Under Construction

Virtualism

All things are number - Pythagoras - Aristotle's Metaphysics

Virtualism is a single idea followed all the way down. The idea is that nothing is fundamental except relationship - and that everything else, number and space and matter and time and mind, is built on top of it, one floor at a time. Assume difference, and only difference. The rest emerges.

The One Idea

Take two things that are partly alike and partly unalike. The relationship between them is itself a thing - it exists whether or not anyone is there to notice it, and it is a third something, over and above the two it joins. Stack relationships on relationships and you have number. Stack number and you have space. Press space hard enough, until it can no longer lie flat, and it buckles inward into matter. Each level is made wholly of the level beneath it, and no level was placed there by hand.

To be is to be relationships.

That is very nearly the whole of it. What looks like a world of solid stuff turns out to be a world of facts - facts about sameness and difference - behaving, reliably and lawfully, as if they were solid stuff. That 'as if' is not a confession of unreality. It is the working principle of existence, and it is why this site is called what it is.

The Bridge

Most pictures of the world ask you to choose a floor and call it the bottom. The materialist points at matter and says the rest is froth upon it. The spiritually minded point at mind, or meaning, and say matter is the coarse outer shell of that. Virtualism says the quarrel is about floors of one building, and offers the staircase. Matter is real, and emergent. Mind is real, and emergent. Neither is the ground, because the ground is not a thing at all - it is relationship, the bare fact of difference, from which both are grown by one and the same process.

So the theory is meant to be legible from both directions. A physicist can read it as an account of why the world is quantised, why it has the dimensions it has, and where gravity comes from. Someone who has always felt that number and pattern run deeper than stuff can read it as the working-out of precisely that intuition. They are reading the same staircase from different landings.

What Drives It

If everything is built, something must do the building. That something is paradox. When a situation is forced to be two incompatible things at once and cannot wriggle out of it within the room it has, the only way through is to open a new direction - a dimension that was not there before. That is strong emergence, and it is how genuinely new things come to be. Its gentler twin, hypodox, is what happens when a situation is under-decided rather than over-decided: nothing new is forced into being, but what is already there rearranges itself to fill the room. Between the two of them - the engine that raises new floors and the engine that furnishes them - everything gets made.

Where to Begin

The pages below run from the first step to the last. They are meant to be read roughly in order, though each stands on its own; the early ones ask nothing of you but attention, and the later ones repay a little patience with mathematics. Start at the beginning - which is, fittingly, nothing at all.