Core Principles of Reality

• Emergence - that new entities of increasing size or complexity have entrely new properties of their own.

  • Everything is process, not thing

• Attention - that what you focus on expands.

  • Projection - Jung - What we can't see or accept in ourselves we tend to perceive strongly in others.

  • He said what you admire in others is equally revealing - you can only recognise a quality you already possess in potential. You can't see what you have no internal reference for. So what moves you, what you find beautiful, what you're drawn to - that's also a map of something in you that wants to develop.

  • observation produces a definite reality from indefinite potential

• Relationship is more fundamental than substance

• Information is as fundamental as matter and energy

• The observer is not separate from the observed

• Time can be a construction of consciousness rather than feature of reality

  • Einstein introduced the block universe - past, present and future all equally real, laid out like a landscape.

  • The present moment is actively being constructed in the mind - rather than passively received.

    • Think of it this way. Your eyes have a blind spot - a gap in the retina where the optic nerve connects. You never see a hole in your vision because your brain fills it in seamlessly. The filling-in is real. The experience is real. It’s just not a passive recording of raw reality - it’s an active construction that serves you better than the raw data would.

      The now you feel is like that. Real. Vivid. Yours. And actively produced by a mind that is itself part of reality.

  • The brain constructs the present moment. Memory constructs the past as narrative - not a recording but a reconstruction, rewritten each time it’s accessed. Anticipation constructs the future as projection.

  • Carlo Rovelli - in his beautiful book The Order of Time - argues that when you strip away entropy, when you go to the fundamental level, time disappears. The fundamental equations of quantum gravity have no time variable. Time is not in the basement of reality. So what is time?

  • Time as relational and thermal

    Rovelli’s answer - time is what we call the statistical unfolding of entropy from our particular perspective inside the system. We are thermal beings. We interact with the world through heat and entropy. Time is the name we give to the direction of that gradient.

    Different beings with different thermodynamic relationships to the world would experience time differently. At the quantum level — no time. At the cosmic level - time nearly stops near massive objects, runs faster far from them. Time is not a universal container. It’s a local, perspectival phenomenon.

• Space might not exist

  • Think of temperature. Temperature feels real and fundamental -you feel cold, you feel hot. But at the microscopic level there is no temperature. There are just molecules moving at various speeds. Temperature is what the statistical behaviour of billions of molecules feels like from the outside. It’s emergent. Real at its level. Not fundamental at the deeper level.

    Space may be like temperature. Real at the level we experience it. Emergent from something underneath that has no spatial character - just information, just relationship, just quantum entanglement between degrees of freedom.

• We actually have no idea what reality is made of

  • The classical idea of fundamental stuff - little billiard balls of matter existing independently in space - is almost certainly wrong. The deeper you go the less thing-like reality becomes. More mathematical. More relational. More strange. It could be:

    • Information

    • Symmetry

    • Consciousness

    • Nothing

• Reality is emergence - Reality may be a self-generating process of emergence, with no foundation beneath it, producing its own ground as it goes - and consciousness is what that process feels like from the inside.

• The Tao that can be named is not the eternal Tao.

• Recursion and self-reference

  When a system applies its own rules to itself - strange things happen.

  A camera filming its own screen. A sentence that refers to itself. A mind thinking about thinking. A set that contains itself. The implication:

  No system can fully know itself from inside itself. There are always true things about you that you cannot prove from within your own framework. Every sufficiently complex self-referential system has an outside that exceeds its inside.

  • Your blindspots - what you can’t see from inside yourself

    Your own attractors are nearly invisible to you.

    The patterns you keep repeating - the way you respond to criticism, the situations you keep finding yourself in, the emotional states you return to - these are mostly invisible from inside because they feel like reality, not like patterns. They feel like justified responses to what’s actually happening, not like a loop you’re running.

    The person who keeps ending up in controlling relationships doesn’t see the attractor. They see a series of individually explicable situations. The pattern is only visible from outside.

    Your assumptions are invisible precisely because they’re assumptions.
    Your blind spots are defined by what you can’t perceive.

    By definition you don’t know what you don’t know. The shape of your ignorance is invisible to you. You can know that blind spots exist - Gödel tells you they must — but you can’t see their content from inside.

    Your self-model is always behind.

    The you that you understand is a model built from past experience. But you’re not static - you’re an ongoing process. By the time you’ve understood something about yourself, you’ve already moved. The model is always slightly out of date. You’re navigating the present with a map drawn from the past.

  • The practices that help - therapy, close relationships where people tell you truth, sitting in silence, keeping a journal, putting yourself in genuinely new situations that reveal new responses - all work by providing outside to your inside. They temporarily exceed your frame.

    Other people are extraordinarily valuable for this. Not because they know you better than you know yourself across the board - but because they can see your patterns from outside in a way you structurally cannot.

    The dog doesn’t know it doesn’t know itself. You do. And that knowing - that you have blind spots even if you can’t see them - is itself a kind of wisdom the dog doesn’t have.

    You’re a self-referential system aware of its own incompleteness. That’s rare. Maybe unique in the universe.

  • Knowing yourself and requisite variety - our thinking is simpler than ourselves

  • Which means growing in self-understanding is not about finding the final complete model of yourself. It’s about continuously expanding the variety of your self-model - getting more complete, more nuanced, more accurate — while knowing it will never be fully complete.

• Requisite variety

  From cybernetics. Ashby’s Law.

  Only variety can absorb variety. A system can only control its environment to the degree that it has as many possible responses as the environment has possible disturbances.

  In plain terms - the complexity of your response capacity must match the complexity of what you’re navigating.

• Your capacity to navigate reality is strictly limited by the variety you've built.

  • Requisite variety isn’t built by reading about variety. It’s built by being put in situations that exceed your current repertoire and having to find a response.

  • implications:

    Your ceiling is set by your variety, not your intelligence

  • Homogeneous environments actively reduce your variety

  • Discomfort is the signal, not the problem

  • Other people are your most important source of variety

  • Organisations have requisite variety problems too

  • AI changes the requisite variety equation

  • Self-knowledge and variety are connected

  • How to build variety?

    1. Deliberately seek situations that exceed your current range

  • 3. Relationships with people who are fundamentally different from you

  • 4. Do the thing you’re most avoiding

  • 5. Learn domains that think completely differently from your primary mode

• The adjacent possible

  Stuart Kauffman’s concept. One of the most generative ideas I know.

  At any moment, what can come next is constrained by what already exists. Not everything is possible from any starting point. Only certain moves are available - the adjacent possible - the set of things that can become real given what currently is.

• It doesn’t matter - have fun!