and that's the goddamn truth

The Way Things Actually Are (TWTAA) is the backdrop for every debate humans have, as well as for every agreement. Everything considered to be true or false, i.e., every belief, is that in relation to TWTAA, whether one is inclined toward phenomenology, transcendental realism, or something else. Whether one calls one's epistemological beliefs foundationalist, coherentist or whatever, TWTAA is what's being discussed. It's assumed to exist, even when we explicitly deny that it does or when we deny that anything about it can be known. Again, I don't mean an opiner has to believe that TWTAA is real. I mean that due to the way the game is set up, TWTAA is presupposed in every opinion they formulate. Language precedes epistemology both historically and structurally. Language is naive realistic and it doesn't seem to me like any amount of meta-whatever can save us from that. Not that we should necessarily want it to. And our belief structures precede phenomenology. What do phenomenologists argue about? TWTAA. This is the common space (OK, I'm mixing metaphors; use whichever works, disregard, etc.) where brains intermingle and influence each other.

No one knows what TWTAA is, or if it is. Agreements are short-lived and nobody knows what those are either, but they always rely on some sort of permanent, static, immortal structure often just below the surface experientially happening in brains. Plato's forms. Numbers. Nouns. Probably all words. God. Justice. Immortal permanent static perfection created in always-at-every-single-juncture (hey, what's a juncture? can I just stop world by declaring it so?) never-still-for-even-a-second (hey, what's a second?) spontaneously evolving matter, i.e., human brains. Brain matter freeze frames, but even photographs and the brain versions of those are always, without fail, fluxing all the hell over spacetime.

Epistemology revolves around what we know and how we know when we know something and other things involving "know." I find the whole discussion a bit awkward since we don't know anything (I know this!). But we do believe things (I know this too! It's written in the stars, which are permanent!) and how we come to believe things is the foundation for what we call knowing, or thinking we know, whatever it is we think or don't think or think we know or don't know about anything.

Have you been affected by the words you just read? Will they affect you next week? That's how beliefs form, in a spontaneously evolving present. It doesn't matter if one calls it "free" or "determined" (though that distinction, rebranded, may be useful in another context). It just is what it is, and whatever that is, it's the way everything else is, with tweaks. Repeating, continuing, evolving, spacetimeing, worlding, existing...this is the crazy part. Humans do what rocks do, with added complexity.

And did I mention that noone knows what TWTAA is? That seems like it would be important if it were true.