Structure of Reality

There is space: right, left, up, down, front, and back; but there is also past and present. Time: cause, and, effect, are linked. The concepts I present here make a proposal on the relation between causality and reality.

Why are humans on Earth?

The Anthropic Principle states that since we know that we exist, then this part of the Universe is special. Which is it, first the Principle, and then our existence, or the other way around? I say, we cannot place a cause and effect relation between the Principle and our presence here. Our problem has been to postulate the need of a linear flow of time. Without this Archimedean time concept, there is no need to state first principles.

Nevertheless we see patterns. I think these patterns are produced by lock-in events. All of a sudden everything comes together in harmony and a persistent pattern arises. Once these patterns are there, there is no cause-effect relationships, I think it is more descriptive to say that processes support each other in a bootstrap way. In the sixties Geoffrey Chew studied the idea of bootstrap. In his view the proton was not more important than the neutron, or any of the other strongly interacting particles discovered frequently in those days. What made sense was the mutual interaction of all particles, that in a sense then were producing each other.

In my view then, time is not visualized like a one dimensional Archimidean line with past events always behind future ones. It is more like a fractal stream where complex interactions and lock-in phenomena produce the permanence of structures that gives us a sense of reality.