I’m not a philosopher. I haven’t studied it in a conventional sense and I haven’t read all of the great philosopher’s books. I also haven’t been living under a rock. For better or worse I’ve been afflicted with a compulsion to think, and an ample amount of time to have that thinking explore the nooks and cranies most of us would probably never consider. Many aren’t even necessarily useful in everyday life.
Beyond that, I’m not gonna go through the whole process of how I got to the conclusions I’m about to present. I’m just gonna let it out.
For the longest time I’ve believed that an objective reality exists. This refers to The Reality that is there regardless of whether there’s anyone to experience it or not. If a tree falls in a forest and there’s nobody there to hear or see it, did it really fall? The answer, as far as I’m concerned, is a resounding yes.
We are a part of that objective reality just like everything else. Just another form among many.
For things to form they have to be formed out of something. Bigger things are formed by smaller building blocks which are formed by yet smaller ones and so on until we reach some fundamental ingredient.
In science it seems we are still searching for that ingredient of all ingredients. Some would say it’s just pure energy, others would call it consciousness. I would say it doesn’t necessarily matter beyond academic discovery.
What seems clear though is that reality is ultimately formed out of the same thing, regardless of what that thing is. The deeper we look the more uniform everything becomes. Distinctions disappear. Everything is “one”.
So I would describe this objective reality then as a field of foundational ingredients. If this is energy we can call it a field of energy, of whatever kind.
However, if this was all it ever was, just a field of energy without form or process, just energy existing, then nothing we could even call a thing or a happening would exist or happen. The universe would be completely and utterly dead. In effect, formless energy is complete emptiness.
I suppose we could argue that emptiness and nothingness aren’t the same thing. Nothing is nothing. Emptyiness implies something existing which is without contents. Formless energy might not be nothing in itself, it is just one thing with nothing in it. Great, still completely meaningless, and obviously not what is actually the case, which is all that matters.
Given that the universe actually has a whole lot of things going on I’d say it’s pretty safe to say that this field of energy is not formless or uniform. So what’s apparently happening there is that the universe modulates itself into its endless forms and does this continuously.
To understand this through probably imperfect, but illustrious analogy, we can imagine sound being created by the modulation of air movements, pictures on a screen being created by modulating pixels on the screen, and various forms being created by modulating arrangements of sand particles by way of sound vibrations in this good old Cymatics video.
In all these cases there is a medium (air particles, pixels, grains of sand or one affecting the other). In the universe the medium are quantum particles or more likely a yet undiscovered fundamental something. So, again, something does exist prior to any form. It’s just empty, dead, dormant.
Another thing that’s clear in all these cases is that there’s an external force modulating the medium into these forms. What is the external force behind the universe? That’s basically the question of what caused the big bang. Or maybe in the case of the whole universe or reality itself it is self-directed and self-caused.
There certainly are some fundamental mysteries here, but I don’t think we need to solve all of the possible mysteries to understand that everything being formed out of the same stuff doesn’t in any way negate the realness of the forms themselves including us and everything we see around us as such. The modulations are just as real as the medium being modulated. They literally are the medium itself, only taking different shapes in time and space.
Similarly, every point in space-time is relative to every other point in space time, and if we put an observer there it will have a different perspective on the rest of the universe compared to every other point in space-time. This is just a perspective of the forms and the fact that these perspectives differ does not mean that the actual objective forms don’t exist as what they are.
We know this intuitively and from practice. If we see a tree from one angle one moment we don’t assume that the shape we see is the whole shape of it. We don’t see in 2D. If we move just a bit we see the whole shape. The whole shape is reality. The present-perspective 2D shape is just a perspective on that reality. Subjective perspective-dependent models of reality aren’t the whole of reality, but they do observe actual contents of reality from various sides and through various lenses.
But I will write more on this relationship between a conscious agents like us and reality itself at some other time.