The Schisma

Epilogue

You may rightfully wonder why it is you should believe anything I have said. For most of you, it would be a catastrophically unintuitive claim at the least. For this, I must impart some philosophical theory unto you.

This begins as a question of what knowledge is and how it can be obtained. Knowledge does not exist independently of the universe or its natural description; in other words, to say that one has knowledge it must be the case that knowledge exists somewhere. When we say that something exists we mean to say that it has been instantiated somewhere in reality and as a feature of reality. All things that exist must have properties, which are the descriptors of what that thing is and is not. To strictly be one thing and not other things it follows that the existence of all things follows rules, or that it can be described as having order to it. If all things have a strict order to their existence, then descriptions that contain contradictions to that order are necessarily false, insofar as it is the case that they produce incoherence.

I will elaborate one step at a time from here; Knowledge is not some ineffable or magical property some mind has. Knowledge is pattern of information that exists in the world as an object of a linguistic or intelligent mind. Knowledge, like anything else, is a metaphysical object with limitations and governing rules to its definition. The definition of knowledge, like any word, can be anything some thinking being chooses for it be, but for our purposes, knowledge will be defined in the only such way that is both coherent and useful. The definition of knowledge is thus "an object of the mind where some symbolic (linguistic) representation of reality is accurate and justly accounted for". To be accurate, it must be perfectly accurate. Anything in any degree less than 'perfectly accurate' is held as a belief with a probability of being wrong in proportion to its inaccuracy. It must also be justified so that incidental or chance descriptions that are perfectly accurate are excluded. A description of the universe that is accurate only by chance and not by justification is not useful to they who possesses it. Knowledge must meet these criteria so that the word describes ideas that are useful and distinct from, say, mere beliefs.

It then follows that knowledge is produced by creating a proposition or description of reality and then analysing it through justification. To justify something as knowledge it must pass all checks on incoherence. Propositions fail to be coherent when they contain logically contradictory elements to their description. It can be known that there is no such thing as a 'square circle, for instance, because there is a contradiction in how many sides are described to the shape. This contradiction implies meaninglessness. If meaning cannot be carried by a word, phrase, or an entire theory, then there is no way one can say it is 'true' because it ultimately doesn't say anything at all. A 'square circle' can no more exist or be described as true than a 'pergathumx' or a 'e7m6q7t10 ' can.

Eliminating propositions is generally very simple in this way, but producing positive propositions is much more involved. There are infinite expressions and propositions that could be shown to be untrue or not exist, but what does exist then? Conventional theories in philosophy have always presumed that there are independently coherent things that do not exist; they are called 'possibilities'. The heart of this matter is to propose that it cannot be the case that there are things that are possible and yet do not exist. First, note that while relationships between 'things' can vary immensely, there is no variance in existence itself. Things either exist, or they do not exist at all. We know this because existence implies properties and things that have any properties whatsoever exist and things that have no properties do not exist.

If it were the case that things could be possible but also not exist, then we would face the following problem: the universe fundamentally selected for some things to exist and other things to not exist. Horses were ostensibly chosen to exist but unicorns, perfectly plausible and coherent as they are, were not. When the universe is broken down to its most fundamental ontology, where and how did it make such a selection? No conventional answer is satisfactory because every answer involves creatio ex nihilo, or something from nothing. Any mechanism you might attribute to it is producing things that require a property that spontaneously creates things from nothingness. The mechanism itself is invariably a 'thing' of some kind that requires its own explanation. The result is a unending recursion of logic that fails to establish justification.

The only solution therefore is to say that there is no 'nothingness'. The universe did not make any selection as to what possible things do and do not exist because all things exist by virtue of being possible. Possibility and existence are exactly the same thing. This passes justification, by deduction, and leads to a coherent understanding of the universe.

If it the case that this is what exists in the universe, then how do things exist? All things are described completely by their properties and properties follow exact and persistent rules. When you break down what things are, ultimately simpler and simpler sets of rules become apparent. The simplest thing anything can be is a single piece of information. If something could be described by multiple pieces of information, then it will always be the case that it could possibly be described by as few as two pieces of information. One piece of information can never produce meaning, but two pieces produces combinations that contain all possible meaning. Any more than two and it could possibly be reduced to two. Because all things that are possible are, It must be concluded that the universe is fundamentally two pieces of information. These two pieces of information are, in the only way that it could be described, 'differentiation'. They project all of existence as the possible transfinite conceptual combinations that could be made from it.

This is the Schisma.