Section 35 (first updated 2.03.2021)

“Onion”: The Layers of Reality

When we say that nothing is negation, Sartre understands this as the non-presence of a specific thing that is, at another point, present. This non-presence is simultaneous with presence. When a thing is present here, it is not present elsewhere—this reflects the law of non-contradiction. For example, John is here in front of me, but a few inches to the side there is not-John; rather, there is Steve. In this understanding, negation is not treated as part of the being of a thing, but merely as the presence of some other thing.

However, not-John is just as much a part of John if we consider determination rather than mere location. When John raises his hand or throws a ball, we do not identify the thrown ball as John himself, but as something John has determined through action. The action is distinct from John, yet inseparable from his agency. Nothing appears here as the domain in which John can express himself into actions that are not identical with himself.

This is why ancient philosophy understood nothing as a void. The void is not simply emptiness that contains things—that is the modern notion of space. Spatially, the void is a field lacking quantity, allowing mass to occupy positions and change location. Yet we lack an equivalent explanation in the domain of time. What substrate allows one event to be replaced by another? What allows a future event to occupy the place of a past one?

The concept of the void is more characteristic of time than of space. It refers to an internal dimension of the object that is unoccupied by any event. Just as space can be unoccupied by mass, the temporal void is free from events. Events “fall into” this void, yet the void itself remains eventless. It is always open to multiple possibilities. The object thus appears as a mediation between two dimensions of nothing, distinguished from itself and yet constitutive of it.

The object mediates between two voids:

1. An external void (space), where everything is possible but nothing is yet there.
2. An internal void (time), where everything that has occurred is fixed, but nothing new is possible.

These two dimensions converge at the point where everything possible is present, but only one thing can occur at a single time. Philosophers have described this layered structure as an “onion”: between every layer there is also a non-layer.

When one peels an onion to reach its center, one discovers that the center is nothing other than the layers themselves. This mirrors the structure of the atom and of objects in general. An atom is a body only at a certain scale; when entered or examined more closely, it becomes a spatial extension containing other bodies. (See the idea of zooming across scales.)

Every Moment in a Moment

Enlightenment—satori in Buddhism—is often described as seeing the “bigger picture,” such that the “smaller” concerns lose their disruptive force. Enlightenment is cultivated through meditation and the Middle Way, not only ethically but cognitively. Consciousness becomes centered through practices such as deep breathing, walking meditation, or endurance activity. When the brain receives an optimal level of oxygen, perception naturally broadens. This does not merely increase sensory input but enhances understanding of the relational structure through which individual things constitute a whole.

This stands in contrast to narrow vision, which isolates parts and fails to grasp their interrelations. Narrow vision sees fragments; expanded consciousness sees form.

The Case Against Reality (Evolutionary Constraint)

Evolutionary science suggests that organisms are more likely to survive when their senses are limited to a narrow range of environmental features. This is counterintuitive, as one might assume that perceiving more of reality would increase survival. In practice, the opposite is often true. Organisms survive best when their perceptual systems are tuned to specific, relevant features of their environment.

This implies that an organism’s conception of reality produces its effective world. An organism living beneath a rock experiences only what the rock discloses; in this sense, it is protected from dangers outside that domain. A praying mantis does not exist within the reality of a pill bug. Excessive light blinds; excessive sound overwhelms. Thus, organisms regulate reality through selective perception, primarily via the nervous system.

Evolution appears to begin with organisms possessing the narrowest possible perceptual worlds. As life evolves, awareness broadens. Nature and its organisms co-develop: there is no sharp distinction between organism and environment in early life. Some organisms, such as fungi, blur the line entirely—they are environments in biological form.

Time, Linearity, and Duration

The notion of linear time is an evolved and acquired conception. Linearity organizes discrete moments into a continuous duration, rendering the beginning of one moment and the end of another indistinguishable. Duration makes successive events appear as a single ongoing occurrence. This is why time feels like forward motion while simultaneously appearing static: things change, yet the present always seems the same.

The present moment is experienced as continuity, not as a sequence of isolated instants. In this sense, every moment contains every other moment—every moment is in a moment.

Footnotes

1. Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness — nothingness as negation internal to being.
2. Aristotle, Physics IV — the void and the problem of place and change.
3. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time — temporality as the condition of possibility for events.
4. Nāgārjuna, Mūlamadhyamakakārikā — emptiness (śūnyatā) as relational, not nihilistic.
5. Donald Hoffman, The Case Against Reality — evolutionary arguments for perceptual limitation.
6. Henri Bergson, Time and Free Will — duration versus spatialized time.

Tesseract: The Structure of the Present

The present moment can be understood as a tesseract of every possible moment. Sensation limits this complex structure by abstracting a single moment from it. Each difference within an event can be perceived only one at a time. From the observer’s perspective, a single event occurs at a single moment: when I am sleeping, I am not playing sport. Experience appears this way because the moment one inhabits is the limit within which an event can occur. For a different event to take place, one must occupy a different moment.

In an infinite state of time, all events exist simultaneously—not as successive moments, but as moments occupying the same space instantaneously. In such a state, nothing could be distinguished. Because there are infinitely many possible events, or differences within the same event, the rate of conception exceeds the rate of conscious processing. In other words, the mind can conceive far more than it can explicitly understand. To cope with this excess, the mind collapses an infinity of differences into a general narrative, producing a coherent experience from which meaning can be drawn.

The discreteness that distinguishes events for conception—or the conception that discloses discreteness—is filtered out and experienced as continuity. What appears as duration is, in fact, an immense compression of differences into a single flowing moment.

What Is an Event?

An event is not merely something that happens within a perceptual or conceptual reference frame, such as a car passing by or a thought arising in the mind. An event is something that is arrived at, not spatially but experientially. When we say we are “going to an event,” such as a party, we do not mean merely traveling to a location—parties can happen anywhere—but seeking a particular experience. The event is what is to be drawn from the occasion.

What is conceived into being and what happens are, in this sense, the same. An event is not accidental to its location; rather, the entire situation leads up to the event. One does not randomly arrive somewhere and then witness an event; the conditions converge so that the event may occur.

For a car passing by to constitute an event, it must be conceived and understood as such. Within the same reference frame, a small insect may also be present, yet if it is not conceived, it does not constitute an event for that observer. Once it is conceived, however, it becomes one. This reveals the active role of consciousness: it does not merely receive what is already given but seeks what it finds.

If everything were already fully given, then what consciousness seeks would reflect its own orientation or desire. In this most general sense, desire refers not to craving but to directedness or intention. Aristotle famously wrote that “God desires pure contemplation,” using desire to denote the movement of intellect toward form.[^1]

From another perspective, the insect is an event—for its predator, or for itself. Even without an external conceiver, the insect conceives itself insofar as it perseveres in its being. An event, then, is an occasion of novelty or significance for some center of experience. Everything is an event for something.

Every single thing participates in the whole of reality as an event.

The Tesseract as Temporal Geometry

A tesseract is a hypercubic, grid-like structure—an extrapolation into higher dimensions. It is often said to represent five-dimensional perception, allowing one to see past, present, and future simultaneously. Such illustrations are abstractions: they depict how an infinity of possible moments might appear “from the outside.”

In reality, there is no true external vantage point. What the tesseract symbolizes is a single reference frame layered with infinitely many moments occurring at once, differing only slightly from one another. The mind filters this flux by selecting an instance. This instance is not a portion but a momentary stabilization within the flow. Because perception passes through countless instants at great speed, these instants appear as one continuous moment in motion.

Where Is the Tesseract Located?

The idea of a tesseract raises the question of location. Idealism locates this infinite possibility within the mind, or claims that the mind is its source—what Alan Watts famously described as “behind your head,” akin to a blind spot or uncertainty.[^2] Materialism, by contrast, locates possibility outside the mind, in the configurations of matter in physical space, with consciousness emerging as a product of material arrangements.

Both views capture part of the truth, but not equally. Idealism is fundamentally correct; materialism is locally correct. Idealism is correct because the further a potential moment is from direct sensation, the more abstract it becomes. It has no measurable weight, length, or depth. This abstraction aligns closely with how time functions: objects may be separated in space yet share the same time.

Sharing time is not merely a matter of clock synchronization; it implies real physical relations. Quantum entanglement, for example, shows that objects sharing a common origin or structure can remain correlated across distances.[^3] Changes propagate like ripples in water: the greatest effect occurs at the point of impact, diminishing outward.

Time physically bounds events and affects objects, yet its properties are not directly measurable. We measure objects, not events as such. Events—like ideas—are tangible only insofar as they exist and communicate meaning. Even physical quantities are abstractions whose significance lies in interpretation.

Materialism is correct because experience requires limitation. To extract anything from infinite possibility, consciousness must narrow its focus to a particular moment embodied in an object. Sensation performs this narrowing. Feeling and understanding arise by isolating one phenomenon from the totality. If everything breaks through at once, concentration collapses. In biological terms, this collapse is death. Sensation thus serves as a center of preservation.

Consciousness and Infinity

Infinity is neither solely in the mind nor solely in physical space. Both are expressions of a single continuity of duration. Within this continuity exists a concentrated point—a hyper-particle of awareness—that can rest on one aspect at a time while retaining the ability to shift anywhere. This transcendental capacity is consciousness.

As a meditative exercise, one may look outward at an object, then turn attention inward to the act of looking itself. Between these poles lies a middle point where internal and external dissolve into a single phenomenon. This midpoint reveals that mind and object share the same continuity of being.

To conceive time as merely abstract risks neglecting the concrete reality of events: contact, friction, heat, cold, emotion, creation, and destruction. The traditional philosophical distinction between thinking and feeling—as though humans think while animals merely feel—fails to recognize that feelings are forms of thought. Emotion is rationally structured and thus open to study, as psychology demonstrates. Feeling is not opposed to reason; it is one of its modes.[^4]

Footnotes

[^1]: Aristotle, Metaphysics, Book XII — intellect and contemplation as the highest activity.

[^2]: Alan Watts, The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are — the “blind spot” of awareness.

[^3]: Einstein, Podolsky, and Rosen; Bell’s Theorem — nonlocal correlations in quantum systems.

[^4]: Baruch Spinoza, Ethics; William James, The Principles of Psychology — emotion as structured cognition.

Friction: Contact, Events, and the Emergence of Novelty

What we experience as physical contact between objects—or more generally as space itself—is the interaction between events. We often say that space is the medium in which things interact, but this merely redescribes the problem rather than explaining it. What is this medium? Space, more precisely, is the interaction itself.

To conceive space as externality already presupposes a distinction: something must be external to something else for distance to exist. Distance marks the relation between identity and non-identity—the thing and what it is not. Consider friction: friction is the resistance one surface encounters when moving over another. Resistance expresses a thing maintaining itself against what is different from it. With sufficient friction, fire can emerge.

The common explanation is that heat is produced when surfaces interact at a sufficient rate: the faster the interaction, the greater the heat. But this only shifts the question. How does heat itself arise from the interaction of surfaces? Fire is not merely more heat; it is an entirely new event. Nothing in the initial description of the two objects seems to imply fire as a necessary outcome.

Fire arises as an implicit potential within the interacting bodies. Each object already contains thermal energy, and when this energy is mixed at a sufficient intensity, fire emerges as a more fundamental event latent in both. That friction can yield fire is therefore more mysterious than it appears: something genuinely novel emerges from interaction, not merely a rearrangement of what was already obvious.

Contact in space is how events interact. To the observer, this appears as objects interacting within an event. But more fundamentally, events arise out of space itself. Space is not a container of events; it is the relational condition through which events become possible. We must walk a certain distance for a city to appear on the horizon; the event discloses itself through interaction.

Sensation, Blindness, and the Filtering of Infinity

Sensation—especially perception—filters the infinity of all possible moments into a single moment. In one sense, vision is more blind than receptive. If perception did not exclude, nothing could be seen at all; too much would appear at once. What we perceive is always a narrowing.

Yet layered onto the single moment we experience is an infinity of other moments. This totality exists outside linear time: every moment is present all at once, without past or future. Each moment is eternal in the sense that it defines itself completely and is incorruptible as that instance. What changes is not the moment, but the observer’s position within this field. As conception shifts, moments appear to pass, and objects appear to move.

In everyday experience, physical contact seems primary because it is forceful and immediate. We assume that when we act—when we tip over a cup and it falls—we are causing the event. But the action is better understood as arriving at an event that was already potential within the situation.

Will, Conception, and the Selection of Events

The idea of will—especially free will—arises from the relation between finitude and infinity. Infinity, by definition, has no limits. A finite being, however, must posit limits in order to experience anything at all. A finite being cannot experience all possible events simultaneously; experience requires selection.

Although an individual life may disclose an infinity of micro-events—eye movements, fleeting thoughts, minor gestures—only a few events rise to conscious awareness. These are typically events of intensity or significance, such as trauma or major life changes. One can only be in a car accident or be arrested so many times; these are events that stand out because they are consciously registered.

This suggests that what we identify as finite events are those that reach consciousness, while an infinity of equally real events unfold unconsciously. A question then arises: do individuals conceive certain events as possibilities before they occur, and do they in some way will themselves into these routes of experience?

If all possible events exist simultaneously at a hyperdimensional level—analogous to the tesseract—then certain routes become accessible through patterns of behavior. As long as an individual continues particular behaviors, a corresponding conception inevitably follows. By altering behavior, one alters the route through which experience unfolds.

For example, if a person develops violent tendencies in daily life, it becomes increasingly likely that they will encounter events involving serious conflict or legal consequences. That route exists as a real possibility, but it becomes actual only through sustained patterns of action. Changing one’s fate, in this sense, does not mean denying possibility, but redirecting behavior toward different possibilities.

Suppressing behavior is often ineffective, because suppression is itself a form of action. Neglecting the underlying causes of violent tendencies—such as lack of sleep, chronic stress, or unresolved emotional drives—allows them to express themselves indirectly. Psychoanalysis emphasizes that unaddressed impulses do not disappear; they act themselves out in distorted forms.[^1]

Studies in criminal psychology repeatedly show that extreme criminal behavior develops through gradual indulgence in personal vices rather than sudden decisions. For instance, Ted Bundy himself linked his violent crimes to prolonged exposure to violent pornography, illustrating that repeated conception tends toward enactment.[^2] There is no pure conception without consequence. To conceive something persistently is already to begin acting upon it.

Conclusion

Friction, contact, and interaction reveal that reality is not composed merely of static objects but of events emerging from relations. Will and conception operate within this event-structure, selecting paths through a field of possibilities. Consciousness does not create events from nothing, but neither does it passively receive them. It navigates, filters, and intensifies certain routes of becoming.

Footnotes

[^1]: Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle; Jacques Lacan, Écrits — repression and unconscious enactment.

[^2]: Interviews with Ted Bundy (1980s); see also Stanton Samenow, Inside the Criminal Mind.

[^3]: Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality — events and relations as fundamental.

[^4]: Aristotle, Physics and Metaphysics — potentiality, actuality, and causation.

Mental Disorders and Feedback Loops of Thought

Mental feedback loops are not arbitrary. Thoughts arise because they are attempting to communicate something significant. When the observer fails to properly reason through these thoughts—fails to make sense of them or to apprehend what they signify—the thoughts enter a feedback loop. They repeat themselves restlessly and do not release the observer’s attention.

At one level, this repetition functions as a survival mechanism. There is a perceived danger or unresolved condition that demands assessment. Ignoring it would be detrimental to the mind, leading to further deterioration. The repetition persists because the issue has not yet been integrated or resolved.

When the observer fails to reason adequately and therefore fails to resolve the content of thought, fixation develops. Fixation means that the same thoughts recur compulsively, eventually forming patterns associated with anxiety disorders. In contemporary culture, mental “disorders” are often treated as arbitrary malfunctions—like a broken record—whose causes are unknown or accidental. Yet it is increasingly recognized that many mental illnesses are strongly linked to physiological conditions such as chronic stress, lack of sleep, poor nutrition, and insufficient exercise. These factors generate physical stress, which is correlated with both psychological disorders and somatic illness, including certain cancers.[^1]

The dismissive claim that “it’s just in your head” ignores the fact that the mind communicates genuine problems to the individual. What is thought can have the same practical significance as an event occurring directly before one’s eyes. However, listening to the mind is not as simple as passive attention. The individual must also resolve what the mind presents, and this requires the capacity to reason clearly.

The mind poses logical challenges to the individual, and these challenges correspond directly to lived situations. How well the observer reasons determines their access to new understanding, which arises naturally when a problem is properly worked through. Resolving a logical problem is not merely a technical exercise. Logic confronts the individual with ethical questions that must be judged and acted upon. It is through ethical discernment—not mere calculation—that resolution occurs. While there may be infinitely many possible responses, what is ethical is not arbitrary.[^2]

In states of fixation, a single idea can dominate consciousness, drawing all attention and importance to itself simply because it has arisen. A healthier approach is to anticipate the spontaneity of thoughts and to meet them case by case, recognizing them as expressions of the same underlying mental activity. This is analogous to how we encounter objects in perception: we do not cling to every object that enters our visual field, but allow appearances to arise and pass while maintaining orientation toward the whole.

Footnotes

[^1]: See Robert Sapolsky, Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers, on the relationship between chronic stress, mental health, and physical illness; also contemporary psychosomatic research linking stress to immune and endocrine dysregulation.

[^2]: Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics — ethical reasoning as practical wisdom (phronesis); also Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, on non-relativistic ethical determination.

Justifying the Future Beforehand

When we ponder things throughout the day, we usually assume these thoughts are random—either recollections of the past or imaginings of possible future scenarios. What we often exclude from this view is a quality typically associated with deliberate thinking: the attempt to rationalize, understand, and judge the subject matter at hand. When we ponder unconsciously, we do not say that we are trying to understand, yet the same process of thought is occurring as when we consciously reflect and analyze.

When we unconsciously think about something in the present, the mind—acting as an efficient principle—is already rationalizing and anticipating a future event that has not yet been experienced. The mind anticipates possible futures which, although not occurring now, are likely to occur at some later point. It thinks through these experiences as if they had already happened, assigning moral or logical meaning to them in advance. In this way, when the event does occur, the mind can move through it with a certain detachment: the deliberation has already taken place in the past, and the experience is lived in the future. The future is, in this sense, justified beforehand.[^1]

Did We Choose the Time We Are In?

When it is said—whether in Hindu philosophy or other traditions—that an individual “conceived themselves into being,” or that one chooses the life one lives, a further question arises: did the individual also choose the time in which they exist? If so, why would anyone choose an earlier time rather than a later one, given that later periods often involve greater technological development and, by modern standards, a higher quality of life?

These questions rest on assumptions about time and consciousness that many ancient cultures did not share. The first assumption is that time is linear in the sense of continual progress: the more time passes, the more development necessarily occurs. While this is not entirely false, the fallacy lies in assuming that this linear progression exhausts the form of time itself. Many ancient traditions instead understood time as cyclical, where history unfolds through recurring patterns of rise, decline, and renewal.[^2]

The individual, within their historical period, is identical with the development of consciousness at that time. A person living in an earlier age embodies the consciousness of that age. From a later standpoint, one may ask why anyone would choose an earlier time, but the same question applies in reverse: why choose now and not later? Time’s developmental aspect can be understood as the drawing of a circle—the tracing of a circumference that curves back upon itself. Time, as a general form, must be circular in order to be an actualizing system. A purely linear time would be an endlessly extending line, never required to return or integrate itself, whereas a circle has a point of return.

In this sense, one chooses a time period because one is that time period. A historical epoch is defined by the consciousness of its people, just as people are shaped by the culture and conditions of their time. Both determinations occur simultaneously.[^3]

The Tesseract and Free Will

The tesseract can be understood as the domain in which free will operates to determine a finite set of experienced events from within the universal whole. Since infinity is eternal, it necessarily contains—or has “time” for—every possible movement and variation, from the smallest gesture to the most consequential action. Each of these possibilities exists as a potential instance that can be actualized.

At first glance, this appears physically impossible. If every possible action already occupies space, then there would be no room for anything new to occur. But this objection assumes that all movement is external—that one object must displace another in space. Time, however, involves another kind of movement: movement within something rather than movement across something. The sun moves within the sky; a person moves within the earth; thoughts move within consciousness. These are not displacements that require empty space in the ordinary sense, but internal differentiations within a larger field.[^4]

Free will operates precisely at this level: not as the creation of something from nothing, but as the selection and actualization of one possible path among many that already exist within the total structure of time.

Footnotes

[^1]: Aristotle, De Anima and Nicomachean Ethics, on deliberation (bouleusis) as anticipation of action; also contemporary cognitive science on predictive processing (e.g., Andy Clark, Surfing Uncertainty).

[^2]: Mircea Eliade, The Myth of the Eternal Return; Hindu conceptions of kalpas and cyclical cosmology.

[^3]: G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, on historical consciousness; Whitehead, Process and Reality, on epochs as modes of becoming.

[^4]: Henri Bergson, Time and Free Will; Whitehead’s notion of “internal relations” and “prehension.”

Formal Metaphysical Argument: Determination Through Negation and Observer Selection

1. Privation as Determinate Negation

The primary contrariety is between positive state and privation—not every privation, but that which is complete. Privation is not mere nothingness but a determinate incapacity taken together with receptive material. Contradiction admits of no intermediate, whereas privation sometimes does, because privation presupposes a subject capable of the form it lacks.

Thus, all contrariety involves privation, though not all privation is contrariety. Change proceeds only from extremes, and these extremes are determinate lacks relative to form. Even the negative is therefore a positive determination, since to lack is already to be positioned within the field of possible form.

2. Zeno’s Paradox and Becoming

The pre-Socratic paradox articulated by Zeno remains true for non-classical models of motion. Aristotle dismisses Zeno on the ground that motion can be observed, a relatively weak rebuttal; however, observation itself is already a partial resolution of the paradox. This is consistent with Aristotle’s model of becoming as the substance of being: being is not merely an ideal or perfect Form but is active and determined, not given.

If all events making up time had already happened, they would not need to exist. The past is gone; a moment cannot be re-entered once it has passed. One may recreate a similar moment, but never the same one. This irreversibility is a fundamental law of nature. Even Forms, however ideal or eternal, must be maintained through duration, having a beginning, an end, intermediaries, and a lived sense that “time is running out.”

Zeno’s paradox fails because it does not consider the nature of conception, which exists indifferently and independently from infinity as the capacity to surpass infinity by narrowing it into a particular abstraction, and then viewing each abstraction one at a time as if the whole were not immediately present.

3. Infinity, Selection, and Perspective

Instead of everything being present forever all at once, each moment compiling infinity is viewed one moment at a time for all time. This is not a denial of infinity, but a different perspective of it. Infinity as every possibility can only appear as one possibility over another for it to be all of them.

Conception latches onto a particular sequence of events and experiences the whole relative to that sequence, and the moments of the sequence relative to each other at a certain rate.

4. Observer-Relative Time and Rate

The nature of conception finds a host—for example, a man who grows up in Georgia with a particular body, health, height, and weight. So far as being that man, the entire rate of the universe accords itself to the rate of his life duration. The stars appear to move very slowly over thousands of years; seasons arrive in four quarters; durations take on a particular pace relative to lived experience.

Yet the stars have been born and have died and exist in an infinite flux between those points. This flux is not stopped in itself, but is stopped at one of its moments by the observer’s selection. This directly parallels quantum indeterminacy: a system exists in multiple possible states, but observation fixes one determinate outcome.

5. Chance, Uncertainty, and Determinate Moments

Casinos succeed because they exploit a fundamental structure of reality: chance as a state of uncertainty combined with the power to determine a definite moment within it. One moment of certainty is sufficient within an infinite field of uncertainty.

This is precisely how conception operates: it selects a definite moment from an infinite flux. It does not begin with uncertainty and proceed to certainty, but is already in a certain position mediated by uncertainty as the movement between different certain moments. This is identical with the cogito principle and with the law of entropy: uncertainty is the state between two certain systems.

6. Conclusion

Being is not exhausted by actuality, nor is indeterminacy a lack of reality. Privation, uncertainty, and negation are productive conditions of determination. Time, motion, and becoming arise through the observer’s capacity to select, limit, and sustain a determinate sequence from an indeterminate totality. This metaphysical structure finds its contemporary analogue in quantum indeterminacy and observer selection, where reality is not fully defined until a determinate outcome is realized.

The passage you quote is from Aristotle’s Metaphysics, Book X (Ιῶτα), chapter 4, in the standard Bekker numbering.

“The primary contrariety is that between positive state and privation-not every privation, however (for ‘privation’ has several meanings), but that which is complete. And the other contraries must be called so with reference to these, some because they possess these, others because they produce or tend to produce them, others because they are acquisitions or losses of these or of other contraries. Now if the kinds of opposition are contradiction and privation and contrariety and relation, and of these the first is contradiction, and contradiction admits of no intermediate, while contraries admit of one, clearly contradiction and contrariety are not the same. But privation is a kind of contradiction; for what suffers privation, either in general or in some determinate way, either that which is quite incapable of having some attribute or that which, being of such a nature as to have it, has it not; here we have already a variety of meanings, which have been distinguished elsewhere. Privation, therefore, is a contradiction or incapacity which is determinate or taken along with the receptive material. This is the reason why, while contradiction does not admit of an intermediate, privation sometimes does; for everything is equal or not equal, but not everything is equal or unequal, or if it is, it is only within the sphere of that which is receptive of equality. If, then, the comings-to-be which happen to the matter start from the contraries, and proceed either from the form and the possession of the form or from a privation of the form or shape, clearly all contrariety must be privation, but presumably not all privation is contrariety (the reason being that that has suffered privation may have suffered it in several ways); for it is only the extremes from which changes proceed that are contraries.” Aristotle, Metaphysics, trans. W. D. Ross, Book X (Ιῶτα), ch. 4, 1055b–1056a. A reliable English translation (very close to above wording) is found in W. D. Ross’s translation.

Being is not given as a completed totality but is actively determined through limitation.
Negation, uncertainty, and privation are not absences opposed to reality but are positive determinations that enable becoming, experience, and time. Consciousness (or the observer) functions as the principle that selects a determinate sequence from an indeterminate totality, a process mirrored in quantum measurement and entropy.

I. Negation as Positive Determination

Aristotle distinguishes contradiction, privation, and contrariety, arguing that privation is not mere nothingness but a determinate lack relative to a receptive subject.[^1] Not-being is therefore not external to being; it is a mode through which being is specified. A thing becomes what it is not by excluding what it could otherwise be.

Thus, even the negative is a positive determination:

• To lack a form is already to be situated with respect to that form.
• To be this event is to negate all other possible events.

Becoming proceeds not from sheer nothingness, but from structured absence—privation within a field of potentiality.

II. Zeno’s Paradox and the Nature of Becoming

Zeno’s paradoxes demonstrate that motion is contradictory when conceived as the completion of infinitely many discrete positions.[^2] Aristotle dismisses Zeno by appealing to observation—motion is evident—but this response is incomplete. Zeno remains correct at the level of conceptual infinity.

The resolution lies not in denying the paradox, but in recognizing a difference of perspective:

• Infinity as a totality of all possible divisions.
• Infinity as lived through successive abstraction, one determination at a time.

Becoming is not the traversal of an already completed infinity. If all moments were already fully actualized, time would not exist. Past moments do not persist; they are irretrievable. This irreversibility is not a defect but a condition of reality itself.[^3]

Forms, though ideal and eternal, must be maintained through temporal duration—with beginnings, intermediaries, and ends. Time is not a container of events but the active maintenance of determination against collapse into simultaneity.

III. Conception as the Limitation of Infinity

Conception (or consciousness) exists independently of infinity as its capacity to limit it. Rather than encountering all possibilities simultaneously, conception narrows infinity into a single sequence and experiences it moment by moment, as if the whole were not immediately present.

This explains why:

• Infinity must appear as one possibility rather than all possibilities at once.
• A sequence of moments can exist without contradiction.

Consciousness does not eliminate infinity; it selects from it.

IV. Observer Selection and Rate of Experience

The conception “latches onto” a particular sequence of events and experiences the totality of being relative to that sequence. Consider a human life:

A person born with specific biological and social determinations experiences the universe at a particular rate:

• Seasons recur annually.
• Lifetimes unfold over decades.
• Stars appear nearly static.

Yet stars are simultaneously forming and dying. The observer does not halt this flux but fixes one moment within it. Time is therefore not universal in pace but relative to the experiential frame of the observer.[^4]

This anticipates modern physics: temporal ordering depends on reference frames, and actuality depends on interaction.

V. Quantum Indeterminacy and Measurement

Quantum mechanics formalizes this metaphysical structure.

Before measurement, a system exists in a superposition of possibilities—not as ignorance, but as real indeterminacy. Measurement does not merely reveal a pre-existing value; it selects one outcome among many.[^5]

This mirrors metaphysical becoming:

• Indeterminacy corresponds to potentiality.
• Measurement corresponds to determination.
• The observer does not create reality ex nihilo but collapses possibility into actuality.

Just as consciousness selects a sequence of moments, measurement selects a definite state.

VI. Chance, Entropy, and Determinate Moments

Games of chance exploit a fundamental ontological principle:
One moment of certainty is sufficient within an infinite field of uncertainty.

Entropy describes uncertainty as the state between two determinate systems.[^6] The cogito itself operates this way: it does not move from uncertainty to certainty, but exists as a fixed determination sustained by surrounding indeterminacy.

Uncertainty is not disorder opposed to order; it is the medium through which order becomes possible.

Conclusion

Reality is not a completed block of all events, nor a pure flux without form. It is a continuous act of determination in which:

• Negation specifies being.
• Privation enables change.
• Consciousness selects actuality.
• Time preserves difference through irreversibility.
• Quantum measurement reflects metaphysical selection.

Being exists only insofar as it is limited, and infinity can only appear by being one possibility at a time.

Footnotes

[^1]: Aristotle, Metaphysics, Book X, on contrariety, privation, and determination.

[^2]: Zeno of Elea, paradoxes of motion as preserved by Aristotle and Simplicius.

[^3]: Ilya Prigogine, The End of Certainty; thermodynamic irreversibility.

[^4]: Einstein, Relativity; time dilation and frame dependence.

[^5]: John von Neumann, Mathematical Foundations of Quantum Mechanics; measurement problem.

[^6]: Claude Shannon, A Mathematical Theory of Communication; entropy as uncertainty.

Thrust Involves the Stride

We hear, for example, in Aristotle’s and Hegel’s logic—and even more primitively in ancient Buddhist philosophies—the idea that the thrust involves the stride, that up involves down. These philosophers articulate the ancient idea that there is a relation of opposites.

These movements are discrete from each other in the sense that they act differently, are opposed, and occur at different points in time. One happens at one point in time, and the other happens at another. However, we are told that their difference involves each other: you would not know the motion of up if it were not relative to a downward movement. Moreover, they presuppose each other, because the relation is prior to each component as a distinct action.

In other words, up and down are simultaneous actions before they are abstracted into one or the other movement. Their distinctness arises from a simultaneous relation of occurring together, each contributing to the same relation while identifying the other as distinct. Breathing in is discrete from breathing out, so that when one happens the other is not happening at the same time, allowing it to happen at a different time immediately after.

The moment of change between one moment and another is both moments laid over each other simultaneously. Their relation is more fundamental than either alone; it constitutes both of their distinct places in conjunction with each other. The fundamental relation is their convulsion; their distinction is their clarity.

“Time with its continuity logically involves some other kind of continuity than its own. Time, as the universal form of change, cannot exist unless there is something to undergo change, and to undergo a change continuous in time, there must be a continuity of changeable qualities.”¹

Every moment is discrete, and this is why they are different experiences. However, they are not ultimately discrete, because if they were, there would be no alteration between moments. Time would be stuck at one moment, and the distinctness of that moment would be maintained fixed against all others. There would be no identity of a single moment, because without another reference point the present would be pure continuity with nothing to distinguish it as another moment.

The common denominator of discrete moments—their continuity in time—is that they occur for something, or that they are happening to an observer. Although moments are discrete in that they offer different experiences, they occur as part of the same continuity for something that is itself partially discrete in them: their conception, which maintains one up, one down, both different and both the same.

Nothing is something—this is the very quality of consciousness. If nothing is a Being, it still remains nothing, yet it is also at the same time a Being. Logos: “Everything changes and nothing stands still.”² We take the differences between these concepts as absolute, so that definition is tied rigidly to the word: nothing must be not-being. Otherwise it would be being. However, while making these distinctions and maintaining them, we nonetheless experience reality otherwise.

We experience reality from a first-person point of view, which exhibits a certain moment happening here and now, where everything is positioned accordingly: the gun held at a certain angle, the trees positioned in front of the house in the distance. A slight movement in perception changes the positioning of the scene but maintains the strictness of a moment being arranged in a certain way. The frame remains the same while the arrangement changes.

In this reference frame, we see a moment arranged in a certain way, but we cannot discern the moment of change from one arrangement to another. We simply presuppose that the observer changed position. Yet for the observer to change position brings out potential positions the objects must have had but were not initially observed. The moon appears to change position relative to the landscape.

We cannot assume change from something merely because it is in motion. Change requires something static for a difference to be discerned. The human brain can perceive about 10–12 individual images per second; faster than that, the brain blends images into motion. There is a split moment: the change from one moment to another is the conception of both moments simultaneously. This is the shift in conception.

When we look at an object, look away, and look back, it is still there. Or we move around it, or turn it in our hands. These are ways of conceiving a thing as a sequence, but we do not see the separations because the sequence is bundled together—particle-like.

The law of fatigue is not merely biological. In the universe there is no lack of energy; rather, fatigue is a condition of relations falling into the wrong place. Energy is right relation; fatigue is wrong relation. Wrong is not subjective, but it is ascribed to the individual: the individual is the objective measure of wrong.

If everything is potentially out there, what the individual chooses is the actual determination of right and wrong. The difficulty is whether inevitability follows. This is a question of the will—what one is willing to do or refrain from doing.

The saying about monkeys typing the Bible is inaccurate because order is not general to chaos; it is a particular abstraction from chaos. Chaos is undifferentiated; order is distinction.

What we call a glitch is absolute motion—being in two places at once. The inability to discern is not in reality but in the observer’s capacity. Reality contains too much information. Consciousness limits it, not as weakness but as skill.

Reality is an infinity of all events of all time. Consciousness develops indifference to this and determines a duration. Each moment is maintained by an observer of that moment, and durations form identities—this is how timelines arise.

Like a water droplet hovering briefly before merging, vibrations hold separation momentarily.³

The tesseract is the form consciousness uses to limit infinity into sequence. The cube within the cube: the central cube is the present moment; surrounding cubes are potential moments.

In non-linear time all moments exist simultaneously. The observer is the limit of this infinity. The reference frame itself is the change; the content appears still. The present is the static limit of all possibilities occurring at once.

Change is disclosed by a third aspect: the relation between passing and coming. This relation remains unchanged and allows continuity.

Whitehead writes:

“Without doubt the sort of observations most prominent in our conscious experience are the sense-perceptions… The bodily reference is recessive, the visible presentation dominant… The truth is that our sense-perceptions are extraordinarily vague and confused modes of experience.”⁴

The observer filters relations and experiences only contents. Presence implies non-presence. Every angle of a thing exists as a possible conception for some observer.

The conception of a thing is its moment. Infinity of finites has infinity as its identity. Motion through finites dissipates into freedom to determine—like film frames forming continuous motion.

Footnotes

1. Charles Sanders Peirce, The Law of Mind, in Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, Vol. 6.
2. Heraclitus, fragment DK B12 / B49a (logos doctrine of flux).
3. Surface tension phenomena; commonly discussed in fluid dynamics.
4. Alfred North Whitehead, The Concept of Nature (1920), ch. 3.

Last updated 12.23.2025