As we have seen, recording takes the place of causality. There could be causality without recording, but it would be nothing. If there is something, it is because there is recording, which from the logical, ontological and chronological point of view precedes causality, and moreover spares us the absurdity of the theories of some causa sui (‘cause of itself’). Recording is the ontological version of hysteresis, the principle of permanence of the substance as presence, resistance, existence. The realism I propose is not limited to believing in the existence of tables, chairs and anti-realist philosophers: as negative realism it recalls that reality resists thought; as positive realism it affirms that meaning comes from the world and its affordances; and as transcendental realism it affirms that the common root of resistance and affordance lies in recording. It is therefore necessary to start from here.

Being equals being recorded. If we follow the physical conjectures prevailing today – the Big Bang and its updated version, the Big Bounce – the origin of the universe presents itself as the weakening of an original recording. This original recording is the same currently found in black holes, which gave rise to space, time and spatial-temporal objects. These objects, after all, are characterised in ordinary experience as permanence and resistance, which find their condition of possibility in recording as the persistence of a state. From this point of view, being (i.e. the object of ontology) is the result of recording. Following an explosion, some very concentrated matter unfolded and became the world, which was a contingent fact. But in order for this contingency to emerge, transforming itself into the world, the explosion had to show not only the capacity to expand, but also the capacity to record, to keep track. At the beginning there was an explosion, at the end there will be thermal balance, and in the middle there is time, which tells the story of a growing tendency towards disorder and heat loss. But in each of these stages there is recording as the possibility of keeping track of the previous conditions, which, in the mesoscopic terms of our ordinary experience, defines the spatial-temporal characteristics of everyday objects (if the library behind me suddenly disappeared, I would have good reason to believe I was the victim of a hallucination, whether positive or negative).