“It is not clear that the universe is a thing, and if it is defined as a set of things it runs the risk of paradox.” – Paul Davies, God and the New Physics
“The thought of your mother is not your mother.” – Joseph Goldstein (restating words spoken by his teacher, Anagarika Munindra)
Holding Reality In Mind
Until Pythagoras and Parmenides, we believed the Earth was flat. Until Copernicus and Kepler, we believed we were at the centre of the universe. Until Darwin and Wallace, we believed that humans were perfectly crafted divine creations. Throughout human existence, we’ve consistently believed in models of reality that have been proven wrong. How is this possible?
Part of our confusion stems from the simple fact that knowledge is hard-won. Nature’s workings are rarely intuitive, and must be coaxed out by a prolonged process of prodding, postulating, and persuading. Good science takes time, which leaves us ignorant in the interim.
But another part of our confusion is more fundamental, and cannot be corrected even with hard-earned knowledge. This confusion results from our belief that thoughts can perfectly convey reality, combined with our ignorance of how, in truth, they can only ever imperfectly describe it. Thoughts are simply metaphors which, no matter how fine-tuned, never capture the world.
By treating thoughts as ground truth we forget that they’re just pointers, imperfect descriptive tools which, at their best, can only hint at the ordered splendour of nature. This fools us into feeling like we can literally hold pieces of the world in mind.
For instance, when I think of a book it feels like I’m thinking of something tangible, which exists independently of my mind. But how could this be? The thought of a book is just that—a mental construct which can neither be touched nor read, and which is actually unlike a book in all the ways that matter. To confuse the thought of a book with a book itself is like confusing the synopsis of a movie with the experience of watching it, or the anticipation of a vacation with the actual trip.
Upon reflection, it’s obvious that thoughts are not reality. “The map is not the territory,” as the saying goes. But when we’re caught up in thinking (which is most of the time), we rarely reflect in this way. Instead, thoughts convince us that they exist independently of our minds, even though they exist entirely within them. This leads us astray in many important ways: it makes us attached to our biases, overconfident in our beliefs, resistant to better ways of thinking, and ignorant of our latent emotional wisdom.
Fortunately, we can defuse some of these tendencies by understanding just how deep the disconnect between thoughts and reality runs.
In any moment, we can only hold a tiny sliver of reality in mind. Thoughts take nature, trim it down, and excise pieces crude enough to be analyzed and manipulated by the limited processing power of a human brain. And because we assume that thoughts are “real”, we wind up thinking that reality must be made of these pieces, which we call things.
But, put bluntly, things don’t exist. The world is not composed of noun-like things which interact in verb-like ways, and the only reason we think otherwise is because of the architecture of thought, which takes the existence of these things as a given.
Things are not innate components of nature; they are artifacts of human minds, which help us conjecture and communicate. And we can begin to understand how thinking gives rise to the illusion of things by zooming in on the currency of thought: language.
Lost in Language
Words help us order, predict, and communicate endless states of affairs. But they also cleave us from the reality they purport to convey. This cleavage starts in childhood, as we learn to pin down the world with concepts and language.
Growing up, we were taught that proper sentences must have a noun (a subject) and a verb (an action). Equipped with this knowledge, we then cast our minds outside the confines of English class and learned how—in physics, chemistry, biology, and beyond—the world itself functions like a proper sentence, where nouns (such as particles, molecules, and organisms) interact with other nouns in all sorts of verb-like ways.
Of course, if we hope to think, plan, and talk about reality we must reduce it to a form that can fit into thought. But because we’re never taught about the fundamental disconnect between language and reality, we give thought far too much credence. As we age, we turn into cognitive bureaucrats who supplant the fluidity of the world with the rigidity of thought. In other words, we ignore reality in favour of well-worn stereotypes—about the world, others, and even ourselves.
The wonderfully wacky Terence McKenna made this point well, saying that we have fallen “into constructs of reality rather than reality itself.” He illustrates this idea with the example of a child lying in a crib who, upon seeing a hummingbird for the first time, “is ecstatic, because this shimmering iridescence of movement and sound and attention—it’s just wonderful. It is an instantaneous miracle when placed against the background of the dull wallpaper of the nursery. But then Mother or Nanny or someone comes in and says, ‘It’s a bird, baby. Bird. Bird.’” To McKenna, the label—bird—is a “linguistic piece of mosaic tile” which gets “[glued] down with the epoxy of syntactical momentum, and from now on the miracle is confined within the meaning of the word. And by the time a child is four or five or six, no light shines through. They have tiled over every aspect of reality with a linguistic association that blunts it, limits it, and confines it within cultural expectation.”
To be sure, McKenna is exaggerating to prove his point; simply knowing the names of things does not totally block reality’s iridescence. But he’s not exaggerating by much. Watch any child grow up and you see a sad (but somewhat necessary) transformation take place: the child, once unselfconsciously spellbound by the wonder of existence, gradually grows into a self-conscious adult, plagued by ruminations about the past, worries about the future, and obsessions in the present, all of which blot out the splendour of immediate experience. It is generally only by meditating, taking the requisite substances, or a random stroke of luck that we can peel back the curtain of our adult neuroses to see the world, for a time, through a lens of childhood wonder.
I suspect that most readers, though they may agree about the tragedy of self-conscious adulthood, see no problem with a reality made of nouns and verbs. After all, they’re currently sitting in a chair reading these words—and things don’t get much more noun-like than a chair, or more verb-like than the act of reading. Right?
Not so fast.
What is a Cat?
As we all know, nouns and verbs are different. Nouns refer to “people, places, or things,” while verbs refer to actions. But by shifting frames ever so slightly, all nouns can also be viewed as verbs—which quickly muddies the metaphysical waters of our noun-centric worldview.
For instance, take a moment to reflect on the simple sentence, “This is a cat”. Conventionally, the meaning of this statement is clear: the cat is a noun, end of story. Read another way, however, the cat assumes a distinctly verb-like quality.
This other, unconventional reading hinges on what is meant by the short phrase “This is”. Here, the word “is” is the third person form of “be”—I am, you are, he is—meaning that the statement could also be read as “This is being a cat.” But what is the “this” that is doing the being? It’s similar to the “it” that rains when “It rains.” That is, it’s a nonspecific way of pointing at reality.
Viewed this way, we can translate the sentence “This is a cat” to “Reality being a cat.” But… hold on a minute. If something is in the process of being, is it still accurate to call it a noun? Isn’t the cat now more akin to a verb—since verbs describe processes, rather than things? And, in this light, couldn’t every noun be seen as reality in the process of being something—meaning that nouns could also be interpreted as verbs, English class be damned?
You might argue that this is a moot point, since nobody would interpret the sentence this way in the first place. But before you write this off as annoying wordplay, you should ask yourself which view—cat as noun, or cat as verb—better accords with our scientific understanding of reality.
If you zoom in on any feature of the cat, you cannot escape its verb-like nature. Take, for example, one of its claws. Seemingly solid and unchanging, claws are actually a process, whereby keratin continually grows on one end and continually wears down on the other. Just as no man ever steps into the same river twice, no claw remains unchanged over time. We may call this keratinous process a claw, but this is simply a convenient shorthand—conveying neither the changing nature nor the staggering complexity of the underlying process.
You can adopt this verb-based view for any aspect of the cat, at any scale. By peeling off the nouns you unmask the truer nature of the cat, which also happens to be the more poetic one. To sum it up: a cat is not a thing which exists within reality; a cat is reality, engaged in countless metabolic processes.
Of course, this perspective can apply to more than just cats. All nouns mask an underlying verb-like character. This is easily understood by reflecting on a few words which, although classified as nouns, are more accurately thought of as verbs.
Consider the topic of this essay: thought. Officially speaking, thought is a noun, but its common definition reads “the action or process of thinking”. Straight from the dictionary, we get a sense that thoughts are not things; they are actions of mind, transitory expressions of cognitive and emotional processes, which arise and pass like weather patterns or ocean waves. On that note, waves aren’t nouns either—no single thing moves, billiard ball-like, across the surface of water. Rather, waves are water, engaged in an energy-transferring process.[1] And take one more: fire, though technically a noun, is really an aspect of combustion (yet another process).
Although we often mistake transient, verb-like processes for static, noun-like things, we can easily remember that the terms “cat”, “claw”, “thought”, “wave”, or “fire” are merely linguistic signifiers, alluding to phenomena whose workings are totally unconstrained by the rules of English grammar.
However, because we ignore the interdependent nature of existence we frequently forget this fact.
A Specious Essentialism
Most people believe, implicitly, that things can exist in isolation, free from influence by the outside world. By mentally severing aspects of reality from the larger picture, we impart simplified essences to whatever we happen to be thinking about.
By way of illustration, think of a cup of water. If you’re like most people, you see a cup of water as consisting of two essences: a cup, and water. But if you ask how, exactly, this circumstance exists, you’re quickly forced to abandon the dualistic view that a cup of water is separate from the wider world.
For starters, there’s atmospheric pressure: without the weight of Earth’s atmosphere keeping the water contained, it would rapidly boil off. When it comes to holding water, therefore, the atmosphere is as important as the cup. Then there’s gravity: without the mass of the Earth curving spacetime, the cup would not hold water for long.[2] Or take the surrounding air temperature: if it were significantly hotter, the water would evaporate; significantly cooler, and the water would be solid. I could list dozens more conditions like these, each as important as the cup and the water.
What are we to make of this? Should we revise our assessment and accept that a cup of water is not made of just two things, but actually dozens? Or, instead, can we revise our belief in the existence of things themselves?
To help see how things don’t exist, consider their edges. After all, it is edges which give things their unique, separate character; without edges, it would make little sense to describe anything as separate from anything else. Yet when we search for things’ edges, they prove oddly elusive.
Species boundaries shed insight here. We (sensibly) divide the biological world along species lines. Dogs clearly differ from cats, which clearly differ from Scarabaeus satyrus (a dung beetle capable of navigating on moonless nights by orienting relative to the dim light of the Milky Way). Species boundaries seem like obvious lines in nature’s sand, but without the extinction of most life that has ever existed, no such lines could be found.
Consider humans. The first Homo sapiens came into being about 300,000 years ago. Suppose you had a time machine and decided to witness the birth of the first human child. What would you see? Besides the precarious excitement of a Paleolithic birth, things would be anti-climactic. You’d find yourself staring at a baby who was indistinguishable from babies of the previous generation, and if you stuck around long enough you’d watch this baby grow into a typical adult, blending in perfectly amongst its non-sapiens ancestors. In fact, if this very first Homo sapiens chose to, it could even mate and produce fertile offspring with members of the previous, non-sapiens generation—suggesting that it wasn’t the first in a new species after all. How disappointing.
If you searched for species boundaries elsewhere—maybe you were hoping to find the first T-Rex—you’d be in for similar letdowns. Although species boundaries make sense when viewed from the far-out vantage of the present, they vanish when peered at closely. Throughout evolutionary time, changes to lifeforms have been so gradual as to be nearly seamless. Get too meticulous with your analysis, and the idea of separate species can be more confusing than helpful.
Socks and the Edges of Things
All of which brings us back to the notion of separate things. Just as the search for species boundaries unearths no clean breaks between species, the search for things’ edges reveals no clean breaks between things—and without defined edges, how can we have defined things?
Take any object and put it under a microscope. You’ll see that it’s continually trading matter and energy with the world around it. Now, ask yourself: at what point does this matter and energy cease being part of that object, and start being part of the outside world?
I once mulled this over while camping, after a friend threw a sock on the fire. As it burned I wondered when it stopped being a sock: was it when it caught fire, or got its first hole, or turned black? Did it even make sense to say that, at a specific point, the sock lost its sockness?
A burning sock might seem like an extreme case, but the same question can be asked of the socks in your wardrobe. They too are being worn down, holes gradually forming, oxidizing slowly. One day, they’ll be so worn out that they’ll briefly inhabit a liminal mental realm—part sock, part garbage—before you collapse the conceptual wave function, deem them garbage, and toss them in the trash.
The point of this is not to get philosophical about socks. It’s to show that, in many ways, whether something is a sock or not depends on your idea of a sock. Sockness exists in our minds, not in the world. There is no wall between a sock and everything else; both continually bleed into each other, befuddling any attempt to say that the sock stops here and the world begins there.
And this is true of most everything you can think of: everything is so entangled with its surroundings as to be, at some level, continuous and indistinguishable from them. In this regard, all things are coterminous with the universe writ large—a truth supported by what we know about physical laws.
Lawful Nonseparation
The basic laws of conservation of mass and energy state that mass and energy cannot be created or destroyed. If some parts of the universe gain mass or energy, other parts must give them up—implying that, from the perspective of mass-energy conservation, everything is thoroughly interconnected.
This might sound like a sterile academic observation, until you realize the grandeur this entails for our relation to the cosmos. These conservation laws imply that human metabolism (to name but one example) is inseparable from the wider world, on Earth and beyond.
At a terrestrial level, we acquire energy by eating food and breathing oxygen. At an extraterrestrial level, virtually all this energy came from the sun. In a very real sense, then, our metabolism is an extension of the sun—meaning that the sun is part of us and we are part of it. Remove yourself from the sun’s influence and you’ll soon become a dying ember, severed from the flame that feeds your life source. In physical terms, therefore, sun and self are two aspects of a process grander than we tend to realize. Grander, perhaps, than we can realize.
Then there’s Newton’s third law, which states that “for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.” This might seem to suggest that cause and effect are two separate things—an action followed by a reaction—but it actually speaks to the nonseparation between them. Cause and effect always come together, but we’re fooled, perhaps by the law’s wording, into viewing them as opposites.
Just as the start and end of a marathon are both aspects of the same event—in this case, a running race—cause and effect are really two aspects of one underlying process. Nobody has ever found a cause without an effect, or vice versa, because cause and effect are not separate.
If you’re struggling to grasp this point, try an experiment: pinpoint the moment at which a cause—say, the force from a pool cue—vanishes into the past as its effect—say, the force impelled on the cue ball—takes over in the present. As with species boundaries or the edges of things, you’ll find no clear line at which cause stops and effect begins.
Then there are equations which took our understanding of separate phenomena—like electricity and magnetism, or matter and energy—and unified them, revealing deep interrelations in the fabric of reality.
Maxwell’s equations showed, in precise mathematical terms, that electricity and magnetism are expressions of the same phenomena—which we now call electromagnetism. Einstein did something similar for mass and energy, joining them via his famous E=mc2 equation—which describes how mass can become energy, and energy can become mass. Though mass and energy seem a world apart, they share a fundamental equivalence.
These are just a few examples. Given that nothing in the universe is truly separate, we shouldn’t be surprised to find unifying linkages like these. In fact, we should be surprised if we don’t find more.
What About Atoms?
But what about atoms, or even more fundamental particles like protons, electrons, quirks and quarks? Surely, the concept of a thing makes sense when it comes to the building blocks of matter and energy?
In Richard Feynman’s famous Lectures on Physics he said, “If, in some cataclysm, all of scientific knowledge were to be destroyed, and only one sentence passed on to the next generations of creatures, what statement would contain the most information in the fewest words? I believe it is the atomic hypothesis (or the atomic fact, or whatever you wish to call it) that all things are made of atoms—little particles that move around in perpetual motion, attracting each other when they are a little distance apart, but repelling upon being squeezed into one another.” So, was Feynman—a Nobel Prize-winning physicist who applied his genius to the quantum world—wrong on this most fundamental of points?
It would be the highest hubris for me to claim that Feynman was wrong about atomic theory. But just as our understanding of reality cannot fit into a single thought, so a full understanding of atomic theory cannot fit into a single sentence.
Brilliant scientists have been unravelling atoms and their constituent parts for over a century and, though their work is incomplete, they’ve learned that atomic and subatomic particles are, at base, not particles at all. To imagine that the world is made of building blocks is to imagine the wrong metaphor.[3]
Wave-particle duality is the now-famous idea that subatomic particles can behave as waves or particles. If true, we might argue that things do exist, in some fleetingly transient form, whenever subatomic particles manifest as particles rather than waves. But quantum field theory (which explains the underlying mechanics of subatomic particles) has usurped wave-particle duality with an idea that’s even harder to conceptualize—and which leaves no things in sight.
Frank Wilczek, winner of the 2004 Nobel Prize in Physics, outlined this idea on the Making Sense Podcast. Wilczek says that particles “should be thought of not as hard points or particles in the sense that people intuitively think about particles.” Rather, particles are best thought of as expressions of underlying quantum fields. As Wilczek acknowledges, this updated view is “more abstract and less intuitive” than the particle-as-particle paradigm, and we won’t try to understand it here. For our purposes all that matters is that the notion of things breaks down even in the quantum realm—because, as it turns out, the things that make up reality are not things at all.
So What?
Does any of this matter? Even if things don’t exist, we still have to make sense of the world. This requires thinking, which inevitably breaks the world into separate things. If we have to think in terms of things, and we can’t possibly give up thinking, isn’t this essay a big waste of time?
No, for two reasons.
The first has to do with humility. Often it’s not what we think that matters, but how we relate to it. I can think “I am Superman” while either believing it’s true or knowing it’s false. In each case the same thought is present, but I’m relating to it differently: in one, the belief that I’m Superman would likely leave me dead or incarcerated; in the other, the knowledge that I’m not leaves me free to carry on life as usual.
By understanding the fundamental disconnect between thoughts and reality, we can benefit from thoughts without being subservient to them. Too often, especially in this age of infinite scroll, we get anxious, angry, or depressed, merely because we stumbled upon the wrong thought online. But thoughts are not reality, no matter how you slice things, and by viewing them with the humility they warrant we can hold them less intensely.
The second reason strikes at a thing around which we all structure our lives. This thing goes by a few names, but it’s commonly referred to as a self. We all believe, implicitly or explicitly, that we have some stable core—some thing—at the centre of our being, around which our experience and interactions take place. Mine is named Tristan, and he is a 32-year old introverted man who likes dogs, meditating, playing piano, and writing essays on obscure topics that few people actually read. Strange dude, this guy who lives in my skull.
But of course, there is no thing in our heads called a self. As we’ve just seen, there are no things at all! If something as simple as a subatomic particle is not a thing, why would a process that’s vastly more complex—that is, us—be one?
By viewing ourselves as things we reify an abstraction, which blots out the wonderfully fluid nature of experience. And by obsessing over the false fixed reference point of this seemingly enduring self, we miss out on opportunities for growth. But, just as we can see through the thought of a cup of water, so we can see through the thought of our selves—and learning how to do so, if only for brief periods, can liberate us from much of our self-imposed misery.
Terence McKenna aptly said that our extraordinary ability to reside in language is “both the glory and the trauma of human existence.” And it is indeed traumatic, but only if we accept our thoughts as truths.
[1] In a similar vein, Alan Watts liked to point out that seeing sights, thinking thoughts, and smelling smells could be more succinctly described (without losing any information content) as seeing, thinking, and smelling. Likewise, to go for a walk is simply walking, to have a rest is simply resting, etc.
[2] I won’t pretend to understand gravity, but this great Veritasium video makes me think I almost can.
[3] We understand the world through metaphors, but no metaphor perfectly captures truth. The best we can hope for is better metaphors, but they’ll never be true metaphors. Understanding is an asymptote: it can approach truth but will never fully reach it.
Stories From the Ground. 
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