What if reality is fundamentally binary, rather than unitary?
Say the other side of the coin to reductionism is contextualization? Nodes and networks. While we may assume there is some underlaying material reality, what we ever experience is the tension and friction of contrasts.
Consider the binary of energy and information/form. Energy radiates out, while form coalesces in. Galaxies are energy radiating out, while mass/form coalesces in.
In fact, if we were to view mass as an effect of this concentration/wave contraction, rather than “gravity” as a property of mass, it might be this contraction extends far out into the radiological spectrum. Say to the point that light only quantizes by interacting with mass/being ‘measured.” Brownian motion. Thus “dark matter” is unnecessary.
As biological organisms, we have the digestive, respiratory and circulatory systems processing the energy driving us on, along with a central nervous system to sort through the forms precipitating out of the environment, referee the emotions and impulses bubbling up from the heart and gut and focus them in some intentional function.
So no matter how far down into reality we observe and test, we see information, because that is what we are looking for and what our brains are built to observe. Patterns, not processes. Motion is treated as statistics and otherwise static measurements.
Consider how we treat time; As these mobile, intentional organisms, we experience reality as flashes of perception, cognition and then sort and judge this derived information, in order to navigate our environment. Then we narrate our journeys and build civilizations out of the collective knowledge.
So there is this fundamental effect of the point of the present moving past to future, built into our culture and subconscious. Physics codifies it as measures of duration, to correlate with measures of distance.
Yet the evident reality, with a little perspective, is that change turns future to past. Tomorrow becomes yesterday because the earth turns. Potential, actual, residual. Duration is this physical state, as events come and go.
There is no physical dimension of time, because the past is consumed by the present, in order to inform it. Aka, causality and conservation of energy.
Energy is “conserved,” because there is no physical past for it to recede into, nor physical future for it to arrive from. It is the changing configuration of this energy which creates the effect of time.
As effect, it is like temperature, pressure, color, etc. We could use ideal gas laws to correlate volume with temperature and pressure, but no one calls them the 5th and 6th dimensions of space, because they are only foundational to our emotions, bodily functions and environment, not the sequence of thought.
The left, cause and effect logical hemisphere of the brain is analogous to a clock/ruler, while the right, emotional, intuitive side is to a thermostat/barometer.
Different clocks can run at different rates simply because they are separate actions. Think frequencies, or metabolic rates.
Time is asymmetric because what is being measured, action, is inertial. The earth only turns one direction, not either. The relative order of a system, entropy, is not being measured and is irrelevant.
That different events can appear in different order is no more consequential than seeing the moon as it was a moment ago, simultaneous with seeing stars as they were years ago. It is the energy being conserved, not the information carried, as it is the changing of this information which creates the effect of time.
So processes go past to future, while the patterns generated go future to past.
In a factory, the product goes start to finish, while the production line goes the other way, consuming material and expelling product.
Lives go birth to death, while life goes onto the next generation, shedding the old.
Consciousness goes one feeling or thought to the next, while these perceptions rise and fall, like so many waves.
The feedback is the patterns steer and define the process. Like our brains steer our bodies.
While it might be academically fashionable to assume math and information are all, half the equation is missing, when you only focus on the patterns.
Epicycles were brilliant math, as they modeled our view of the cosmos, but crystalline spheres were lousy physics. Spacetime is the modern equivalent of those crystalline spheres.
Math is only a map, not the territory. Abstraction means abstracted from, not foundational to the underlaying reality.
Our tools become our gods. Like narrative. Or money.
