Xavier Gréhant

Reality appears to be independent of its appearing: it resists, constrains, and persists regardless of attention. Imagination, by contrast, feels derivative and optional. This paper argues that the asymmetry, while phenomenologically real, cannot be ontologically grounded from within the practice that registers it. A survey of grounding accounts---causal, phenomenological, physicalist---reveals a shared presupposition: that reference to the grounding relation is independently settled. The paper formalizes referential closure---the condition under which all reference within a practice is internally stabilized---and proves a parity theorem: no consequence available within the practice distinguishes the hypothesis that reference is externally anchored from the hypothesis that it is closure-stabilized. The demand for ontological grounding exceeds referential jurisdiction. The paper then develops a positive structural account. An appearance hierarchy identifies structural aboutness as the constitutive floor for articulation; qualia are modeled as multi-plane stabilization patterns whose explanatory gap is invariant; and the reality/imagination distinction is explained as differential stabilization---high-constraint versus low-constraint---within referential closure. The framework does not claim exhaustiveness: the possibility of non-articulative being remains genuinely open. What is removed is the demand for ontological grounding---not because it is false, but because it exceeds the jurisdiction of the only adjudicative practice available.

Logic appears indispensable to every coherent description of reality, yet admits no external grounding: any attempt to justify logic presupposes it. This paper argues that the circularity is diagnostic rather than vicious. It reveals _constitutive closure_: a structure whose components mutually enable each other such that no component's absence can be coherently questioned. Logic is the worked example, but the structure is general. Using Gödel-Löb provability logic to characterize the boundary of self-referential demonstration, the paper establishes a parity result: within demonstrable reach, constitutive closure and any proposed external grounding have equivalent explanatory force. The result is dissolution, not stalemate. Grounding questions dissolve when posing them requires what they ask about.

Scientific confirmation relies on the convergence of independent sources of evidence. When multiple observers, instruments, or experiments yield the same result, the improbability of coincidence supports the conclusion that an external fact caused the agreement. This paper argues that the independence assumptions underwriting such inferences cannot be justified without presupposing the external-world framework they are meant to establish. Independence is not an observable property of data but a structural claim about data-generating processes---a claim that requires substantive background assumptions about distinct systems, causal separation, and error mechanisms. These background assumptions are justified only relative to models that already presuppose external reality. The result is not that external realism is false, nor that intersubjective agreement provides no evidence, but that the degree of confirmation is underdetermined without framework-level commitments that cannot themselves be confirmed by the same methods. This underdetermination extends to perception itself: the intervention-structured patterns of experience are compatible with multiple metaphysical embeddings. The paper concludes not with an alternative metaphysics but with the recognition that questions about the ultimate source of experience are underdetermined by any evidence expressible within experience.

``Why is there something rather than nothing?'' appears to be the ultimate explanatory demand. This paper argues that the principal strategies for answering it---parsimony, necessity, causation, and brute-fact acceptance---share a common failure: each presupposes conditions that cannot be secured independently of what the question asks us to explain. The argument applies a Jurisdiction Test: an explanatory norm applies legitimately only when its application conditions are independently available. When exported to existence as such, each norm is asked to underwrite what it already presupposes. The conclusion is not that existence is inexplicable, but that explanatory norms cannot coherently be globalized. The question persists not as an unmet obligation but as a marker of where explanation overreaches.

This paper argues against person-identification---the assumption that consciousness is fundamentally identical with a particular human organism. Person-identification generates the lottery question (``why this observer among all possible observers?'') but cannot resolve the reference class needed to answer it; the question remains permanently malformed. An experiential-priority framing, by contrast, resolves the reference class (the class of coherent experiences is the unique non-arbitrary specification for any verbalized inquiry), enables the question to be coherently stated, and immediately dissolves it (every coherent experience is, trivially, a coherent experience). The resolution is the instrument of the dissolution. This yields the paper's core contribution: an explanation of why person-identification persists culturally despite being philosophically untenable. The same constraint that dissolves the puzzle---the structure of verbalized inquiry---also prevents the dissolution from spreading. Ideas propagate through narrative, and narrative requires precisely the dualistic structures (subject/object, self/world) that person-identification provides. The insight thus points to its own limited transmissibility.