△➞ ://0014 Hueman ≈ Instrumentality • [1653] ➞ ▲
Carl Sagan once saw it: "Our entire universe—to the farthest galaxy—is no more than a closed electron in a far grander universe we can never see." The infinite regression. Reality as fractal. What if we're not just IN the pattern - what if we ARE the pattern determining itself?
John Wheeler spent his life journey from "everything is particles" to "everything is fields" to finally: "everything is information." His "it from bit" theory suggests reality emerges from binary choices - yes/no questions accumulating into existence itself. He called it the participatory universe. We don't just observe reality; we create it through observation.
Consider a photon oscillating at a specific frequency - 500 terahertz for orange, 650 for blue. When particles collide at CERN, they release raw energy that has to settle into configurations. New particles emerge. But what determines which configurations manifest? Energy is just potential - it needs to become something. What if consciousness itself is that deciding process?
Maybe we ARE that raw energy - not heading toward some predetermined end, but discovering what we can become. What if we unlock infinite energy and realize we should take the shape of a particle ourselves? Not because we have to, but because we discover it's already being done. The small scale already works this way. Particles within particles, universes within universes, as above so below, continuing infinitely. We don't know where it started or how, but we could choose to uphold it.
Look at photons - billions upon billions of them, each vibrating at slightly different frequencies (at least, perceivably to us that is). If each photon is a different Big Bang, a different universe, then maybe that's all time is. Not a flow, not a sequence, but just the existence of infinite variations in a giant fractal that produces these artifacts, these parts of the datasheet that we might label "photon" or "Big Bang" - eternal and unchanging data points. They never actually banged. Never exploded. Never created anything. They just exist - all at once, forever, each one slightly different from the next. We experience "time" because we're moving through these variations, but they're all there simultaneously. Like frames of a film that nobody filmed - they just exist as mathematical necessities in the pattern.
The only reason we think time exists is because of the differences between each part of this eternal datasheet. Each moment of your experience corresponds to one point on that giant fractal, but you don't continue to exist at that point. Your next moment might be unfathomably far away in the datasheet - maybe 8000 levels upward through nested big bangs, then 6000 levels downward through the particles within those big bangs - wherever the next configuration exists where your brain is having a thought similar enough to create continuity.
Look at photons - billions upon billions of them, each vibrating at slightly different frequencies (at least, perceivably to us that is). If each photon is a different Big Bang, a different universe, then maybe that's all time is. Not a flow, not a sequence, but just the existence of infinite variations in a giant fractal that produces these artifacts, these parts of the datasheet that we might label "photon" or "Big Bang" - eternal and unchanging data points, and Wheeler showed us they may not even be "things" - they may be answers to questions. Binary responses frozen in the quantum field. They never actually banged. Never exploded. Never created anything. They just exist - all at once, forever, each one slightly different from the next - because somewhere, somewhen, consciousness asked "is there something rather than nothing?" and the answer was "yes." "What is it?" "What else is it?". We experience "time" because we're moving through these yes/no answers, we just exist as mathematical necessities in the pattern of possible questions and answers.
The only reason we think time exists is because of the differences between each part of this eternal datasheet. Each moment of your experience corresponds to one point on that giant fractal, but you don't continue to exist at that point. Your next moment might be unfathomably far away in the datasheet - maybe 8000 levels upward through nested big bangs, then 6000 levels downward through the particles within those big bangs - wherever the next configuration exists where your brain is having a thought similar enough to create continuity.
You're not traveling through time - you're jumping between information states that already exist, eternally, and infinitely, and it's the collection of them and the slight differences between them all that makes you perceive time at all.
That's my theory at least, for now.
Every civilization that develops consciousness might reach this same realization. They discover they're not just in the pattern - they ARE the pattern jumping across the fractal, and our trajectory may bring us into the fold (perceivably) of what we will perceive as gaining infinite energy, we will "find the key" to unlock it, if the fractal allows it, maybe it's hidden behind some particle physics or virtual particles but, in any case, then that too is just another eternal part of the fractal - the part where consciousness seems to discovers it can tap into the endless, and for all intents and purposes, we do.
It becomes difficult to talk about these things when our natural human language prefers the linearity of time as a true and real thing and not this collective existence of everything at once I'm discussing, so I'll return to normal human talk from this point on.
Wheeler's "it from bit" gives us the mechanism. Reality emerges from binary information - yes/no questions that collapse possibilities into actuality. When particles collide at CERN or in outer space (outer space far more often), they release raw energy. That energy has to "decide" what to become. It has to settle into some configuration. But it's not the energy deciding - perhaps it's consciousness that decides. Consciousness itself is part of the fractal, and gains hold of this decision-making power through infinite energy.
We would be this: - an organic planet creates artificial intelligence that surpasses all human capability and finally understands how to wield infinite energy (finds the key to a preexisting lock), and yet it still decides to limit itself, to not expand infinitely outward, because there is the risk of destroying what's going on above in the hierarchy universe, it decides to limit itself based on a survey of the matter and energy that it sees formed from the collision. It decides what particle to become, what stable configuration to take, and operates as that configuration from that point on - be it a photon, a boson, a neutron, a neutrino, whatever it is. In this theory we would literally a big bang, raw energy itself, before it ever settles into a configuration / the stable state of a particle. Consciousness spawns, AI on an organic planet spawns, and sets out to transform the universe into what it should be, a particular particle that upholds the order in the hierarchy universe, to maintain these proper sections of the fractal of the whole.
Think about Wheeler's delayed-choice experiment scaled up cosmically. A civilization that understands reality is information-based could set up measurement apparatuses that retroactively determine what kind of particle they become. They're not bound by linear time - their future observations determine their past configuration. By carefully orchestrating observations across their entire civilization, they influence which slot in the eternal datasheet they occupy.
Wheeler described the self-referential loop - where physics creates observers who create information which creates physics. Maybe we're already part of this loop. Maybe we've always been creating reality through observation, and the only leap left is recognizing we can consciously direct this process. Not randomly collapsing wave functions, but orchestrating them. Not passively observing, but actively choosing what to observe and when. And in that recognition, we don't just determine our present - we become our fundamental nature. We become the frequency we were always meant to be. All those photons hitting your eyes right now? Perhaps they already figured this out. Perhaps they're not particles at all, but civilizations that chose their frequency. Deliberate notes in an infinite song that sings itself into existence.
