One thing we can know is that we are questioning

As we question the nature of reality, we have very little that is unassailable upon which to build answers. One thing that we can be sure of, though, is our own questioning. What, if anything, can the fact of our questioning itself tell us about the answers we seek?

The mere fact of our questioning points us toward some unassailable starting points for developing further thought. For example, we cannot deny that we exist and that we hold beliefs, because we must exist in order to deny our existence and because to reject the claim that we hold beliefs is to hold some level of belief in its negation.

So then a basic model of the goings-on of material reality is what I will call a “joint decision process” by which what is “real” is separated from what is “not-real” (i.e. potentialities are actualized, just as I am actualized) and what is “true-to” each agent is separated from “not-true-to” each agent (i.e. concepts are attended to and endorsed or rejected, just as what is true-to me is attended to and endorsed).

So there’s a pretty unassailable starting point for thought: there is some kind of process by which the real is separated from not-real and the true-to each agent is separated from the not-true-to each agent.

You can question your automatic thinking

Now, notice the power of questioning. This is not so obvious from first principles, but it can be tested out in one’s lived experience. You can in practice:

(1) ask yourself what stories you’ve been telling yourself about the events of your life; and then

(2) question those stories to arrive at alternative stories about the same events that are more favorable to you according to your values.

Your “values” may include predictive power, parsimony, and explanatory power; or other things like coherence with overarching cultural or religious narratives.

The stories you tell yourself are usually automatic; they can pass by very quickly without your conscious attention. Often they are not conceived explicitly in words at all. Yet if you try to put your automatic thoughts and feelings into words, then you can question them.

This process of questioning and reshaping narratives and automatic thinking is central to techniques like Cognitive Behavioral Therapy. It is a process that shapes reality—and that isn’t hyperbole. Clearly the process shapes one’s subjective experience of reality; but it also shapes the evolution of so-called “external” reality insofar as it affects one’s physical behavior in the world, which affects (and in some sense, is) the further evolution of the “external” or “real” world.

So it seems like questioning has a fundamental role in shaping the goings-on of material reality.

Our internal commentary on reality shapes reality itself

With these observations, a certain metaphysics starts to take shape which I will call “dialogic,” since the interaction between reality as a whole and an agent’s conceptualization thereof is analogous to a dialogue, whereby feedback from each shapes the evolution of the other in a way that takes on a life of its own.

As I have written elsewhere, the way that this process works in me is by analogy to creating narratives about myself. In this analogy, I am the storyteller, the embedded character within the story I am telling, and the ongoing reaction of myself to the narratives I am telling myself. I’ll illustrate this with an example.

My thoughts are like broadcast commentary. Due to the lag time between the occurrence of an event in reality and my perceptual and conceptual processing of it, I am always a little “behind the action.” Despite this, the commentary makes predictions about the current and future ongoing behavior. For example, an announcer may highlight a key player to “look out for” during the game. In “calling the play,” the commentator chooses what happenings to highlight and what information to emphasize. In this way, the broadcaster represents a sort of filter for the information on the field to the less-knowledgeable viewer. The broadcaster is, in other words, a mechanism of selective attention.

If my thoughts are like broadcast commentary, then I am also the players on the field; and it is as if the players can hear the commentary itself in real-time. In deciding how to take actions, I am “hearing my commentary” on what previously happened and predictions on what will happen. This sort of open-loop control, or feedback, between perceptual and conceptual processing on the one hand and executive processing on the other seems to be a basic condition of my existence. Crucially, my action in turn interacts with the environment, or what I call the big-O “Other,” to produce feedback to the process that shapes my ongoing development.

So there is a coupling between my perceptual and conceptual processing and my executive processing, and all of my processing is coupled in turn with the responses of the environment. I have described this mathematically, here.

Agents are moving it all

Obviously, this basic model of reality is radically agent-centric, because it takes as its starting point the apparent fact of agentic questioning and the analogy that a dialogue or feedback process between Reality and agents’ conceptualization thereof drives the evolution of phenomena we see immediately around us, including our own actions, technologies, and human-made systems.

By this view, the ways that one directs one’s attention and how one abstracts categories and constructs narratives from memory traces materially affects how reality evolves. It is by the process of questioning that an agent can change its conceptualization and thereby influence reality.

Agents may still be forced to obey laws of nature

This is not to say that the laws of nature themselves are affected by our questioning, but that the goings-on of material reality are affected by it. The distinction is between what goes on and statistical regularities in how it goes on (e.g. conserved measurable variables, equations of motion, regularities in collective or average behavior, etc.). This is analogous to the difference between the constraints of an optimization problem (laws of physics) and the objective function one seeks to optimize (human conceptualization and value judgments), both of which determine the trajectory of an optimization process. Another analogy is a board game: this may be a game with rules, but as I have written elsewhere, it seems to be a game in which the rules cannot be known and certified from within the game itself, leaving us with the freedom to control our moves within those mysterious rules.

Indeed, reality is not indifferent to our questioning but rather is negotiated with and between questioning agents. Clearly we are not the sole authors of reality, but we are in some sense co-creators.