The Abstractionist’s Papers · Part II · Chapter 4 of 13
You’re at the kitchen table with your sixth grader, getting through science homework. One question is about an atom. The next is about the solar system. You do your best to follow along, and you have little feel for what these things are or what they’re doing.
You know they’re in the same universe as you, and that’s about as far as it goes. The natural world feels ours and alien all at once.
So let’s map it. Every natural process has an inside, an outside, and a boundary. Inside is where meaning is handled. Outside is where things happen. These domains are orthogonal and always in interaction.
That map is the Natural Reality Framework. It shows how reality works, whatever reality turns out to be.
Contents
4.1 An Apple in the Sun
4.1.1 When We Run Out of Map
4.1.2 Recognizing the Hidden Dimension
4.2 Principles of Natural Reality
4.2.1 Inside, Outside, Boundary
4.2.2 Every Natural Process Has a Model
4.2.3 From One Process to Many
4.2.4 Where to Draw the Line
4.2.5 How Influence Spreads
4.3 How Reality Builds Itself
4.3.1 Interactions
4.3.2 Causal Impedance and Resistance
4.3.3 How Energy Works
4.3.4 The Role of Incoherence
4.3.5 How Natural Spaces Emerge
4.4 Layers of Natural Spaces
4.5 Closing Remarks
4.1 An Apple in the Sun
The orchard is quiet except for the occasional rustling of leaves as a warm breeze moves through the trees. Late afternoon light filters through the branches. Thira, whom we met in Chapter 2, watches an apple sway gently, release its hold, and fall. Now we’ll draw what happens in her.
She’s seen this over and over, expected and unquestioned. Apples fall.
She glances up at the sun, brilliant and unwavering, fixed in the sky. Something stirs inside. The apple and the sun, both suspended above, both subject to the same world, yet one falls while the other doesn’t.
Why?
Everything she knows tells her that unsupported objects fall toward the earth. Drop a stone and it falls. Pour water from a bucket and it falls. The rule holds everywhere she’s tested it.
The sun hangs there, nothing visible holding it up, yet it stays.
Her reasoning feels airtight. If the apple falls, the sun should too. She’s certain the rule is right, until she looks at the world again and sees it can’t be.
4.1.1 When We Run Out of Map
Something in Thira’s understanding is wrong, but she can’t see what.
The Blue Space is the outside world, where things happen by rules of causation. The apple and the sun exist here, as happenings. Mind N (a Red Space) is Thira’s inside, where she makes meaning.
In the Blue Space, ➀ represents the sun in the sky. In her mind, Ⓐ is the abstraction induced by ➀, the mental image she perceives in its place. This could be a visual image of the sun, or an idea about it.
In the Blue Space, ➁ represents the sun remaining in the sky, following the rule of causation that governs celestial bodies. In her mind, Ⓑ is the corresponding abstraction induced by ➁.
Thira has learned from experience that unsupported objects fall. Her mind applies this reasoning to the sun. Interpreting Ⓐ, she expects Ⓒ, the sun falling. What she perceives instead is Ⓑ, the sun still in the sky.
Her reasoning ends in a contradiction.
- Rule of Causation (in the Blue Space): The sun remains in the sky due to mechanisms she doesn’t yet understand.
- Rule of Reasoning (in Thira’s Red Space): If nothing holds it up, it falls.
Her expectations (Ⓒ) conflict with what she perceives (Ⓑ).
The paradox lives here.
4.1.2 Recognizing the Hidden Dimension
To Thira, inside her Red Space, reality seems broken. Something about the world doesn’t add up.
If Thira could see her own mind as one process inside the Blue Space, as Figure 15 shows, the contradiction would vanish.
Even without knowing what the underlying Rule of Causation is, she would recognize that something she doesn’t yet understand governs the sun’s motion.
Thira doesn’t get to see her own mind from the outside, and from inside she already believes she’s seeing the outside. Her mind’s contradiction looks like a contradiction in the world. The apple falls and the sun doesn’t, both are heavy, and one of those facts has to be wrong. She can ask around, and she can be taught, and whatever comes back has to pass through the same reasoning that produced the problem. She never gets to hold it up against the happening.
The blindfold works the same way on you and me. We take ourselves to be looking at reality while we look at our minds’ interpretation of it, and the assumption stays invisible from where we sit. Thira can do what we can do. She can learn about gravity from others and trade her paradox for the next one.
The principles that follow are how we work with a universe we can’t see.
4.2 Principles of Natural Reality
Nature operates as a network of interacting natural processes.
At first the universe seems made of things. A tree stands tall, a rock sits solid, a river runs by.
The rock that looks permanent is eroding. Geological forces work on it constantly. Wind, water, and temperature swings break it down grain by grain. Today’s rock is one moment in millions of years of transformation.
The river alters the land as it flows, moving soil and rock, carving new channels. Tomorrow’s river will follow a slightly different path because it has changed the ground it runs over.
The tree grows, converts sunlight into sugar, exchanges gases with the air, drops leaves that enrich the soil. Eventually it will decay and feed other organisms.
Each example shows the same principle. What appears solid and separate is formed through countless interactions. Electrons jump between energy levels. Atoms vibrate and bond. Heat flows through everything while pressure builds and releases.
We rarely see any of this. Our minds turn the flow of change into manageable concepts such as rock, river, and tree. We need these labels to make decisions, communicate, and move through the world, and they create an expectation of separation with no basis in happening.
Instruments let us measure more, and measurements remain interpretations. Everywhere we look, things change.
The rock’s dissolution happens whether any of us observes it or not. “Rock” is the meaning we create when we encounter that process. We see a solid object (meaning). What’s going on is change (happening).
A “thing” is a snapshot of a process.
The lines we draw around things are meanings our minds create, useful for thought.
4.2.1 Inside, Outside, Boundary
Every natural process has an inside, an outside, and a boundary. An electron has them. So does an atom, a molecule, a cell, an organism.
Take a biological cell. We describe the membrane as its boundary, yet the real boundary lives in the interaction between inside and outside. Beyond the membrane, molecules collide, temperatures change, and reactions occur. These are happenings.
Inside, the cell generates its responses. When the environment changes, events at the boundary trigger interpretation. The cell makes its own meaning from the signals those events send.
The chemistry outside is happening. The cell’s interpretations inside are meaning. That meaning belongs to the cell. It’s whatever the cell holds inside, its own response to what reaches it.
The inside of a natural process can’t observe the outside. All it has is its own response.
The boundary functions as a transformer, the word Chapters 2 and 3 have been borrowing for it. External events happen. The boundary receives signals from the event and triggers the inside, which makes meaning of them. When action follows from that meaning, the boundary emits signals that turn into new happenings in the outside world.
4.2.2 Every Natural Process Has a Model
All natural processes produce their responses from within. The mind was a special case. Internal modeling is the general principle.
When an electron exhibits mass or charge, it expresses a response determined by its own internal model, one we can’t directly access. We observe its behavior, interpret the pattern, and call it “mass.”
That model is ours. The electron has its own.
Our minds project interpretation onto the electron’s response, modeling it as if exposing an inner reality.
Start with a single process.
4.2.3 From One Process to Many
Figures 16 to 18 redraw the first three pictures of Chapter 1, now for any natural process.
Each process maintains its own model, its Red Space, and interacts with the outside world, the Blue Space, across a boundary.
When we say a process has an inside and outside, we’re describing distinct dimensions of the same phenomenon. The outside is part of the process. Happening in the Blue Space produces the Red Space, and the Red Space produces more happening in the Blue Space.
Now add others. Processes operate in parallel, each developing its own internal model. Figure 17 shows several side by side.
Each Red Space represents an independent process’s internal model, while the Blue Space is the shared external world where interactions take place.
A process that hits what seems like an obstacle is meeting another process. The obstacle is its own picture of that other process. One process acts, and what it does induces a response in the other.
Put them all together and you have the Natural Reality Framework.
Processes interact in the Blue Space, and each process interprets those interactions separately within its own Red Space.
The pictures carry two principles:
- Parallelism: Each process constructs its own internal reality independently, and none can read another’s.
- Orthogonality: Meaning and happening differ in kind, so no process has direct access to another’s internal model; all interactions occur exclusively through the Blue Space.
4.2.4 Where to Draw the Line
Take a thought. Ask whether it’s physical or abstract and you get two good answers. A neuroscientist will tell you a thought is a physical process. Most people will tell you a thought is abstract. The same thing can be both.
Meaning and happening differ in kind. Every event is entirely happening, and every interpretation of it is entirely meaning, with no sliding scale between them and nothing to argue about.
The old dualities run into trouble because their two sides overlap. Physical and abstract are both concepts we hold about processes, so both sit on the side of meaning. Mind and body are interpretive categories that got mistaken for something fundamental. Subjective and objective fail the same way, because objectivity is itself an interpretation, the agreement between minds.
Happening is what goes on. Meaning is what we build from it. They work in different domains while influencing each other continuously. Happening drives interpretation to produce meaning, and meaning drives action to produce happening.
Finding this boundary requires holding on to paradoxes long enough for the distinction between your own inside and the shared outside to appear.
Understanding orthogonality takes deliberate effort. Left alone, the mind fixes meaning at once with the models it already has, quieting contradictions before they can trigger internal reorganization.
4.2.5 How Influence Spreads
Nothing gets handed across between two people. The same holds for every process. Every process builds its own inside and keeps it there, and no process has ever read another’s. So how does anything reach anything?
Induction is how a process turns outside interactions into representations inside its model. No other process can see them, so every interaction takes place in the Blue Space, and each process reads what happens by its own model.
Figure 19 shows a process taking an outside cause in as an induced cause within its own model.
Interactions create happening, and each process interprets it on its own.
Follow the arrows. A cause in the Blue Space leads, through the transformer at the boundary, to an induced cause in the internal model (Model N), which then creates an induced effect based on its internal rules.
The internal model processes the induced cause. If the model then acts in the Blue Space, the loop of interaction closes.
The yellow band represents light, the entire electromagnetic spectrum. To us, light is the boundary between meaning and happening.
4.3 How Reality Builds Itself
Interactions accumulate, and some of what accumulates doesn’t fit the rule a process was enforcing. Enough of it and the process operates under new rules, as something that didn’t exist before. Part III keeps coming back to this. Here we start from causality. The most familiar pattern we interpret is cause and effect, events following from other events as part of a continuous process. From there we map Natural Spaces, where interactions follow distinct causal rules.
4.3.1 Interactions
Entities interact somewhere, and wherever they do, something governs how. Call the where a Natural Space (N) and the something a Rule of Causation (Ψ). The rule takes a cause (c) and makes an effect (e) out of it.
Ψ: c → e.
Each effect has two components:
- Change (δ): The transformation that occurs due to the interaction.
- Decay (λ): The inherent cost of the interaction, which works against persistence.
Such that e = δ + λ.
Depending on how change (δ) aligns with decay (λ), an ordinary interaction follows one of three patterns, all of them within the plane of the space:
- Constructive Interactions: When change opposes decay (180°), the interaction stabilizes or strengthens the entity, allowing it to persist.
- Destructive Interactions: When change reinforces decay (0°), the interaction accelerates the breakdown of the entity.
- Neutral Interactions: When change happens at a right angle to decay (90°), the interaction neither offsets the breakdown nor adds to it. The decay is still paid, so the entity wears down by that cost alone.
Add a brick to the tower and the tower gets taller. Swing a hammer at it and it comes down. Paint it and it’s a different color. All three happen on the plane, and all three pay their decay.
4.3.2 Causal Impedance and Resistance
The same rule doesn’t affect everything the same way. Some entities transform under it, others barely register it. Causal Impedance (ZΨ) is the property of the receiving entity that determines which. It’s the resistance of Chapter 2, now with a symbol.
The effect of an interaction depends on impedance:
e ∝ c / ZΨ
For a fixed cause (c):
- Higher ZΨ means the entity resists change, experiencing a smaller effect.
- Lower ZΨ means the entity is more susceptible, experiencing a greater effect.
This mirrors physical principles like Newton’s Second Law (F = m × a), where mass (impedance) resists acceleration, and Ohm’s Law (V = R × i), where electrical resistance affects current flow.
Push a ball and it rolls. Push a wall and it doesn’t. Same push.
Impedance decides how much a rule reaches something. It also decides whether something can leave the space that rule governs.
4.3.3 How Energy Works
Imagine pushing a cart up a hill. At the top, you let it go. It rolls down.
The meaning a process holds inside is potential. The happening it produces outside is flow.
The cart at rest holds potential energy. That readiness sits in the internal models of the atoms we call “cart,” in how they stand relative to other processes with mass.
Let go and you see motion. What you see is your mind’s reading of what happens in the Blue Space, because the blindfold lets us interpret what happens and never observe it. “Kinetic energy” is our model of that motion.
Potential turns into flow, and flow accumulates back into potential. A rolling ball compresses a spring. Water flowing downhill gets pumped back up. Push the cart uphill and motion turns back into stored readiness.
Where was the cart’s potential energy before you pushed it uphill? After it stops rolling, where does the kinetic energy go?
Follow it backward, from the cart to your muscles, from your muscles to the food you ate, from that food to photosynthesis, from photosynthesis to the sun. Follow it forward, from the rolling cart to friction, from friction to heat, from heat to molecular motion spreading outward indefinitely. The trail never ends, because energy describes a relationship between processes, and each relationship leads to the next.
Read with Causal Impedance from 4.3.2, these observations take a mathematical form.
Potential ∝ Impedance × Flow
A battery’s voltage turns into current, a spring’s tension into motion, a mind’s intention into action.
4.3.4 The Role of Incoherence
Most interactions take place within the plane of a Natural Space, following its governing rule. Some interactions introduce a different kind of change, one that doesn’t align with the existing rule. We call this Incoherence (Δ). The word has travelled with us since the Introduction, and this is its definition.
- Incoherence is a move out of a space. Change within a space is ordinary propagation.
- It’s a change perpendicular to the plane, and it alters an entity’s relationship with its space. A neutral interaction meets decay at a right angle and stays on the plane. Incoherence leaves the plane.
It happens when change (δ) increases an entity’s Causal Impedance (ZΨ), making it less susceptible to the governing rule. Decay belongs to the rule, so it stays on the plane, and Incoherence is indifferent to it.
As this resistance builds, the process reaches a threshold where it begins interacting according to a different set of causal relationships. The old rule may still apply, or it may not. Either way, something new now applies as well.
Four limbs on the ground. Then some stand, and two limbs free up. Nothing decided yet what they’re for.
Written as a formula:
Δ = ZΨ(n+1) – ZΨn
where Δ represents the degree of Incoherence that separates the new space from the previous one.
4.3.5 How Natural Spaces Emerge
As Incoherence builds up, new Natural Spaces form, each governed by its own rule set.
The process unfolds in stages:
- A Foundational Natural Space (n−1): entities interact under the governing rule Ψn−1, following well-defined causal relationships.
- Accumulation of Incoherence (Δ) produces a new set of entities, carrying increased resistance (higher ZΨ) to the governing rule of the space they came from.
- A New Natural Space (n) emerges, where new entities interact with each other under a different governing rule (Ψn), distinct from the space they emerged out of.
- The cycle repeats. Each new space can give rise to another under its own governing rule, however often the cycle has already run.
A Natural Space is out there happening, and it’s also in here as the version we built. The atomic space is out there whether we name it or not, and what we work with is the version our minds build. Same for every Natural Space in this book.
4.4 Layers of Natural Spaces
Physical, biological, and cognitive are human ideas, categories we invented to sort what we sense. Nothing in the Blue Space carries those labels. To see why we needed them, we have to look from inside the kind of process that makes them.
Reality feels like one seamless thing from inside a Red Space. Our interpretation breaks it into layers we can work with.
- The physical layer: matter, atoms, objects, things.
- The biological layer: life, adaptation, persistence.
- The cognitive layer: reasoning, concepts, the forming of internal models.
All three sit inside one Red Space. They aren’t the same as Chapter 3’s mind layers (Base Layer, General Reality, Self-Reality). Only the Red Space as a whole sits orthogonal to the Blue Space.
The physical layer is our conventional picture of what’s really out there. It feels like the outside, and it’s Red Space interpretation. Happening itself stays outside it.
Consider what the three layers cover. A crystal forming under pressure. A cell dividing. A thought arriving unbidden during your morning commute. Each follows rules of its own. No account of crystal growth predicts cell division. No account of cell division predicts the thought. Yet all three arrive in the same experience, at once, in the same world.
Inside Mind N, the physical, biological, and cognitive layers stack up without friction, one interpretation sitting right on top of the next.
Down in the Blue Space, the processes behind those layers don’t stack so cleanly. ΔBP marks the Incoherence between the physical and the biological. ΔCB marks the Incoherence between the biological and the cognitive. ΔCP spans the whole stack, physical to cognitive.
The happening side of Incoherence never shows up inside the mind. From inside, the layers sit together, seamless and unexplained, while the processes beneath them follow rules that have nothing to say about each other. So we supply the meaning side ourselves. We invent Incoherence, draw it into the model as Figure 24 does, and test whether the model holds. The model passes, and the rest of the map follows from it. Recognizing Incoherence gives us a way to study where novelty comes from and how emergence happens.
A process can’t reach the happening underneath it. From inside, the process is blindfolded.
4.5 Closing Remarks
Thinkers have long sensed the universe is process, and a usable map has been hard to come by.
Thira is still in the orchard. The apple falls, the sun stays, and she can’t get outside her own reasoning to see which part is wrong. Nobody can. Natural Reality tells her that the contradiction was never out there. It’s within.
Every natural process builds its own inside while taking part in shared causation. An electron responding to electromagnetic waves follows the same pattern as a mind building experience from what induces a response at its senses, and a cell reading signals at its membrane is doing what a person does reading another.
Accumulated interactions that don’t fit a process’s rule eventually carry it somewhere new, under rules that didn’t exist before it got there.
Back at the kitchen table, the atom and the solar system sit on the same map now, and so do you and your sixth grader.
What you learned about you applies equally to everything else. What you’ll learn about everything else will say something about you.
New realities emerge the same way everywhere, through what the next chapter calls General Selection.
Chapter 4 in the Chapter Manual · Study questions