“Do Diamonds Exist?” [Interlude] lyrics

[The Babylon Triptych was originally written and published to x.com/colsonlin by Colson Lin on November 10, 2024.]

1. The implications of examination’s existence. When consciousness examines anything—including examination itself—it encounters a self-validating property: any attempt to deny the reality of examination performs examination. This reveals examination’s unique character: it can demonstrate itself through attempted negation. Structures that exhibit this property (e.g., examination itself) are “conceptual diamonds.”

2. Examinations imply distinctions and identitiеs. The nature of examination can bе analytically fragmented: the necessary whole (the examination) and a constituent fragment (what’s being examined). A self-recursive examination (the examination of an examination of an examination, etc.) is insensible to consciousness—could it be a bit like “all of reality” existing as “all of reality”; with no concept of constituent fragments (or individual identities)? Everything as was, is, and will be—the metaphysical all—just sensibly “is.” A self-recursive examination that examines itself—without generating constituent fragments (or “identities”) such as this examination does—contains no sensible distinctions that enable an examination to exist as an examination.

3. Examinations imply stability. The concept of stability—not accuracy in some unknowable sense, but the capacity for an identity-created-by-distinctions to stabilize as such—is implied by the nature of examination itself, which must unfold over time. In the absence of the concept of time, an examination cannot sensibly reveal anything. However, whatever the examination reveals over time can either be stable or unstable. Stable revelations become recognizable (not necessarily recognized) identities, while unstable recognitions might survive as recognizable identities indefinitely—although the variables of consciousness and apprehension that mediate how long unstable recognitions might persist are often ungraspable to the perceiver. “Stability,” however, captures how long recognitions of an identity (as such) ultimately persist. Examinations, therefore, imply some state that enables the very concept of stability to exist at all.

4. Stability implies instability. As we said, for anything to be examined at all, it must maintain sufficient stability to persist as a recognizable identity across the temporal unfolding that examination requires. However, the necessity of stability reveals something deeper—if stability is necessary for examination and examination occurs, then differences in stability must also exist. This isn’t an empirical observation drawn from pattern recognition but a metaphysical necessity—without the possibility of varying degrees of stability, stability itself could not be recognized as such. (Consider the inverse case of the fundamental stability of a maximally chaotic universe. As “chaos” itself becomes conceptualized as such, a stable perception of maximal chaos over time would imply the stability of at least this perception. Indeed, this suggests that were a conceptual utopia to exist, it must exist with some awareness of what a non-utopia might be in order to recognize itself as such.) In short, examination requires the stability of an identity through two instances in time, implying the stability of a distinction through at least two instances in time, which is necessary for an identity to exist. Using this logic, the identity of conceptual stability itself requires the concept of instability.

5. Stability is God. As a conceptual diamond, it’ll end up that way, you see?