The Ground of Everything
Part 1 of the Core Concepts series
The Ground of Everything
Part 1 of the Core Concepts series
For years, Mike and I kept coming back to the same question. We’d poke at it, prod at it, and every time we did, something else in the established paradigm unraveled. That question — What makes experience possible?
Not “how does the brain do it” — that’s already assuming the answer. Not “why do we have consciousness” — that’s asking for a purpose when we haven’t even established what we’re talking about. Just: what has to be true, at the most basic level, for there to be something it’s like to be you, right now, reading these words?
We’re not asking as people who have this figured out. We’re asking as people who have spent years watching smart people talk past each other about consciousness, getting nowhere, and finally realized: maybe the problem isn’t that we don’t have the right answer. Maybe the problem is that we’ve been building on the wrong foundation.
The One Thing You Can’t Deny
Let’s start with what survives every skeptical attack.
You are experiencing something right now. Words on a screen. Maybe the weight of your body in a chair. A mood, a temperature, background noise. Whatever the specifics — something is happening for you.
This isn’t a hypothesis. You can doubt the external world. You can doubt your memories, doubt that other minds exist, doubt that you’re not a brain in a vat. Philosophers have been playing those games for centuries. But you cannot coherently doubt that experience is occurring. The doubt itself is an experience. The very act of questioning proves there’s a questioner for whom the question appears.
So: experience exists. That’s our foundation. The one brick we can’t kick out from under ourselves.
Now here’s where it gets interesting — and where most frameworks quietly fall apart.
The Difference Experience Makes
If experience exists, then reality is different than it would have been if experience didn’t exist.
I know that sounds almost too obvious to say. But don’t brush past it. If your experience right now is real — if it’s actually happening — then it’s not nothing. It’s something. And something is different from nothing.
This is what is called Inevitability 1: experience makes a difference.
I can already hear the objection forming: “Of course experience makes a difference. So what?”
So everything, actually. Because once you admit that experience makes a difference, you have to ask: what kind of difference?
And this is where the whole physicalist project — the idea that consciousness is just what brains do, that it’s neurons all the way down — runs into a wall it cannot climb.
The Difference That Structure Cannot Capture
Think about what science does. It describes structure. Relationships. Patterns. The physicist tells you about mass and charge and spin and spatial position and causal relations. The neuroscientist tells you about neurons and synapses and activation patterns and information flow. All of it — every bit of it — is structure. Things in relation to other things, describable from the outside.
But experience isn’t like that.
Experience appears. There’s something it’s like. The redness of red, the sting of pain, the felt quality of reading these words — none of that is captured by describing the structure of light wavelengths or neural firing patterns. You could have a complete structural description of what happens in your brain when you see red, down to every last atom, and nowhere in that description would you find the redness.
This isn’t a gap we’re going to close with more data. It’s not that neuroscience hasn’t gotten sophisticated enough yet. It’s that structure and appearing are categorically different kinds of things. You can’t get appearing from non-appearing by adding more non-appearing. That’s not a limitation of current science — it’s logic.
This is Inevitability 2: appearing cannot be reduced to structure alone.
And here’s the thing — these aren’t TNT’s assumptions. These aren’t claims the framework invented. They’re constraints that fall out of the bare fact that experience exists. Any theory of consciousness, regardless of its metaphysical commitments, has to satisfy them. TNT didn’t create the Inevitabilities. TNT is one framework that honors them.
What Grounds Appearing?
So if experience exists, and if it can’t be derived from structure alone, then we need something else at the foundation. Something that doesn’t face the problem of trying to squeeze appearing out of non-appearing.
I’ll be honest — this is the part that sounds like it’s about to veer into mysticism or woo. “Just posit something consciousness-y at the bottom and call it a day.” I had to work through that discomfort before I could be okay with what we were realizing.
What TNT proposes is this: instead of starting with structure (matter, energy, physical processes) and trying to derive experience from it — which doesn’t work — we start with something that doesn’t have that problem. We take appearing itself as primitive. Not as something that emerges from something else, but as the ground within which everything else exists.
TNT calls this ground Awareness.
What Awareness Is (and Isn’t)
Before the objections start — and I can hear them forming — let me be clear about what Awareness is not.
Awareness is not a mind. It’s not a cosmic consciousness floating around thinking thoughts. It’s not God. It’s not a soul or a spirit or a universal Self. It’s not even a thing — not a substance, not a force, not an object among objects.
Awareness is the primitive ground of existence. The condition that makes experience possible rather than merely describable. It doesn’t act. It doesn’t choose. It doesn’t generate or constrain or do anything. It’s not agentive. It simply is — the prior condition for the very possibility of things, structure, and experience.
Think about it this way: physicalism takes matter-energy as its primitive and tries to build consciousness on top. But structure can’t yield appearing. TNT takes Awareness as primitive — the ground that doesn’t face that problem, because we’re not trying to derive appearing from non-appearing. We’re starting where appearing already is.
Nothing exists outside Awareness. And before you think that means “mind creates reality” — it doesn’t. This is an ontological claim about containment, not a claim about minds making things up. Structure exists within Awareness. Physical patterns exist within Awareness. The coherence constraints we’ll talk about in a moment exist within Awareness. It’s not that Awareness is a box holding objects. It’s that Awareness is the prior condition for there being boxes or objects or “holding” in the first place.
I won’t pretend this is easy to wrap your head around. We’re so used to thinking of consciousness as a product of something more fundamental that making it the foundation feels backward. But that’s exactly the move we have to make if we’re going to stop banging our heads against the hard problem.
The Field of What Could Be
Okay. We have Awareness as the primitive ground. What’s within it?
Everything that could possibly be.
TNT calls this the Field of Infinite Potential (FIP).
This isn’t mystical hand-waving. It’s a structural recognition. Think about your experience right now — it’s this experience rather than some other experience. You’re seeing these words and not a purple elephant. You’re feeling whatever you’re feeling, not something else. Experience is determinate. It’s specific.
For experience to be determinate, there has to be a domain from which determination occurs. There have to be possibilities — things that could be experienced — such that one of them becomes actual. The FIP is simply that: the totality of all potentials.
The FIP is not itself experiential. It’s not structured. It’s just: everything that could be.
But not everything that could be can be.
The Shape of Coherence
Some potentials are coherent. Some are not.
What does this mean? Consider: you cannot experience a square circle. Not because something is stopping you, but because “square circle” doesn’t name anything. It’s not a possibility that’s being blocked — it’s not a possibility at all. It’s incoherent.
Same with “married bachelor.” Same with experiencing something that has both property X and not-property-X at the same time in the same respect. These aren’t forbidden options. They’re not options. They don’t even rise to the level of potentials that could be selected against.
TNT posits that coherence has structure. There’s a boundary — primitive, immutable, eternal — that defines which potentials from the infinite field are actualizable and which are forever incoherent.
This boundary is called B₀ (the global coherence boundary).
B₀ is not something that was created. It doesn’t have an origin. It’s not a force or filter that does anything — it’s not agentive any more than Awareness is. B₀ is the eternal structure of coherence itself. The shape of what can be.
What satisfies B₀ is the domain of coherent potential — the stuff that’s genuinely possible. What fails B₀ isn’t forbidden or unlikely. It’s incoherent. Outside the domain of the possible entirely.
What We’ve Built So Far
Let’s step back and look at the foundation we’ve laid.
Awareness: the primitive, irreducible ground within which everything exists — not a thing, not an agent, but the condition for existence itself.
The Field of Infinite Potential (FIP): the totality of all potentials within Awareness, not yet structured by coherence.
B₀ (the global coherence boundary): the eternal, non-agentive structure that defines which potentials are actualizable and which are forever incoherent.
This is the ground of everything. But it’s not yet experience.
Experience isn’t just floating in Awareness waiting to be noticed. Something has to happen. A potential has to become actual. And that transition — from potential to actuality — is what TNT calls actualization.
But actualization doesn’t happen randomly. It doesn’t happen to the whole field at once. It requires a selector. An individuated point through which selection occurs — what TNT calls a conscious aperture.
This foundation alone isn’t experience. Something has to happen. A selection has to be made. And those selections don’t just vanish. What they do? What they become?
That’s next.
Next: “What Happens When You Experience”—introducing the conscious aperture, the Now, and the act of selection.