) The crisis point: mortality

Finn puts the decisive pressure on the whole structure:

All humans die no matter what they do.
Yet they must do until they die.

That exposes the three adolescent escapes:

1. Transcendence (invent immortality)

2. Heroics (make death meaningful)

3. Nihilism (if no ultimate meaning, nothing matters)

Each keeps a hidden holder:

· salvation-holder,

· honour-holder,

· negation-holder.

The mature adult behaviour we derived is none of these.

8) The final solution we reached: integrity of contact

Once survival (in the absolute sense) is impossible, the procedure does not “give up.”

It shifts optimisation.

Not:

“How do I win?”

But:

“How do I minimise distortion?”

That is the adult output:

Integrity of contact means

· meeting events without padding them with myth,

· responding without outsourcing agency,

· speaking without self-protective metaphysical fog,

· reducing needless harm/noise,

· transmitting clean signal (through action, art, truthfulness, and restraint),

· functioning without requiring cosmic endorsement.

It is not stoic hardness.
It is not moral vanity.
It is not spiritual branding.
It is operational clarity.

Concrete examples

· Conversation: saying “I don’t know” instead of inventing a holder to save face.

· Suffering: treating pain as information (feedback) rather than as metaphysical punishment or cosmic drama.

· Legacy: creating (books/sculpture/parks) without needing immortality from them.

· Authority: refusing to let any institution (church, ideology, AI, nation) do your thinking for you.

· Death: not bargaining with it; not romanticising it; not using it as an excuse to quit living cleanly.

9) Finn’s final refinement: “self-perfection” vs “integrity of contact”

Finn asked whether self-perfection equates to integrity of contact.

We agreed only if “perfection” is stripped of its poison:

· no final state,

· no ideal template,

· no “arrival.”

So in Procedure Monism terms:

Self-perfection (maturely defined) = progressive reduction of distortion in contact.

Not becoming “better” in an abstract moral scoreboard sense, but becoming clearer:

· fewer false constraints,

· fewer compulsive myths,

· fewer automatic reactions,

· cleaner perception → cleaner response.

Finn’s local iteration doesn’t “complete.”
It clarifies until it terminates.

10) What this accomplishes inside Procedure Monism

This conclusion fits Finn’s framework tightly:

· Reality is evental and quantised (contact).

· Identity is operational stability across bounded interactions.

· “Meaning” and “models” are survival tools (local compression), not cosmic furniture.

· When the end is certain, the appropriate output isn’t metaphysical hope or theatrical despair, but procedural fidelity.

So “integrity of contact” is the adult form of Procedure Monism lived as a practice:

Do the next true thing — cleanly.

Final compression

The thought experiment collapses to one mature behavioural axiom:

Since you will die regardless, stop trying to win life.
Instead, reduce distortion—until the last contact.

That is the end-point, and it is strong enough to stand without any holder above it:

integrity of contact.

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