Fundamentally, It's Stuff
“‘What is reality?’, you ask. Beneath all the photons and leptons and baryons and gluons, underlying space-time and quantum fields, out there in the realm of fundamentals where the natural ontologists and the ontotech engineers play, what actually is the world made from? What is underneath it all, what can we do with it, and is there any way to make another one, possibly a better one?”
“In this department, we have three answers, and this course will cover all of them.”
“First and most conventionally, Matrix Theory postulates a six-dimensional continuum of interacting fields and strings, whose interactions and resonances along all modes are reflected as — in the four-dimensional slice of this continuum which we occupy and directly perceive — the shadow-on-the-wall phenomena which we interpret as space and time, energy and matter, even — possibly — the basis for the nondeterministic mathematics of the logos.”
“Second, Information Physics holds, instead, that “it is bit”; that the basis for all of plenary reality is software. The universe is no more than the interaction of patterns of information, a self-modifying hardware-less algorithm (or rather, idestelté – the existence of the algorithm is equivalent to the existence of the processor) continually computing itself. (Albeit, in this theory, one with an unfortunate resource leak; but then, software can be debugged. Even if that software is also the universe.)”
“Third, Ontological Precedence holds that the plenum is defined-created by the binding of extrauniversal principles, mirithestel — Identity, Existence, Location, Time, Entropy, and so forth — in accordance with an external topology of infinite metaphysical possibility. This binding creates the rules by which the universe operates, and hence defines its constituents. By modifying this underlying binding, whether globally in the construction of so-called pocket universes, or by local modification, deletion, or insertion of such mirithestel, all the less fundamental aspects of reality, mere particles and physical laws, may be defined or altered as one wishes.”
“These are the three most popular and accepted theories in the field. The difficulty, of course, is that ontotechnological devices have been built using, and to verify, the predictions of all three of these theories — and they all function. Which in turn suggests that we have at least one more layer of the delightful complexity of the universe to unwrap, even after refining these, before we can approach the true answer to that question.”
“After all, it would be a shame to find the single answer in only a few thousand years, wouldn’t it?”
– Academician Kathery Melithos-ith-Meliastinos, Professor of Natural Ontology, University of Almeä