Most of us just think we and the environment around us have been there forever. We think that things and people we interact with are real hard objective entities. What is real and hard and objective is our description of these entities, how we think about them, the meaning we give to them.

Where does it all start?

How do we create such entities, such ideas about things before we know they are real and actually exist? And after we create them from what’s out there, how do we continue to remember them? How do they continue to exist in our memory?

After we’re born as babies, our parents point to things and help us to know what the name of that thing is. They also teach us the meaning of things. So when we recognize things later, we already know what that thing is named and its meaning (if its dangerous or helpful, for example).

So, if the thing is not here and now for us to observe it, where does it exist? It exists as a template somewhere. A template is a combination of all the things we, our parents, our society, and our ancestors think or know about it. That would be called information, but information about something is not that thing. It is an explanation about the thing. [For example, the word “love,” we would all agree, is not the feeling: our heart beating more rapidly, the effect of hormones coursing through our bodies, maybe the watering of our eyes. In fact, at first, it does not seem that any explanations exist as “love,” because they are not the actual experiences that accompany love].