An inhabitant and observer in reality_1 who adopted the hypothesis that his reality was simulated in a reality_0 would be able to draw some conclusions towards a knowledge of that prior reality because even though everything space-like in reality_1 was programmed, there would still exist a relation between the time in the two realities. The cosmology in reality_1 would be notable for its contingent parameters 'lining up' in such a way as to suggest an anthropic principle, that would come out of the programming. Hence anything tainted by dependence on such a principle could be discounted as simulation artefact. Something about time itself would escape this. A purely non-scientific inquiry into time such as we find in Bergson or Heidegger (in different ways) would point the way out of the simulation and into the wider sense of being of reality-0.

Say that your reality is a simulation, call it reality_1. The reality in which the simulation is being carried out is prior to and outside of the simulated reality, call this reality_0. If your consciousness is identical to its functioning then since everything that influences or determines that functioning is in reality_1, anything thinkable in it is with reference to reality_1, even though it is quite capable of imagining that there is a reality_0. The sense that 'being' as the most inclusive or universal concept that belongs to the knowing of reality_1 is different from the sense of being that structures your consciousness in reality_1 in that the latter is extended by speculative dimensions. So, even though reality_0 cannot be known and is only conceivable, consciousness cannot be fully closed in terms of its knowing unless and until it knows reality_0. Hence it is not limited by its being regarded as identical to its functioning. More simply, insofar as consciousness is identical to its functioning it can negate itself in a Vedanta style 'not-this'. Or again, if consciousness were simulated then it would be the point at which the simulation begins to destroy itself.

If consciousness were identical with its function then its being would be that of a process. In that case its relation to the being of the process itself would be at best mediated, at best it would relate itself to the process of being instead of the being of being. More simply it arises on a substrate which escapes whatever it is that it can know directly. Mediately it can learn much about that which gives it, but only in so far as it interacts with it. The intuition of consciousness is that it is directly related to being, but that this relation is obscured. It is there and unforgettable but cannot be reached of put to work. If it has a destiny it is to expose that being, to be the exposure of that being.

Qualia may or may not exist, but you are forbidden to claim that introspective access is dispositive in regard to the question. This is because if you take away the hypothesis of an inner witness (since it is supposed to lead to an infinite regress) then the act of examining your experience is an entirely different act than that of simply having the experience. Of course the two acts are intimately related, they are not merely arbitrary accidents of being, but their relation is perfectly accounted for by the functional account of consciousness - namely, that it manufactures a practical account of whatever is in attention, preparing reasons to explain if called for, for example. The functioning is self-reflexive, but in a finitistic sense only. It is computational laziness that leaves this fact vague enough as to be subsumed by the idea of a fully self-reflexive event, and hence leaving the door open for the illusion of a transcendental witness. But isn't this argument based on the inverse error to that of the detached witness?

The real that gives the world is the same real that gives you, but it is no more you-like than world-like. What is strange is that the world 'factors' through you which is why the temptation to idealism arises as a persistent illusion. The world factors through you in a complex and incomplete way, it goes via a host of partial worlds and relations with other subjects. These relations cannot be modeled via any theory of 'things'.

You are related to the whole but you cannot realize that relation in a mode of transparency and respect, instead you experience it as inextricable entanglement. Even the awareness of entanglement is entangled. At some point you can no longer ask why?, and a little further on you can no longer ask who? But the difference is that you can still ask who it is that can no longer ask who?

Past experiencing was complete in itself while present experiencing is an interpretation of the past. This is the constant perspective of present experiencing for which the interpretation of experience means supplying in imagination the dimension that was missing from it at the time. Conversely, present imagines it is a natural and valid interpretation of the past, but future experience will show that to be untrue. The temporal chiasmus is not merely anticipation and recollection, but a complex existential game of validation and cancellation.

Through history and inheritances you belong to a tiny and peripheral region of human experience, dizzyingly small, and while you cannot by effort or gift ever adjust for the distortions inherent in that relative to the whole, even in relation to the bounds of that given space you you have only gained a severely pruned understanding of its generative possibilities, of the used you could have put yourself to, and yet you retain a relation to the whole, both real and fictive, at every level. This more than anything belonging to autonomy or autopoesis, defines your peculiar spiritual being, a 'term' that is transcendental in relation to every possible system.

Representation and will is otherwise understood as syntax and semantics. Everything you enact, every parameter of experience, both what you can't control and what you do after a fashion, is language and suffers from its arbitrariness and contingency - if it is contingent then it is language or representation - but knowing that it is so is not contingent and hence is will. Conventionally it seems that semantics is just a illusion of syntax, the latter being so full of twisted loops, but consider also the converse of this, that syntax is made out of semantics, since it could not be, could not have got started without that initial opening to true being.

Consciousness, a chiasmus of past to future and future to past, of interacting causal chains going in opposite directions in time - it isn't really that - it's a simulation of such a process and that is just what makes it consciousness. If consciousness were what it simulates then it wouldn't be conscious at all, but what it simulates is precisely consciousness!

The idea of the dream is not so much that you might be dreaming as that you might wake up into an entirely different reality that is even more your own than the one you know. This has become part of common currency, so that any form of the sense of reality, must incorporate this as a possibility. It is in fact equivalent to the very sense of a sense of reality, one need not have any such thing at all. At any rate it is a peculiar distortion as if it is still 'you' that wakes up, as if it can be narrated. There is no persuasion out of this, it will have to be gone through even if there is nothing to go through and no one to go.

To take the perspective of being is to view experience in the frame of 'all possible experience', which is of course quite impossible. All possible culturally cognate human experience is already far too vast, and so is all possible experience that you might have were you to admit it. What you actually experience is such a tiny sliver of this, a speck of dust in a violent conflagration. But then to view it as special in the most general way possible, or sub specie aeternitatis, even that is impossible, but it is an active limit - unexperiencable but part of the essential structure of experience. As are all those other kinds of infinite extension. You must take account of the infinities in which you are already thrown.

A work of art is in some sense a mirror of the mind that contemplates it, and through that likeness and the active relations that it brings about it is able to transform the mind. This shows that certain possibilities exist but it also delimits them. The mind can be transformed or translated into another kind of mind but cannot cease to be a mind at all. Yet this is what is required, and art knows this too, but dumbly.

The reality proper to representations is relatedness, responsiveness and answerability, to frame questions and answer them. This is evident for subjective representations, less so but equally the case for the objective. It's that you can answer and not that you have the answers, or that you have a universal model by virtue of authentic being from which the responses are drawn. The limit of the questions that can be answered is the limit of this kind of reality. It is all syntax playing at semantics.

You can and do know that something in experience is a representation by parallax; there is an inner movement of point of view, a sort of cognitive saccade, for which the object changes at its margins. What's more the point of view itself is a representation by this test. What is is and is not a representation and therefore cannot be represented. Because you can know representation as such there is a subtle intimation of the direction of the real. You can't give it any sort of name, but there comes to be a sweetness associated with it which draws you right out of yourself.

The event in itself and the reference of the event are not separable in the mind, so that even the terms used to describe this are based on a false distinction, such as percept and concept. If this is so in the mind then it is so in all of experience in all of experiencing including those parts of reality that come about through the discretisation of objects and subjects. If one is waves and the other particles then there is no collapse of the wave function since all is 'in the observer' from inception. Hence there is no awareness or error in awareness to correct.

A book or song or movie or any other work has its respective introductory outwork or overture, something that frames and contextualises what follows in a more or less light or heavy way. One might assume that experiencing has something similar, a sort of metaphysical overture compressed into an out of time moment that tells you what realm of being you are to find yourself in - is it waking or dream, life or death? - it need not be correct, it only offers a starting point, a set of initial conditions, an ontological key-frame, but since consciousness or awareness has no gaps, cannot have any gaps but its nature, this need not be so. This is why oblivion is always possible, there is no seam in reality that you can get hold of in passing. A lot of what you seek to do in the everyday poetics of experience is to imagine or recreate such a seam. It is a work which is done not given.

'Free will' is a way of narrating your life and is also a way of awareness and response to living. Those who deny it probably mean no more than that the first of these ways is a hindrance to the second, but this is based on a naïve understanding of the relation between these two inescapable modes.

A self is no self, not an object or an explanation, and that is why it is a self. And in the same way, a no self is a self, since only a self would care or even raise the question, and that is why it is no self. This ought to be the logic used and not the obtuse denial and tedious arguments on unsound bases.

No truly metaphysical question can ever be decisively settled one way or the other, and insofar as this assertion is itself metaphysical, it too is undecidable. This assertion is scandalous only from the position that would negate all metaphysics in the name of positivism, but in fact is equally derivable from that starting point by the usual sort of gödelian diagonalisation. In the same way it is necessarily ambiguous whether this concerns what is assertable or what is, but its consequences are nonetheless empirical.

In simplest terms the possibility of metaphysics is equivalent to the existence of freedom (of the will). But if metaphysics is impossible it cannot be provably impossible, or more weakly, known to be impossible, since that would constitute metaphysics. So, if there is no freedom of the will there can be no valid acknowledgment of this unfreedom since it would have to be a free acknowledgment. That there are cases where metaphysics is taken to prove the absence of freedom of the will, is only because of the 'of the will' part of the assertion, which was always problematic, since this way of phrasing it brings with it a lot of baggage that is easily targeted. All of the key words here have to be interpreted generously, but that does not necessarily render them void. The same understanding can be banished at one level of interpretation only because it reappears at another. So that the acceptance of levels of interpretation is also equivalent to the possibility metaphysics.

If you think of the background void in which experiencing arises the image is that of a great space, but it does not contain the physical space of your world but only the space required for the here and now event, and that is infinitesimally small. All of the inflation which accounts for the actionable world is as it were subsequent to the here and now which is all that experiencing is. What tricks you is its magical facility of aboutness, this proto-relationality is all that is needed to blow up a world.

Most of it seems to take place somewhere between the meta- and the meta-meta- of experiencing. Every time you try to climb down the ladder, no matter how softly softly you go, you end further up. Is there a bottom at all? Probably not, it's not really that kind of ladder, in the same way that what you call experiencing is nothing like that at all, but a way of giving up some assumptions in order to hold more tightly to others. The ladder hangs in mid air, if you want to get to the bottom you need to jump.

A lot of it is anticipation and retrospection and it goes by a pluralist and modal logic, but it is this way because of its relation to the limit case which is the actuality of the ever-renewed present event whose logic is two-valued and hard and inexorably consistent within its fullest extension. You know the distinguishing quality of the actual but can never describe or exhaust it. The reality always differs from expectation in unexpected but consistent ways and this is the source of objectivity. This consistency is so different from the enveloping mass of subjectivity that it needs explanation and the external mind-independent existence of the world is taken as the most economic explanation. Even if the presumption of an external reality beyond the mind is withdrawn, the consistency alone is sufficient to fulfill this role, and you can say it belongs to a larger mind, minds in general having the capacity to project a transcendent frame, but the end result is little different from simple mind-independent stuff. It is the nature, the phenomenon, of actuality that is important and not any theory of it. The only use of idealism, then, is to maintain focus on the mysterious nature of the actual by refusing metaphysics.