Why?

Consciousness on the edges of reality, distinguishing new from nonsense 

01/12/2024 An essay on a new theory on reality (the Dot theory) that logically follows in the footsteps of Newton and Einstein, by Stefaan Vossen 

For the “Dot theory” paper, please scroll onto the overnext post by scrolling to the bottom of this page and skip that post to “introduction”.

Part 1/3 

It has been a few days since I last published anything on Dot theory stuff, but far from the last time I thought or wrote about logic and evolution, my main pet subjects. This 3-part, 8-page essay, however, is the result of observations made in collaboration with a few people who have contributed insights and ideas on and offline. It discusses why my proposal about the nature of reality is the way it is. It also goes into some thoughts about what it would mean to our experience of reality if my theory about the nature of reality is correct. 

You can find the full paper discussed, explained and published as a blog post on its dedicated post (down below. Inconveniently, I cannot add links to this page due to the site’s format).  

As of writing, and other than in private and strictly in theory, nobody has publicly agreed to my mathematical premise yet. And even then, agreement was only with the caveat that it is an extreme thought-object (something extremely complicated and hard to wrap your head around) but very neat. Admittedly, I take solace in the fact that any theory on reality will always start off as a strange idea with hard-to-understand bits to it.  

The Dot theory involves reusing all sorts of existing concepts differently, and unless you know and are familiar with those complicated concepts, you may need to run through its papers slowly and with the help of a search engine. This, as obstacles go, is kind of inherent or even defining of a new idea though. You could even argue that if it didn’t do that, it just wouldn’t be new.  

The problem is that well-written nonsense can also be agreeable enough when it is positioned with enough caveats. In cases like these, you just need experts willing to spend time to distinguish “new” from “nonsense”. 

That is a problem because experts understandably do not like doing that. They are experts in the science they know, and although they are best positioned to engender change in it, they are also naturally averse to changing it (because they know it to work, so must find ways to make things work better first). Neither do they feel able to be the judge of what kind of change is right and wrong. Furthermore, some bits of the language used also trigger certain non-expert audiences.  

Words like data and math seem to have a magical ability to turn people’s brains off, but this theory is also triggering to scientists who are wed to the safe and literal application of a theory. I can sympathise professionally, but not intellectually: just because something has been proven right in the past doesn’t mean that we can’t do better in the future.  

Now, classically, if something has been proven right in the past, it must still be right, and yes, that is logical, but it is also wrong to think that is the end of it. It was right then, yes, but what kind of right is it now? If something was once “right” (or wrong for that matter), it was because it met a certain standard, and standards change under the influence of other changes (a great black and white TV doesn’t seem so attractive now as it did in the 50’s).  

That’s all very logical and consequentially it only stands as obvious (now you see it) that any “Master Logic” or theory with Grand and let alone Unifying theoretical aspirations will, logically, be a theory that embodies that sentiment of progress and evolution.  

The Dot theory embodies that in every computational sense. 

It is also important to distinguish that the premise I’m making with it, does not mean that I think that Professor Einstein’s theories of General and Special relativity are wrong (which, if you’re new to Dot Theory is what that is all about) no, I am suggesting a change to the way we represent the meaning of the math that we use in Quantum Field theory.  

Those theories perfectly adequately describe the universe as he understood it through his thought experiments. A form of Mathematics that was possible because of that idea. Mathematics that came from that conceptualisation of reality. The mathematicians wrote out calculation models that reflect that idea or conceptualisation of reality very well and their tools (formulas) enabled us calculation and accurate navigation in. Just as Newton did. However, as with his thought experiments, the question starts with a different way of thinking about what reality is to us, humans, and end user of science.  

In my theory, I’m basically describing the universe slightly differently again and reflect that altered view/understanding by altering the mathematical terms used in the theories we currently use (and their byproducts including Quantum Field Theory, which again, is just a particularly effective way to describe and compute the reality Einstein described us to be in). The problem is that even if my theory can easily, and logically, show the benefit of altering those terms somewhat (and even if only to make real-time predictive healthcare possible) passionate loins get stirred.  

Understandably, people have kittens when you change things like the meaning of reality. I’m not lacking in empathy, it can be deeply disturbing to reconsider our constructs of what we are, and neither am I arguing that current theories are wrong. I’m not saying that at all. Saying anything like that would also be demonstrably wrong due to the immense success of Quantum Mechanics.  

It also is understandably so, if you additionally consider that (if the theory is applied there) it also has quite an impact on experimental physics.  

No, what I am saying is that the way we use QM and QFT derivatives in real world science could be more right if some of the terms and perspectives were rearranged. In this theory, I am saying that there is a way to do the math differently for certain instances of how we calculate reality. Doing that, makes their calculation possible or more accurately on target than what we currently can predict. 

So, I am not saying that Einstein was wrong. He was, in some parts of reality, very usefully more right than Newton. But the problem is that some of the way his theory was written out, just is not continuous with the way I, as a human being, understand the world and our personal, individual relationship to it. I think that this is why all these consciousness theories are making an appearance in theoretical physics and weirding everyone out. They are the product of this incongruent way of describing reality to us.  

So, my paper is just a piece of logic really, an irrefutable consequence of the fact that each and every, including Einstein and Newton’s respective theories are essentially better in ways at describing how we, as individuals (educated by cultures defined by science and its theories), are told to understand and experience certain parts, layers or aspects of reality. Like culture, language, habits for analogy. 

In this sense, you could say that the production and progression of theories (the process of new theories coming out, being tested, accepted, and integrated) is the process of all its sub-parts becoming more continuous with science’s sense of self via experiments and technological development. And as our individual and societal sense of self evolves with it and its products, so do our theories. Basically: theories emerge from societies that can educate their people about how things work according to those theories and all I’m doing is proposing an “update” on our theories for a “slightly-more-accurate-again" version of our understanding of reality. 

That all almost sounds self-servingly solipsistic, but “proven theories” are not “the way the world is”, they are “ways to describe how we experience the world works”. 

And that is the challenge with my theory’s propositions: It says that something we know to be right (right enough - I am talking about Quantum Mechanics, which is the method used to calculate certain parts of what we call “reality” in physics but obviously that is true for everything) could be known in a way that is more right than we currently know it to be (if we make certain changes and apply certain conditions to specific types of data). This, as an idea, makes scientists a little uncomfortable because the way we tended to do science was to seek ways to give us a true or false answer from new information, not a measure of how true or false something was in the past.  

In my theory’s case, however, (which you can find out all about on www.dottheory.co.uk , skip to the heading “paper” for my paper as a blog post in chapters) I formulate a way to make things better in physics and even if it may seem iconoclastic to “correct” various geniuses’ math (badly – I am not a mathematician); logic must lead the way. If we can make a theory more right, more often, across a wider part of how we understand the thing we agree to call “reality” by adapting the math, then we must adapt the math. The problem is that my theory concludes that we are in a singularity between singularities we call “moments” and that give the Physicists the “eebegeebees” (makes them uncomfortable). For those who don’t know what that singularity sentence means; that is novel in physics. The implications are many, but the benefits are too (and the point is that if its immediate product is Cheap, Effective, Real-Time, Predictive Healthcare, then that must be worth pursuing and seriously considering). 

After all, Mathematics is a tool used to compute reality for us and make parts of life predictable. What else? It should be our slave, but with the current way we do math in physics, we are (inevitably, because of the perspective issue my theory corrects) falling into things like String theory and multiverse nonsense. We have become foolish slaves to it and the logicians and mathematicians must lead and correct the way here. If we adapt the math in line with my suggestions, that nonsense stops, and if the nonsense stops and predictions improve, we must, logically, accept its veracity and adapt the Physics that is here to serve us, the human individual.  

Part 2/3 

In one sense, the fact that no one has been willing to disagree on its principle in public (and many agree to it in private) is as good an endorsement I could get for a new idea. What happens with good innovative ideas is that they stick around until enough people think it’s “not a bad idea” and when enough people think it’s a “not a bad idea”, some people will take the risk to try it. This idea, however, is truly strange. It doesn’t require you to believe anything when you understand each of the parts. It’s just logical. It is about understanding them, accepting the facts of it, doing it/testing it.  

It’s just odd as a thought-object. It is an idea that when you know its parts (and admittedly, that is not easy), cannot not work. (Which is the mirror of that odd thing that you’re frustratedly looking for when something doesn’t) 

What is interesting too is that the logic of the Dot theory positively affects every debate it is applied to. Which is itself logical, because if it is to be a GUT (Grand Unified Theory*), then it necessarily would be the logic on how to improve any logic. And logics are written into theories and processes through which we operate the world, they and their language is how we conceptualise the world and navigate it.  

So, the fact that it can be applied in any field that manipulates data, information or ways of understanding things is, well, ... logical. In fact, that observation might just be more evidence that the Dot theory might just be correct. Hence this joint observation being so salient and worth a separate essay.  

You simply would expect a GUT to do that and be weird. The Dot theory does that because it is a method of weighing up information. It is the logic of improvement, progress or evolution, and can be understood (conceptually at least) as “the way to make better decisions” on any process considering information. So weirdly that includes things like philosophy and psychology as much as math and physics where logics give us decisions.  

Decisions are how we live and what we come to experience life through, so you can see a GUT would necessarily affect our life experience in many (every?) ways. It is a “Master logic” to the human life experience if you will. So how do we talk about something that deals with both consciousness and physics? 

One collaborator remarked with some surprise that we always end up talking about the same basic principles when it comes to making things better (the product of logic and evolution). That phenomenon should not be that surprising in the end, because in some sense, the whole life experience is only about selecting and looking at the data in a certain way and deducing from that. What you then do with those deductions is a different matter. 

These ideas and concepts have many faces and applications (not just in physics) simply because every individual’s understanding of the world and how to live in it are different and unique. Luckily, we agree about some things through language and ideas like “the named sciences”, “policies”, or “discussions on consciousness” that there is a reality, a shared reality we can all experience at least. A reality we can navigate by focusing the mind on a particular thing of interest and progress our understanding of it and move better in it. When we work it out from the context and our skill, we also often experience that dopaminergic satisfaction of feeling clearer about something. 

That Master Logic of figuring things out better, is simply that, once you realise you can look at things from different perspectives by educating yourself about them, you will then be able to consciously choose the meaning attributed to that information by taking that very perspective and logically end up being able to then make better decisions. Logically, you can apply that everywhere. Including physics because we’ve done a lot of measurements and continue to do that in experimental physics. But also, in healthcare and history or law.  

Two of my collaborators pointed this out repeatedly whilst a third is currently applying it in cultural, social and legal-structural contexts. All my theory says really is: make the math work so that we can analyse the data describing the patterns of traits and behaviours of past, most-similar events, and you will be more correct in your predictions of what that something similar is going to do. 

Whether human or particle, it’s all observed behaviours we gave meaning with fuzzy edges to after all. 

I know it could seem strange to talk about theories on reality so casually, but we talk about reality all day long, just without knowing it. It is simply what we do when we solve problems or react to our environment. What we do differently between real life and theory, however, is the difference between discussing a painting for its various shapes and colours, while discussing a theory is more like looking at the recurring relationships of the chosen colours and the lines if you will.  

This Dot theory logic is discussing the rules that define not what makes something work, but what makes something work better. That is what makes it both weird and smelling of being a GUT. And when applied to QM and General Relativity, it makes them work better in experimental physics. So that has to be worth something too. 

For people who do not know what the GUT* (Grand Unified Theory) is; it is a theory that should exist (if reality is real), but science is having a tough time defining. I think that my Dot theory is that GUT because it links data frames so that you can predict things better in mathematics and physics, whilst in philosophy it helps you to understand the human condition better by offering pattern recognition as a source of information.  

Those two defining pillars of science describe, and between them try to make sense of, the spectrum of the human condition. If any theory is going to be grand or unifying, it will logically be doing something that affects our understanding of reality in both those directions. 

My theory does just that, but Mathematicians do not like it because they currently work in service of Physicists that believe in a different Universe, not logicians with new ideas. Physicists also do not like it because it first means accepting that there is a way to say that Einstein, Dirac, and Pauli et al could have been more right. Oh, the irony. 

When it comes to understanding what the Dot theory says about consciousness and our relationship to reality (in the title of this essay after all) it all gets much simpler. When I said that “the nonsense stops” (like multiverse theories and the exponentially emerging manifestations that clearly shows that the current route has lost any hope of creating any sense of order), I really do mean: it all becomes tremendously more straight forward, if you allow it: 

In the Dot theory, consciousness is simply understood as an emergent property from the interaction between data loads. That sounds big but you are, after all your living body, in a location and at a certain time, looking at other “stuff” in a specific location at a specific time, and unless you see (can interact with) that other stuff, to you, it does not exist. What you make of the things you see, and what meaning you give them, is based on what you know (experienced), and its data load is expressed in you as brainwaves emitted by your cells’ activity in the form of thoughts and actions.  

In particle physics, the same is true: everything is defined by its data load and defined by how we perceive that data load interacting with the environment it meets. The difference between human consciousness and science is that the “science” of particle physics is in this case the “person” and the combined record that makes up the knowledge base of a science like particle physics is its “consciousness” or data load. From that reference basis we then give that “meeting of data loads” a meaning and call it something. Give it meaning and make it real. 

That is heady but it is what we do when you get over the “data-nausea”. This just is how we make sense of the world and the stuff that makes up any observed situation is the data load, and what you know about yourself is the product of that data load (you) interacting with the world’s data load (everything that is not you). If you think about it, that is obviously true. In technical terms, that means reality is only real to the individual observing it and any second-hand experience is modulated into a unique perception. Which, again, is obviously true. 

When it comes to science, however, it gets slightly more complicated: science also has a data load or consciousness of its own: the meaning of the collection of information it holds about measurements and observations on reality. It has its own data load and interprets reality the way it does, based on what it has learned, just like we do when brushing our teeth. And in its own way it interprets reality for us, so we can make effective tools.  

This reality, however, is a shared reality. One that can agreeably be observed from different angles. 

Part 3/3 

When it comes to individual consciousness though (which is what this post is about, for math and physics got to the www.dottheory.co.uk website), that “reality” is observed/seen and experiences through an interpretation of the world in an entirely unique internal language. 

Not unique in its components, as Wittgenstein already demonstrated with his “beetle in a box” rationale, but one unique in its combination of parts. There is an almost redundant obviousness to the fact that “no two people can have exactly the same life experience” that it doesn’t serve saying, but that very thing is exactly was enables pattern recognition and differentiation. In short: we observe, see, experience and understand things because things change and are different between us, not because they “are”. Again, obvious but when you apply that to the fundamentals of the mathematics of physics, ... well that is not what we are doing there. And as a result, we treat reality as if it’s “a thing” that is there when we’re not there to see it.  

As humans of the same animal species, we will probably see things very similarly, but if we live in the same area too, we will probably see it even more so. But we’re not seeing the same thing. That combination makes us both predictable as a group and essentially random as both an individual and a group of groups (as an “animal”, we’re generally speaking rather predictable: born, eat, poop, sleep, do stuff, die, like most animals).  

Just like DNA, we are fundamentally predictable, but inherently random. Mastering that as a thought piece, computationally enables us to understand us and our world better. 

And managing that, in a nutshell, is the human conscious experience if you’d like to believe the Dot theory. Now, what you then do with that consciousness is up to you but what it means is that you have to press on two pedals to navigate reality:  

Pedal A: lets the random generator in you produce random things and recombine them in ways that have meaning. 

Pedal B: educates yourself with insights on how to achieve positive goals with the things you have access to.  

Both must be pressed for any action to be perceived, but by how much and when are a complex, relative, a moment-to-moment and individual-led decision over perceived profit and loss over whichever terms can be considered in the moment. The ability to take a perspective on how depressed either pedal is compared to the other, is in a sense Free-Will: a spring in a sinkhole, Dot-theory-technically speaking. The more context-appropriately informed, the more spring-like. The less appropriately informed/educated, the more sinkhole-like. 

And that’s the thing with Free Will; we basically only have as much of it as we can control the loss of. 

You can’t consider the judging of anything (what things mean) to others before considering the implications of what its meaning to others will mean to you. Now, the thing that can be done without consideration however is a habit, but that too, will at one point have been educated, taught or instilled and accepted or believed on someone else’s say-so. 

That means that we are all, to some great degree, conditioned in the fundamentals of our habits and behaviours which is wonderful therapeutically speaking (because that means we can think of solutions) but also highlights that we are no more than the product of our interactions with our environment. It also emphasises the value of the fair distribution of empathy, education and knowledge of what you can find out worked well for someone else just like you. 

As a closing side-step: in (freakish) data-technical terms, Dot theory means that “life” is an infinite string of singularities. What that means to all of us phenomenologically (how we experience reality) is that “There is no reality we don’t perceive” in all senses of that phrase. 

Look not at what your experience of reality is but what reality means to you. Another way to think of it is that if you don’t jump off and on the wagon, you won’t know it’s moving. And depending on which wagon and how fast, it’ll hurt one way or the other. 

Thank you for reading this essay, please share if you found it interesting. 

Stefaan Vossen 

*a GUT is a theory that would make everything calculable and predictable. The question you must ask yourself to make this make sense what a GUT should be is to first define: “what is a thing?”. A GUT would be a theory like Newton’s laws that could take any available form of data that describes that “thing”, process it and make it predict things, preferably better than current theories. The point of asking “what is a thing?” is that it forces us to consider what the several types of data mean and then inevitably come to ask ourselves the question of what it means to us.