The Basic Nature of Physicality

Physicists generally describe their model of the world in mathematical terms, rather than with stories. Describing behaviors around us with math has allowed very accurate predictions of controlled experiments, which have fostered increasingly complex technology. This then raises the philosophical question of what math really is, and whether this math that we’ve discovered or invented as a species is similar to, or radically different than the math that rules the behavior of our cosmos.

Many have pointed out that because our cosmos contains Turing-complete computers (ie those that are capable of a certain set of computation), that the universe hosting the cosmos is also Turing-complete, because it at least contains those computers. While the math we do as humans is dependent upon biological or silicon-based substrates, transcendent math and computation may be far more ethereal in nature, and operate with fewer limits. This unlimited, abstract basis may be required to explain how a computer could host a detailed cosmos behaving in line with quantum physics and general relativity, all while interacting with the insubstantial nature of consciousness, at scale.

The calculations that occur in our physical reality are so complex, that as entities embedded in that reality, we haven’t figured out how to accurately describe or simulate the interaction of three classically-behaving bodies, let alone three quantum particles. On top of that, we don’t know all of the mathematical rules of our system yet, nor how to accurately describe them in terms of a conventional story. In truth, we don’t know on a deep level what particles and their behaviors are like, but instead we perceive knock-on effects from that behavior. We also may have a hard time convincing ourselves that we know the outside world isn’t just a dream.

Even if we live in such a dream, the patterns that drive the phenomena appearing in it can still be thought of as a kind of computation or math describing the process of the dreamer’s dream. Because a “real” physical world is also describable with math, they are both two variations on the same kind of reality. The main difference between them is the scope or complexity of those mathematical systems, and their characteristics, including whether one of them is mostly a narrative. In other words, a dream does not simply create itself out of nothing.

If physicality as we commonly think of it is real, then there is plenty of room for illusion and dream-like qualities too. First of all, the apparent solidity of a chair is just us sensing the result of an abstract mathematical equation plus information. How much does an ethereal and transcendent equation describing a chair weigh, especially if a chair is such a small component of that total reality? Like the famous Zen story, if you think that the rock exists only in your mind, then the rock you carry around in your head must be very heavy. Another way of looking at this is that the basis for our cosmos must make efficient use of resources in computing its highly complex behavior, if anything like a “resource” exists on that level at all.

In addition to the interface between our cosmos and the transcendent, it’s also worth thinking about the internal behavior of our cosmos. This investigation may tell us about our relationship to physical time, whether we live with fate or randomness, and the beginning of all that we perceive.

General relativity tells us that space and time are not separate, but exist as part of a continuum, with time being like a fourth dimension to what we normally consider a separate three dimensional space. Depending upon which way you’re walking, relativity affects which events at the edges of the visible cosmos lie in the future or the past, relative to you. Because there are many entities moving in different directions, we might wonder “which is correct?” hoping to pinpoint which events are “now”, and which are yet to happen. However, all of them are valid. This means that something that exists now in your future may exist in my past, simultaneously for us both.

It wouldn’t make sense for movement to destroy then re-create reality at the far reaches of the cosmos according to who is walking where. This leaves us with the perspective of “block time”, where each state and perspective exists simultaneously. This means that time neither creates the future, nor destroys the past. It is merely a factor of a pattern that describes what appears everywhere, at all times. If so, then the past, present and future are already realized.

Quantum physics also reveals insights about our reality, in which small scale events often appear random. As a way of thinking about an analogous phenomena, computers generally store secret numbers in their memory, which they use to produce pseudo-random numbers. Unless we had access to those secret numbers, we could never guess future pseudo-random results, regardless of how many pseudo-random numbers we’ve seen it produce before.¹ In the same way, it may be that for the computational system hosting this cosmos, all behavior is determined, but from our limited, cosmically embodied perspective, we can’t predict the exact outcomes of quantum effects in any way.

Another question I’ve pondered and heard others mention is the origin of the cosmos. Most likely the big bang was a singularity, with the explosion occurring in both directions of time. This is possible because of the reversibility of time in the mathematical equations of the cosmos. The main difference between approaching the big bang from one end of time vs leaving it from another is entropy. Entropy describes the way that the cosmos evolves into more chaos and lower states of energy. So in this view, entropy increases in both directions away from the big bang. However strange watching a broken glass un-shatter and then fly into your hand might be, both halves of time are mathematically consistent in either direction. You could pick an arbitrary slice of time and follow it through the big bang, then out the other end, without finding any discontinuities in the unfolding of events.

The big bang is not the beginning of the cosmos itself, but it is a point of simplicity that is defined in the continuous flow of time. So, what caused the big bang? If time is a feature of our cosmos’ behavior, then deeper layers likely have fabricated it, and are thus not bound by it. This removes the need for a first event in time. I’ll cover this topic in future writings.