Let Me Try To Explain Myself

There is something is deeply wrong with how we understand ourselves in relation to everything else. Not just morally wrong, though that too, but factually wrong. Like we've been working from a upsidedown map , or a backwards one only viewable when lit with candlelight from behind. Every system we then build on top of that map inherits that crucial first wrong assumption.

The map we use today says “you are here.” Everything else is out there. The world is a collection of separate things bumping into each other, competing for space and resources and significance, and you are one of those things. Your job is to persist. The universe doesn't care whether you do.

I think that map is wrong. As a matter of physics. Here's what I mean.

When you follow the mathematics of spacetime all the way down… past general relativity, past quantum mechanics, past the standard model, down to where the equations start to stop doing what we need them to, you find something strange. The further down you go, the less the universe looks like a collection of separate things in a container, and the more it looks like a single pattern of relationships. Distinctions. Differences that make differences.

What I've been trying to show — what I think the mathematics actually says — is that the universe is not a place where things happen. It's a structure of informational relationships that, at certain scales, looks like a place where things happen. Space is what those relationships look like from one angle. Time is what they look like when they're irreversible. Gravity is what they look like when they curve. And you — your mind, your experience, your sense of being a self looking out at a world — are what they look like when they fold back on themselves and become self-referential.

You are then not in the universe. You are a region of it that has become aware of itself. And If true — and I believe it's true, and I think the mathematics supports it — then the story we've been telling about separateness is not just philosophically questionable. It's physically incorrect. The boundary between you and everything else is real in the same way that the boundary between a wave and the ocean is real. It's there. It matters. But it's not a wall. It's a gradient…a spectrum of conditions across the same water.

I think most human suffering — not all of it, but most of the suffering we inflict on each other rather than the suffering that just happens to us — comes from forgetting that. From the map that says you are here and everything else is out there and the distance between you is fundamental rather than apparent. Ideology is what happens when you take that and systematise it. War is what happens when you take that it to its natural conclusion.

I'm not saying physics can fix that. I'm not that naive. People have known intellectually for a long time that we're all made of the same atoms, all evolved from the same ancestor, all breathing the same air — and it hasn't stopped anything. Knowing something and feeling it and acting from it are very different things.

But I do think it matters what story a culture tells itself about what things fundamentally are. And right now the dominant story — the one embedded in our science, our economics, our politics, our technology — is the separation story. The container story. The universe as a place full of separate things competing for scarce reality.

What if the mathematics said something different? As a derivable result from the geometry of distinguishable states.

The boundaries between self and other become gradients, not walls. The other person — the one who frightens you or angers you or seems utterly alien to you — is another region of the same geometry, coarse-grained differently, seeing a different face of the same thing. Not wrong. Not other. Differently located in a shared structure.

I think if that understanding/belief penetrated culture the way that, say, evolution penetrated culture - genuinely, as a shift in the background assumptions people carry — it would change things. Not all at once ….never works that way…But in the direction of less cruelty and more curiosity. Less terror of difference and more interest in what the other person's location in the geometry reveals that yours conceals.

That's what I'm working toward.

I started asking why spacetime exists when I was fourteen years old in a math class and got told to stop asking stupid questions. I never stopped asking. And the further I've followed the question, the more it leads not away from human experience but toward it. Toward the question of what experience is, why it exists, what it means that the universe has arranged itself such that some of its regions can ask questions about the whole.

I don't have a complete answer. The mathematics isn't finished. But I think the direction is right. And I think the work matters..and the documentation matters.

Because if the universe is what I think it is — a self-consistent loop of informational relationships that generates space and time and gravity and mind from a single underlying geometry — then we are not strangers to each other in a cold and indifferent cosmos. We are the cosmos, looking at itself, from different angles. And maybe that's enough.

I want to follow that last thought somewhere that may at firstseem like a detour but I promise it isn't.

Because after I wrote that, after I said we are the cosmos looking at itself from different angles, I realised I wasn't saying anything new. I was in fact saying something very old. Something that has been said so many times, in so many languages, by so many people across so many centuries that we've mostly stopped hearing it.

The Hindu traditions said Atman is Brahman. The Buddhist traditions said nothing exists independently — every apparent thing arises from its relationships, and what we call a self is a process not a substance. The Taoists said the thing that can be named is not the eternal thing — because the eternal thing is what all names and distinctions emerge from. The Christian mystics kept insisting that at the deepest level the boundary between the soul and everything else doesn't disappear into nothingness — it dissolves into recognition. The Sufi poets said existence is one and the apparent separateness of things is a veil. Indigenous traditions that Western science spent centuries condescending to as primitive animism turn out to have been describing something structurally closer to what the physics suggests than the Cartesian subject-object split that replaced them.

Every major tradition that has ever tried to point at the deepest nature of things has pointed at the same thing. Unity. Relationality. The self as region not as atom. The boundary as gradient not as wall.

They were right.

They just didn't have the mathematics.

The history of religion is largely the history of what happens when you try to transmit an experience of unity through institutions built on hierarchy and distinction. The institution eventually betrays the insight. The words calcify. People start worshipping the finger instead of looking at what it's pointing at.

What the mathematics adds is not a replacement for any of this. It's simply the thing that was always missing from it.

Necessity.

It's not just that reality happens to be relational. It's that it could not be otherwise. The geometry of distinguishable states has one natural metric — not one of many, one. Lorentzian signature — the thing that makes time different from space — is forced by the mathematics, not chosen. Observers are not accidents of evolution in an indifferent cosmos. They are required by the self-consistency of the whole.

Belief can be threatened. Understanding cannot. If you understand why the universe must be relational it's no longer a position you hold. It's something you've seen. And what you've seen can't be taken from you by someone with a different book.

That's what the traditions were trying to do.

That's what they mostly couldn't do because they didn't have the tools.

I'm trying to build the tools. And everyone thinks I'm nuts …lol