Nothing can relate without information transfer across some form of boundary.

Nothing exists except in relationship. Relationship can be noted in two primary ways: by a difference across an expanding, changing boundary and by the experience of energy flow across that boundary.

If we were to place our finger on either side of a boundary between hot and cold, each touch would return the experience of a different temperature (potential). If we’re suddenly standing in a cold shower, we’d experience the loss of heat (flow). Different artificial detectors are invented to return these types of responses to changes of potentials in space and time.

The Reality/Virtuality Spectrum

Most of us believe that there is a real objective reality out there (the physical universe). The virtual world is reserved for some representation, or generalization, of the physical world. Computer graphics illustrate a virtual world generalized from the real world.

On our blog, The Union of Opposites, we will explore another possibility–that every relationship, every change in potential is virtual. Virtuality is a construct of symbolic language. A quick example of such a language is the Periodic Table–how atoms, on average, seem to relate to one another. But what are the configurations of the actual atoms (the electron shells and valences)? No one knows, not even the atoms, until they come into contact with and relate to other atoms. Nothing exists for them, or us, until this occurs.

Of course, the implicit universe becomes explicit (bounded, relational, and seemingly condensed, as its energy to do things runs down (its entropy increases)). We normally think that when energy is depleted there is then entropy death where nothing happens, no information flows across boundaries (what scientists might call steady state). But we’d be wrong if we believed that.

At a certain location on the boundary of an expanding universe, it appears the laws of subatomic particles, how they relate by the language of electromagnetism is formed. Then atomic relationships, molecular relationships, organic relationships, chemical relationships, cellular relationships, tissue relationships, organ relationships, neural relationships are formed. Each relationship using any remaining depleted energy to form a new language and to motivate new degrees of freedom or possibilities.

If with each language there seems to be an increase in the hidden rules for how the universe will manifest, then the universe will expand into this virtual space. Granted, the closer the relationship to the center of expansion, the more seemingly real, objective, and predictable it is (mostly at localities). The farther the relationship from the center of expansion, the more seemingly virtual, subjective, and improbable (mostly nonlocalities). And so there is a reality/virtuality spectrum of sorts, but that’s only the way we describe nested relationships across the expanding boundary of our universe.

 NVR is my secret acronym that means, No Virtual Reality. In truth, there can only be a virtual reality, as opposed to a real objective world (if there were a real objective world at all). But if there were no objective world, all worlds coming to life as the subjective experience of relationship, then all realities are virtual (some more probable than others). So what we mean as real, must needs be virtual. In this way, the irony is: all relational experience forms reality and there is NVR.

The next posts or pages that follow will examine the types of information transfer across boundaries and how they determine the characteristics of that boundary, what the double-slit experiment tells us about sampling in such virtual worlds, about what probability means in the process of sampling, and how potential relationships might be captured in the HERE and NOW through sampling.