On the Nature of Reality

WARNING! This post is in no way to be taken as absolute truth, its content is merely a sample of my own personal considerations and is therefore subject to error.

“I am the vine; you are the branches. If you remain in me and I in you, you will bear much fruit; apart from me you can do nothing.” (John 15:5)

Did you ever wonder what these words are all about? Is Jesus saying that we can do nothing good or nothing at all without Him? Ever since I came to the realization that the physical universe may be virtual in nature and that everything is a huge communication grid between abstract objects which display concreteness only when talking to each other, I began to ask myself yet another question: What is conscious experience? Not what the universe is, I already pointed out it’s nothing but a huge informational construct, at bottom. I mean subjective conscious experience, our perception of what is, instead of what actually is out there, where does that come from?

Classical scientific explanations point to our brain being the artisan of all of our experiences, yet nobody has ever been able to answer how electricity in our neurons turns into color, sound, scent, taste, tingle. Why do we experience all of these things instead of mere electricity? And how do we do that at all? Or, as University of Arizona philosophy professor David Chalmers asked, “How does something as unconscious as matter give rise to something as immaterial as consciousness?”

I got a first glimpse of the answer from an unlikely source: Perry Marshall, the Google Ad-Words marketing guru, who’s also an electrical engineer, Ethernet expert and self-taught theologian. He is the guy behind this scientific website, which I insistently recommend, and here’s what he said in a post written on his other personal (theology dedicated) website:

“I liken the [Christian] Trinity to a communication system which has encoder, code and decoder (analogy Father, Son and Holy Spirit) – communication does not take place until all three are present. The encoder is the source of the information, the code is the expression and the decoder is the understanding. God is love because God is the desire that melds all three together in perfect harmony.”

He then went on to say the following: “I have an analogy to the [Christian] Trinity that goes like this: I have a cell phone, you have a cell phone, communication takes place ONLY when our phones share the same protocols and are connected. A cell phone all by itself is completely useless, communication is not possible with one cell phone all by itself. Communication involves three parts – sender, message and receiver. God is a community, God communicates and God is love. Love cannot exist if there is not another to love. So God is ONE – in the sense that communication itself is one process – but God is also plural because God communicates and loves by His very nature. So in one sense it seems contradictory but in another sense it’s necessary for God to be plural.”

And, in another one of his posts, on yet another one of his personal websites, he stated: “If we define God as self-aware, then we automatically invoke a splitting [...]. Which is where the Trinity comes from. Self, expression of self, and self-understanding (Father / Son = WORD / Holy Spirit).”

Now let me ask you this: is that a stroke of genius or what? Yes, this makes so much sense it explodes in countless colors inside my head. God is a Trinity because he must be in order to love and communicate that love, no communication can ever be done without the three instances: encoder, code and decoder. I’m not sure whether this means that God subjects Himself to the necessity of our known communication model or that the model in question was designed in the image of the Trinity. It’s probably the latter, since God created everything as it is. But the point is this: God is a Trinity specifically because He is a communicating entity, who doesn’t use anything other than Himself in order to communicate. So, He simply must have all three instances of the communication model within Himself if He is to convey His thoughts, will and feelings.

Whether God needs the aforementioned model to express all of the above within the Trinity Itself, I don’t know. But the really nice thing about Perry’s insight is that is extends also onto everything that God relates to. The Holy Trinity is not only communicational toward Itself, it is so with everything else, the entire creation.

There seems to be a necessity relationship between the Trinity attribute of God and the communication attribute of God. The Trinity attribute seems to be a prerequisite for His ability to express anything at all outside of Himself. That goes back to the transcendence of the Divine, not one created thing can really understand the true nature and essence of God, since it is completely unknowable and hidden within the Father. But, in order to help His creation overcome this obstacle and be able to reach God, He expresses Himself and communicates to us similarly to the three instances model: encoder, code and decoder.

This helped me understand that conscious experience is actually God speaking to sentient beings. Out of this constant and continuous input of communication, experience emerges. Still, for the sake of being rigorous, I wanted to see if there were some Scripture verses that would support Perry’s analogy. I found them here:

“But”, he [God] said, “you cannot see my face, for no one may see me and live.” (Exodus 33:20) – This verse refers to God the Father, the encoder of information, to whom nobody has direct access to, unless they would cease to exist and return to the Source, the boundless Mind of God, where they would probably no longer be recognizable as individuals.

“No man has seen God at any time, the only begotten Son, who is in the bosom of the Father, he has made him known.” (John 1:18) – This verse emphasizes the idea that the only way to know the Father, the encoder or the source of information, without the need to cease individual existence, is through the Son, the language of the Father, who expresses Himself using the Son, or the Word or the code – Jesus Christ.

“No one has ascended to heaven but He who came down from heaven, that is, the Son of Man who is in heaven.” (John 3:13) – Again, an emphasis on the idea that the only one who has access to the true nature and essence of the Father while remaining a recognizable individual, is the eternal Word of God, the only one able to directly express the will of the Father across all of creation, simultaneously in space-time (“down from heaven”) and outside of it (“in heaven”).

“The Son is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation.” (Colossians 1:15) – Another way of saying that the Word of God is no more and no less than the only expression of the otherwise inaccessible Father.

“But the Helper, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in My name, He will teach you all things, and bring to your remembrance all things that I said to you.” (John 14:26) – This verse discloses the role of the Holy Spirit as decoder of the information coming from the Father and expressed through the language or the Word of God. The Holy Spirit is the one who translates Jesus, the Word of the Father, into human conscious subjective experience, according to the category of our understanding of the Word.

My statement here and now is this: not only does the three instances communication model analogy of the Holy Trinity work for conveying the teachings found in the Bible, it also works for expressing the very nature of reality. The Father is the source of the information found in the Scriptures but also of the information which, at bottom, makes up the universe, as well. The Son is not only the bearer of the Father’s good news of salvation to man, He is also the Code that the Father is using to express Himself when creating the universe. The Holy Spirit is not only the one helping people understand and deepen the meaning of the teachings of Jesus, He is also the one directly responsible for turning electrical signals in our brains into subjective experience such as color, sound, scent, taste and tingle. He is also the one who makes subatomic particles “understand” what other particles are communicating about their properties, in the process of turning abstract objects into concrete physical ones.

Now read again John 1:1-3: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. Through Him all things were made; without Him nothing was made that has been made.”

I submit to you that, if the famous Howard Storm, who allegedly went through a near death experience and came back to give an account of the things angels taught him in heaven is correct, then the creation process is an ongoing one. The universe did not simply come into being 13.77 billion years ago and went on by itself ever since. God keeps recreating everything from one moment to the next, slightly modifying things everywhere, in order to give the appearance of continuity in space-time, or in plain English, to make things appear to move from here to there or transform or change in some way from one second to the next.

If this is true, then the great mystery is, in fact, how all of this is happening without our noticing anything at all. If concrete physical existence is not truly continuous but periodically recreated, then there must be "moments" in time during our lifespan and "distances" in space inside of our own bodies when and where we do not exist. This is a serious offense to our common sense but, it turns out to be true.

Max Planck was the famous physicist who established quantum physics as a field of its own. He was the first man ever in the history of our species to come to the jaw-dropping realization that everything in our universe comes in packets, or, as he called them, quanta (singular "quantum", the Latin word meaning “amount” in English).

He began by pointing out that atoms only absorb or release fixed amounts of energy whenever component electrons get to a higher or a lower orbit around the nucleus. Later on, it turned out that everything, including matter, energy, space and time, comes in packets, nothing is ever continuous. This is quite obvious for matter, since we can clearly see that all physical objects are limited in their size, however small or large they may be. There’s no single object that extends out in space forever. But to come to the realization that the same is true for everything else, not just matter, that was quite another story. But what does it mean?

Well, “the Planck scale” was a term coined by physicists to designate the smallest possible scale at which space-time still exists as space-time. Anything below that scale goes into quantum gravity theory. At the Planck scale, space-time exists as a grid, a fabric so to speak. Each section of a thread in this fabric is a quantum of space-time, a very, very small portion of space existing in a very, very small amount of time. Between the threads there’s nothing, nothing at all. Moving in space-time means to travel from one consecutive thread section to the next, as well as from one thread to a parallel one, as you would if you were walking on a regular fabric but, in order to get from one thread to a nearby one, you simply need to jump across the nothingness between them.

Since we’re all made of quantized space-time, running on quantized energy, the above is a clear indication that physical existence itself comes in packets and is, therefore, not a continuous but a dotted line.

Of course, this raises the question as to where we are when we are not on any one of the dots that make up the dotted line. Do we simply cease to be, in the moments when our own existence takes a break, between two consecutive dots? Well, the short answer is a blunt yes. The long answer is: we cease to exist as concrete physical entities but we go on as abstract physical entities, only to be reborn again into concreteness, as soon as existence reaches another dot in the dotted line. After all, as I pointed out in my previous post, we are, as physical objects, at the very core, merely informational constructs in a virtual reality. Even when we play video games, there are moments when the game images disappear from sight, when the computer display refreshes the picture, but they go so fast that we never notice it (tech guys know what I mean). But that doesn’t mean the game is not running any longer. The video card is still working, so are all the other components in that computer and all the characters and sceneries of the game still exist on the hard drive and in the RAM memory and in the graphic processor and the data buses between them.

OK, so Planck made the first breakthrough in providing evidence that physical existence does not go indefinitely downscale. You cannot divide a distance or a time span forever, you will eventually hit a wall, the Planck scale wall, beyond which nothing can go smaller. Zeno’s paradox of Achilles and the tortoise was solved by this bright mind of the 20^th century. But how does that tie in with God as a communicating entity?

Well, quantum physics has helped us understand that physical existence alternates with non-existence all across our so-called objective reality and that the universe, even though started out at the Big Bang, is actually being recreated over and over again, from one quantum of space-time to the next, from one moment to another. And since the fabric of space-time requires all of its threads in their entirety and “at once”, in order to be a fabric, then this means that the quanta of yesterday space-time share the same neighborhood with those of today and tomorrow. But, that sounds very much like Einstein’s theory of relativity claim that the past, present and future coexist simultaneously, because they’ve all been created together, at the same “moment” in “meta time”, which is a made-up term designating God’s timelessness or eternity, which is distinct from our time, since it is not part of our space-time.

In this perspective, the Big Bang would be no more special than any other moment in the history of our universe, it is simply the first dot on a dotted line that already contains all the dots. We can and do exist as human beings even when our existence crosses the nothingness between two dots on this line. Perry Marshall helped me understand how that is possible. It is God who recreates the universe from one moment to another, communicating the next quantum of physical existence to my consciousness and turning His communication into my sentient experience. And He does that by acting as encoder (Father), code/Word/Logos (Son) and decoder (Holy Spirit) of the information which He conveys to me.

The Father communicates with me using the Son as His language and the Holy Spirit as my literature professor, the one who integrates the message into my awareness and turns it into an experience. This seamless process is so smooth and ineffable that we take it for granted, never asking ourselves how it is that electrical discharges in our brains translate into color, sound, scent, taste and tingle but never into electricity. It is the Holy Spirit who does that for us, interpreting the Word to our understanding or, in this case, turning electrical impulses in our brain into human subjective experience.

This shouldn’t surprise us since, as we already know, there’s nothing in the physical world which is actually physical, everything is interpreted communicated information, everything is words spoken by the Father, using the Son as His language, translated by the Holy Spirit to our consciousness. It’s not that there is a cause and effect relationship between the speech of the Father and the creation of the universe, but rather that the universe is, in fact, the speech itself, while our perception of the universe is the Holy Spirit’s interpretation of the Father’s words, which is being conveyed onto us.

This is why Jesus said that apart from Him we can do nothing, because He is the Code and if there is no code, no language for the Father to speak, there’s no creation at all and hence, there’s no us and our actions either. Jesus makes it possible for us to do good and He makes it possible for us to do evil, too. He provides a common framework for both. That does not mean that He wishes for us to do evil but it does mean that He allows for it, He creates the prerequisites which are necessary for us in order to obey as well as to disobey God, if we choose to. That’s the essence of true free will, to be able to do both, if this is what you want.

It’s important to understand that these prerequisites can be used for good or ill indiscriminately. There is no single way in which a man can sin and which can’t be put to good use instead. There is no single activity which is altogether sinful regardless of context, since sin is a parasite on naturalness, it is merely an exaggeration for the less or more or a misplacement of what is good and natural. This is why Jesus’ creation is naturally good but can be distorted when free agents choose to turn it against its own character.

Therefore, when we commit evil against a fellow man, we don’t just wrong him, we also make ourselves guilty before God, because we force Jesus to be a witness to it, not as a side person but as the very engine at the core of the reality in which we play our little pathetic disobeying games.

The Bible calls Jesus “the Word of God”, but the Greek word from which the English “word” comes is “logos”. The Greek term designates more than a mere word, it is, in fact, a technical term in philosophy, beginning with Heraclitus (ca. 535–475 BC), who used it for a principle of order and knowledge. In common Greek, it had a semantic field extending beyond "word" to notions such as language, thought, reason, due relation, proportion, and analogy.

Given the case I’ve made so far, it is my opinion that the “Logos” of the Bible, in addition to other meanings it may have, should be understood more as language or code rather than simple word. Jesus would be the language of the Father, while the creation would be the words spoken in this language. Everything that the Father does, He does by speaking up His will, using this code, the Logos, to express that will. This is why the Logos of God is also the action of God.

This code would be directly responsible for establishing the relations between subatomic particles as well as the values of their abstract properties, when they become concrete, as a result of a mutual “dialog” between the particles in question. And it is the Holy Spirit that lets particles “know” of each other and “understand” this “dialog”.

The Father speaks constantly in order to keep this universe and all of His creation in existence and whatever the Father is saying becomes conscious physical experience for all of us, through the intercession of the Holy Spirit. The words of God are the raw material which the objects that make up the universe are, themselves, ultimately made of. It is also God who communicates the abstract properties of each subatomic particle to another subatomic particle and turns them into concrete properties.

Everything is of God and, whenever we sin, we are using His own words, translated by the Holy Spirit to our experience as physical objects, including our own bodies, to turn against Him. That’s why God calls sin an abomination, it literally is like a dog chewing on its own leg.

In conclusion, a rhetorical question: isn’t it wonderful how the proof of God, which atheists have always asked for, is to be found in the very fact that we experience life as a result of God communicating to our consciousness, translating the electricity in our brains into color, sound, scent, taste and tingle?

“I praise you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because you have hidden these things from the wise and learned, and revealed them to little children. Yes, Father, for this is what you were pleased to do.” (Luke 10:21)