This consciousness-first view doesn’t ask us to abandon what science has found. It asks us to notice the frame it arrived in. Once we do that, two things fall into place. We regain our ordinary experience of space and time and we see why physics describes matter so completely.
We’ve seen that matter is the frozen geometry of light, knots wound so tightly the pattern persists. But there’s another difference between the individual subjects and matter. The individuals are bound within the field, their consciousness held within a density boundary created by a difference in tempo. The knots of matter are frozen and completely locked into their own structure.
Which means a frozen knot has a fixed position in the field relative to the other knots. That fixed position is what space is. The boundary created an individual when there was only partial constraint, but with the maximum constraint, knots form in the field, and bounded now means localised. Space has entered our consciousness-first picture.
It’s commonly said that Einstein’s relativity turned our intuitive picture of space and time inside out. There’s something right about that, but the word intuitive hides a swap. Start with how we actually experience space. If you hold up two fingers, there’s a gap between them. But if you take your fingers away the gap doesn’t stay there hanging in the air. The gap is only the empty space between the fingers. If we ask what space is on this commonsense view we’d say it’s nothing. It’s not a thing made of stuff, it’s only the gap between the things made of stuff.
But then relativity merged space and time and gave us a picture of spacetime that was the reverse of this commonsense view. Space was no longer nothing, it was part of a four-dimensional substance. Material objects became dents in the fabric of spacetime, not things sitting on top of it. We no longer pictured space as the absence of things, but instead, as the stuff from which the universe was made.
These days we accept that spacetime is the stuff the universe is made of, and that everything is taking place within that four-dimensional manifold. Spacetime is like the container of reality. This picture of spacetime as a substance that deforms has become the one that feels intuitive to us. Notice the inversion. The textbook version feels intuitive, but it’s not your lived experience. You don’t experience yourself deforming a four dimensional substance as you walk to the store.
This view doesn’t reverse Einstein’s insight; it encompasses it and situates it within a wider frame. In the process, it restores our picture of space and time to the way we experience them to be. In this view there’s no container. There’s the field, and the stable knots wound into the field stand in relation to each other. Those relations are what space is.
If there are no knots, there’s nothing that can be apart, and so there can be no space. Space doesn’t hold the knots within it; the knots create the space. Spacetime only appears once the field is knotted. It’s not something extra to the knots or another kind of stuff or pattern in the field.
This helps us see the reversal of spacetime as container. It assumes that space was already there, waiting to be filled, so it must come first, before the stuff of the world can appear within it.
Our intuitive picture of time is restored in the same way. Think of throwing a ball into the air. The ball is a knot, a stable pattern within the luminous field. It rises and falls. Time isn’t a river the ball floats down. Take away the changes of the things and there’s nothing leftover. There’s no other stuff called time that’s still ticking. Time is the order in the ball’s positions: first in our hands then higher, up to the apex, then coming down and back into our hands.
Space is the order among the knots; time is the order among their changes.
The idea that space and time are demoted to just relations within a field can seem hard to grasp. But it’s the textbook version that’s non-intuitive, because it isn’t like our experience of the world. We start with the experience that space is nothing, and only after reading the textbook about Einstein’s discoveries do we come away with the picture of spacetime as a something.
Notice that the view of spacetime as a something has assumed a frame. It’s not a finding of relativity but a picture laid over it: that spacetime is all there is. That frame is never made visible. It comes along with the idea that science is the only reliable source of knowledge of the world. It simultaneously lessens our own confidence in our ability to gain reliable knowledge of the world through our experience of it.
Matter is real
The idea that spacetime is all that exists not only inverts our ordinary experience of space and time, it carries another hidden assumption – that matter is the only thing that’s real. We associate what’s real with physicality. Consciousness has no tangible properties, so when we picture consciousness as fundamental, we keep that assumption but invert the order. We assume that if reality is a single field of consciousness, matter must now occupy the intangible layer and not be fully real. It must exist in our mind, or God’s mind, or its existence must depend on a mind to observe it.
That assumption creates a logical tension, because our experience of the world tells us that material objects are fully real, not illusions. They exist independently of our minds and they’re still there and moving according to the laws of nature even when no one is looking at them. But that tension is only there if we keep the assumption that matter is first and the only thing that’s real.
Drop that assumption and we get exactly what we expect from both common sense and the validity of science. There’s a mind independent external reality. It has no interior so nothing internal creates its behaviour. It only moves in response to forces acting on it externally. Matter looks and behaves exactly like what it is, a structure pushed around by outside forces. That means its movement can be described with mathematical laws, and its future movement can be accurately predicted using those same laws. This picture of matter is just what physics tells us matter is like. The movement of matter is what physicists call causally closed. There’s no remainder beyond those forces for an inner force to explain.
Throw a dead bird and a living bird into the air. The dead bird’s trajectory can be predicted with accuracy: we know it will fall toward the earth and how fast it will fall. The live bird, the one with an inner luminosity that determines its movement, will probably fly away.
With this consciousness-first view, causal closure is what we should expect, not a problem we need to explain. Matter is the mode of the field that’s been closed on the inside, and so from the outside it behaves exactly as you’d expect something with no inside to behave. This is why physics describes matter so completely. Physics describes the external structure of the field and that’s all matter is on this view. There’s nothing else to it.
Which means nothing science says is changed. The laws it describes, the mechanisms of action and causal closure, all remain true. What changes is the wider context. Physics accurately describes the outer surface of the field, the place where the field’s luminosity is fully occluded. Nothing about this view requires corrections of physics, it shows where physics fits within the broader picture. Physics isn’t the whole picture but one limited description of it.
