Reality

Finding myself endlessly questioning the reality of all that with which I am presented, two things become clear. First, that which is true can often appear as a lie but in most cases a lie will assert infallible truth and this is in itself a key differentiator and indicator of that which can or should be trusted in life. Second, the reality of the world I exist in is positively infused and riddled with uncertainty, ambiguity and enigma which leads me not to doubt the substantive reality of this experience but rather to affirm by inverse relationship to unwavering certainty that only a truth could be quite so fragile and implausibly discontinuous or operationally incomplete.

All of which is really just a way of accepting that our world and this experience of it is real, but there is a cost. To ground reality in this way upon an empty set of irreducible enigma is to self-consciously admit into consideration that the problematically unknowable or metaphysical that forever lies beyond measurement or experience is in fact indistinguishable from the indefinitely-extensible vacuum of endless system introspection that dwells within. Lucretius wrote that only nothing comes from nothing but there are indeed different kinds of nothing, of non-entity, of epistemological blindspot and a whole (and plausibly infinite) set of abstract conceptual or logical entities and artefacts which are both indistinguishable from pure negation but simultaneously are not quite or exactly the same as it.

Such is our world, all belief and all logical fact ultimately grounded upon the presence of an absence. It is not intended to be easily understood – it exists in the twilight zone just beyond cognition and logical grammar but still represents that compelling force or vacuum that drives this whole complex and autonomously self-propagating information and energy-processing (i.e. computational) system that we inhabit and that, equally, inhabits us. The kernel of this system is logical negation.