5.1 A go-for-broke program aiming at maximal simplicity, economy and theoretical depth, on the other hand, gambles that a canonically recast maths, physics and phenomenology are coextensive and exhaustive of the world. [See the technical appendix for details]. As expounded here, this conceptual framework entails a naturalised, idealistic monism characteristic of a world completely described by the mathematical formalism of QM. The really hard problem, I think, is why anything exists. Perhaps this is still the best bet for a truly insoluble meta-mystery from which all other puzzles ultimately derive. For the most part, however, we're still ignorant of the 'puzzles' we will have to explain, let alone the theories we'll need to do so ('The End of Science?' For Christ's sake!] For sure, the new state-spaces of consciousness, new semantic primitives, and new universes of discourse to be explored are all in a sense implicit in the equation(s?) of the TOE. They'll just never be accessible to us simply by deeper thought and harder work under the psycho-chemical status quo. The proscription of experiment by the power-elite has ensured that we mostly mistake parochial and unrepresentative slivers of consciousness for the whole phenomenon itself. So right now, I worry that I'm just digitally doodling rather than doing real empirical research.

5.2 Yet what about The Big One? It's hard to see what methodology to use to attack the meta-mystery of why there is anything at all. Its solution may indeed be cognitively closed to us; just as it is for, say, chimpanzees. If we assume so, we'll certainly never get anywhere. So we might as well assume that it isn't. Let's suppose that [informally] an explanation is complete when one shows that what is the case is the only possible way things could actually be. We can apparently express, though not imagine, the possibility of nothing at all having existed. This would have left nothing to explain. So one might attack the Riddle of Existence via a contrastive attempt first to define rigorously and precisely what must be the case for nothing to exist or explain. [No space or time or dimensionality? No meaning or reference or properties or events? No truth or logic? Nothing to quantify over or be the case? No reified absence? Nothing which follows from this absence?]. Intuitively obvious as its meaning may seem, full-blown(!) nihilism proves exceedingly difficult to explicate: it's not clear whether it could potentially have anything even analogous to truth-conditions.