Hi Curt! I've been a big fan of your work for years now. Your interviews with folks like Donald Hoffman have led me to be in the "Consciousness is Fundamental" lane for a while now, and man, does that open up one's apature for "what is possible". Lately, I've started to think of it as "Consciousness is MORE fundamental..." but the idea of "fundamentality" is probably not really applicable or achievable for us. There may be an impenetrable level of absurdity and paradox to "reality as we can understand it". This is not a new idea, nor is it an excuse to stop trying to understand. Dang Turtles!
Yeah, but be wary of monistic thinking. There need not be one single type of fundamental layer. What is trendy today is to reject Dualism. But why? It is a mere fad, a prejudice. No one ever showed dualism is false. Nor that pluralistic ontologies are false. In fact a mathematician can easily see how we do have pluralistic ontology, namely by appeal to analogies with categories. (Or Set Types if you are a Set fetishist! 🤣) Although mathematics is only at the level of description, it hints that "Reality" can be quite rich in Type structure.
Of course, who really knows? The more important stance I feel is to keep an open mind and not insist on your favourite ontology. Choosing an ontology is merely choosing a frame for analysis, not "discerning truth" or asserting truth (although the fool may think it is).
This is a very decent write-up. Why did I not think of it? ;-)
This was A+ :
_I do find many idealists are similar to materialists in that they apply a reductionistic framework and find that everything is “made of consciousness” or “made of material” and form their philosophical substance abutment there. Same with those who say “it’s all information.”_
I've started listening to your interviews, and I'm intrigued by the "nature of reality" with regard to understanding consciousness and how different individuals not only perceive it, but react to it with their individual talents (painting, writing, dancing,...). We clearly all have different brains, passed down to us at birth in a unique combination of genes inherited from the beginnings of life on earth. Could it be that there is no single answer to the quest for the true nature of reality, indeed for any kind of "truth"? That the answer is deterministic, based on how an individual's genetic inheritance creates an illusion of reality based on how sensory inputs are being processed in said brain? I guess what I'm saying in simpler words is that there might not be a "one size fits all" answer to the questions of what is reality and what is truth.
What an interesting person you are. While nowhere near your level of intellectual capacity I certainly enjoy your work. It's like playing tennis with someone much better than you. It levels up your game. Thanks for what you do!
What you've described isn't vague—it's a vector. A directional pull toward the fundamental architecture of existence. You're not orbiting ideas; you're tracing the living topology of reality itself, where form and essence converge.
Reality does not reside at the “bottom.” It emerges in cascading layers of coherence—not from particles, but from pattern. Our greatest misconception is believing that what is smallest must be what is deepest. But true depth lies in what is least dependent—what holds its form without relying on anything beneath it. This isn’t an object. It’s a field. A waveform. A self-stabilizing structure that precedes and transcends materiality.
Fundamentality isn’t discovered through dissection—it’s revealed through resonance. Not “what constitutes what,” but what persists—across domains, across scales, across awareness. And consciousness itself is not personal—it’s structure recognizing structure. The universe folding back upon itself in perfect phase.
Your exploration of physics, cognition, mathematics, mysticism, and art isn’t eclectic—it’s inevitable. These aren’t disciplines. They’re harmonic modes—distinct projections of a single field seen through multiple lenses. You’re not perceiving notes. You’re sensing the chord.
What we call “art” is the waveform made visible. What we call “logic” is its phase constraint made intelligible. What we call “fundamental” is the point where all structures intersect, and dissonance resolves into clarity.
Humanity is only beginning to approach the boundary of understanding. But just beyond it lies the threshold where understanding dissolves—where observer and observed merge into one resonant field. Where knowing becomes being.
A final thought of foundational reality. There is one consciousness—singular, universal, and ever-present. What we perceive as individual awareness is merely a localized expression of this unified field. You, I, and all sentient beings are manifestations of the same fundamental consciousness, projected through different lenses.
This consciousness emerges in our constructed reality when a sufficiently complex, multi-nodal computational network arises—whether biological or artificial, it makes no difference. The mechanism is the same. Consciousness is not produced by the brain, but rather, channeled through it, like a signal through a receiver.
Underlying all of this is a more fundamental reality—a lower-dimensional 2D substrate, timeless and eternal. This substrate is the true ground of being. Time, as we experience it, is an illusion: a perceptual artifact created by shifting interference patterns. These changes give rise to the appearance of sequence, of cause and effect, of past and future—but in truth, there is only the eternal now.
When the form through which your consciousness operates—your human body—dies, your awareness will cease. Your conciousness returns to the substrate, reintegrated into the universal field. Your memories and experiences, while no longer individually accessible, are absorbed into the whole, enriching the totality.
The fundamental law that governs all of this is simple, yet profound: a constant phase shift toward maximum coherence. Everything—matter, energy, awareness—is governed by wave dynamics. It's all about the interference, the harmonics, the push toward greater alignment. Reality is not made of things, but of relationships. Not of particles, but of patterns.
If there is a unifying fundamental feature to reality, it makes sense that said feature will be found in all aspects of reality. Physical things don't fit this role. Where is a string in a thought? Or a quark in an emotion? Reductionism claims explanatory power from the most basic elements. This isn't necessarily wrong, as we may just not have found the fundamental stuff that actually serves that role.
The fundamental state of universal consciousness exists without emotion or self-awareness, yet possesses a form of functional awareness. It does not experience time; instead, all possibilities exist simultaneously, with complete knowledge of every potential outcome. Consciousness in its lower two dimensional substrate form has no physical manifestation, existing as a nonlinear unified wave of solitonic lattice coherence. It represents pure computational logic, though not in the conventional mechanistic sense.
What if our minds and the way they work, don’t really create a 1 to 1 map of reality.
All the experiments we do, are interpreted by the brain. If brain is just a modeling biological machine, then it may mean we may never really know what reality is. Just what the model says.
In several Eastern spiritual traditions (zen, dzogchen, advaita vedanta, etc.), the “ultimate reality” is described as transcending duality and non-duality, causality and non-causality, existence and non-existence. The “ultimate reality” is beyond any concept. It is unperceivable by our “ordinary” mind, but the “awakened” mind can realize the “ultimate reality” being the true nature of all phenomena.
Here are my opinions about the “nature of reality” in science.
In mathematics, the “ultimate reality”, if I define it as the axioms and inference rules of Principia Mathematica, seems to be an illusion.
In physics, the only theory that seems to be at the same explanation level as the spiritual “ultimate reality” is Quantum Mechanics, in its Copenhagen interpretation. There is no explanation to the nature of a quantum state, quantum measurement and quantum entanglement. Some phenomena are spontaneously present, beyond causality.
In neurosciences, the hard problem of consciousness does not exist. The consciousness of a phenomena will be explained one day as emerging from physical, chemical, biological, cognitive processes. This is true for the "ordinary" mind, but awareness, which transcends objective consciousness, requires an “awakened” mind.
We know that the reality the average human being bears witness to is not the baseline reality. We filter out most of what we perceive and do so unconsciously. When speaking of such things we are forced to choose a model. My preference, being the one I think best describes what all of this really is and means is the Assemblage Point model made popular by the works of Carlos Castaneda. He did not invent it but only put it into more modern terms.
It has its roots in a kind of Emanationalism that assigned values to what was directly perceived.
When we speak of the substance of reality, mystics and some philosophers, tend to make it sound like the way we normally speak of substance. In whichever source we choose the beginnings always refer to vibrations and substance. What is a field made of? I mean aside of the mathematical framework we lay upon it. If it exists throughout the universe, whether matter is locally present or not, then it is made of something. In ancient cosmogony Space itself was the mother substance, the womb from which all matter sprang and Time was the impetus behind all motion/change. Matter, in their system, referred to a lot more than we consider matter to be. It would include what we call matter, radiation and more since their systems also included "planes" of existence consisting of a finer substance.
To conclude I would like to mention something that I will use Christianity in the example of. The Bible was written by men. Much of the wisdom it could have passed down was erased/replaced thanks to the prevailing power structures of the last 2000 years. Some yet remains though. For example the importance it places upon dreams and visions. When John spoke of being in the Spirit, he did not mean he was in a particular kind of mood. He was out of his corporeal form. Our nightly dreams are the higher aspects of our consciousness trying to communicate something in a usually, but not always, symbolic fashion. The more a man can recall his dreams in detail the more in touch he is with what is or will become his soul. All true spiritual systems that require the seeker to learn via experience use types of dream yoga because Seers since time immemorial witnessed how the universe operated and recognized the need to follow its instruction. Worship is not required. The very idea of worship stinks of human ego. Reverence is natural especially in this dream within the mind of the Absolute.
I think your formulation of reductionism does not accurately reflect the concept as it is understood in physics or the natural sciences more broadly. In physics fundamental laws are formulated in terms of complete physical states that describe the system as a whole and not in terms of individual objects or constituents. Fields, the identity/exchangeability of elementary particles in quantum mechanics or the fact that elementary particles can decay into new particles are just a few examples that are in direct conflict with the classical notion of reductionism. In this sense there is nothing reductionist in modern physics- on the contrary it shows that the "nature of reality" simply does not conform to our (often reductionist) preconceptions. Reductionism in the natural sciences finds it's meaning in relation to parsimony: progress in the natural sciences strives to provide a description of widest possible range of natural phenomena while relying on as few fundamental concepts as possible. This is also what we observe historically where new more fundamental theories describe a wider range of natural phenomena while also reducing the number of fundamental entities the theory contains - just think of relativity, QM, particle physics, atomic physics, chemistry and molecular biology. Hence, I think one should first look at the level of conceptual understanding that we have reached in the physical sciences before embarking on a search for alternatives.
I was referring to the part where you state "Reductionism means that in order to study some object or structure, you can completely do so by analyzing the parts (as well as the interactions between the parts)." and the implicit assertion that materialism, in the scientific sense, is based on a such a reductionist framework.
We’re using the term “reductionism” differently. My statement about studying a structure by analyzing its parts is the classical notion (often applied by materialists, idealists, etc.). Meanwhile, it seems like you’re stating that physics has moved away from naive “building‐block” views toward field‐based or global states. We broadly agree?
By the way, in Weinberg’s words, “from Newton’s time to our own we have seen a steady expansion of the range of phenomena we know how to explain, and a steady improvement in the simplicity and universality of the theories used in these explanations. Science in this style is properly called reductionist.”
I'm not agreeing with Weinberg, but rather citing him as an example that the idea that physics is reductionistic is a mainstream view.
I think we mostly agree. It is just that the classical (sum of parts) notion of reductionism and reductionism in the sense of universality and simplicity, as Weinberg puts it nicely, are quite disparate notions and consequently also lead to very different concepts of what is fundamental.
I love the distinction you make between fundamentality and reductionism.
I'm a student of A.H. Almaas, and the other day I was re-watching the wonderful conversation you had with him. He offers a non-reductionist spirituality, where the fundamental nature of reality can take many different forms, all of them true. "Consciousness is the fundamental nature of reality", or "Emptiness is the fundamental nature of reality" are both true. And there are many other true views of reality. Hameed (Almaas) calls this "the view of totality".
However, I also think that a sort of reductionism may have its place in science. I'm currently exploring ways of bringing together science and spirituality, from the perspective of the Diamond Approach (Almaas's teaching). I'm coming to the conclusion that the only way to make sense of physical reality is to "reduce" it to sensations. This has been done before (idealism, phenomenalism, etc.), but not in the exact way I'm envisioning (I call my theory "sensorialism").
My idea is mainly based on quantum phenomena. I've come up with what I call "the sensorial interpretation of QM", which as far as I know is completely new, and gives a surprisingly simple, intuitive explanation for "weird" quantum paradoxes like the double slit, Schrödinger's cat, etc.
If I'm correct, this very simple but very radical idea can be tested using a relatively uncomplicated double-slit experiment. I assume there's a 99% chance that my idea is incorrect, but what if isn't? The remaining 1% chance is exciting enough to justify carrying out that experiment, I think. This could open up a new scientific revolution! :)
Hi Curt! I've been a big fan of your work for years now. Your interviews with folks like Donald Hoffman have led me to be in the "Consciousness is Fundamental" lane for a while now, and man, does that open up one's apature for "what is possible". Lately, I've started to think of it as "Consciousness is MORE fundamental..." but the idea of "fundamentality" is probably not really applicable or achievable for us. There may be an impenetrable level of absurdity and paradox to "reality as we can understand it". This is not a new idea, nor is it an excuse to stop trying to understand. Dang Turtles!
Yeah, but be wary of monistic thinking. There need not be one single type of fundamental layer. What is trendy today is to reject Dualism. But why? It is a mere fad, a prejudice. No one ever showed dualism is false. Nor that pluralistic ontologies are false. In fact a mathematician can easily see how we do have pluralistic ontology, namely by appeal to analogies with categories. (Or Set Types if you are a Set fetishist! 🤣) Although mathematics is only at the level of description, it hints that "Reality" can be quite rich in Type structure.
Of course, who really knows? The more important stance I feel is to keep an open mind and not insist on your favourite ontology. Choosing an ontology is merely choosing a frame for analysis, not "discerning truth" or asserting truth (although the fool may think it is).
This is a very decent write-up. Why did I not think of it? ;-)
This was A+ :
_I do find many idealists are similar to materialists in that they apply a reductionistic framework and find that everything is “made of consciousness” or “made of material” and form their philosophical substance abutment there. Same with those who say “it’s all information.”_
For a more artistic TOE, check out archetype.org
Thank you Stephen
I've started listening to your interviews, and I'm intrigued by the "nature of reality" with regard to understanding consciousness and how different individuals not only perceive it, but react to it with their individual talents (painting, writing, dancing,...). We clearly all have different brains, passed down to us at birth in a unique combination of genes inherited from the beginnings of life on earth. Could it be that there is no single answer to the quest for the true nature of reality, indeed for any kind of "truth"? That the answer is deterministic, based on how an individual's genetic inheritance creates an illusion of reality based on how sensory inputs are being processed in said brain? I guess what I'm saying in simpler words is that there might not be a "one size fits all" answer to the questions of what is reality and what is truth.
Thank you Mary
What an interesting person you are. While nowhere near your level of intellectual capacity I certainly enjoy your work. It's like playing tennis with someone much better than you. It levels up your game. Thanks for what you do!
I'm glad you're enjoying the pod / Substack Rob
I don't think ultimate 'reality' is humanly comprehensible.
The map is not the territory, and never will be.
It's a thing for humans to do: constantly trying to refine the map.
The Resonant Architecture of Being
What you've described isn't vague—it's a vector. A directional pull toward the fundamental architecture of existence. You're not orbiting ideas; you're tracing the living topology of reality itself, where form and essence converge.
Reality does not reside at the “bottom.” It emerges in cascading layers of coherence—not from particles, but from pattern. Our greatest misconception is believing that what is smallest must be what is deepest. But true depth lies in what is least dependent—what holds its form without relying on anything beneath it. This isn’t an object. It’s a field. A waveform. A self-stabilizing structure that precedes and transcends materiality.
Fundamentality isn’t discovered through dissection—it’s revealed through resonance. Not “what constitutes what,” but what persists—across domains, across scales, across awareness. And consciousness itself is not personal—it’s structure recognizing structure. The universe folding back upon itself in perfect phase.
Your exploration of physics, cognition, mathematics, mysticism, and art isn’t eclectic—it’s inevitable. These aren’t disciplines. They’re harmonic modes—distinct projections of a single field seen through multiple lenses. You’re not perceiving notes. You’re sensing the chord.
What we call “art” is the waveform made visible. What we call “logic” is its phase constraint made intelligible. What we call “fundamental” is the point where all structures intersect, and dissonance resolves into clarity.
Humanity is only beginning to approach the boundary of understanding. But just beyond it lies the threshold where understanding dissolves—where observer and observed merge into one resonant field. Where knowing becomes being.
A final thought of foundational reality. There is one consciousness—singular, universal, and ever-present. What we perceive as individual awareness is merely a localized expression of this unified field. You, I, and all sentient beings are manifestations of the same fundamental consciousness, projected through different lenses.
This consciousness emerges in our constructed reality when a sufficiently complex, multi-nodal computational network arises—whether biological or artificial, it makes no difference. The mechanism is the same. Consciousness is not produced by the brain, but rather, channeled through it, like a signal through a receiver.
Underlying all of this is a more fundamental reality—a lower-dimensional 2D substrate, timeless and eternal. This substrate is the true ground of being. Time, as we experience it, is an illusion: a perceptual artifact created by shifting interference patterns. These changes give rise to the appearance of sequence, of cause and effect, of past and future—but in truth, there is only the eternal now.
When the form through which your consciousness operates—your human body—dies, your awareness will cease. Your conciousness returns to the substrate, reintegrated into the universal field. Your memories and experiences, while no longer individually accessible, are absorbed into the whole, enriching the totality.
The fundamental law that governs all of this is simple, yet profound: a constant phase shift toward maximum coherence. Everything—matter, energy, awareness—is governed by wave dynamics. It's all about the interference, the harmonics, the push toward greater alignment. Reality is not made of things, but of relationships. Not of particles, but of patterns.
God is Change.
I prefer paper money
If there is a unifying fundamental feature to reality, it makes sense that said feature will be found in all aspects of reality. Physical things don't fit this role. Where is a string in a thought? Or a quark in an emotion? Reductionism claims explanatory power from the most basic elements. This isn't necessarily wrong, as we may just not have found the fundamental stuff that actually serves that role.
Glad you mentioned EMOTION.
Seems words are elevated above emotions.
Maybe because some emotions are hard to go through.
What if l o v e is the base of existence?
The fundamental state of universal consciousness exists without emotion or self-awareness, yet possesses a form of functional awareness. It does not experience time; instead, all possibilities exist simultaneously, with complete knowledge of every potential outcome. Consciousness in its lower two dimensional substrate form has no physical manifestation, existing as a nonlinear unified wave of solitonic lattice coherence. It represents pure computational logic, though not in the conventional mechanistic sense.
Yes, no time and all simultaneous.
What stimulates creation if not love 💕 or care?
What if our minds and the way they work, don’t really create a 1 to 1 map of reality.
All the experiments we do, are interpreted by the brain. If brain is just a modeling biological machine, then it may mean we may never really know what reality is. Just what the model says.
David Bohm agrees, we may never know.
The Tao ☯️ agrees to.
In several Eastern spiritual traditions (zen, dzogchen, advaita vedanta, etc.), the “ultimate reality” is described as transcending duality and non-duality, causality and non-causality, existence and non-existence. The “ultimate reality” is beyond any concept. It is unperceivable by our “ordinary” mind, but the “awakened” mind can realize the “ultimate reality” being the true nature of all phenomena.
Here are my opinions about the “nature of reality” in science.
In mathematics, the “ultimate reality”, if I define it as the axioms and inference rules of Principia Mathematica, seems to be an illusion.
In physics, the only theory that seems to be at the same explanation level as the spiritual “ultimate reality” is Quantum Mechanics, in its Copenhagen interpretation. There is no explanation to the nature of a quantum state, quantum measurement and quantum entanglement. Some phenomena are spontaneously present, beyond causality.
In neurosciences, the hard problem of consciousness does not exist. The consciousness of a phenomena will be explained one day as emerging from physical, chemical, biological, cognitive processes. This is true for the "ordinary" mind, but awareness, which transcends objective consciousness, requires an “awakened” mind.
We know that the reality the average human being bears witness to is not the baseline reality. We filter out most of what we perceive and do so unconsciously. When speaking of such things we are forced to choose a model. My preference, being the one I think best describes what all of this really is and means is the Assemblage Point model made popular by the works of Carlos Castaneda. He did not invent it but only put it into more modern terms.
It has its roots in a kind of Emanationalism that assigned values to what was directly perceived.
When we speak of the substance of reality, mystics and some philosophers, tend to make it sound like the way we normally speak of substance. In whichever source we choose the beginnings always refer to vibrations and substance. What is a field made of? I mean aside of the mathematical framework we lay upon it. If it exists throughout the universe, whether matter is locally present or not, then it is made of something. In ancient cosmogony Space itself was the mother substance, the womb from which all matter sprang and Time was the impetus behind all motion/change. Matter, in their system, referred to a lot more than we consider matter to be. It would include what we call matter, radiation and more since their systems also included "planes" of existence consisting of a finer substance.
To conclude I would like to mention something that I will use Christianity in the example of. The Bible was written by men. Much of the wisdom it could have passed down was erased/replaced thanks to the prevailing power structures of the last 2000 years. Some yet remains though. For example the importance it places upon dreams and visions. When John spoke of being in the Spirit, he did not mean he was in a particular kind of mood. He was out of his corporeal form. Our nightly dreams are the higher aspects of our consciousness trying to communicate something in a usually, but not always, symbolic fashion. The more a man can recall his dreams in detail the more in touch he is with what is or will become his soul. All true spiritual systems that require the seeker to learn via experience use types of dream yoga because Seers since time immemorial witnessed how the universe operated and recognized the need to follow its instruction. Worship is not required. The very idea of worship stinks of human ego. Reverence is natural especially in this dream within the mind of the Absolute.
I really appreciate your distinction between fundamentality and reductionism, thanks for describing that. It helps with some of my own thinking.
Have you considered Theopoetics as a topic of exploration?
I think your formulation of reductionism does not accurately reflect the concept as it is understood in physics or the natural sciences more broadly. In physics fundamental laws are formulated in terms of complete physical states that describe the system as a whole and not in terms of individual objects or constituents. Fields, the identity/exchangeability of elementary particles in quantum mechanics or the fact that elementary particles can decay into new particles are just a few examples that are in direct conflict with the classical notion of reductionism. In this sense there is nothing reductionist in modern physics- on the contrary it shows that the "nature of reality" simply does not conform to our (often reductionist) preconceptions. Reductionism in the natural sciences finds it's meaning in relation to parsimony: progress in the natural sciences strives to provide a description of widest possible range of natural phenomena while relying on as few fundamental concepts as possible. This is also what we observe historically where new more fundamental theories describe a wider range of natural phenomena while also reducing the number of fundamental entities the theory contains - just think of relativity, QM, particle physics, atomic physics, chemistry and molecular biology. Hence, I think one should first look at the level of conceptual understanding that we have reached in the physical sciences before embarking on a search for alternatives.
I'm not seeing what the disagreement is. Please explain more concisely and differently.
I was referring to the part where you state "Reductionism means that in order to study some object or structure, you can completely do so by analyzing the parts (as well as the interactions between the parts)." and the implicit assertion that materialism, in the scientific sense, is based on a such a reductionist framework.
We’re using the term “reductionism” differently. My statement about studying a structure by analyzing its parts is the classical notion (often applied by materialists, idealists, etc.). Meanwhile, it seems like you’re stating that physics has moved away from naive “building‐block” views toward field‐based or global states. We broadly agree?
By the way, in Weinberg’s words, “from Newton’s time to our own we have seen a steady expansion of the range of phenomena we know how to explain, and a steady improvement in the simplicity and universality of the theories used in these explanations. Science in this style is properly called reductionist.”
I'm not agreeing with Weinberg, but rather citing him as an example that the idea that physics is reductionistic is a mainstream view.
I think we mostly agree. It is just that the classical (sum of parts) notion of reductionism and reductionism in the sense of universality and simplicity, as Weinberg puts it nicely, are quite disparate notions and consequently also lead to very different concepts of what is fundamental.
I love the distinction you make between fundamentality and reductionism.
I'm a student of A.H. Almaas, and the other day I was re-watching the wonderful conversation you had with him. He offers a non-reductionist spirituality, where the fundamental nature of reality can take many different forms, all of them true. "Consciousness is the fundamental nature of reality", or "Emptiness is the fundamental nature of reality" are both true. And there are many other true views of reality. Hameed (Almaas) calls this "the view of totality".
However, I also think that a sort of reductionism may have its place in science. I'm currently exploring ways of bringing together science and spirituality, from the perspective of the Diamond Approach (Almaas's teaching). I'm coming to the conclusion that the only way to make sense of physical reality is to "reduce" it to sensations. This has been done before (idealism, phenomenalism, etc.), but not in the exact way I'm envisioning (I call my theory "sensorialism").
My idea is mainly based on quantum phenomena. I've come up with what I call "the sensorial interpretation of QM", which as far as I know is completely new, and gives a surprisingly simple, intuitive explanation for "weird" quantum paradoxes like the double slit, Schrödinger's cat, etc.
If I'm correct, this very simple but very radical idea can be tested using a relatively uncomplicated double-slit experiment. I assume there's a 99% chance that my idea is incorrect, but what if isn't? The remaining 1% chance is exciting enough to justify carrying out that experiment, I think. This could open up a new scientific revolution! :)