Multisense Realism

…It is really energy then that creates ‘time’ by causing changes in matter in the ‘now’. It’s not as simple as that though. To know that something has changed, there has to be some sense of a remembered ‘not now’, otherwise there could be no time, only an eternal now with no history whatsoever, not even a millisecond of sensory caching to paint any kind of perception of realism. It is difficult to separate our own experience of human memory from what might be a universal temporal continuity in changes to matter, but frequency or rhythm seems to be a key principle in how this synchronizing order is maintained.

In view of these observations, it makes more sense to say that space is null matter and time is null energy – figments of energized matter’s presentation of itself. In my view, energy cannot exist independently of matter, and is in fact the sense and motive experience of matter itself. The cosmological implications of this make more sense to me also; rather than a big bang exploding into an infinite vacuum (which isn’t possible since there is no space yet to explode into and no time for the event to take place in), there would be a ‘big diffraction’, in which time space fissures fragment the wholeness of the Absolute totality/singularity. It would be an ingress of division which becomes matter-space and multiplication of those ingressions which experiences the cosmos as energy-time.” –  excerpted from my answer on Quora

Multisense Realism departs from conventional assumptions about spacetime as a physical plenum. Instead a four dimensional curvature of a spacetime matrix which is literally real, the idea is that physical laws, space and time are localized by sensory range.

Space is the sense of how multiple bodies or forms are divided and united. Distance and scale are sensory metrics which support Cartesian-Newtonian conception of position. Space is, in this way, the basis for truths which are reliable and quantitative, truths we can count on.

Time is the sense of how experiences seem to be divided on some levels while remaining united on others. Time is not position, not the coordinates of hands on a clock or calendar, but it can be inferred through the dispositions of the hands relative to each other. Time is both an ongoing duration (on and on) and an oscillation or repetition of similar experiences (again and again).

Starting with the big bang

Developing multisense realism has changed the way that I think about space and time. This change has left me keenly aware of  some contradictions about the big bang, which is understood to be a central mass which is both an event in time that consists of matter exploding into space and a point at which time itself begins. What I think most people miss completely is that as they visualize the big bang, they are modeling it as if there were space outside of the thing in which to expand and a remote vantage point from which to view it. It is also left unclear how it is that time begins, when we could project a time such as ‘five minutes before the big bang’ (or a billion years) and it is hard to realistically think of how the big bang prevents any kind of pre-big bang chronology from taking place.

What most people do I think is go with an Emperor’s New Clothes level of belief and just say, well, the big bang must have just exploded into a nothingness that is just like space except we are not allowed to call it that, and the time before the big bang was similarly exactly the same as time except that we can’t call it that until after the big bang. Like a lot of creation myths, it sounds a lot better if you don’t think about it too much.

What I propose is a radical literalism in interpreting the big bang. I take astrophysics at its word and assume that time and space both originate solely as a consequence of the big bang. Since we are dealing with the birth of the universe, there is nothing that we can assume about the event as far as normalizing it in terms that human beings might experience when they are awake and in the world. We are talking about a frame of the totality of all experiences – like the structure of the programming language through which time and space emerge as a ‘runtime’ effect.

Once you can let go of the idea of the big bang as something that is possible to get outside of in any way, then it makes more sense to think of it as a fixed condition which frames space and time rather than exists within it. Like there is no more North than the North pole, there is no more ‘before’ you can have than the big bang. It is not the first event, it is the only event. We are subroutines called from within it. The big bang is just the largest possible frame of ‘here’ and ‘now’ – expanding at the speed of light, yet never expanding relative to anything other than itself.

This is why I call it the big diffraction or ‘sole entropy well’. It is the one thing that can ever happen, and so in a sense, it can never stop happening. There isn’t any barrier to obstruct its boundaryless singularity. All it can do is to keep interrupting itself (time) yet keep accumulating the interruptions (space).

The main thing is to think inside and outside instead of just outside. Instead of a ball of white hot matter exploding into nothingness, think of a subjective experience; a feeling of being present – of solitude, multiplied upon itself over and over as through a kaleidoscope. On the inside, this totality is everythingness diffracted, broken into imperfect self-recapitulations which are dynamic and seeking to recover their place in the whole. Each of those recapitulations has a view of every other fragment, but diminished and distorted precisely to the extent that there is distance and dis-identification. What we see of the universe as individuals, as human beings, as animals, as material phenomena, are only what can be seen through the cracks of the lens of what we actually are.

Once we have a handle on the interiority of the cosmos, that it is as much a primordial feeling or experience as it is a radiant scattering of physical forms, then maybe we can entertain the idea that they are both opposite aspects of the same thing, and that in fact all interior experiences have an unexperienced exterior which can be reflected and inferred indirectly. The trick is to see the symmetry of the continuum and the continuity of the symmetries. Literal and figurative, public and private, space and time, entropy and significance, etc. It’s both. The part that we can see is all probabilistically scattered debris and galactic whirlpools. The part that is not that is the part that we are. We are the part that cares and creates and creates more to care about. That’s all part of the universe, we just don’t recognize it because it looks different when we see it outside of ourselves, of our culture, our species.

Space and Time

Consider the following:

If you have universe consisting of nothing except a single billiard ball, there is no way for space to exist without some other object to act as a frame of reference. There would be no difference between motion and stillness, no meaningful basis for position coordinates. Space, then, is a function of objects relations to each other; it is how matter presents the topological modulation of its own presence and absence. Space then, does not exist as a concretely primitive reality, but as a second order logical abstraction. Space is a sense of position and density relative to objects.

Time, similarly, is a function of relative perception rather than an objective framework which moves the universe forward in unison. Time depends on what you are measuring time with, how close you are to large dense objects, how fast you are accelerating compared to other objects, etc. Our concept of time is really a social construct, made of clocks and calendars of our own design and interpretation. We standardize them against reliable rhythms of celestial or microcosmic objects, but ultimately what is measured is nothing but quantified ratios of physical changes to matter.

It is really energy then that creates ‘time’ by causing changes in matter in the ‘now’. It’s not as simple as that though. To know that something has changed, there has to be some sense of a remembered ‘not now’, otherwise there could be no time, only an eternal now with no history whatsoever, not even a millisecond of sensory caching to paint any kind of perception of realism. It is difficult to separate our own experience of human memory from what might be a universal temporal continuity in changes to matter, but frequency or rhythm seems to be a key principle in how this synchronizing order is maintained.

In view of these observations, it makes more sense to say that space is null matter and time is null energy – figments of energized matter’s presentation of itself. In my view, energy cannot exist independently of matter, and is in fact the sense and motive experience of matter itself. The cosmological implications of this make more sense to me also; rather than a big bang exploding into an infinite vacuum (which isn’t possible since there is no space yet to explode into and no time for the event to take place in), there would be a ‘big diffraction’, in which time space fissures fragment the wholeness of the totality/singularity. It would be an ingress of division of matter and multiplication of energy which creates the cosmos.

What prevents us from realizing this understanding of spacetime is the assumption of subatomic events as independent dumb particles rather than what I think they might be; subjective experiences of matter which are creating space and time through their actions rather than things which exist separately in space and time. Until we lose this assumption, I think that general relativity, quantum mechanics, and human consciousness cannot be understood correctly. Each will be forever segregated in their own terminology, modeling spacetime as warping, Planck digitizations, nonlocal entanglement, paranormal activity, etc. Turn it inside out, and see that spacetime is the shadow of matter and energy. Not a place or a dimension but a suite of perceptual protocols.