There was a time in philosophy when everything was broken down into primary qualities and secondary qualities (Quentin Meillassoux opens his book After Infinitude on this very subject). Primary qualities were things that made up an object; secondary qualities were those that were produced by the encounter of one object with another. Let's picture that one object is a human and the other is a flame. When the human encounters that object, they are burned. This burning is not in the flame, nor is it in the human; it is in the encounter between the two. This quality is secondary. Even being hot is not in the flame. The flame can only be hot if it encounters something else. A primary quality is non-relational. Number, for example, does not require a relation, nor extension.

There is, admittedly, a whole movement of thought—indeed, the dominant movement since Kant—that is convinced that all things require a relation to exist, correlationism, because how can anything, even number, exist without an observer. Yet, we know there are places in time and space that exist without relationships or encounters—once, before the explosion of the star whose dust is our sun and us, there was simply nothing where I'm now (on a seat in the office), and, if the open universe theory is correct, or if the big crunch theory is correct, there will also be in the future nothing where I am at this moment.

What I find most fascinating about the mind is it can imagine such places and things in primary terms—a lonely piece of ice drifting through space five billion years ago, the terrific density a neutron star that is a billion years away from now. And yet the mind knows these things can never be seen or exist for it in any possible away. A big part of our real is wholly imcompossible.