The Search for Reality

I have poor rote memory. Names, dates, places, faces — they all disappear into a fog, and it only has become worse with age.

I learn by analogy.

In school, I passed tests not by memorizing the material but by analyzing all the questions and trying to imagine what the test creator was trying to acomplish.

This worked especially well with multiple-choice (usually four) question tests, because I had hundreds of questions to compare all at once.

When I was asked, “What is your favorite book?” my answer was the “Miller Analogy Test.” I have a copy on my desk. It contains fourteen hundred questions of this form: “A is to B as C is to ?“

We all learn by analogy. You learned the alphabet with a poem that began, “A, B, C…” and our learning was aided by the fact that “G” rhymed with “P.”

Rhyming is a kind of analogy in that words are connected by a similarity of sound. “Beat” is like “meet,” is like “feet.”

We love analogy so much that part of the appeal of poetry is analogy, even when the poems don’t rhyme. It’s not just analogy, but also metaphor and simile that attract us and help us remember.

In school, we learned that an atom is like a miniature solar system, with electrons flying in orbit around the nucleus. Later, we learned that gravity can be compared to a rubber sheet with a bowling ball suspended at the center,

While those analogies helped us visualize, they ultimately were misleading. (All analogies are imperfect, which is what makes them analogies and not the actual thing.)

Learning requires comparisons, which makes quantum mechanics a baffling subject. Physicists speak of the “wave function” and its “collapse,” but there is no wave and nothing collapses. We cannot visualize the quantum world; it is so different from our macro world that our analogies don’t work.

The irony is that we pursue reality through analogies, which, by definition, are not reality.

The primary purpose of this blog is to present economic reality in a world that teaches economic fantasies, such as:

1. The federal government’s finances are similar to  personal finances
2. Federal taxes help pay for federal spending
3. Medicare and Social Security are supported by FICA
4. The federal government can run short of dollars
5. The federal debt is unsustainable.

I’ve spent more than two decades presenting facts to counter these fantasies — an attempt at reality — and that is why I often question even the existence of reality.

What is reality?

Your brain creates reality via its translation of stimuli.

You do not see an object. Instead, your brain translates photons into a meaning that it creates. It translates sound waves, odor molecules, and taste molecules into meanings. We call those meanings “reality,” but they are illusions, the opposite of reality.  

Phosphenes as Reality

Close your eyes. What do you see? Not nothing. You see patterns of light called “phosphenes.”

They are not “real” in the sense of something physical, but they are real to you.

Your brain invents them just as your brain invents everything else you see, hear, taste, or believe.

The patterns of light you see with your eyes closed are a direct demonstration that the brain does not passively receive reality. It generates reality from internal rules and signals.

There is no fundamental reality, at least not one that the human brain can comprehend.  There is an old story that makes the point. (Please don’t stop me if  you’ve heard this one.)

A scientist gives a lecture, explaining that the Earth orbits the Sun, and the Sun is part of the Milky Way, and the Milky Way is part of the Local Group, etc.

Afterward, a person stands up and says: “What you’ve told us is wrong. The world is actually a plate resting on the back of a giant turtle.”

The scientist asks, “What is the turtle standing on?”

She replies: “It’s turtles all the way down.”

It illustrates infinite regress — the idea that an explanation depends on another explanation, which depends on another, and so on without end. It tries to explain the nature of reality and answer the question, “What is everything made of?”

If the answer is “atoms and fields,” the question becomes, “What are atoms and fields made of?”

Today, the answer given by many physicists is that a field is the fundamental entity — the thing other things are made of, not the other way around.

A field is a value assigned to every point in space and time.  Not a substance, not a fluid, not particles smeared out — just a function that tells you “what is the value here?”

Examples: Gravitational field: assigns an acceleration vector to each point. Electromagnetic field: assigns electric and magnetic components. Quantum fields: assign amplitudes that tell you the probabilities of particle interactions.

Particles are excitations of fields. Electrons aren’t made of “stuff.” They’re quantized ripples in the electron field. Photons are ripples in the electromagnetic field. Higgs bosons are ripples in the Higgs field.

The fields themselves are the substrate. A field is a mathematical object with physical effects. As far as current theory goes, it has no parts, no internal structure, and no medium carrying it.

Are you able to imagine something that is not composed of anything? A wave that has no substrate? Can you imagine a wave where nothing is waving or a field that is not made of anything, yet has effects?

Think of a magnetic field. It is so strong it can lift cars and trains, but it is not made of anything. And how does the Higgs field give mass to anything?

If you can visualize them, you’re far better than I am, for I cannot. Nor can I visualize how speed can affect time and dimension, yet it does both.

I don’t believe fields are the funamental reality because there are various fields, with various properties, which seems at odds with the notion of “funadmental.” So what is?

I have speculated that gravity is the fundamental substrate and that everything is “made of” gravity. Gravity is everywhere, It affects, and is associated with, everything. It never completely disappears.

The most disatant star feels the gravity associated with you (though the effect is extraordinarly slight). That distant star also feels the gravity associated with every other thing in the universe. It’s an incalculable blend of gravitational effects that we ignore but for the most prominent. However, “incalculable” does not mean “nonexistent.”

Gravity may be the base layer of the universe and needs no further explanation except its rules. The “turtles all the way down” ends with gravity, and we have not yet created the language to answer the question, “What is gravity made of?”

Each type of particle and field effect represents a distinct mathematical “twist” on gravity, which is analog, not quantum. It exists everywhere as it is fundamental to existence.

Digital measurement is used not because the universe itself is digital, but for several practical reasons.

Digital systems allow for easy error correction, tolerate noise effectively, and can be easily scaled. Additionally, they are easier to design at large scale.

Most importantly, digital technologies give an impression of precision.

I say “impression” because most measures cannot be exact. “Pi” and “e” cannot be exact digital numbers, nor can the Golden ratio and the square root of any number that is not a perfect square

The entire universe is analog, not quantum. Quantum mechanics is our attempt to describe continuous fields and continuous geometry using discrete conceptual vocabulary: Particle, spin, energy level, measurement

In reality (always searching for “reality”), the universe does not have edges, true discreteness, digital bits, or perfect integers. Mathematicians even say that 1 is equal to .9999999999999999 . . .

(We should remember that “equal to” is not the same as “identical with,” an important distinction in some cases. For example, trying to measure the gravitational effect of a distant star on a earthbound grain of pollen.)

We presume that spacetime (gravity?) is curved, and we have no exact digital measure for that curve. Geometry is the visible pattern; information is the substrate that produces the pattern.

Even a single electron a million light years away exerts a tiny, nonzero influence here. Discrete particles exist as patterns, but their effects are continuous.

The universe is analog at its core; discreteness is only a convenient interpretation.

Every particle and field in the universe is part of a single, continuous analog network.

Discrete particles, energy levels, and quantum states are patterns emerging from this analog substrate, and apparent discreteness is a convenient human abstraction.

Entanglement pervades this network, but nearly all of it lies beyond our ability to measure. Measurements, whether with rulers, detectors, or digital devices, are analog approximations of these underlying continuous effects.

The Black Hole Singularity

The universe is fundamentally analog. All fields and particles — gravitational, electromagnetic, electron, quark, and so on —  permeate every point in space.

Every excitation of these fields is a concentrated pattern, a region of higher amplitude that gradually trails off as a smooth gradient, extending infinitely.

No particle has a hard edge; no object is truly separate. What we call an electron, a proton, or a photon is a stable, concentrated pattern in its respective field, with its influence fading continuously into the surrounding space.

Because these fields overlap everywhere, everything is interconnected. The peak of one excitation may appear localized, but its gradient merges subtly with all other excitations, across both near and cosmic distances.

Gravity, as the curvature of spacetime, is universal: it couples to all forms of energy and momentum, connecting every pattern and establishing a global substrate.

From this perspective, the universe is not made of discrete substances, but of patterns of instructions: configurations of field amplitudes, gradients, and interactions.

Mass, charge, spin, and all measurable properties are emergent features of these patterns.

Reality, as we perceive it, is a manifestation of overlapping, concentrated gradients in an analog, globally connected network, with gravity providing the scaffolding upon which all other patterns arise.

The black hole “singularity” is not a point, not a particle, not a substance.

It is the unity of the continuous field itself: an infinitely overlapping substrate from which all localized patterns — all particles, all excitations, all phenomena — emerge.

In one sense, it is related to a universal “butterfly effect,” where a small effect can travel through many iterations to create a significant effect

Our classical experience of distinct objects, boundaries, and separation is  a high-amplitude manifestation of this underlying continuous analog reality.

Gravity and The Unified Field: Patterns, Gradients, and Degrees

Because the fields overlap everywhere, everything “touches” everything, and classical notions of separation lose their absoluteness. What we measure as “distance” is better understood as a degree of influence: how strongly one pattern affects another across the continuous substrate.

A peak far away (i.e., of lesser influence) may exert a subtle effect; a peak “nearby” exerts a strong one. Classical space, with its rigid coordinates, emerges from these degrees of interaction, not the other way around.

Gravity, as the curvature of spacetime, is the universal analog substrate: it couples to all forms of energy and momentum and organizes the global network of patterns.

The universe is a group of instructions for gravity.

From this perspective, the universe is not composed of discrete substances, but of instructions manifested as overlapping gradients.

Mass, charge, spin, and other measurable properties emerge from the structure and dynamics of these patterns. Our classical experience of distinct objects, boundaries, and distances is an emergent perception of high-amplitude configurations in a globally connected, analog field.

A singularity, then, is not a point, particle, or substance. It is the unity of the continuous field itself: an infinitely overlapping substrate from which all excitations emerge.

Reality is a unified concentration gradient of information and degrees of influence.

Distance is not fundamental. What we perceive as distance is the brain’s rendering of an underlying information distribution described by a mathematical object (a formula, field, or rule-set).

A “singularity” looks paradoxical only if we assume distance is real; once distance is seen as emergent, the paradox disappears. All the information that becomes the universe can be encoded in a single informational structure.

The Universe is an Informational Field With Emergent Space

Start with a single underlying thing: an informational field. Not space, matter, energy, or particles. Just information describing structured relationships.

This field is not “in” anything. It does not occupy space, because space hasn’t emerged yet. Physics already accepts some versions of this idea: The universal wavefunction, the holographic principle, the Wheeler–DeWitt view (timeless universal information).

These all are attempts to describe reality without assuming space or distance are fundamental.

I propose a similar idea. Start with the information, not the spacetime. Space, time, matter, and “location” are translations of that mathematical information. This is the key philosophical and scientific step and it is a difficult one because we don’t think about information as a separate entity.

The reality we perceive is a translation of information into experience. Phosphenes—the lights and patterns we see with our eyes closed—show that the brain can generate an entire “world” from nothing.

Quantum mechanics seems strange because we assume information must describe pre-existing objects. However, information comes first, and what we call particles, space, and time emerge from it.

The universe isn’t weird; our intuition about how it “should” work is, because we believe intuit that information has to be about something, not the something itself.

What we experience as distance, size, duration, velocity, mass, fields, and curvature are not fundamental. They are interpretations produced by the informational field itself, the structure of our nervous system (or whatever we define as observers), the rules that make physics appear classical at human scale.

Just as color is a brain’s interpretation of wavelengths, heat is an interpretation of molecular motion, solidity is an interpretation of electromagnetic repulsion, space is an interpretation of informational relationships, and distance is how our brains visualize certain patterns in the underlying field.

Viewed this way, the “singularity problem” disappears. A singularity looks weird only if things need room, points must be separate, and volume must scale with information content.

But if distance is not fundamental, nothing needs to “fit,” nothing collapses to “zero size,” and no paradox arises from “infinite density.”

The singularity is a place where the space-based translation breaks down, not a breakdown in the underlying information.

Everything — past, present, future — is encoded in the informational field

A single rule-set (call it “the universal equation”) contains the contents of the universe, the dynamics of change, all events, relations. apparent randomness, observers, interpretations

Consider it a form of informational compression similar to how RNA encodes a living body, how a physical law encodes motion, or how a computer program generates a world.

Life does not arise from the four nucleotides of RNA themselves, but from the information encoded in the constraints that determine how those nucleotides can interact.

Mixing A, U, C, and G alone yields no results; what is crucial is the precise ordering and regulatory framework that guides chemical reactions along allowed pathways.

RNA, therefore, is already several steps removed from the true origin of organization—it assumes an underlying informational framework that shapes chemistry into functional structure.

This distinction illustrates a broader principle: reality emerges not from material components, but from the rules that govern their possible arrangements.

Every scientific theory rests on axioms that cannot be derived from anything deeper. Gödel’s incompleteness theorems guarantee that any sufficiently powerful system must contain irreducible assumptions.

Thus, the laws of physics are not “created” or “derived”; they are the primitive informational constraints from which everything else follows.

Physics does not explain why the universe has the rules it does; it only describes the rules of the informational structure we happen to inhabit.

At the most fundamental level, the “laws of nature” are the constraints of this system. There is no deeper layer from which these constraints are derived—they are the bottom turtle, the primitive informational grammar on which all further structure depends.

The universe is the unfolding of the rule. The rule doesn’t need space. Space needs the rule.

Determinism and “the illusion of distance” become the same idea. If everything is encoded in one informational structure, nothing is truly separate, and causation is internal, not spatial. “Near” and “far” are interpretations, not realities.

The whole “movie” of the universe is already in the rules. Distance is a story the brain tells itself so it can navigate information.

Just as consciousness is a response to stimuli, distance is merely a visualization of relational structure. Nothing actually travels anywhere. Information describes merely a transition.

Thus, quantum behavior stops looking weird. If everything is relational information, entanglement is natural. “Instantaneous” correlations are instantaneous because there is no distance. Superposition is a basic property of the information field. Measurement is the process of translating information into classical perception.

Nothing spooky is happening. It only looks spooky if we assume spatial separation is real. The “turtles all the way down” problem is resolved. You don’t find infinite layers of explanation.

You have the informational field (fundamental), the emergent spacetime (our translation), the emergent objects and particles (our further translation), and the emergent consciousness (our perceived responses to stimuli).

While I posit that gravity is the fundamental “substance,” it is created by something even more basic: Information.

Gravity feels fundamentally unique because it is the earliest and simplest way our brains interpret the informational structure of the universe. The four compounds that make up DNA do not create life on their own; it is the instructions that these compounds follow that give rise to life. Similarly, it is the instructions that gravity follows that shape the universe.

Gravity does not require a particle, charge, or medium; it is the shape of what we call “space.” This makes gravity appear as a genuine substance—an all-pervading field that everything else depends on.

And in a sense, that is true: gravity is the first physical phenomenon to appear when raw information is translated into a coherent universe. It is the first emergent property, the first way that the underlying informational relationships become visible when rendered as geometry.

What we perceive as curved space is the structural pattern of information as interpreted by our sensory and cognitive systems. In this interpretation, mass does not create gravity; rather, gravity creates mass by following the instructions for an informational architecture.

Gravity is the group of rules by which information arranges itself when viewed through the lens of spacetime.

This explains why gravity appears universal, smooth, and unavoidable—it is the baseline translation of information into physical law. To us, gravity looks like the “stuff” the universe is made of.

At the most basic level, gravity is no more fundamental than the shapes we see when our eyes are closed. Both are interpretations created by a brain (or an observer) processing an underlying informational pattern.

Gravity is real in the same way that space is real: as an emergent feature of how information is organized.

SUMMARY of REALITY?

As we have discussed, what we see, indeed, all we sense by any means, is not real. It is an illusion. What then is the basis for reality? What is the bottom “turtle”?

I suggest that the basis of reality is not physical, but rather the rules — the information — that determines the illusions of the universe in which we live.

Perhaps there are other universes with other rules yielding other illusions. There may be infinite other universes with infinite other rules and infinite other illusions.

It is the rules — the information — that differentiates our universe. Change any rule, and the universe would be vastly different. If gravity, the strong force, the weak force, or any other field were even slightly different, our universe would be unrecognizable.

Science only can attempt to discover the rules and then accept them as they are. Asking “why” or “how” may prove fruitless. It’s enough to learn “what.”

Rodger Malcolm Mitchell

Monetary Sovereignty

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