Foundational

>We make a lot of assumptions. This is necessary for survival. To maintain healthy existence, we must partake in assumption, philosophy, and being (more on that some other time). Let us now partake in philosophy.
>Rather than retracing my thoughts, I will simply share with you the conclusion of my thoughts; the conclusion of my fundamentalistic meditation. There exist three things. These things are awareness, objects, and method.
>Awareness explains itself better than I can explain it just now.
>Objects are things like a car, a tree, love, the number nine, an intelligent shade of blue, a guy named Leonardo, the left eye of a guy named Leonardo, or the twitch of the left eye of a guy named Leonardo. These objects may not actually exist as we perceive them, but because there is variation in our perception of what seem to be objects, we know that there must actually be various objects.
>Method refers to the way that these things function. We may consider that when a cat is put in water, the cat gets wet; or, when a heart stops beating, blood generally ceases to flow, and oxygen is no longer delivered to the cells, eventually leading to death; or, a²+b²=c²; or 2+3=5. Method essentially is the way things work. We don’t know for certain that the methods we perceive are accurately perceived, but we know there are methods.
>(Another possible method to consider is chaos, which is essentially the non-orderly method. Suppose that all the memories wired into your brain and all the elements of your current surroundings spontaneously appeared there around the time you began reading this essay. How did you get here? Your memories will tell you one story, but that story was just put there, as I said, around the time you began reading this? Who are you? What was your childhood like, what have you experienced. According to the theory of this chaos method, all of these memories, all that you know about life, everything you learned in school, and from your parents, and your parents themselves, and all you knowledge and thoughts you’ve had, are essentially false. All ideas that were generated completely and absolutely randomly around the time, again as this example suggests, that you began to read this essay. It may also be possible that a combination of orderly methods and the chaotic method may exist. Of course, it may well be that only the orderly methods, and not the chaotic method exist.)
>Now I will mention some thoughts I had in the process of coming to this conclusion. For a long time I have considered perception and misperception as being based off of a material world. My thoughts were that actuality was some material plain that I perceive indirectly, and reality was composed of those indirect perceptions. I realized though, during my analytical meditations after reading Rene Descartes’ First Philosophy, that I was making too many assumptions here. Matter doesn’t necessarily exist. Objects exist, and they function according to methods, and they are perceived or misperceived by awareness.
>Also, I used to assume that awareness was indirect, but it was in considering that our perceptions themselves operating according to methods could be actuality, that I realized the belief in this underlying material world, or any underlying world, was unjustly founded. This is by no means to say that there isn’t an actuality underlying our perceptions, it is merely to say that I was wrong to assume so readily that my perceptions could not themselves be actuality.
>Now, methods and objects are really both objects... let me get out my journal and see how I worded it back then... O.K., nevermind, that didn’t help. But, really objects, methods, and awareness (I called it sentience then) are all objects, not that that does a lot of good at clarifying what I’m trying to say, but oh well.
>So, according to current scientific understanding, some objects we might consider are things like a cat, and the atoms which composes that cat, and some methods we might consider would be matters of chemistry and biology and some physics regarding why that cat is the way it is and how the molecules in it are held together and how evolution and environment formed that cat. A more simple example would be the object of a triangle, and the method that if two triangles share one side, there will be four non-shared sides which will make another object, which object shall be a quadrilateral. (This is a much better example for several reasons, one of which is that triangles don’t physically exist, and another is that numbers are a perfect example of objects and math a perfect example of method.)
>So, yup, there you have it. Make of it what you like. I’m gonna go look through my fridge for some more food now. Leave some comments, share your thoughts, do a little dance.
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>(Oh dear me. Google, you were dong so well, but you had to go and be fancy and make the same mistake as Microsoft, so now I have to manually go back and say, no thank you, I don't want my computer to behave as if it thinks it's smarter than me and randomly decide to change my formatting halfway through. If I wanted my formatting changed, I would have changed it, but I didn't, so it really shouldn't be happening. Maybe I should go back to notepad.)