Change itself must be recognizable for it to be registered as such. Without familiar features to foreground or frame that which alters or mutates, change cannot possibly be acknowledged. Wholesale change, a redefinition of all parameters, complete redefinition, is impossible—such a thing would be synonymous with apocalypse: actual death and rebirth. If everything that is available to know is suddenly new, there is no utility at all to anything that you may recall. The true tabula rasa would be a state of anguish and absolute alienation. Even at birth, we are not without bequest from previous iterations of our own living paradigms. Within our bodies patterns are encoded, perpetuated, regenerated, and replicated. We do not enter the world a blank slate, but rather pre-loaded with schema ready to assimilate compatible awarnesses, data, and options. Our adaptations and our choices are predetermined, not so much in the sense that there is no choice, that we cannot effect change or direct the destiny of our awarenesses—not that choice is an illusion—but rather the range and the limits of creativity and invention, self-determination, are set. Unquantifiable ranges of permutation are available to all actors in the universe, but not all things are possible. In fact, that there are definable limits to the possible constitutes, and describes, one of the only irrefutable conditions of all that is knowable. Inevitably, one reaches the end of all things.

For a thing to be, it must be what it is not. But to be what it is not, and acknowledged, a thing must be made of the same stuff as that what is.