What is reality? When someone says that something is real, what do they mean?

I can’t tell you how someone else might define “real,” but for me “real” has the property of existence.

So you might say, “What is existence?”

For my definition of existence, I have to go back to the beginning of our universe. You must have heard that some physicists are interested in how the Big Bang (the explosion of our universe into being) occurred and what happened before the singularity that preceded that.

Okay, so now, I need to give you my definition of both what a singularity is and then what existence is:

One type of singularity is a point from which the universe is thought to have expanded into the Big Bang explosion. This is how I like to think of the time preceding the Big Bang and the time after it:

Before the Big Band nothing was explicit, or sensed, or experienced (no changes). Everything was implicit or implied at the beginning. So for reality or existence to happen, there needed to be a change or relationship between two states of energy. Another way to think about the first thing that existed out of the singularity is that a boundary was formed across which energy/information flowed. And that flow itself created the first experience of existence.

That doesn’t mean that the original experiences of existence out of the singularity were conscious, like the consciousness that we’re familiar with, but I believe our consciousness is based in this flow of energy across expanding boundaries and that’s what ultimately gives us the experience of existence and the sensation of reality.

Lots must happen between the existence of a boundary forming simple relationships (like those I observed in the radial Hele-Shaw cell in my research: see the Experiment) and those that form more complex relationships (like human consciousness). The original high-energy boundaries out of the singularity, though simple, were less discrete. The relationships across boundaries that form human consciousness might have been products of a succession of subsequent relationships of longer and longer duration.

I have discussed my beliefs that my two-fluid experiment is analogous to a primitive expanding universe throughout this website. And I will make every effort, as I become more familiar with my own thought processes about this topic, to clarify my understanding of how reality is formed, how things come into existence, and how our consciousness evolves.