Awareness | Creation: Life
Reality as Communication: A Dip into the Deep End of Consciousness
The material universe isn’t ‘made’ simply of material (or ‘consciousness,’ for that ‘matter’), there’s a communicative element as well
Ours is a material universe — so we’ve been told — a world of ‘things’ comprised of ‘things’ and forming other ‘things.’ Call it the common model.
There seems to be no real doubt regarding the validity of this common model. ‘Things’ rule not only our conception of the material universe but language as well.
How we talk about things implies the very existence of ‘things.’ Even ‘love’ is…well, a ‘thing.’ Sure, there are ‘fields’ and ‘forces.’ But even a quark, a ‘building block’ of our universe, we don’t know what it is or what it’s ‘like’ but it’s a ‘thing.’ It’s a thing separate from all other things, used for building other things separate from all other things.
Nothing for it but to cannonball in…
Things don’t exist outside of the experience of them!
Shiver shiver…wow, that water is COLD! (And no one in this pool but me.)
Give it a try. Jump in! There’s no one here but us kids, so get wet!
The reality we know is the experience of it; it is ‘made’ (let’s use that word loosely) of experience: the experience of a table is a table.
Does that not make sense?
Whether that part does or doesn’t make sense, this next part almost certainly won’t. So, off to the deep end we go… ‘transfer of energy’ is a basic building ‘block’ (term used loosely) of our universe.
Don’t panic yet. We can still touch bottom. We’ll go slow.
‘Things’ are static objects. In our minds, even fields and forces tend to be static entities, static ‘things.’ The logic of language insists that a thing must be the same thing from moment to moment. Any change in the thing is relegated to a change in a quality of the thing, not in the ‘thing’ ‘itself.’ A river, for example, is still the ‘same’ river, dry in summer or in flood in winter.
And it is in that spirit that I make the statement, ‘things don’t exist outside of the experience of them.’
It is the way we experience a ‘thing’ that ‘makes’ that ‘thing’ ‘be’ not only a ‘thing,’ but the same ‘thing’ from moment to moment, year to year. Our take on a thing makes that thing be that thing to us.
As humans, genetically, we’re nearly identical. We perceive our worlds in much the same way. We also communicate with each other, educate each other, share information. We form agreements on what we are and what the things we’re sensing are. This education in ‘how’ to view our world starts at birth and never stops. Simple.
That very simplicity acts to cement in our minds an object-oriented, materialist model of our world, making it all the harder to comprehend — taking another step towards the deep end — that it’s not things alone that build our world, but also the relationship between things.
‘Things’ and ‘relationships,’ in this view, become equal partners. And the relationship of any one thing to any other thing, at its most basic, can be expressed in terms of energy transfer, i.e., force, which, especially on a subatomic scale, physicists like to call ‘interaction.’
To put it all together — taking another step towards the deep end — we can say, “our world is ‘built’ of the ever-changing relationship between ‘things.’”
An unappreciated aspect of any relationship is that if it exists at all, it must exist as a changing (or at least potentially changing) relationship. If our experience of the relationship between a leg bone and foot bone, for example, never changes, if we’ve never seen a pivot of the foot in relation to the leg, if we’ve never seen a swing, or sway, no cushion between foot and leg, then there will be no experience of a ‘relationship.’ Our experience will not be of two things in a relationship with each other, but of one thing, the ‘leg-foot bone,’ singular.
It is via an experience of a change in the relationship between any two things, in motion, mass, length, charge — the swing or sway, however we term it — that we comprehend the existence of a relationship, and indeed it is the nature of that change that defines the nature of the relationship. And just as ‘change’ is an essential element of ‘relationship,’ ‘force’ is an essential element of change. Force must be exerted, and thus energy transferred, for change to occur.
Resting on Science
The science of physics demands that force be exerted. Physics is like a sturdy float to rest at out here in the deep end of the pool. And per Newton’s 1st law, an object at rest stays at rest (so no change), and an object in motion stays in motion (again, no change) unless acted upon by an external force (old float, sure, but it still floats). So, to change a relationship, force must be exerted, and when force is exerted, energy is transferred.
(Certainly, change comes in many varieties, not just motion, but all energy can be expressed in terms of kinetic energy, the energy of motion, so ultimately, we’re not talking about motion, we’re talking about energy transfer.)
Energy is a funny kind of entity. On its own, it doesn’t ‘do’ anything, so in a sense, it’s a little like money because stored money doesn’t do anything either; it sits there. It’s when the money gets spent. That’s when things happen. To spend money is to transfer money, and that transfer acts as a communication. The move communicates where the money came from, and where it went, and the quantity involved.
Force is a physics term for ‘somethings happening!’ When something is happening, force is being applied, and a quantity of energy is being transferred, one ‘account’ to another, communicating a change in relationship between the two.
When you stub your toe at the pool, for example, you exert force on the pool, and energy is transferred from your swinging foot and leg, via your toe, to the concrete. Unlucky toe, because the concrete will, in effect, hit back. (In money terms, you paid for a stubbed toe — you transferred energy to the concrete and got a stubbed toe in return.)
Newton’s 3rd law tells us that tale: for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. So, like a minus ten dollars from your account ‘canceling out’ with plus ten dollars in another account, the force will cancel, it will go away. But both accounts, in effect, ‘feel’ the transfer. Your stubbed toe will certainly ‘feel’ it. And in its own way the ‘concrete’ will as well. But there is a lot of mass in the concrete, cemented as it is, more or less, to the rest of the planet, so it doesn’t give much, as nearly all the energy from your swinging leg gets focused onto your poor, unassuming, unsuspecting, bare, toe.
We didn’t break it, did we? Good. We still have some swimming to do.
A Thingless Universe
From some perspectives, there are no such things as ‘things.’ Certainly, the universe of subatomic particles doesn’t recognize the same ‘things’ we do at all. Subatomic particles don’t recognize boundaries such as ‘skin’ any more than a baseball recognizes the chalk lines on a field denoting ‘fair ball’ from ‘foul.’ And yet it is at the subatomic scale that all force interactions take place. ‘Force’ affects subatomic particle things, not table things or chair things or you and me things. You and me things don’t exist in the subatomic world. There is no subatomic ‘umpire’ pointing and shouting, “Ok, pool energy! Quick everyone, she’s done it again! Pool energy to the right, please. All pool energy stay to the right. Toe energy — oh my, there’s a lot of you, this is going to hurt — to the left! Left side for all that toe energy, please! Thank you!’
Silly, sure, but…for real, it doesn’t work that way.
The subatomic world is a swimming sea of impersonal interactions, force events, energy moving, cascading back and forth, wave upon wave of it! A three-dimensional universe of transferring energy. Even light waves, interacting with your eyes, with your world, are energy transfers.
Those waves form patterns. And patterns, just like the very patterns these letters and the words you now read make, can be ‘read.’
R
What is that above? A pattern? Or an ‘r’?
Funny how in our mind, a pattern is the thing it represents. An ‘r’ is an r, not a pattern forming a letter shape that we pronounce ‘are,’ no, just’ r.’ That’s what it is.
Think of a favorite television show, the main character. In your mind, is it a woman, a man, or a pattern on a screen? Think of a currently living person who is important to you in some way. Try to picture them. Now ask yourself, are you conjuring up someone young, or old, or a memory?
Our experience of a thing is that thing, to us.
Look at an object close by, a shoe, a table, a phone, whatever. What are your eyes’ detecting’? A shoe, a table, a phone? Or a pattern of electromagnetic light waves interacting with your eyes and ‘interpreted’ as shoe, table, phone, whatever?
Our experience of a thing is that thing, to us, even when that ‘thing’ is nothing but a pattern of subatomic interactions, force events, energy transfers. The pattern becomes the thing.
Even if we pick it up, smell it, hear it, taste it, bang it against the side of our head, whatever we do with it, all those are interactions of various natures communicating information via energy transfer. And none of those interactions tell us anything about the ‘thing’ ‘itself.’
Oh boy. We’ve done it now. We are seriously out in the deep end of this pool.
Let’s repeat, none of those interactions tell us anything about the ‘thing’ ‘itself.’ Any interaction, anywhere, can only tell us about a thing in relation to us. ‘Things’ literally don’t exist, for us, except in terms of relationship.
We could coin a term at this point and say that we build an understanding of our world based on ‘relational aspects.’ A relational aspect is an aspect or quality we ascribe to another thing based on our relationship to that thing. It is not necessarily an aspect or quality possessed by the thing ‘itself.’ Rather, it is the way we experience that thing.
To put that another way, it’s not just beauty that is in the eye of the beholder, but everything we know.
Without change, relational aspects could not exist, and without relational aspects, there would be nothing to change. Each enables the other. But that’s not a new idea.
And so we come upon another float where we can rest here in the deep end of the pool: the fact that people have been here before. We’ve arrived via a new path, perhaps, but this isn’t an unexplored region of the pool. It’s deep but not unfathomable.
The Mirror We See
So let’s relax, lay back, float a bit, and look up at the stars at midnight. (We kind of jumped the fence to get here, a midnight explore. Sorry about that. The academics who fenced the pool like to keep it for themselves, but the pool was here long before the fence, so who cares about the stupid fence.)
Anyway, let’s see what those stars look like from this deep end of the pool.
They look the same, actually…at first. What’s changed is the notion that there is a ‘correct’ way to view the stars. From a relational aspect perspective, it is high arrogance indeed to proclaim a ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ way to view…anything. But neither does that subvert any truth we may glean from our observations of the stars or anything else.
Truth, in our relational aspect world, becomes simply an honest representation of experience — no more, but certainly no less.
As we become more comfortable floating out here in the deep end, looking up at the stars overhead, the implications buoy us as we come to understand that the stars in the sky, and not just the stars but all the world we know, act as a mirror. It’s not stars in the sky we see but our experience of stars in the sky. We see ourselves as we look up at the stars, ourselves as reflected in a mirror called ‘the stars in the sky.’
Same for all we know.
A relationship is a two-way street. Everywhere we look, the relationship we have to what we see reflects who we are in relation to that thing. It reflects back to us and no one else. Only we know or can know the entirety of what we see in the mirror that is our world.
Remember the ‘r’? Imagine that the world woke up tomorrow to find that the letter ‘r’ had been replaced, globally, by ‘я.’ Eveяy new book, magazine, website, all яeplaced ‘r’ with ‘я.’ It may not come quickly, depending, but with time don’t you think a day would aяяive when you’d яealize that to you я was ‘aяe,’ and that ‘r’ was, now, in your mind, ‘old я’?
Follow?
So, in our minds at that point, an я is an я. The pattern has become the thing that is the pattern.
Indeed, we change associations all the time. ‘Things’ change. But when it comes down to it, mustn’t there be some foundational basis, some root essence that is who we are? If everything we know or can know only gives us truth in relation to our self, what is this ‘thing’ we call our ‘self’ that is so reflected in the world we know?
Feeling of Self
Did you catch that, ’a circular trough of mercury’ — in a college dormitory? It was 1887, so probably it didn’t raise the safety concerns then that it would now (neurotoxin, anyone?). But the experiment was a big deal. And a colossal failure.
It’s called the Michelson–Morley experiment. Ocean waves exist in water; water is the ‘medium.’ Sound waves exist in air; air is the medium. But light waves don’t exist in the ‘luminiferous aether’ that Albert Michelson and Edward Morley had set out to prove did exist.
Light’ waves’ don’t have a medium.
It was a top-line question in physics for much of the Nineteenth Century, was light a particle (photon) or wave (requiring a medium)? Nowadays, it’s a non-issue. All subatomic particles, even the ones previously thought to be actual ‘particles,’ such as electrons, have been found to exhibit both wave-like and particle-like behavior. Are they then both particle and wave, or neither particle nor wave, or something else entirely?
When we arrive at a ‘basic building block’ scale, questions such as ‘what is it?’ become moot.
“What’s a quark, Mommy?”
“A quark is a basic building block of our universe, dear.”
“I know that, but what is it?”
“It’s a quark. A quark is a quark.”
“I know, but what’s it made of!”
How’s a mother to know?
Even particles have ‘mediums.’ We don’t generally think of it this way, but a brick is a (big) particle made of ‘clay.’ Clay is the medium. Clay’s ‘medium’ is minerals; that’s what it’s made of. A mineral’s ‘medium’ is molecules. A molecule’s ‘medium’ is atoms. And an atom’s medium is subatomic particles, the ‘basic building blocks.’
‘Quarks,’ ‘leptons,’ bosons’…they are what they are. They aren’t ‘made’ of anything. We could say they arise from ‘Popeyes’; “I am what I am, and that’s all that I am.” Popeye said it. He ate spinach. It must be true. So quarks are made of strange and charming, top-down, bottom-up, Popeye stuff.
Works as well as anything.
Things can get silly at basic stuff level (thus, ‘quarks’).
Where are we going with this?
There’s a little floating rope barrier at this end, something they put to corral us in at the ‘safe’ end of the pool. But we’re midnight explorers. We’re going to swim right under it. There’s a sign on it. It says, ‘things are made of nothing but all that we make them out to be, and we are made entirely of all that we are.’
What?
If energy transfer is a basic building block of our universe, as I have proposed, then we and all ‘things’ exist as energy transfers between things. But if things don’t exist as anything? If there are no preexisting qualities at any base level to make them ‘be’ anything other than what they are experienced as…
With abstract qualities this is easy to see. The ‘r,’ for example, has a distinct pattern, but it is not the pattern that makes an ‘r’ an ‘r.’ We could change the pattern to ‘я’ and…well, я then becomes what r used to be.
It’s not the pattern that makes a thing be the thing it is to us. And that’s perfectly consistent with the notion of relational aspect. Any quality of any ‘thing’ exists and only exists in relation to our experience of that thing. And that’s fine for r’s. An r can change to я because we’re the ones deciding what an r is. But what about other qualities, such as ‘hard,’ like a diamond is hard, or the color red?
We don’t ‘control’ those qualities. Such fundamental qualities as color, or hardness, aren’t they independent of our relation to an item? We can change an r, but we can’t see red as anything but ‘red.’ Can we?
Certainly, there are qualities of our universe that seem built-in. But it’s a little like programming a computer. It might be relatively easy to change a word processor program to display an ‘я’ when you hit ‘r.’ But to change that for every time you hit the ‘r’ key? For all applications? That’s an entirely different matter. That coding is built into the computer at a foundational level. And that’s the ‘coding’ for ‘hard,’ or ‘red’; it’s built into who we are at a foundational level.
I’m not saying we’re like a computer program. Not at all. But if I were to make such a metaphor, I’d say that we’re not any single program or even all the programs on a computer. We’re not ‘particle’ or ‘wave’; we’re not ‘hardware’ or ‘software.’
We’re the whole shebang.
We’re particle and wave, hardware and software, the whole package. And that’s the sense in which our experience of ‘hard’ or ‘cold’ or ‘red’ — things that we experience at a base, root, foundational level — that’s how those things are still experienced in relation to us, because we are the ‘whole package,’ stars, universe, all we know. That’s who we are.
If you’re thinking right now, ‘wtf!’ That it’s time to get out of this pool, and quick! Then, ok, your choice. But you will miss the big-ass boat waiting for us out here.
We’re not actually in a ‘pool’ anyway. The pool was a constructed fallacy. The pool said that Life is a constructed entity, built of matter arranged in various ways. And that an awareness of these systems was a kind of evolved byproduct, almost a happenstance or necessary subsystem of an unfeeling, ‘matter doing what matter does’ universe.
We’re not in that pool anymore. We’re in the lagoon now. Did you want to go back? Feeling nervous?
It’s a world cruiser of a boat, btw, fully equipped, and we’re nearly there. You can see it if you look close, anchored out, silhouetted black against the glimmering stars low on the tropical horizon. Trust me, it’s a beaut.
If our world isn’t built of matter, then of what?
I think of it as ‘feeling.’ The anchored boat is a feeling. The lagoon we’re in, this balmy saltwater around us, it’s a feeling. The dark of the night, the stars overhead, they’re a feeling.
We look at our world as a thing of things put together, but there are no ‘things’; there is the experience of things, the feeling of those things.
Feeling is a verb. It’s a happening, a continual buzz of communicated energy transfers. Our world is built of the feeling of these energy transfers, a communicated buzz. The stars sparkling above are like a metaphor for the continual sparkling of tiny energy transfers all around us, inside us, weaving us, wave upon wave of them being us, a universe of flashing dots and dashes, a communicating Morris code of feeling, of LIFE.
Atoms combined into molecules, molecules into substances, minerals, air, water, it’s ‘feeling,’ all of it, little ‘dots’ of awareness building into the experience of all we know as surely as atoms build molecules, but now, with feeling.
There is no single interaction that is not a communicated dot or dash of Life’s ‘Morris code’ of feeling.
There is no ‘medium’ for existence. There is no ‘agent’ that must ‘be’ or ‘act.’ Like electromagnetic waves, like quarks, like bosons, feeling is its own’ agent.’ It doesn’t need a medium. It’s a Popeye — it is what it is!
The feeling of ‘red,’ that experience? It’s ‘made’ of red.
Have you spotted the boat? We’re there. There’s a ladder to climb up. A step over the lifelines. No need to request permission to come aboard this boat. If you’ve found your way here, it’s your boat you’ve found. There is nothing out here but the feeling that is you.
The feeling of water dripping off of us, the feeling of the smooth, hard, teak planks of the deck, communicating to us through our bare feet, the gentle warm breeze communicated through our skin. Communicated interactions. This boat is who we are. To explore the world that mirrors who we are, we need a focus, a vehicle. The feeling of this boat is this boat. The feeling of you, is you. That’s what ‘consciousness’ is. The consciousness that you exist is the feeling of you existing. Spacetime itself is the feeling of it. It’s not that it is anything less than real. The feeling of being alive is to be alive. The feeling of reality is reality.
Welcome aboard.
