imagine any mundane positive claim. for instance, “my car is parked right outside”. at first glance, it would seem that this is a supportable claim.

however, what if you were told that in reality, your car wasn’t parked outside… that it is impossible to prove that the car is parked outside, because an advanced being may exist which is merely maintaining the illusion that your car is parked there. projecting it’s holograms, implanting false memories, generally setting everyone up to beleive that the car is parked, right outside. or perhaps that you are merely suffering from a persistent delusion that you own a car.

this hypothetical being or condition belongs to a set that we’ll call ‘nullifiers’ because they exist to negate or nullify any statement you would use to support a positive existence claim. although the likelyhood of such a being or condition existing is vanishingly small, it would be impossible to ‘prove’ it doesn’t exist.

I wish I could go to the depths that the original article did, but to conclude… because every existence claim implies the non-existence of a nullifier, positive and negitive existential claims are on the same epistemological footing. we can only assign a probability that a given statement is true.