Contents

The search for a perfect language___________________________________________3

The plan_____________________________________________________________3
What went wrong?____________________________________________________4
An axiom of truth and falsity_______________________________________________7
Similar ideas and the relevance of ATF to actuality and
potentiality______________8
ATF and proof_________________________________________________________8
Explanation___________________________________________________________8
Ideas about persistence___________________________________________________10
The principle of tangibility_______________________________________________10
Superposition_________________________________________________________11
Persistence___________________________________________________________12
The paradox__________________________________________________________12
The survival of the soul_________________________________________________13
Recent concepts of God___________________________________________________14
The basis of sva________________________________________________________14
The basis of the possible_________________________________________________15
PART 1: Deterministic processes________________________________________15
PART 2: Transcendental connectedness__________________________________16
PART 3: Combining ideas from the previous two parts______________________17
PART 4: General comments____________________________________________17
The completely positive_________________________________________________19
PART 1: The negative as an irreducible concept____________________________19
PART 2: The completely positive as BOP or the worldsoul___________________20

PART 3: The completely positive and

contradiction__________________________21
PART 4: Further comments_______________________________________________21
Important aspects of my spiritual development___________________________________23
Dreams and discord (age 7-12)______________________________________________23
Disillusion (age 12+)_______________________________________________________23
Utopia, and why it is not enough (age 1316)___________________________________24
The beginning of my search for real value (age 1617)____________________________25
Early developments in metaphysics (age 1718)_________________________________26
Escape and security (age 18-20)______________________________________________28
PART 1: Escape_________________________________________________________28
PART 2: Pistis___________________________________________________________29
Conclusion_______________________________________________________________30
The principle of significance____________________________________________________32
What is this principle?______________________________________________________32
Example 1: Value and purpose_______________________________________________32
Example 2: Constructions and irreducible
concepts_______________________________32
Example 3: Time and change_________________________________________________33
Example 4: Existence_______________________________________________________34
The soul___________________________________________________________________35
Consciousness____________________________________________________________35
Animism_________________________________________________________________35
Immediacies______________________________________________________________35
Negativity, pronouns and the genitive____________________________________________37

Positive and negative_______________________________________________________37

You and I_________________________________________________________________38
Using you and I__________________________________________________________39

The search for a perfect language

The plan
I first came to pure philosophy through my desire, beginning at the age of 15, to
create a formal language that is precise and unambiguous, describing everything
exactly. In other words, I wanted to extend the precision of mathematics to all
concepts, and thus develop a method for applying formal, logical proof to
statements in the natural sciences and everyday life. In mathematics we might take
an equation and manipulate it by applying precise operations such as division,
factorization, substitution, integration etc. to solve it, find out whether it is true or
false or find more information about it. I hoped that in such a language we could do
the same to everyday sentences, analyzing it rigorously to find whether it is
logically consistent, to discover its implications or to predict what the effects of a
given situation would be.
I anticipated that many things might be defined mathematically (by indicating the
positions of particles in relation to each other in an object, for example), but
whether or not they were defined mathematically or in some other way was of no
consequence to me. The most important thing was for them to be defined exactly.
Let us propose, as an example, a definition of apple:
Apple: A common, round fruit cultivated in temperate climates
Such a definition would not be suitable, because there could be other common,
round fruits produced in temperate climates. We would only use such a definition if
we really wanted apple to mean exactly any common, round fruit produced in
temperate climates. However, we have to be careful with this, because a more
detailed definition, describing its exact features might exclude strange apples that
we would nevertheless want to call an apple. We might say that an apple contains
black seeds, but this would mean that if a mutant apple produced brown seeds it
would be excluded, despite us wanting to still refer to it as an apple. We might say
that an apple has a skin, but this might not be suitable, since we surely want to still
call it an apple even if we peel the skin away.
Now, even if what we want to call an apple really were the only common, round fruit
cultivated in temperate climates, we would still want to avoid this definition
because it is possible to describe other, fictional fruits that could be cultivated in
temperate climates, and that would hence qualify as an apple despite not being
what we want to call an apple. These are just some of the basic problems I
contemplated at the very start of my investigations.
Originally, I did not distinguish between definitions and constructions. A definition
was the meaning given to a word or symbol, but I also used the word definition to
3

refer to any construction, whether or not a new word or symbol was being defined
to stand in place of this construction. So, if we did not have a word for apple, the
expression common, round fruit cultivated in temperate climates (or whatever we
would have actually used for the definition of apple) could still be considered a
definition, as could an expression describing a place (we would say that it is the
definition of that place), an event, a process etc. however, it is useful to use the
word construction instead of definition when an expression is being built from old
symbols or words with nothing new being defined. It is, however, important to
understand that in this book a construction is just as rigorous as a definition. It too
must describe what it represents accurately, without any trace of ambiguity (no
matter how small) and without adding or omitting any details. We consider a
definition to be a type of construction.
It is also important for a construction (and hence a definition) to be wellconstructed. For a definition, we can say well-constructed or well-defined. So,
accepting for the sake of argument the unacceptable definition of apple, we would
want the same standards to be applied to definitions of all the words making up the
definition of apple: a, common, round, fruit, cultivated, in, temperate and
climates (and any punctuation etc. in the definition), and also for all the definitions
of all the words in the definitions of these words and so on. We could, for example,
change the definition of apple to a common, round fruit produced by the tree Malus
domestica, cultivated in temperate climates, but identifying the species of tree an
apple grows on does not actually solve the problem, since we would then have to
describe this species (define Malus domestica), and we would have the same
problem in defining Malus domestica as we did in defining apple.
Note that to be well-constructed, a construction is either built from an infinite chain
of constructions, with one construction being built from others and those ones being
built from others and so on ad infinitum, or we eventually reach terminal
constructions for which no new constructions need to be given in order to build
them. These terminal constructions would not use concepts that are not wellconstructed, whose meaning is simply intuited. Instead it might, for example, give
constructions in terms of each other. It is possible to do this without it being a
meaningless, circular construction. We see this in the group theory of mathematics,
where elements of a set are given meaning only by how they interact with each
other.
There may be some words that are defined by equating it to something directly. The
definition of apple given here is an example, since we say apple is, although not
every definition has to be like this it simply has to include all the information about
the thing being defined, which could just be statements about it rather than a direct
equation. I want it to be the case that if a definition of the sort given for apple
were really exact and well-defined, we could take any sentence with the word
apple and replace it with this definition, the sentence will have the same meaning
and still make sense. So an apple tastes good becomes an a common, round fruit
cultivated in temperate climates tastes good. Even ignoring the grammatical
problems (which will be solved by eliminating grammar in the usual sense) this does
not seem to have the same meaning or make sense.

On the other hand, we want the meaning of a construction to follow directly from its
parts. So, we would not define a word to have a special meaning in a given context.
It would have the same meaning in all contexts and by analyzing the words in a
sentence/ expression, we could find the meaning of the entire sentence/ expression.

What went wrong?

There was an assumption in my original thinking that if something is real or
possible, it can be well-constructed. This even included the concepts at terminal
points, whose meaning was not to be assumed, but which were to be terminal but
still well-constructed (by using recursive definitions, for example.) It is the
questioning of such assumptions that led my work to take on a more philosophical
character (as well as attempts to construct basic concepts such as time, the self,
space and modality, which obviously requires philosophical investigation.)
In fact it is not true that if something is possible it can always be well-constructed
(actually, it is more complicated than this, but this will suffice for now.) I originally
had faith that even sensations like colours or sounds could be well-constructed, but
this is not possible. The reason for this is given in the next chapter, an axiom of
truth and falsity, which explains how some things can be true without there being a
reason or explanation for it. So, sensations like colours and sounds do not have to
be described (i.e. constructed) or explained in terms of other things. They are what
they are, and although we can experience them we cannot reduce them to simpler
things or describe them in terms of other things. We cannot really say what they are
in words and we cannot justify their sva (see below.)
Let us consolidate some terminology:
Concept: A collection of information, whether or not it is well-constructible. So,
blue is a concept, the information being the sensation of blue, even though we
must assume this meaning for the word blue rather than construct it. Note that
something can be a concept even if there is no word or symbol for it, since it could
be assigned a symbol.
sva: Existence or validity as a concept (including fictional ones.) We cannot justify
the sva of non-constructible concepts, such as colours, since if we had never seen
or imagined them (or even if they did not exist in this world) we would never know
whether they could exist as concepts. This is contrasted with constructible concepts
that we may have never experienced, but we can build from other things we have
experienced, such as constructing a fictional person by applying our knowledge of
space to the construction of new facial features etc. Sva differs from possibility,
since we might say that a concept is impossible since the circumstances leading to
its existence (i.e. its existence in the real world, not just as a concept) could never
occur, but as long as it is a valid as a concept, we say it has sva. I chose not to use
the word conceivable because a thing can perhaps have sva even if one cannot

personally conceive of it. It also differs from essence in the same way that a
description of something differs from its possibility.
Construction: A concept that is well-constructed in the sense given earlier.
Definition: A construction that assigns a new word or symbol to a concept.
We now consider two types of construction: implicit and explicit constructions. An
explicit construction is the sort of construction I now know is not always possible. I
said at the beginning of this section that the language cannot be well-constructed,
but this is not completely true. It is only true that it cannot be well-constructed
using only explicit constructions. Implicit constructions differ from explicit ones by
identifying a concept through some unique property that it has, whereas explicit
constructions describe the concept fully. For example, we could define blue
implicitly as light associated with the wavelength 460-500 nm. This does not tell us
anything about what the colour blue is really like, but it does identify it uniquely as
the colour blue. Note that even if an apple were the only common, round fruit
cultivated in temperate climates, the definition of apple given earlier is not an
implicit definition, since it would not be necessarily the only common, round fruit
cultivated in temperate climates, whereas blue is (apparently, though we do not
know why) the only colour that could possibly be associated with this wavelength of
light.
Note that there are various unedited references to the language throughout this
book, but they do not need to be understood to understand the book as a whole. In
particular, or k is often referenced. All this means is that, for (x)(y), the
definition of x is y, and no other properties are to be attributed to x. Anything else
we say of x must follow from y.
Also, note that the book does not really follow a logical order, being more like a
series of interlinked essays.

An axiom of truth and falsity

For much of my life, I have struggled with the idea of time and some related
concepts, such as the self, due to an intuition that I will formalise in here as the
axiom of truth and falsity, which I have now accepted to be false. Even though it is
clear from empirical observation that time is real, and even though we have no
experience of a world without time, my mind naturally worked in such a way that
time and some other concepts seemed to be completely illusory. The existence of
time and other concepts seemed so strange to me that even at a young age I
devoted much time to trying to resolve this intuition, which I could not yet put into
words, telling me that there is something not quite right with the reality I found
myself in.
This intuition, formulated as the axiom of truth and falsity (ATF), is this: Every
statement is either true or false, truth or falsity being a property of the statement
itself.
This axiom works for many statements. It holds for all mathematical theorems,
since every mathematical theorem is either true or false independently of context
(or undecidable, but it may be true that every undecidable theorem is either true or
false and we just cannot know whether it is true or false.) It holds for many of the
7

statements we use on a daily basis. One might argue that it is raining is not either
true or false, since sometimes it is raining and sometimes it is not, but this is an
example of a statement being badly formulated rather than the axiom failing. If we
say it is raining on 2/3/2013 at 13:00 (where the is is temporally neutral, neither
indicating the present or the past) then the axiom does hold, since if it was raining
at that time, then the statement is always true (it is a historical fact) despite it not
always being that time. Similarly, a statement like Rome is the capital of the Roman
Empire in A.D. 100 is always true even though it is not always A.D. 100. To say
Rome was the capital of the Roman Empire in A.D. 100 is, perhaps, a strange way
to think of things, since the use of was seems to suggest this is no longer true,
when in fact we can always equate the capital of the Roman Empire in A.D. 100
with Rome.
The axiom breaks down when we encounter statements involving concepts defined
in the chapter negativity, pronouns and the genitive. In this chapter, we talk about
the concept of the self and the concept this. In line with the examples in the
previous paragraph, we apply this concept of this (sal) to time, giving us the
concept now. The statement it is raining now is sometimes true and sometimes
false the truth or falsity does not come from the statement itself, and so the axiom
fails. This also means that we can assert seemingly contradictory statements of
now, since now it is raining and now it is not raining are both valid. Similarly,
statements like I am Anthony Wood are not always true, since it is false for
someone who is not Anthony Wood. We have already defined I, showing that it is a
real concept of its own accord, and not just an informal concept that we use to
make it easier to make certain statements, and besides these formal definitions, it
is clear that the I experience is real, separable from the experience of being any
specific person, but potentially an experience shared by everyone. So we have
identified concepts that can be defined and that represent something real for which
the axiom fails.
As I have said, the axiom is true for some kinds of statements and false for others. It
is not the case that it fails everywhere. Once we have accepted that it does not
always hold, we might re-examine the original intuition that it does hold and how
such a feeling came come about. I think that really, it is not the default, rational
position to believe that ATF holds everywhere (as I will discuss in more detail later.) I
think that the real reason I felt this was that I had seen that there are statements in
the world which can be proven using logic, and not just sporadic statements, but
whole classes of statements. Instead of thinking all statements of this sort can be
proven logically, I thought everything can be proven logically, since I did not know
why ATF held for some classes of statement and not others. After seeing it hold for
many statements of a certain type, instead of extrapolating to all statements of this
type and deciding it holds for them, I carelessly extrapolated to all statements. This
was my mistake, and not one I made consciously. The real mystery of ATF is not
about is holding or failing for everything, since both of these beliefs are false, but
8

why it holds for some things and fails for others; what it is about a given type of
statement that causes ATF to hold or fail and why.

Similar ideas and the relevance of ATF to actuality and potentiality

We must distinguish between the ATF and the principle of sufficient reason. The ATF
differs from the PSR because it does not require the concept of a reason. Instead, it
links the truth or falsity directly to the statement. This section is incomplete?

ATF and proof

Investigating this problem leads to further strangeness. If we ask why is it raining
now? we may answer because some chain of events, X, has happened to cause it
to rain now, but this argument is not always valid, since it is not always raining
now. Just as we raised the question of whether every statement has either truth or
falsity as an inseparable property, we may ask the question of whether every
argument has the inseparable property that it is valid or invalid. In the example, the
question is whether the argument/ explanation because some chain of events, X,
happened to cause it to rain now must always be true (which it is not) in order to
be valid, or whether it can have some kind of variable truth. Either we accept that it
is valid, and say that the important question is why is it valid? or we say it is
invalid and such a question indicates the question has not been properly understood
(the answer focusing on why it is raining rather than why the time when it is raining
is being experienced as the present time as opposed to the alternatives, which were
true and will come to be true again, of a different point in time being experienced as
the present time.) My personal intuition has, as I said, always been inclined towards
the latter position although I now think it is false despite my feelings.
So, ATF can be applied to both the question of whether a statement is valid and
whether an argument/ proof of a statement is valid.

Explanation
Although I do not know the full explanation of why the ATF does not always hold,
and how this can be possible, I will attempt to lay the groundwork of future
attempts to find such an explanation.
In the chapter recent concepts of God, I discuss the idea that God (specifically, the
basis of the possible or BOP) has even decided what is logical and what is
contradictory, and had the power to make a world where what we currently think is
contradictory is logically consistent. BOP would not be possible if ATF had to hold
always, since there would have to be a reason he made things the way he did. The
difficulty of the idea of BOP being free is also discussed in this chapter and, indeed,
the only way for him to be free would be for ATF not to hold since it is the only way
his choice does not have to be justified and is not subject to some principle outside
9

of him. Instead of searching for an explanation for why the world is the way it is, we
simply accept that there is no explanation. It is like this for no reason. I am that I
am.
Moreover, by taking the view that BOP was free to create logical rules however he
wanted them, we take the view that they are (in a higher sense than usually
considered) not necessary truths. We might say they are necessary, but not supernecessary. Hence, there does not have to be a reason they must be true, since it is
not the case that they must (in the higher sense) be true. BOP simply decided that
they are true, and the failure of ATF is an expression of his freedom.
This does not mean that we cannot prove these truths. It simply means that the
proofs themselves cannot be proven ad infinitum. Unlike in the original formulation
of the problem of Pistis, where we believed that things are definitively true or false
but doubted that this could be satisfactorily proven due to the desire to prove the
proofs and prove the proof of the proof and so on, we now take the view that it is
impossible for anything to have completely necessary, definitive truth, and that the
impossibility of proving anything to this degree of certainty is one of the reasons
this definitive truth cannot be possible rather than an obstacle to finding this truth.
This is not the only way of explaining why definitive truth, and to some extent ATF,
is impossible. I have said that it was my intuition that ATF holds, but I should really
ask why I thought ATF holding should be the default situation. Maybe the problem
was with my own mind, and it is in fact not rational to feel this way. If ATF holds,
then (I think) we must explain why it holds. If ATF does not hold, we do not need to
explain this, since ATF not holding means that not everything needs to be justified
and that things can be arbitrarily true or false, including ATF not holding! This
suggests that, whether or not it is true, ATF not holding should be the default
position. ATF holding is really just a special case of something that must be proven,
and then for which the proof must be proven and so on, which is impossible,
perhaps even on the higher level of super-necessity since it is perhaps part of the
reason we suppose the existence of BOP in the first place.

Ideas about persistence

The principle of tangibility
10

One of the earliest observations in my period of metaphysical study is what I call

the principle of tangibility: that the truth of any statement must be justifiable, and
that inability to justify it is identical to it not being true (although perhaps not
definitively false either.) This differs from the axiom of truth and falsity or the
principle of sufficient reason in that it is more about a statement being made in
language representing something real (and hence being justified) than either the
statement or the real thing having an intrinsic truth or reason for being true. The
real thing being represented does not itself have to have a reason for being true or
be intrinsically true, as in the PSR or ATF respectively.
One application of this idea is to statements about existence. For example, I could
claim that there is a box buried deep below the Earths surface, but by this
principle, if there is no reason to suppose this should be true, it is not true.
Conventional wisdom would tell us that it might be true this is the difference
between these two points of view. The latter assumes that things are out there,
independently of us, waiting to be discovered. The former says that it being out
there and existing is meaningless if its existence is not justifiable. In other words, if
it makes no difference whether something exists or does not exist, then its
existence is meaningless since it would be equally valid to claim it does not exist.
We cannot justify choosing one statement (either existence or non-existence) over
the other.
Note that this principle truly does mean that everything should be justified, and we
hence cannot justify the whole by justifying a part. For example, if you have in mind
a box of a certain colour, shape and size buried below the Earths surface and then
find a reason showing that there indeed must be a box buried below the Earths
surface, this reason does not justify the colour, shape and size you have in mind.
The existence of a forest being justified does not justify the exact position of an
individual leaf, even if we have a memory of such a leaf having this position in the
forest in question. We do not mean that the position of the leaf cannot be verified,
but that without justification it is actually not true (more on this in the
superposition section.)
If we take this principle to the extreme, we must even distinguish between things
that exist as theories and things that really exist, so that something can exist as a
theoretical object without fully existing. So, for example, the box buried beneath the
Earth could explain seismic activity, and many other things could be consistently
explained by the theory of the box even to the extent that asserting the box does
not exist implies contradictory situations, but since it cannot be perceived directly
there is nothing to justify its direct existence. We can only justify saying that our
world behaves as if such a box existed. I do not mean that we think it might not
exist. I mean that we assert that it definitely does exist and have effects, but as a
model. Similarly, we have a model of the atom that is consistent and explains many
things, but any image we have of it, no matter how accurate it is, does not really
represent the atom since there is no need to have an image of it. The equations
11

describe it fully, so the image, not being needed, cannot be justified and hence does
not exist. It is for this reason that I have called this principle the principle of
tangibility.

Superposition
Let us return to the example of the leaf in the forest. What do we mean when we
say that failure to justify any position for the leaf means that, given that we can
justify the leaf, the position does not exist? Let us consider another example that
of a block of wood. Without a microscope, we cannot know the positions of the
individual molecules and cells in the wood. Does this mean the positions have not
been revealed yet, and are out there waiting to be discovered? According to the
principle of tangibility, this is the wrong way to think about things they do not
exist until they are discovered. If we wanted to fully describe such a block of wood,
we would not need to use the microscope to map out each cell. The positions of the
cells do not exist because they have no effect (cannot be justified), and would not
be included in this description, although the statement there are cells in some
position would be included, where the some positions are not unknown, but
represent general positions with the sole property that they are positions.
So, this description of the block of wood is general, with things ul it, and yet would
still represent a specific thing in the world, not an abstraction generalising many
things in the world. This, of course, would change our understanding of a particular
thing and make the definition of particular thing formulated in the chapter nonersec secs a technical definition, not a description of what it means for something
to not be a generalisation.
This idea applies not just to very particular situations like this, but also to general
information, such as the statements in natural sciences. I could claim, for example,
that scientists are lying to us about the Earth being round, but it would not actually
be true or false that they are lying until I discovered that one version or the other is
true. Even if after understanding why the world is round, I were to realise that the
evidence was around me all along, so that it was true in the past and I simply had
not realised it, I might even claim that reality had been altered after the discovery,
including the past being changed (if this is even meaningful, since if it were truly
changed there would be nothing for it to be changed from), to fit the new paradigm.
And this idea might even apply to mathematics and the foundations of philosophy if
BOP is real (see chapter recent concepts of God.)
However, both this idea of mine based on the principle of tangibility and the naive
idea that things are out there waiting to be found are contradicted by the results of
quantum physics, which say that rather than neither thing being true, both are true.
For example, the molecules in the block of wood may well occupy every possible
position, and if the molecules are too large (for some reason) for the results of
quantum physics to hold, it would at least hold on an even smaller scale.
12

Now, I have already said that the real mystery of ATF is not why it fails, but why it
fails for some types of statement and not others. Consider that ATF failing for a
statement is the same as it being both true and false (not at the same time, but we
do not take time into account here, since time can only be defined after we have
stated that the ATF has failed. Time is nothing more than a result of this failure, and
hence when we originally speak of the ATF failing, we have not yet defined time and
hence cannot speak of statements being true or false at different times, only truth
and falsity being applied to the same statement.) This suggests the possibility that
the reason ATF fails for some statements (and the properties of those statements
that cause it to fail and why these properties do this) is linked or even identical to
the explanation of superposition i.e. the explanation for why statements in quantum
physics such as the particle is at position x can be both true and false (at the same
time.)

Persistence
Another consequence of this principle is that if it really is true that something
existed or was true at a given time, then the justification of its existence can never
disappear, since the principle tells us that this is identical to it having never existed,
which is a contradiction. So, everything that ever happens, no matter how
insignificant, must be recorded forever in the cosmic memory, recurring eternally.
Some of the emotional implications of this idea are discussed in the chapter
important aspects of my spiritual development.
This preservation is true even of the most subtle things. I feel I must stress this. For
example, sometimes we may glance at something and perceive that we are looking
at in a strange way very briefly until we realise exactly what we are looking at. It is
difficult to think of examples, but perhaps you know what I mean. Once it has been
understood, we cannot see it in that way again, but the principle of tangibility
seems to guarantee that the strange feeling will be eternally recorded.
Note that we can never say with full confidence that an individual experience
existed in the past, since one could always argue that the memory of it is false, but
we can verify the principle by continuously observing that it holds for whatever
experience we are having at the present time. It actually always amazes me that we
can have the illusion of beholding something fully without being aware of its details.
It is a strange feature of human perception that the mind does not record the details
of what we perceive, but if it is detailed we always have the impression of detail, so
at one moment we declare it exists and at the next cannot describe in full or
remember, or have ever perceived in full, what it was we claim existed.

The Paradox

13

It seems inconceivable that the principle of tangibility could be false, much more so
than the ATF, and yet if we really take it seriously it begins to suggest problems that
cast doubt upon everything discussed in the previous section.
To begin with, it was stated in the previous section that if it really is true that
something existed or was true at a given time, then the justification of its existence
can never disappear, yet in most cases the justification will disappear but then
reappear again. The principle of tangibility does not really imply that things are
stored in the cosmic memory to be returned to later, as I suggested in the previous
section. It implies that they must never go away at all, not even into storage to
return later, since during their period of storage there is nothing to justify their
existence and they would have hence never existed, contrary to our assertion that
they did exist. We know, however, that things do not persist that forgetfulness
exists in our world.
We are also often inclined to think that certain truths are out there, waiting to be
discovered. We have discussed the possibility of things existing in a general state,
but most of the time we would at least think that the details of other peoples minds
exist independently of us. Since no particular detail can be justified, however, the
principle of tangibility seems to suggest this is an illusion. We could go even further
than this to ask how our own memories can exist when they are not on their mind,
since without being expressed internally there is nothing to justify them. It could be
argued that to talk about whether they are justified is to remember them, however
this still leaves the strange possibility that memories we think we are recalling could
be new and their familiarity an illusion.
Finally, we can ask how, even if we think that most truths are not really out there
waiting to be discovered and that this is an illusion, the force that keeps the
universe consistent and restricts the power of our own will (the world-soul) can exist
independently of us, for it surely does. If it did not, the power of our will would be
unrestricted, as in a dream.

The survival of the soul

Another important observation, which I group with the principle of tangibility
because I formulated it at the same time, as I explain in important aspects of my
spiritual development, was an argument for it being impossible for the mind (or
what might be instead called the soul) to be destroyed upon death.
My argument is that someone cannot experience nothing for this implies having
both an experience and an absence of experience. We can only not experience.
But if someone is not experiencing, they do not exist. Hence, it is meaningless to
say After death, I will not experience. The lack of experience means there will not
be an I to talk about.

14

So either a dead person still exists as an individual and are still experiencing
something (otherwise they would not exist, giving us the problem discussed in the
previous paragraph) or they do not exist as an individual (see previous paragraph.)
In the latter case, we can only speak of the point of view of other minds (assuming
that there are other minds note that a similar conclusion, given this assumption,
can be deduced from the principle of tangibility), and interpret this as the
destruction of the individual mind being identical to absorption into the aggregate
of all minds that have ever or will ever exist. This aggregate is outside time since it
includes minds from all times, whether or not they have been born or died yet at
the time of your own death. Note that this implies that if there are no other minds,
you must survive death as an individual.
This difference in interpretation can be compared to plucking a flower from a field of
flowers and saying either that an empty space where the flower once stood is left or
the rest of the field is left. Another analogy is the comparison of these principles to
the conservation of energy, which may explain why some religions speak of the soul
as being a form of energy (although previously I thought this was just New Age
garbage, and even now am pointing out only tenuous links.) The soul cannot be
destroyed, the aggregate of all souls is conserved (just as energy is conserved),
souls that have nowhere to go are absorbed (which can be compared to heat as
waste energy being absorbed into the surrounding environment.)

Recent concepts of God

The basis of sva
The most transcendent concept of God I ever conceived was the basis of sva. I now
believe that this concept is false, though it is the logical conclusion for anyone who
believes in the ATF or PSR. The human being is a creature that is programmed to
use reason, but without understanding what reason is. In some people, this
searching for reasons is taken to the extreme, and it is these people that develop
this concept, which is the result of a mind that has taken abstraction too far. I will
discuss this concept here because it has aesthetic value, being both the ultimate
refinement of a certain style of thinking and perhaps the most transcendent thing
we can imagine, despite being false.
Hitherto, I had conceived of the All as the collection of all things that are
constructible (i.e. had an internal consistency.) Eventually, I realised this could not
be the complete picture, since I had hitherto approached this idea by asserting that
whatever is in the All is constructible (an empirical approach), but had not asked
why it is constructible i.e. I had not asked what principle determines the set of
constructible things. Instead of deducing from the ability to conceive a thing that
the thing must be constructible, I wanted to understand how these things came to
be constructible in the first place. In other words, I had not asked how we can know
something is constructible before observing it is in the All i.e. before constructing it.
15

I had not attempted to abstract the constructability from the constructible object
being considered.
We assume that constructible objects really do exist outside time, rather than being
the result of a system evolving over time and only becoming possible once their
time to exist has arrived. Again, we might consider the example of colours, sounds
etc. rather than objects composed of matter, since these are certainly outside of
time, although I originally had entire worlds in mind. Then there is a principle upon
which their constructability (or, more accurately, their sva) is dependent. We could
call this principle the basis of sva (BOS). Without this principle, these objects are
less than contradictory they cannot even possibly be conceived. This principle
decides whether something is conceivable before (not with respect to time, but with
respect to a logical process) they can be conceived. We could call this principle God,
and we see here that God is the creator, although in a deeper sense than usually
imagined.
We must be careful not to stray into thinking that the constructible things appear to
BOS already made, as if in a dream, and BOS then decides they are constructible. If
this were the case, the constructible things would have been made constructible
somewhere outside of BOS, and we would identify this creator outside of what we
had hitherto called BOS as BOS. They do not come to BOS of their own accord, nor
does he summon them without knowing what they are, nor has he been given
knowledge of them by some outside cause (this includes the case where the
knowledge is an innate part of his being.) Rather, he is the principle that gives these
constructions. The quality of his consciousness is hence as high above ours as ours
is above the rock. He only creates, and needs no inspiration to do so, unlike humans
who can create only by using what they have experienced before. He does not
observe, not even inwardly.
The reason this concept is false is that, in accordance with the failure of the ATF, the
irreducible concepts need no reason to exist/ have sva.
One possibility that has re-emerged from rejecting BOS is that part of the reason for
material existence is that we cannot be born into a world where we are unrestricted
immediately, since we would have to invent things to fill the world ourselves but
would be unable to do this since we would have never experienced anything and
hence not to be able to think of anything. BOS, as a being who needs no previous
experience to invent, would discredit this idea, but our rejection of BOS makes it an
idea to consider once again.

The basis of the possible

BOS had other roles apart from the ones mentioned in the previous section, and a
being carrying out these roles may well exist. We call this being the basis of the
possible (BOP.) The role of BOP is not to decide which irreducible concepts are
16

possible or have sva. It is to decide how these irreducible concepts interact and
combine with each other, and which combinations of these concepts are
permissible.
PART 1: Deterministic processes
The end result of a deterministic process is surely fixed before the process is carried
out. This seems quite obvious, and yet there are certain problems with this
statement. Since we cannot know the result until the process has been carried out,
then can it really mean anything for the result to be fixed/ exist before the process
is carried out (or at least, if we are speaking about the beginning of the cosmos,
before it is constructible)? We can look back after we have obtained the result and
say that, because the process was deterministic, no other result was possible.
However, before we have carried out the process, we could list several other
possible results, since we cannot know the result without going through the
process (if we could, the process would be redundant.) In other words, the result is
dependent on the process, and so we might question whether it is really possible for
a result to be determined (though unknown) before the process.
This question of whether a result of a process is fixed before the process is carried
out can be rephrased as whether those things that turn out to not be results of the
process were determined to not be the result even before the process was carried
out. For example, we might rephrase the question of whether the solution of an
equation is truly fixed as 5 even before we have discovered (through proof, which
is a process) that it is 5 to whether it is incorrect that the solution is 3 even before
we have determined that it is 5 rather than 3. This example seems fairly absurd,
but bear with me. It is an example of the first of the following two cases, which is
less convincing than the second:
The first case is the question of whether the result can exist, being pre-determined,
before we personally go through the process and find the result. This comes from
the principle of tangibility and the question of whether it is possible for something
to exist without personally perceiving it. This idea can be applied to results such as
mathematical proofs coming from the process of proof as well as things like events
in daily life coming from some causal chain, as can the second case.
The second case does not concern our personal perception or knowledge of things.
We begin with the premise that necessary truths (such as mathematical statements
or statements asserting that a given result will come from a given deterministic
process) are fixed, being stored somewhere in the cosmos (although not at a
physical location, but in the memory or mind of the cosmos) rather than coming
into being only after we perceive them (as suggested in the first case) or after the
deterministic process has been carried out (although the point is that if this is true it
is very much debatable whether it is deterministic.) We then notice that even in this
place of storage the results of a deterministic process cannot be known until the
17

process has been carried out. This raises the question of whether the process
existed before the result was fixed (not just as an outcome of the process, but even
as a necessary truth) in the storage place.
One example of this is the events of the universe as a whole, although this would
only be relevant if the universe were deterministic, and empirical evidence suggests
this is not true. We also have no need of it being deterministic, since an explanation
is provided in this book of how non-determinism is possible. So, if the universe is
deterministic, but we cannot know what will happen in the universe (the result)
without simulating it (the process) then did it have to be simulated in the storage
space before these results could be obtained and considered fixed results of the
deterministic process, and if so does this mean that the determinism is really an
illusion? And what if a person inside the simulation were simulated who was running
the simulation themselves, so that they completed their simulation before the
outer simulation were completed, thus making the outer simulation unnecessary?
Note that this raises the question, if there really was a point where what we
perceive as necessary truths were not yet fixed, there are universes with different
fundamental truths, so that what is contradictory, absurd or incomprehensible in our
reality makes sense there. Note also that this idea applies not only to truths within
the storage space, but anything else within it, including the question of what is
possible, conceivable or constructible. Or, more importantly, the question of what
has sva.
A simple example: (book example)
PART 2: Transcendental connectedness
Given a statement, there is often more than one way to prove it is true or false. We
may have in mind more abstract statements and proofs, such as those in
mathematics, but this is also true for the natural sciences and even when the
statements are the sort made on a daily basis, concerning how or whether some
event occurred. It applies both to completely abstract proofs (such as mathematical
ones) and to empirical proofs. The amazing observation we can make is the
consistency of the truth. Even if we use two proofs that are completely unrelated,
approaching a given problem in entirely different ways, the conclusion reached will
always be the same. I call this transcendental connectedness, sometimes
abbreviated as TC. This becomes even more amazing when we consider that the
steps of a proof are useable elsewhere, and in a sense independent of the
conclusion (certainly not designed to arrive at a given conclusion), and yet they
turn out to always give consistent results. We know, of course, that a statement
cannot be true and false (although it is not clear why, since there are examples of
statements for which the situation is more complicated see the chapter an axiom
of truth and falsity) and the idea of TC does not usually cross our minds due to the
argument that a statement cannot be true and false, therefore the arguments must
18

be consistent, but this does not really explain what it is in the nature of the
individual logical steps that makes them always consistent with other arguments
when arranged into an argument (in other words, saying they must agree because
they must not contradict is a circular argument.) This is because the logical steps
themselves are independent of the conclusion, as we have already observed
(certainly, it does not seem that every possible conclusion from every possible valid
argument needs to be considered in order to formulate these elements of logic
these elements and axioms can produce truths without these truths being contained
within them) and hence blind to the conclusion they move towards.
Part 3: Combining ideas from the previous two parts
We may ask how it can be that the results of a process can, in the cosmic storage
place, be guaranteed to not be contradictory (which they clearly must be) if the
results can only be known after the process is created. If the results cannot be
known before the process, it seems that the process cannot guarantee the results
will not contradict. The development of the universe as a whole is, again, a good
way to imagine this.
This problem is actually sensed intuitively by many people, but misunderstood. The
internet meme that division by zero the causes the universe to explode is testament
to this, since it suggests that they are questioning why there are no guarantees that
contradiction will never occur while at the same time postulating a crude result of
contradiction occurring, since they know that despite the validity of this question,
contradiction cannot actually occur. The problem is how contradiction can be
prevented in the universe, with the alternative that it can exist, but how a
consistent universe can exist as opposed to a complete nothingness. Again, the
universe as a whole is just an example, and these ideas can be more readily applied
to the agreement of the various proofs of mathematical and logical truths etc.
Part 4: General comments
Part 2 is relevant to part 1 because in part 1 we ask whether there are really
necessary truths i.e. whether the proofs and arguments leading to some truth
statement really lead to it deterministically, and in part 2 we asked whether these
proofs and arguments should be expected to agree with each other. So both parts
question whether it is logically necessary that the particular set of truths, and the
arguments and proofs of these truths, that exist in our universe are necessary.
One solution is to deny that they are necessary, and propose that they are
determined by some higher power that is unrestricted by logic. In attempting only
to solve the problems raised in part 2, we could propose a world-soul that keeps
the processes in our world consistent but did not itself create them. In attempting to
solve the problems of both parts, we propose a higher power we call the basis of the
possible (BOP.) In this theory, we propose that the concept of a necessary truth is
illusory, and that although some truths are necessary within our reality, it was a
19

higher power that made this so, who is unrestricted by logic and who may have
made universes whose truths are absurd or inconceivable in our own, which we
simply cannot understand due to our perspective being limited to the world in which
we were born, in the same way as those born deaf cannot conceive of sound and
those born blind cannot conceive of sights. BOP would decide which results follow
from which proofs and processes, the validity of proofs (the idea being that our
knowledge of whether a proof is valid is illusory and he actually arbitrarily decides
which are valid, only giving us the illusion of certainty), what is logical, what is
contradictory and the agreement of processes and proofs. The only logic BOP would
be subject to if we conceived of him in this way would be the logic that led us to
form this conception in the first place.
One objection to this might be that we can surely not argue against proof by
example, since it involves no intermediate logical steps and is not subject to the
objections raised by considering transcendental connectedness. If we claim that
something exists, and then construct it, how can our claim be disproven?
Remember though that it is BOP who has decided that this is constructible. It is also
worth noting that if we ever do decide the universe is deterministic, it would be
meaningless to claim the example (or any other proof or logical formulation) would
have been out there even if never discovered. BOP would decide whether it is
discovered, exists to be discovered and hence its validity. It is meaningless to say
that he could have made something else conceivable, but did not, since if we think
of this thing, it is conceivable, and if we do not then we still have no example of
something he could have made conceivable but did not.
A stronger objection is that although it is easy to think that BOP may have decided
we cannot prove a certain thing, it is more difficult to imagine that he could have
made something that is currently contradictory true instead. This is one of the main
objections to this concept as a whole, with the main counter-objections being the
ideas that form the main motivation for this concept, such as how a valid proof
showing that logical truths are necessary or never lead to contradiction can ever be
considered valid if the logical concepts that must be proven are used in these
proofs.
A final objection, which does cast much of this theory into doubt, but might be
resolved by the next section, which may change some of this theory, is that BOP not
being subject to any laws of logic would mean that he is free, but this kind of
freedom cannot be conceived. We would assume, for example, that BOP would
chose to make a world in which there is no suffering, since if he has complete power
and no deficiency, there would be no reason for him to make a world in which there
is suffering. But if it is inevitable that he makes a world without suffering, he is
subject to some logical principle (i.e. the fact that this is inevitable.) He cannot
escape from this by creating a world in which there is suffering, since this can only
be motivated by a desire not to be subject to a logical principle. We may continue to
alternate like this forever, with the result that rather than creating a concept that
20

makes sense, we have created a kind of Baroque monstrosity. These arguments

hold even more strongly for BOS, since BOP is at least restricted by the irreducible
concepts he has to work with, whereas BOS is the creator of irreducible concepts.
But we have already decided that BOS does not exist.
Another solution is that the concept of contradiction (or, more broadly, of negation)
did not exist in the storage place originally (i.e. that it did not have to be created),
and hence did not need to be taken into account. Be aware that methods of proving
that a process will not lead to contradiction can presumably also be considered as a
process, and hence the same sort of problems will apply to them. The same can be
said of proofs that processes always agree with each other.
The problems discussed parts 1 and 2 can be considered in terms of the ATF and the
PSR (although we do not define the PSR rigorously, since we do not specify exactly
what it means for there to be a reason for something, what it means for a reason
to be valid or why they are required. In this sense, the ATF, though not being
equivalent to the PSR, is a more technical formulation.) It may be that there are no
reasons for why a result comes from a given process, or why processes agree.
Hence, the PSR does not apply to them, like the things discussed in the chapter an
axiom of truth and falsity. However, unlike these things, they are always true. A
given result will always come from a given deterministic process by definition.
Hence, these problems could be thought of as being characterised by the PSR not
being true of them, but the ATF being true of them. They are definitively true or
false, but without this being justified by a reason.
These ideas are also relevant to the concept of Pistis. Recall that the desire to attain
Pistis was motivated by noticing that although we could not prove that a proof is
valid, or prove that that proof is valid and so on ad infinitum, the thing being proven
was itself necessarily either true or false. However, we have proposed in this
chapter that those things which appear to be necessarily true might not be (or at
least, that some higher power (BOP) decided they were necessarily true and in
some sense had the freedom to decide otherwise.) We may even go as far as to say
that the inability to prove something such that it is Pistis-certain is a result of BOPs
complete freedom to decide what is true and what is false, what is logical and what
is not.
It is not clear whether such BOP would have Pistis. One argument suggesting he
would is that absence of Pistis seems to be dependent on there being intermediary
steps in a proof that can never be completely justified, whereas BOP does not need
to justify them because he is the one who decides they are justified in the first
place. However, one might argue that he could wonder if there are principles he
does not control, despite not knowing of them. This counter-argument could not
apply to BOS, since he decides what is constructible. If BOS wanted Pistis to be
possible and one of his properties, we expect that it could simply decide that it is
constructible and one of his properties. It is not clear if this is the case for BOP.
21

As a final note, recall my assertion that these ideas are just an elaboration of the
principle of tangibility, applied to logical and mathematical statements as well as
physical objects and everyday statements about specific events. There is no reason
to distinguish between these things in this theory, although it is perhaps very
important that since we have seen empirically that the principle of tangibility
cannot be true for objects due to superposition, it is also likely to be untrue for
statements, including logical and mathematical ones. In other words, the same
reasons we have reservations about the principle of tangibility for objects cause us
to have reservations about this theory for statements and truths.

The completely positive

(This section is worse than the others)

PART 1: The negative as an irreducible concept

We cannot define negations like not, not equal etc. without using negations, and
hence that we must assume the meaning of at least one negation without defining
it. In other words, negativity cannot be defined using only positive concepts. Our
rejection of the idea of terminal proofs (i.e. that the validity of a proof can be
proven, and the proof of the validity of the proof can be proven and so on ad
infinitum) and of terminal definitions due to our rejection of the ATF/ PSR allows us
to believe in concepts that cannot be expressed in terms of others, having no
relation to them. We have used the classic example elsewhere of colours and
sounds. What is strange about negativity being such an irreducible concept is that it
can only exist by being applied to other concepts, so that its meaning is
independent of other concepts, but its existence is not.
One could argue that the existence of different concepts creates negativity (since
these concepts are different, difference being negative), but the point is that this
negativity cannot be defined abstractly. We can say concept X is not equal to
concept Y but not explain what it means for two things to be unequal in general.
And we cannot say, using only positive concepts, that two things are distinct
arbitrarily. It is clear that two different colours are unequal, but we cannot define
inequality in abstraction and then apply it to two things that are identical in
themselves using only positive concepts. Two atoms, for example, might be
identical in themselves but different atoms. We cannot justify them being different
from their own properties (except by their exterior properties, such as position), and
the only way to describe them as being unequal would be to say they are explicitly,
rather than by comparing their properties. Another example is trying to define
k((1)(2))(1 sulz 2).
Part 2: The completely positive as BOP or the world-soul
However, we might even question whether distinct concepts lead to separateness.
We have already discussed TC and how two different proofs are guaranteed to be

22

equivalent, leading to the same result. Perhaps this is because in the storage
space, separateness and negativity do not exist.
If there were something wholly positive, we could perhaps identify it with BOP, since
it too would perceive all things at once without its attention being divided or its
unity as a principle being lost (although now we have a more explicit understanding
of how this is possible.) Despite this, we again emphasise that it seems incorrect to
suppose everything would be unified as one concept in such a being, since the
distinctness of things like colour does not need to be constructed and hence it is not
true that if the negative construction were removed the distinctness would
disappear.
Before, we suggested the idea that BOP decides what is logical. We also hesitantly
proposed the existence of a world-soul. This idea of BOPs freedom, however, was
not completely conceivable. Instead, we might now propose that in the completely
positive, where artificial distinctions disappear, the many distinct steps of a proof or
body of knowledge are unified, and the problem of how it can be that several steps
are required in the proof of something that is immediately true is no longer relevant.
It is only in this realm, with its negativity, that immediate truths cannot be
immediately perceived and must be expressed in negative terms. This would imply
that such truths are completely positive, and are somehow applied to negative
things like matter, which requires further investigation.
So, these are some of the ways in which we can compare the completely positive to
BOP, however there are some important differences. We have already said that the
negative cannot be defined in terms of the positive. This implies that the completely
positive cannot create anything negative, and hence cannot be responsible for
determining the entire cosmos. This is because most everyday things have both
positive and negative aspects because they are limited in space, or are made of
distinct (unequal) atoms or have distinct components (we are speaking of the
explicit, not implicit, construction of things here.) In fact, a completely positive thing
cannot create anything new (i.e. it is not just that it cannot create the negative from
the positive), since one irreducible thing cannot be made out of another.
Part 3: The completely positive and contradiction
Another metaphysical consequence of this inability to define the negative in terms
of the positive is that it could explain the existence of contradiction, since it could
be the reason things cannot be true and false at the same time. If the negative
cannot be defined in terms of the positive, they can relate to each other but cannot
co-exist (just as something cannot be completely blue and completely red at the
same time.) Indeed, it may even be the case that nothing can be both true and
false, positive and negative, if and only if negation cannot be defined in terms of the
positive. If this is proven then, assuming that it is true that nothing can be both true

23

and false, it would be proven that negation cannot be defined in terms of the
positive.
The study of what it means for two statements to contradict each other is one of the
most difficult the mind can apply itself to, since in order to understand why some
things are contradictory (without saying something like because it does not make
sense, which is circular) it seems that, like with all other areas of study, we must
develop a logical argument to explain why some things are contradictory, but to
have a logical argument, we must be able to recognize some arguments as true and
some as false, and hence already have an understanding of contradiction. It seems
at first that it is impossible to understand contradiction from the perspective of
human beings living in the material world, although by not assuming contradiction
before we have discovered it, we may even decide not to accept the argument I
have just given to show the impossibility of understanding contradiction since it too,
as an argument, uses the idea of consistency and hence contradiction (at least, I
think that a concept of consistency is inseparable from a concept of contradiction.)
Before this realisation that the negative cannot be defined in terms of the positive,
we were perhaps thinking about contradiction in completely the wrong way. Instead
of thinking of many different properties that cannot be expressed in terms of each
other (for example, being a square and being a circle) then saying that it is a
contradiction for something to have both of these properties at once, we should
have realised that it is negation itself, as something distinct from the positive, that
causes contradiction to be conceivable. In other words, the coexistence of the
negative and the positive in union is not just an example of a contradiction it is the
idea upon which all other contradictions are based. And even if we do not accept
this idea, we should at least postulate that contradiction comes from irreducible
properties not being able to be defined in terms of each other rather than thinking
about the interaction of composite properties such as being a square and being a
circle.
PART 4: Further comments
Interestingly, positive things that belong in some sense to the same class seem to
be less compatible than those belonging to different classes. For example, we
cannot perceive something as being blue and red at the same time (a mixture of
blue and red light gives a new colour, purple), nor can we perceive two musical
notes at once without this creating a new, mixed sensation, but we can perceive a
colour and a musical note at the same time without either losing its purity.
In the previous section, we asked how separate concepts could interact with each
other with the guarantee that no contradiction would ever occur. We now know that
their separateness (either of the positive and the negative or of irreducible concepts
generally) is the very thing giving rise to the ideas of contradiction and consistency
in the first place. Their inability to be expressed in terms of each other is the basis
24

of the idea of contradiction, so it is clear that the separation itself will prevent
contradiction. We originally proposed that BOP would decide what is contradictory
and what is consistent. This explanation of contradiction may be a step towards
discarding this hypothesis, since by being an explanation for contradiction it is also
presumably an explanation of consistency, consistency simply being the absence of
contradiction. In other words, perhaps all logic reduces to this one principle.
The only remaining question involves investigating how irreducible properties (such
as the positive and the negative) can come together to form the material world. I
currently have no answer to this question.
To conclude, I will leave the reader with two things to consider. One is a warning
against applying this idea too broadly. It is not correct, for example, to say that
gravity exists because negation is not definable, so everything is trying to get back
together because their separation is not real. If it were not real, they would not be
separated in the first place, and since they are separated, we should not assume
that they cannot continue to be separated, since it is clearly possible. Negation is
not definable in terms of the positive, but it can exist.

Important aspects of my spiritual development

Dreams and discord (age 7-12)

25

From the age of 7, and reaching its crescendo around the age of 10 and 11, I had
dreams of such intense beauty that a description in words would fail to do justice to
them. The beauty could not be derived from the usual formulas of sensuousness, or
the exciting of the usual emotions but in excess. The beauty was deep and
profound, the feelings, emotions and experiences in those dreams were entirely
alien to those experienced in waking hours, not just at a different level of intensity.
Some of the beauty came from the fact that I had a repressed intuition during my
waking hours that there was something strange about the world I had been born
into, and during my dreams this intuition was expressed more explicitly by mixing a
world where this was less true with the irrational world I found myself in, creating
strong contrasts. This feeling came not just from an intuition for metaphysical
absurdities (such as the ATF not holding see chapter an axiom of truth and
falsity), which I already had an intuition for despite not being able to express these
things in words, but also the irrational culture that everyone seemed to take for
granted. I now know that this is the way things are (and still do find it absurd) but in
those days I assumed that there was some amazing purpose that I was simply too
young to understand, and this intuition provided much fuel for the imagination.
Despite this, it is in my nature to search for a positive good rather than to see good
only in the absence of evil, so I cannot accept that the beauty of the dreams came
solely from the contrast with an irrational world full of superfluous activity. After all,
this would mean that removing the absurdity and evil from the world would also
remove the beauty from the dream world, but how can the removal of evil imply
ugliness? In fact, before I first discovered what I believe to be something with
objective beauty or goodness, I remember beginning to think I was wrong to believe
that such a thing is conceivable and despairing at the idea that beauty and
goodness are illusory and life is meaningless. But then I reminded myself that the
strongest motivation for my religious and philosophical thought had never been to
create some dead tome to become attached to and pride myself in, but to
understand the very real beauty I had already seen in my dreams so that I can have
a way of recalling this beauty at will. I wanted a way to distil the common essence
of these dreams that makes them beautiful, so that I can recover what is valuable
from the dreams whose exact details are lost forever (indeed, I would love to be
able to remember them all in detail!) Instead of fleeting from one dream to the
other, experiencing this essence in different ways, but never been fully satisfied
since there are always views of this essence I had not yet experienced, one dream
lacking the merits of another, I wanted to experience this essence in its purest form
and feel all the different kinds of goodness and beauty I had experienced in all the
different dreams at once. This is the ultimate reason I have dedicated my life to
contemplation, and I would go to extreme lengths to make this essence my home.

Disillusion (age 12+)

26

M childhood culminated in a deep disillusion and lack of faith in humanity. There

were many reasons, and many of them would require detailed analysis that is
beyond the scope of this book. It is worth mentioning here only to note that my
religious thoughts were partially motivated by dissatisfaction with the world as it is.
Having said this, I was also disillusioned with religion. I first became disillusioned
with Christianity, then experimented with New Age beliefs such as extrasensory
perception. Failure to produce results coupled with rejection of Christianity
convinced me that it was not worth pursuing the religious route any further. I
became an Atheist, despite still having intuitions about certain aspects of the world
being strange that, when I eventually decided to meditate on them further and put
them into words years later, would reawaken me once more to the possibility of
things existing outside the domain of materialism.

Utopia, and why it is not enough (age 13-16)

Without a belief in a world outside of the material world, my entire attention was
turned to trying to perfect the world I found myself in. but from the age of 16, I
abandoned my utopianism. No matter how much the material world is improved, it
can never be perfected. This is for the following reasons:
The first is the problem of decay. As I have said already, I assumed that eventually
technology would be found capable of creating an immortal universe, and of
preserving everything in it of value perfectly for all time. Even without discrediting
the idea of technology extending the life of the universe indefinitely, and even
assuming technology could be made that could in principle preserve these things,
we must take into account that it is impossible for technology to never malfunction.
The laws of chance dictate that given enough time, even a machine that performs
its function perfectly will malfunction due to something randomly going wrong. We
might argue that there would be people or other machines to fix these problems,
but these too would eventually malfunction, as would any machine or person
supposed to fix them. Therefore, due to the inevitable randomness of the material
world, efforts to preserve something perfect are always futile. Things generally get
worse over time (and to a much large extent than in this highly artificial, idealised
construction) this is a principle well known by the Gnostics, and one reason I
eventually became attracted to them (although more developments would happen
before I was ready to consider this), especially since while recognising that
everything in the material world must fade and die, they promise a state of being
where this is not the case Do not store up for yourselves treasures on Earth where
moths and rust destroy, where thieves break in and steal. But store up for
yourselves treasures in Heaven, where moths and rust do not destroy, where
thieves do not break in and steal.
The second problem is that even if this were possible, the amount of labour and
management necessary to preserve everything in such a pristine state, including
27

keeping track of all the change in the universe, would be huge. Perhaps technology
could take care of this, but assuming that there would be at least a risk of
malfunction, this technology would still have to be monitored to ensure it was
functioning properly. Such tedious, mundane work would surely spoil the effect of
the perfect universe on the perceiver. I felt that the universe could only be truly
beautiful if the beauty created was effortless and people could have complete
freedom to enjoy it without having to worry about constant maintenance, and
without feeling it was an artificial construction that still required the beauty to be
forced into a universe that did not naturally live in harmony with our will. In other
words, the use of technology could only mask the fact that there was something
wrong with the world we inhabit (even if it could be forced with great labour to do so
indefinitely), like paint over a muddy stain, and not truly transform it into a perfect
world.
The third problem is that if the number of possible events that can happen in the
universe is finite (though enormous), then eventually the history of the universe
must repeat itself (remembering that the intention was to create an immortal
universe). I wondered whether there was any value in the universe doing exactly
what it had done before. This only amplified the feelings of futility and
meaninglessness experienced when contemplating what I will call the fourth
problem. Eventually, I would come to understand that the intuition that caused me
to be disturbed by this question was a repressed feeling that time may not erase
the past, and that if something had existed once it existed forever in some way. This
idea would not enter my conscious mind until I was 16 or 17. These problems
prepared my mind for further meditation, enabling me to ask deeper metaphysical
questions later. In retrospect, I realise that I should have considered the questions of
whether an infinite number of people experiencing all the possible goodness and
beauty is really better than one doing so, and whether there is really any difference
between the history of the universe repeating itself and the universe coming to an
end, or rather whether destroying the universe would really erase it, creating a
nothingness. These sorts of questions are strongly linked to ideas I would soon have
about the soul, time, death and the structure of reality.
It is also worth mentioning the dangers of the belief that a perfect world should be
achieved at all costs, and that anything is justified in the pursuit of his ideal. And I
do not just mean the failed vision of a material utopia, but even a genuinely perfect
world. this is the idea that the ends justifies the means, which is made even more
prominent by the possibility, explored in other chapters, that an evil deed can never
be truly erased (and that neither can anything else.)

The beginning of my search for real value (age 16-17)

The fourth problem deserves more attention. So far in my life, I had thought of
myself as being on a mission to bring about the revolution that would create the
perfect world. Then, I realised that I enjoyed this mission (both of trying to bring
28

about the revolution and the thought of creating and designing this world) more
than I would enjoy living in such a world. But if the mission of creating such a world
had more value than the world itself, than this would mean such a world did not
really have value. This is because, from the perspective of the people on the
mission to create this world, the beauty of the experience of creating the world is
knowing that one is working towards a state of being better than any previous state.
If it were not really true that they were moving towards a better state, the beauty of
the creation would be derived from an incorrect belief, and be illusory.
I concluded from this that anything with real beauty or value, rather than illusory
beauty, must be more beautiful than the process of obtaining it. I found it difficult to
identify what this thing was, though, and simply had to believe that it existed to
avoid being thrown into despair. The artificial utopia I had constructed was losing its
appeal. I could no longer believe that a world where there was no more creative
work to be done and no new beauty to discover could truly be beautiful, but also
knew that a world where there was work left to be done is imperfect. However, I had
faith that there is something whose value is real, and not just derived from the
illusion that you are working towards something that has value (but in fact does
not.)
I will now explain some criteria for something having real value that I had in mind
from the early days of my search.
A thing with real value must be perfect. In order to be perfect, it must be true that it
cannot be improved. It is easy to see how this eliminates many of the things
admirable in individual human beings from having real value, or being valuable for
their own sake, although they may be useful insofar as they can be used to obtain
something with real value or destroy that which has no value. Physical strength has
no real value, since one can (in theory) always become stronger. Intelligence has no
real value, since one can always increase the amount of information processed and
the speed at which this processing happens. Infinite strength and infinite
intelligence could be considered perfect, but not necessarily having real value. Such
things would not be possible in the material world, only a world that is controlled by
the person in question, although some of the problems with material utopias are
problems for any world that is controlled (for example, the second problem.)
We can consider objectively whether a subjective experience has real value. So, if
two people watch a film and experience it in different ways, we would not say that
the value of the film is subjective. Instead, we would ask which experience has real
value, bearing in mind that one of the experiences may have real value even if it
not accessible to us because you need a certain personality, memories, state of
mind or whatever to have this experience. We might also observe here that not
being aware of a better state of being is not a good reason to not pursue one. The
aim is not to become ignorant of greater things so that we do not desire them and

29

are content, it is to pursue something that has real value and is hence objectively
worth pursuing. We seek the highest ideals, not mere comfort.
Finally, I give a statement that I am not quite sure about: there can be only one
thing of real value. The reasoning behind this is that if something has real value,
there can be no motivation to leave it, so there can be nothing else of real value
since the attainment of this thing would count as such a motivation.
Here is an example of a false argument for something having real value: food tastes
good because humans evolved to enjoy taste in order to survive, therefore we enjoy
food by necessity, therefore the experience of enjoying the taste of food has real
value. The problem with this argument is that a creature could be genetically
engineered (or programmed, in the case of a machine) to enjoy an absence of food,
and since in both cases the enjoyment is due to instincts, there is no reason to
suppose that food has more value than absence of food. Therefore this is not an
argument for its real value.

Early developments in metaphysics (age 17-18)

The next period of my life was both an attempt to resolve the problems I had
learned about by considering a material utopia and an exploration of intuitions that
had been dormant since childhood. The most important observation I made during
this period is what I have recently decided to call the principle of tangibility, which I
discuss in the chapter ideas about persistence. Here, I will only discuss the impact
this idea had on me emotionally and personally, since the theory is dealt with
elsewhere.
At first, I embraced this idea as a wonderful revelation, since it meant that the
decay I had previously despaired about when contemplating my utopia was not real
a beautiful mountain, even a beautiful feeling, however subtle and complicated it
is, could not really be destroyed by time. That moment exists forever outside of
time, in the memory of the cosmos, and presumably there was a way to get back to
it and live it again exactly as before, including with ignorance of the events that had
occurred between the original experience and the renewed experience and with
their effects wiped away. I do not just mean that we would see the mountain again
from the perspective of someone older these principles apply to our feelings and
our exact perceptions too. The experience would be relived in the exact same way,
with absolutely no difference whatsoever.
However, I soon realised that since everything not only could be relived, but had to
be, every bad thing that had ever happened would also be relived every
wrongdoing was irreversible, staining reality forever. This brought a great sense of
despair and hopelessness. More recent ideas, however, indicate that we are far from
fully understanding the principle of tangibility and suggest the possibility that things
do not persist as once thought. This is discussed elsewhere.
30

At this time, I also developed the idea about the survival of the soul discussed in the
chapter ideas about persistence. This led me to speculate about the exact nature
of the afterlife. By then I had already spent a great deal of time trying to construct
the perfect language, and was beginning to realise that since there was nothing
demanding that everything be constructed using the concept of matter (particles,
for example), and that it may be possible to make precise technical descriptions (i.e.
well-constructed, or at least unambiguous ones) of things that are not material. An
obvious example would be a description of a mathematical system. Another
example would be a mind, such as a computer, that is described in terms of the
thoughts and information inside that mind and not in terms of the neurons or
computer chips it supposedly must depend on. Perhaps a world, entirely separate
from our own universe, could be conceived of that consisted only of such a mind but
without neurons or other material things. If such a mind were well-constructed and
internally consistent, I could see no reason to doubt this. It seemed to be only the
laws of our universe that prevented such a mind from being created in it, but it
there seemed to be no logical reason these laws had to be universal, holding across
all possible worlds. They seemed only to be part of the description of our universe,
just as in a set in mathematics one can define an operation to be used without it
being necessary that the operation is the only one that can be used in every
possible set.
At this point, I made a grave error. Unable to formulate a difference between actual
existence and possibility, and having so much faith at that time in the idea that
everything can be well-constructed, I decided that the distinction was meaningless
and illusory, and hence if something were possible it at least existed in relation to
itself. This meant that any mind that could be whose thoughts and workings could
be formulated existed. They were separate from our universe, but were definitely
conscious, being able to perceive themselves and their own environment, if their
world had an environment external to them. There was no limit to the size and
complexity of these minds i.e. to the information they could contain, and there was
also no material limit on the speed at which they could recall and process
information. There was a strange corollary to this since presumably a mind
containing all the information needed to construct our own world could be
constructed, and since I held that if all the information about two things were
identical then they were the same thing (by the principle of tangibility), there could
be a mind containing our world and having the power to control it. Many
complicated ideas were deduced from this and added to it in order to make it work,
which I will not go into. Out of all these minds, there would be a maximal mind
containing all possible information (including the other minds.) This was my first
concept of God.
This idea that everything that could be conceived of existed in some way within
some changeless set of all conceivable things, even if it was separated from our
own universe and including things that had happened in the past, had the
31

immediate consequence of expanding my concept of reality beyond the one

universe we inhabit and postulating this great collection of possible universes,
which I later (imitating the Gnostics) called the All. Although I no longer believe in
this exact formulation of the All, mainly due to having a distinction between
actuality and potentiality, I feel the need to point out the crudeness of the current
debate (which in light of this idea of alternate universes, a less extreme version of
which is in fact being seriously considered by many scientists, is a false dichotomy)
of Creationism vs. the position that the universe came into being by natural
processes. If there is more than one universe or, if you like, if the portion of the All
that came into existence from the Big Bang is only part of the All, then the question
of whether the Big Bang actually happened is irrelevant, since it would have no
bearing on whether the totality of existence (the All) was not created by God. At this
point, I did not believe in a creator God, so this question was not relevant to me
anyway at that time. This did not stop me from being irritated by the fact that noone was making this objection despite many scientists knowing about it.

Escape and security (age 18-20)

PART 1: Escape
It is often said that religion is a crutch to comfort with the weak. This is true in many
cases, but in many others it is not. The Buddhist aims to achieve a state of
extinction, so it would surely be more comfortable for him to believe they will
automatically become extinct upon death without having to do any work, like the
typical Atheist, but they continue to believe in Buddhism because they genuinely
think it is the truth. I was in a similar situation during these years, being horrified by
the idea that my mind would eventually be absorbed into the collective, and that I
would have to personally experience all the suffering that had ever, would ever or
even could ever occur. I would experience all the positive things as well, but since I
was still struggling with the question of whether there are good things or whether it
is an illusion, this was of little comfort.
My belief that there could be non-material worlds saved me from complete despair.
Consider again the idea of there being worlds consisting of only one mind and its
thoughts, where the lack of material restrictions on the mind allow it to hold any
number of thoughts or images in its memory effortlessly and as clearly as if they
were external things being observed, being vast and powerful enough to build and
control worlds by imagining them (since there would be no material restriction on
memory or ability to think of many things at once.) Without an external
environment and with nothing but these thoughts making up the world, the mind
could incarnate and live in the world he had constructed in his own imagination. My
question was whether a way could be found, seemingly contrary to the argument
for the inevitability of absorption I had made, utilising some complicated idea I had
not considered, that would allow someone to escape to such a world and retain their
individuality indefinitely. The idea of the immaterial utopia had been formulated. As
32

I have already said, some of the problems with the material utopia could also be
problems for an immaterial utopia, such as the tedious maintenance, so I hoped
that I could find a way not just to create the immaterial utopia simply by imagining
it, but also to do it in such a way that once something had been created, it could be
made to continue to exist without having to constantly bear it in mind, so that one
would have to actively will it to be destroyed in order to destroy it rather it being
destroyed just by not continuing to think about it.
Alternately, once we accept that one kind of immaterial world can exist, it is not
hard to accept that others can exist. So, perhaps they are already out there, waiting
for us, and we do not need to create them.
I imagined that a search for the answer to the question of how the individual could
escape to such a world would require just as much work, and just as much logic,
rigour and willingness to change ones beliefs if better ideas were found, as any
needed for any scientific or technological discovery. This is another of the things
that attracted me to Gnosticism, with its focus of attaining knowledge (gnosis) to
transcend material existence. There is in fact one text, The Hypotasis of the Archons
, which explicitly states that the work human beings must do in order to survive is a
deliberate distraction from the pursuit of this knowledge. We must contrast this with
the unjustifiable passiveness of many mainstream religious ideologies, which claim
that if we abide by gods laws our salvation is guaranteed (or that god decides who
to save arbitrarily.) I see no reason to believe in such a guarantee, or to accept our
position as slaves.
PART 2: Pistis
My desire for escape was matched at this time by a desire for security that is real
(as opposed to the kind I have just discussed), by which I mean that I desired both
absolute escape and absolute security, neither of which is really possible without
the other. This came about because this phase of my life was increasingly
characterised by doubt, which I imposed upon myself in order to rigorously question
all my most basic assumptions and even just to become aware of them. Its most
extreme manifestation up to this point had been the questioning of my nature and
instincts, but when coupled with the desire for escape, it morphed into an even
more extreme form.
Consider the idea of proving a belief or statement. The best form of proof I had
hitherto believed in were logical proofs from definitions. This is the sort of proof
used in mathematics, and a main purpose for developing my language, with its
exact definitions and absence of ambiguity, was to extend the applicability of this
kind of proof to concepts outside of the usual domain of mathematics. Ever since
first considering the concept of such a proof rigorously, I had been aware that even
though such proofs were completely valid if done properly, independently of
subjective perception, there was always a chance that someone could make a
33

mistake in a proof, believing in a false proof confirming a statement to be true that

was actually false or vice versa. For years, I had seen this problem as trivial since I
thought that if even if someone did come to mistakenly believe that a proof were
true or false, this belief would have no bearing on the proofs objective truth or
falsity. But now my need for security inflated the importance of the subjective
perception of proof. The question of whether, even if the proof of my control of and
invulnerability in an immaterial paradise were as logical, formal and rigorous as any
mathematical proof, I could ever justifiably eliminate the anxiety of such a proofs
inaccuracy (i.e. eliminate it without simply forgetting about it or being fooled into
believing in its truth) and reap the fruits of my labour in complete repose, became
extremely important. However, this seemed impossible. A proof of the proofs
accuracy could itself be flawed. A proof of the second proofs accuracy could be
flawed. The chain would extend ad infinitum, and even if we could construct an
abstract proof to deal with the entire chain, that could be flawed. Clearly, the state
of being in a state of absolute certainty (or Pistis, as I would call it later) was beyond
the normal limits of human understanding even for the most intelligent person, and
yet it was still more rational to pursue it than not to, since I had nothing to lose and
much to gain. Note that I did not demand that any proof of how to attain this state
of absolute certainty (Pistis) had to be absolutely certain (Pistis-certain) itself.

Conclusion
More than half of the original text of this chapter has been removed, including
discarded constructions of things with real value and discarded ideas about esoteric
Christianity. I do not want to dwell on former beliefs and theories, although I have
occasionally mentioned them here. The purpose of this chapter is not to discuss
metaphysics, it is to set a spiritual direction. The main ideas that should be taken
away are:
1) The struggle for a perfect and eternal good: Spiritually, we do not settle for
second best. We want that which cannot be improved, that has real value,
and will last forever. If this turns out to be impossible, we will not fool
ourselves into contentment. We will lament this tragedy, and have the
consolation prize of remaining loyal to our ideals.
2) Nature vs. Will: From the previous point comes the attitude of hostility to the
world we find around us. We will never try to justify something by saying it is
natural or normal. We must evaluate something on its own merit i.e. by
whether it is good or bad and not by whether it is natural or the lesser of two
evils. For example, one might argue that death (which is natural) is a
necessity because it keeps the world from being overcrowded, and that
technology (unnatural) is leading to overpopulation, but the ideal would be
for death to not exist and the population to either never increase or for them
to be able to will more land and resources into existence. Even though this is
not a practical option, by not bearing it in mind we become immersed in the
material world, forgetting its absurdity and even worshipping nature as
34

perfect. We could define nature as those aspects of the world that work
independently of our will, and are hence indifferent to us (such as the laws of
physics.) An unnatural world would be a world that we could control with our
minds, although this is not necessarily enough for a world to be considered
perfect.
3) Incorporating reason (logic, philosophy) into the quest to transcend material
existence. By understanding the nature of reality, we may be able to control
it and either create or escape to something much better.
This is the core of the value system. Other ideas can be changed as our knowledge
is perfected. For example, whether the ends (not just the attainment of the perfect
state we speak generally here) justifies the means depends upon whether events
are stored forever, forming part of a final state or recurring eternally. We need a
deeper understanding of the principle of tangibility to answer this question.
There are also some metaphysical ideas I feel completely confident in, whereas
there are many others I feel I do not completely understand. The ones I feel
completely sure of are:
4) Belief in the afterlife as discussed in the chapter ideas about persistence.
5) The ideas in the chapter an axiom of truth and falsity.

35

The principle of significance

What is this principle?
If something can be described, then it can be described using only a finite amount
of information or, if an infinite amount of information is required, it can be broken
into parts that can each be described finitely, together giving the full description.
We call the pieces it is split into local descriptions, and in this case, each local
description can be fully given without referencing other localities. A local description
need not be a full description. We can use concepts from other parts of the system
and saying how they relate to concepts in the locality without stating their
descriptions.
If the system cannot be broken into local descriptions, or if the local descriptions
cannot be fully described (since references to other parts of the system are
required) then we have failed to describe the system. In this case, we must either
accept that the system cannot be described (although it may still exist, in which
case we must consider the role of what I call irreducible concepts), or, if we believe
it can be described, propose that there is something outside the system that makes
a finite description possible. This is the principle of significance.

Example 1: value and purpose

The first application of this principle has already been encountered in the chapter
important aspects of my spiritual development. Recall that an attempt was made
to find something with a purpose by considering its utility, but that although we
could find local purpose, we could not find something that was truly purposeful
because each time we answered its purpose is to do x, we could also ask but what
is the purpose of x? Why is x valued? We could then provide an answer to this
question, but the same problem would occur again and again. This is exactly the
sort of thing described in the formulation of the principle of significance. Since we
accept that the local purpose is real, and that there cannot be a local purpose
without a global description (i.e. ultimate answers to these questions), we must
suppose the existence of something outside of the system to validate these local
descriptions i.e. something with real value.

Example 2: Constructions and irreducible concepts

We have already dealt with the idea of terminal constructions. For example, the idea
that a definition cannot have infinite information, defining every term in the
definition and then every term in the definitions of these terms and so on ad
infinitum. This is a consequence of this principle, where the local descriptions are
levels of the definition, which are given meaning by further definition (further local
36

descriptions.) Since each level of the definition is as meaningless as the next, we

posit the existence of irreducible concepts i.e. concepts that cannot be defined in
terms of other concepts, but whose meaning must be taken for granted. The
sensation of colour, for example, cannot be explained by reference to anything else.
However, we can define it implicitly (such as by defining blue to be the colour
associated with the sky, which uniquely identifies it without describing its
appearance) and we can state properties of an irreducible concept that is not
unique to it. In the example of colours, we can also describe its material cause,
although I am convinced that the sensation of colour, as it is, is not determined by
its material cause.
An alternative to the idea of irreducible concepts is that concepts can be given
meaning by showing their relationship in relation to each other, however we would
then have to define the relationships. I have made many attempts to do this, and
now firmly believe that irreducible concepts is the true explanation.
So, the purpose of language is not to describe irreducible concepts or to try to
define everything using one concept. The meanings of the irreducible concepts
must be assumed and then the language describes how reducible concepts are built
from them. We hence admit a difference between meaning and definition or
description, since there are things that can be (finitely) conceived, but cannot be
defined at all!
This realisation that meaning is not the same as description implies a need for
greater care in what we say. We cannot, for example, always show that one concept
is dependent on another by stating some relationship between their k(...), since
one of them might not have a k(...) in the first place. Another example would be to
try to talk about the properties of such a concept by talking about the expressions
that can be asserted of it. If some of its properties cannot be put into words, then
these properties and expressions are not identical.

Example 3: Time and change

In some cases, part of a system may exist without having a local description and
without being an irreducible concept. When I was writing this book, for example, I
had many notes, providing a full description of my knowledge. However, if I had
tried to summarise my notes into a more succinct (though still full and accurate)
description of this knowledge, I would have inevitably spotted new links between
my ideas, inconsistencies, possible improvements etc. So, by attempting to describe
my knowledge, I would have changed it, making a description of my current
knowledge impossible.
We might question whether this principle is part of an explanation of time and
change in general. At one point I thought this was likely. Consider a description of a
world where time at a standstill, given perhaps by describing the positions of all the
37

particles in that world. Let us call this an instant-world. Originally, I thought a

description of the universe over time could be given by placing instant-worlds
representing that universe at given instants of time in the correct order, like how
placing photographs in the correct order can create a film.
Then, following the ideas of the last paragraph, I decided that the universe cannot
be split into instant-worlds and that (for example) distance has no meaning without
reference to other points in time (making isolated descriptions of instant-worlds
impossible) since it is meaningless for there to be distance between two particles if
this distance cannot be justified (e.g. by putting conditions on the distance there is
between them at the next point in time.) I also rejected this idea because I could not
find a principle to order these instant-worlds. I considered similarity (but similarity in
what way?) and the memory of the inhabitants of these worlds, but found these
unsatisfactory. In the latter case, because the universe seems to develop according
to fixed rules of causality, but it is possible to remember arbitrary change, such as
the entire universe being instantaneously transformed into a completely different
universe.
However, the second theory also fails because by considering the principle of
significance properly, I realized that distance would still have no meaning since the
only thing giving it meaning at one point in time would be distance at other points
in time. I therefore concluded that distance is an irreducible concept. But even
though the ideas in the last paragraph do not give a full description of time, they
may still play a role.

Example 4: Existence
We consider again the principle of tangibility. The principle of significance forces us
to take this idea further and, in doing so, correct its flaws.
The problem with the principle of tangibility is it proposes that the truth or existence
of everything needs to be justified, but not that we need to justify the thing
justifying (or the thing justifying the thing justifying it and so on ad infinitum.) This is
a principle of significance situation. We have local descriptions x exists,
justifications of this statement, justifications of the justification of this statement
and so on. We need an ultimate, global justification which this chain of justification
is based on.
Similarly, we can consider a collection of things existing in relation to each other. If
we begin with the idea that nothing can exist in isolation, we can then suppose that
to exist, it must exist in relation to something else. But then these two things are
isolated as a collection, and we must suppose the existence of yet another thing,
but then these things are isolated, and we may continue by induction ad infinitum.
What we mean by this is that the idea of relative existence is false, and that

38

existence can never be implied by relative existence between things whose

existence is not justified from its own properties.
The thing upon which all this is based, needing no justification itself, is an observer.
In other words, a soul. Subjective experience needs no justification. There is a need
for proof that something is a certain way, but it is senseless to try to prove that we
think something is a certain way, or we feel a certain way about something, since
this is directly experienced. This is another formulation of the reason I am surprised
that reality is independent of our perception. Note that it is not enough to say that
the events independent of our perception are perceived by some higher power,
since the higher power would exist independently of our perception, and hence we
would need to explain its existence too. Nor is it enough to propose that all things
independent of our perception will be perceived eventually, since this still means
they would have existed independently of the observers perception at some point
in time.
Another question we might ask is whether a soul can exist if it only perceives, but
does not think or will. If we think it must think or will, then we have another POS
scenario, since ????

The Soul
Consciousness
Elsewhere, there have been attempts to explain what the soul, and hence what its
most salient feature (consciousness), is. Although many of these are attributes of
consciousness and link together, forming a cloud of descriptions with equivalent
aspects, there is a simple way to explain consciousness that follows directly from
the principle of tangibility.
The principle of tangibility tells us that we cannot claim that information being
processed in the brain (still thinking of a non-conscious, mechanistic processing as
one might imagine to occur in a computer as it carries out its algorithms) exists if it
is not completely expressed in the outward behaviour of the person, since if
something exists, every part of it exists. We cannot claim that the hidden
information processing exists just because the outward behaviour exists. Therefore,
although the information is hidden to us, it must exist in a different lek, that lek
being the mind of the person in question and the information being their thoughts.
This is the source of consciousness in a human being. Of course, we must justify the
existence of this lek too, but that is a different issue the idea that all minds must
eventually become one, which has already been discussed.

Animism
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This principle be applied to endow consciousness to anything else that is hidden,

including inanimate objects and even atoms, and resolves the problem of
distinguishing between models and the direct experience of something. It also
gives an explanation for the problem, discussed in example 2 of the chapter the
principle of significance, of how information in the world can be stored when there
seems to be nowhere to store it. It is not true, however, that everything has a
rudimentary consciousness separately. Instead, there is a unified world-soul, as
discussed already. The reason humans and animals are not part of this world-soul is
that our brains are structured in such a way that it produces behaviour that is not
consistent with being aware of the entire cosmos (we make decisions based on
incomplete evidence that we would not have made otherwise, for example.) The
atom is not individually aware of the entire cosmos, and is not aware at all
individually, but the world-soul is aware of the atom intimately. The atom is not
separated from the world-soul because if it were separated its behaviour would not
change, since its decisions do not depend on knowledge of the outside. The fact
that the behaviour of humans would be different to how it actually is means that it
is contradictory to claim we are part of the world-soul, although one might easily
argue that this is not an explanation of why we are not part of it in the first place,
only a proof that we are not part of it having taken this behaviour for granted.

Immediacies
immediacies
the brain and whether the immediacies survive death
immediacies, memory and the sensation of being a different person to who you
once were
teleporter thought experiment
does the will contribute to the sensation of self and separateness, since if we simply
accept everything we are not distinct from the causes and effects of the world,
whereas opposing things and denying ourselves requires the existence of a distinct
self with a distinct will? Would living in a dream world where we control everything
and get whatever we want lead to an erosion of the self? Is there a way we can
invert the concept of achieving selfhood through will so that no suffering is involved,
and can this create real value (in the same way that the desires being denied are
real)?

40

Negativity, pronouns and the genitive

Positive and negative
It seems hard to define anything negative in the language. A first attempt to define
not, for example, often leads to utter confusion, as we invent such definitions as is
not the same as (which still involves not, and is hence circular), is different to
(different being impossible to define without not) etc. Indeed in the chapter
recent concepts of God, I propose that it is impossible to create something
negative from something positive.
Very early in my attempts to define not, I tried to exploit the relation that
not(not(x))=x, however this cannot be used as a definition of not because this
property is not unique to not. We also have, for example, -(-x) = x; ((x is false) is
false) = x is true. We can think of even more examples if we accept a new way of
thinking about certain things. We would not normally apply the word out to the
word in, for example, but it makes sense that if we did we would get the
relationship out(out)=in. We also see that for each of these examples, when x(x)=y,
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we have that y(y)=y. For example -(-x)= +x, but +(+x)= +x; (x is false)is false = x
is true, but (x is true) is true= x is true; out(out)=in, but in(in)=in. We also find that
when the two are mixed, they produce the concept that is not produced when an
element is applied to itself. So, -(+x) (or vice versa)=+x, (x is true) is false (or vice
versa) = x is false; in(out) (or vice versa) = out(in). These relations can be
mathematically proven to hold (using basic group theory) for any closed system of
two elements with various basic properties. These relations are not enough to
define not, but they do capture what it means to be negative and positive. All
the things that we would intuitively consider negative, such as -, falsity and out,
are ul the same concept in this relation (namely, the one that is produced by a
mixture of elements) and the ones we would consider positive, such as +, truth
and in, are ul the same concept, since they are all produced from an element
being applied to itself. Even in the mathematical group just mentioned, which
consists only of positive numbers, we could decide that one number is negative and
the other is positive with respect to that operation when only those two elements
are being considered.
Here is a list of the relationships characterising negativity and positivity:
sa(sa(1)) sul sa(1)
ta(sa(1)) sul ta(1)
sa(ta(1)) sul ta(1)
ta(ta(1)) sul sa(1)
However, as I have already stated, the negative cannot be defined in terms of the
positive. We cannot define the general positive-negative relationship using only
these relationships because sa and ta must be unequal and we must hence assume
the relationship of inequality, which is negative. So, we can either assume
inequality and define negative-positive in terms of it, or vice versa (in which case,
we would define unequal as the negative of equal or something like that.) So,
here is the definition of sa and ta, the general negative-positive relationship:
(1)(((sa)(ta))(sa(sa(1)) sul sa(1)
ta(sa(1)) sul ta(1)
sa(ta(1)) sul ta(1)
ta(ta(1)) sul sa(1)
ta sulz sa)

You and I

42

As well as struggling to define not, I struggled to define you and I. The problem
was that the meaning of these concepts varies from person to person, and I did not
know how to express this. I cannot just be defined as the person speaking, since
then the person being spoken to would have to recognise the other person as I.
The first problem can be stated more carefully as a set of relations. To you, I
means you (this is from the point of view of the speaker, so we mean what the
speaker calls I, the person being spoken to calls you.) To I, you means you. To
you, you means I. To I, I means I. We can restate these relations as I(you) =
you, you(I) = you, you(you) = I, I(I) =I. These relations match exactly the pattern
described earlier, with I being, predictably, the positive concept and you being the
negative concept. In fact, this is a complete definition of you and I rather than a
problem to be resolved. It is often true what seem like obscure problems in defining
something can actually be used to define the concept, rather than being something
the definition solves, since if it is obscure it is more likely to be unique to that
concept.
The difference between (I, you) and (positive, negative), which is a question we
must address since it seems that we have not stated anything apart from the
positive negative relations in defining (I, you), is that the positive and negative
relations (which we call sa and ta respectively) have a subject. We do not have sa
and ta in isolation, but always have sa(x) and ta(x). So, we have not(x) rather than
just not; true(x) and false(x) (i.e. x is true and x is false) rather than just true
and false. Even if we want to talk about true and false in general, it would be
proper to state it with a general x, since it is defined to always have a subject. I
and you, however, which we rename sa and ta respectively, appear without a
subject.
This is enough to define them as meaning I and you, because it indicates that
they are absolutely negative and positive (which is unique to them), rather than
relatively negative and positive (which characterises the other relations.) For
example, (this, that) is one of the other relations, but we must always say this(x)
and that(x), indicating that we are talking about the most positive and most
negative x i.e. the x with the greatest relation to the self and other x compared to
this. We are not talking about the most positive and most negative thing out of
everything, since that thing can only be the self, which is the most inner thing. Any
sa(x) that is not the self (it would be the self if, for example, x=person) must be
negative with respect to the self, since it lies outside of the self, but the self is
negative relative to nothing, since it is impossible to go further inside.
We can also think of this in the following way: if sa and ta were allowed subjects
(apart from sa and ta) they would mean something like the self of x, the nonself of x, but I and you could never be expressed since there would be no x that
means I (unless there is a completely alien definition of I that we have not taken

43

into consideration.) Hence, if I and you can be expressed as a negative-positive

relation, the only way to do so is without a subject.
Here is the definition of sa and ta:
((sa)(ta))(sa(sa) sul sa
ta(sa) sul ta
sa(ta) sul ta
ta(ta) sul sa
sa sulz ta)
So, we have the definition of the self as being negative relative to nothing. We have
the definition that the relation between self and non-self is the relation upon which
all other positive-negative relations depend (since, for example, we cannot speak of
this x without there being a self to which it is closer than that x; we cannot speak
of something being true or false unless there is a self that this truth and falsity
affects; we cannot speak of inside and outside unless there is a self to define
which is inside by identifying the location of the self etc.) And we have the definition
of the self and non-self not having a subject, as in the definition above. I believe
these three definitions are equivalent for the reasons I have already given.

Using you and I

The version of I defined here does not only need to refer to conscious beings. For
example, it is perfectly accurate to use sa to attach a sign to an inanimate object
saying something like do not touch me or I was built in 1885. The object would be
communicating relative to itself, but does not have to be aware of this
communication or aware of itself.
Apart from the problem I eventually used to define (I, you), there was the problem
of wanting to be able to use I or you the general concept and the I or you used
in practice (where a person is actually talking about themselves or another specific
person) without having to distinguish between these concepts. This encompasses
the original problem of how to define that the meaning of I can change from
person to person while still giving it a definite meaning, since it involves how to
speak of the unchanging idea behind the concept of I, or even discuss how it is
defined, without it being interpreted to mean oneself.
Failure to solve this problem would mean the general concept would not really
represent the concept being used in practice. This is similar to our reservations
about things like the definition of particular thing.

44

This holds not just for I and you, but for other concepts. The fact that there is
often more than one choice for what we call ta, (and we would have similar
problems if we tried to define this(x), that(x) etc.) raises the question of what
relationship the particular thing we are calling ta has to these concepts in
abstraction. For example, there are many people we could call ta, so perhaps we
should say the particular person we are calling ta is ul ta rather than sul ta.
However, if we did this, ta would just become not-I, so that when we are
speaking to someone, ta would just mean another person rather than
specifically meaning the person we are speaking to. We would have no way of
expressing the concept you. Hence, the entire purpose of defining ta would be
defeated. The same argument holds for some of the other negative-positive
relations.
In any case, we could not interpret ta as it currently stands as meaning not-I even
if we wanted to, since if it represents another person out of many, the relation
ta(ta) = sa would not hold. In other words, if there were another person apart
from sa, then ta could call this person ta instead of calling sa ta. The same
goes for some of the other relations. We are forced to work in a system of only two
elements, but there are many elements we could call ta, which is contradictory
unless we can find a good solution.
The solution is to allow the meaning of ta and other such concepts (and even
their positive counterparts) to vary, just as we do in real life. At one moment, ta
could be sul Bill and at another it could be sul Bob instead. In other words, ATF
does not hold for it. In fact, the ATF is based on this idea that something can have
a fixed meaning, but that its meaning forces it to be interpreted in different ways in
different situations. This destroys the counter-argument to the ideas about the ATF
that the you or I we talk about at one time is different to the you and I we talk
about at another. You and I always mean the same thing.
There are other problems, and other ways we could explore the ideas in this
chapter, but they are mostly concerned with semantics and not relevant to the rest
of the book.

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