Letter to Melissos

Dear friend, Eleatic thinker!

Seldom have fleet commanders faced with combat been drawn to such profound thoughts about existence. You deserve great respect for the philosophy you found in Elea.

You were already very close to finding the truth. But some ideas still needed more than a thousand years to mature. I agree with a lot of things, but some things need to be reconsidered. Some paths of knowledge were still closed to you in your time.

You were looking for the one element that underlies all the others. Even though it was in front of your eyes the whole time, you couldn't see it. You have written down your ideas and your philosophical thoughts with it. It can be writing or thought or equally order in the cosmos. It's called information. All elements are formed from it. The tangible is only an illusion; all parts of matter, on their smallest scale, essentially emerge from it. But where can this information be recorded if we cannot write it down or fix it in some other way?

You also thought that no being could arise from nothing. Everything that exists is unlimited, infinite, never created and imperishable. All our impressions of time, matter and movement are essentially illusions, which is the truth. Time, for example, is solely the chain of fixed states in which we think we perceive the moment of change.

What does not exist is just as incomprehensible to us as the infinite. However, in your philosophy you accept one and reject the other. But nothing is in truth the condition for infinite beings, just as infinite beings are the condition for nothingness. Both are essentially the same, but we find it difficult to understand them because we are caught in the causal thinking of our sensory perception. Nothing can be everything and everything can be nothing! It's just a question of point of view, of perspective.

Think of a blank piece of paper. You won't recognize anything on it, but it has the potential to be used to write any story. Likewise, you no longer recognize anything on a piece of paper that has all sorts of stories written on it. Nothingness is the absence of any information or the superimposition of all information. It is impossible to distinguish whether it is no information or all information at the same time.

If you take away the paper, then all that remains is pure information, which at the same time cannot be information, so it does not need a medium to be recorded. It is simply the duality of everything and nothing, both happening at the same time. The cosmos we observe, the universe we live in, is just a variant of this story. There are an infinite number of them. If there weren't an infinite amount of information, there wouldn't be all the information that could overlap into nothing.

But also think about the consequences of this fact. Being exists in infinite variations. It is there and not at the same time, we receive something and lose it somewhere else. Anger over what has been lost is pointless. So sit back, enjoy your apparent time, take things as they come, endure everything calmly and don't let them take away the joy of thinking.

Your Eleatic non-being