On the surface of things, reality appears to exist, but the more you peer into them, the emptier they become.
Mainline science tells us atoms are 99.99>% empty space, and star systems too are almost entirely empty.
They also tell us there’s a fine line between particles and waves, the many individuals and the one collective are interchangeable.
Scientists once thought atoms were indestructible, but it turns out you can tear them asunder into smaller things still.
There might be no limit to how small things can be, just as there might be no limit to how big the universe is, it may be limitless.
Rocks seem solid, but there’s little-nothing solid about them, every particle/wave in them is always in motion, and as a whole, they’re always fluctuating, their size, shape, position and chemical composition.
They’re also constantly exchanging materials/energy with their surroundings, so there’s a fine line between them and everything else, if there’s a line at all.
As solid as a thing is, it could always possibly be infinitely more solid or gaseous.
There are states of matter in between solid, liquid and gas, various creams, foams, gels and pastes, it’s a continuum, a spectrum of possibility.
Anything you can say about a thing really, that it’s a tetrahedron or a cube, that it’s red or blue, it could always possibly be infinitely more of a tetrahedron or a cube, red or blue.
It could even always possibly be infinitely more of a thing than a non-thing, or a non-thing than a thing.
All ideas/ideals, words/concepts are at best approximations of things, or stuff, revealed to us empirically via the five senses, and at worse, completely relative.
even just stating it’s A at all implies B, and so there’d be no consciousness or appreciation without contrast.
And of course reality itself may be a kind of mirage, or a subconscious creation or projection of our minds, or even a hoax, a conspiracy.
The mind itself may fabricate parts of itself, or may be a fabrication of something else.
Perhaps we’re not really intelligent, maybe we have Ai, or maybe our reasoning, memories and so on are unreasonable, fictitious.
But really how could it otherwise be, I mean whatever can affect us, we can affect.
Reality is a two way street, give and take.
If you can frig me up, I can frig you too.
We alter the relaity we’re interacting with by virtue of what we are, just as it alters us.
And the more different we are from one another, the more different the alterations of our shared reality, but who says it’s shared for that matter, perhaps it’s only shared in part.
What are things but affectance/the capacity to affect themselves and other things?
Things define us just as we them.
What would a cat be without a mouse and vice versa?
What would we be without our adversaries and adversity?
And so cats and mice, heroes and villains aren’t really separate things actually, but they go together, they’re part of a higher cat/mouse hero/villain order.
Sure, you are what you are by virtue of what you are, but also by virtue everything around you.
It’s the whole cosmos making us, and the more the cosmos changes, the less you you could be.
If we were able to pluck just one atom from the cosmos, well we might wind up with a completely different cosmos, because that atom had relationships with surrounding atoms, which’n turn, had relationships with other atoms, and so on down the line, everything affects everything.
You couldn’t break wind on mars, without it affecting everyone on Venus sooner-later.
Children tend to see things like that, innocently, things seem really, solid, like they, matter. everything seems wonderful, until they discover how ephemeral it all is.
A billion years from now, life itself might be extinct, or on the other hand, it might’ve evolved into
something unrecognizable today, it mightn’t even be recognizable as life…or non-life, it might be something in betwixt, or something else altogether, something we don’t have words for or can imagine.
A trillion years from now who knows what, if anything, will remain of the cosmos, the universe, now itself being a kind of mutant reverberation of whatever existed before it if anything.