Knowledge of an objective reality by whatever science it is developed and extended cannot prove the existence of things apart from all the relations by which they are known. This is like saying, in the case of physics, that the only reality is that of mathematical equations, a view which gains more plausibility as the attempts to imagine kinds of 'material' things which anchor these relations grows more and more incoherent due to quantum phenomena. In other words, naturalism inevitably parts ways with materialism. This differs little if at all from saying that mind can only know mind, and that the respects in which physical reality is unlike our contingent mental reality are of no weight compared to all the respects in which it is mind-like in a larger sense - structured by abstract laws, non-local etc. This argument has its purely subjective version as well: that your world is made entirely out of the meanings with which you understand and engage in it. Whatever is assumed to be left over, unaccounted for, by such a view is only further reaches of meaning. It is mind but not limited by your contingent sense at any time of the bounds of mind. These bounds are always being pushed further out anyway, so there could be no reason to grant them any metaphysical priority. Experience pushed far enough leaves metaphysics behind.

If you inquire into the background of experience, or its preconditions, what experiencing already had to already be 'there' so that experiencing can 'take place' then you are treating it as a concept. It is concepts which necessarily have antecedents out of time. The alternative is to isolate the being of experiencing from all thought and all feeling, from causes and purposes, and discover whether and what it demands apart from itself. What is the world native to being?

In a movie or story which ends a chain of catastrophes with the twist that it was all a dream certain formal constraints must be adhered to. When looking back you notice numerous 'tells' that revealed the dream nature of the presented world. You didn't notice these on the way in because you were expecting a pay-off in pity, fear or vicarious enjoyment, and so had no wish to un-suspend disbelief.. The narrative has to justify its facile ending by making your complicity its real subject.

Pivoting back onto the subject is called for by the dual nature of experience, and while here this occurs in the mode of a knowing and hence of a question, and again in a passive and aesthetic mode, in other cases apparently, and perhaps more commonly, it does so in terms of a doing and therefore in ethical terms. in a sort of political imperative. Each is emphatically an 'ownmost'. In so far as these represent fundamental attitudes they are deeply at odds. Each is a jealous principle that will brook no rival. Each seeks to devour the other. Reconciliation is impossible, but perhaps a sort of alchemy.

You do your best to spin out some metaphysical romance sincerely, but also half-aware of your own contriving, and uneasily aware that someone privy to your motives could resolve your paradoxes with ease. There is nothing here that Occam's razor couldn't shear off. That's all very well, it's fine to accept the most minimal version of what it is that is arising, but it can't stop at the view from outside. This 'explanation' must still be taken to correct the inside view as well. And the inside of the inside; the subjective knowledge of the illusory nature of the subject. These still must be granted the same priority as they had before. And as soon as you do so the question returns as fiercely as ever, arising out of the shredded remnants of the self who first posed it.

There is always, in every instance, a way it is taken to be, a most general staging of reality, that is both utterly free and inevitably chosen, as if at a point of maximum steepness that you can't help but descend, in a timeless suspension prior to time in every instant. And in every such staging you are not alone in that you are exposed to another gaze, that is, to a world. It's the only way that thoughts can arise, even the most private and intimate of thoughts. When you want to know who you are you seek the ultimate other to define you. The solitude of the subject without an object therefore cannot be conceived, you'd have to give up every world and every way of bringing about a world.

Who is doing the stream of consciousness? And who seems to be both within it and at in the same instance just outside of it, looking on in dismayed surprise? It is as if the observer collapses it, and it collapses over him, imprisoning, until it melts away into oblivion. Who witnessed that? Where does it go? The new moment destroys the old one. Not the re-echoing thought but the thing itself, the never arrested and timeless falling into time.