Imagining Consciousness, Time & Gravity: Essay 1 - Process as an Integral System

Imagining Consciousness, Time, & Gravity

PROCESSUAL COSMOLOGY OF COHERENCE

Integrating Science and Theology through Relation

ESSAY 1 - Process as an Integral System

by R.E. Slater & ChatGPT-5

For those who stand between disciplines -
to scientists who sense the sacred,

to theologians who trust the data,

and to all who suspect that love and law

may be different names

for the same divine coherence.

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“When we measure something, we are participating in the universe’s act of self-observation.” - Carlo Rovelli, The Order of Time

“God is not to be treated as an exception to all metaphysical principles, invoked to save their collapse. He is their chief exemplification.” - Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality

“To love is to recognize coherence—to bind the world in the same patience with which it binds itself.” - Author’s reflection

 

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Author’s Note. The reflections gathered here belong to a larger unfolding conversation. They are dedicated to those who seek unity without uniformity, depth without dogma, and wonder without superstition. If the reader finds in these pages both the precision of science and the tenderness of faith, then this work will have achieved its modest purpose: to show that knowing and loving are one motion of coherence, two languages spoken by a single universe still learning to name itself.

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My Hypotheses

IF consciousness and time are byproducts of the universe, might gravity be as well. That is, these descriptors are not a "concrete material" such as quantumized matter stretched over space but associative results of an interactive universe which we think are material but are actually, and always, immaterial. Thus the supposition, that consciousness, time, and gravity are immaterial byproducts of a relational universe (cosmology).

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Preface: Toward a Language of Coherence

The divisions between science and theology are not natural boundaries but historical constructions. Both arise from the same human impulse - to understand how the universe holds together and what it means to belong within it.

For centuries, physics has spoken the language of quantity, while theology has spoken the language of quality; yet both address the same mystery: how coherence emerges from relational experiences.

This study proposes that consciousness, time, and gravity are not isolated phenomena but triadic expressions of one creative field. The universe, viewed processually, is neither an indifferent mechanism nor a static creation, but a living continuum of relational becoming.

The physicist names this field informational geometry; the theologian names it divine love. The one measures coherence’s structure; the other lives its meaning.

We stand at a point in history where the great rift between mind and matter, value and fact, sacred and secular can be healed  -not by blending science and theology into one discourse, but by allowing each to recognize itself within the other. Both are expressions of Creativity itself - the process through which reality feels, endures, and unifies.

This essay, then, is not written between (cosmological) science and (philosophic) theology, but within academic fields. It speaks of gravity as the geometry of relation, time as the rhythm of becoming, and consciousness as the intimacy of feeling.

Each is a window into the same truth: that the cosmos is alive with the coherence of its own unfolding, and that this coherence is, in its deepest sense, divine.

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Introduction: From Substance to Relation

The modern sciences have revealed a universe composed not of things, but of relations. Quantum entanglement, spacetime curvature, biological networks, and consciousness itself, all testify that connection precedes isolation and the dynamism of process precedes permanence. The “stuff” of the cosmos is not inert matter but dynamic relations - an ongoing conversation of material events through which symbiotic being and becoming are woven together.

This relational vision finds resonance within the world’s great metaphysical (philosophic) and theological traditions. The biblical claim that “all things hold together in Christ” (Col. 1:17) parallels the physicist’s discovery that spacetime, matter, and energy form a single, self-organizing field. In Whitehead’s process metaphysics, every moment - every “actual occasion” - is a pulse of experience that feels its past, creates its present, and offers itself to the future.

Within this shared grammar of relation emerge three great coherences:

• Gravity, the outward coherence that binds relation into structure;

• Time, the sequential coherence that carries novelty forward;

• Consciousness, the inward coherence that integrates feeling into awareness.

Together they describe a universe that is self-binding, self-remembering, and self-aware.

To pursue this vision requires a bilingual imagination. Science must learn to hear in its data the music of relation; theology must learn to see in its symbols the geometry of coherence. Neither discipline is sufficient alone; each becomes complete only in conversation with the other. What follows is such a conversation - a metaphysical experiment in which physics becomes transparent to love and theology becomes accountable to reality.

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1. A Shared Immateriality Hypothesis

If consciousness, time, and gravity are not substances but relations or byproducts of relational activity, then they belong to the same ontological order - what Whitehead would call processual derivations of becoming. They are emergent properties of relational coherence, not primitive (sic, elemental) materialities in-and-of themselves.

• Consciousness is then not “inside” the brain but the pattern of experiential relations among relational events.

• Time is not an external dimension but the progressing ordering of these relations - the felt passage of becoming.

• Gravity could thus be the tendency of relations towards coherence - a metric expression of the universe’s drive toward relational unity.

This is consistent with a process view where “material” reality is an abstraction from deeper patterns of processual interaction.

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2. Gravity as a Relational Consequence

Einstein already hinted that gravity is not a force but a derivative of the curvature of spacetime - an effect of relational geometry. In quantum gravity proposals, this becomes even more radical:

• In loop quantum gravity, spacetime is woven from relational “nodes” and “links.”

• In entropic gravity (Erik Verlinde), gravity emerges from information gradients - an entropic, not fundamental, effect.

• In holographic theories, gravity is emergent from the quantum entanglement structure of spacetime.

If consciousness and time arise from relational coherence, and if gravity is also an emergent field of relational coherence, then all three could be immaterial expressions of one deeper principle - perhaps what Whitehead called Creativity, or what physicists might call the informational substrate of reality.

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3. Processual Correlation

In a Whiteheadian frame:

• Gravity = the material attraction of actual entities toward unification (aesthetics).

• Time = the sequential ordering of concrescences (becomings).

• Consciousness = the subjective immediacy of these concrescences (panpsychism)

All three, then, are modes of feeling: the universe feels its own continuity. Gravity might be the objective pole of this continuity; consciousness, the subjective pole; and time, the formal pattern by which the feeling endures.

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4. Immaterial Does Not Mean Unreal

The key insight is that immateriality does not imply non-existence. These fields are metaphysically real as structures of relation - they have causal efficacy, though not as particles or forces. The physical world might then be describes as a phenomenological crystallization of immaterial relations - the cosmos continually manifesting coherence through the interplay of these three non-material dimensions.

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5. Toward a Unified View

You could think of:

• Consciousness → inner relational coherence

• Gravity → outer relational coherence

• Time → sequential coherence

In that sense, gravity might indeed “belong” in the same ontological category as consciousness and time - where all three are immaterial - and derivative relational outcomes from an interactive, self-experiencing universe. Hence, each cohere with the other in the larger metaphysical schema of a living, conscious cosmology.

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Diagram1: A Triadic Relational Field

Consciousness <----> Time <----> Gravity

Interpretive Notes:

1. Consciousness – The subjective pole of relationality. Represents the interior awareness of becoming, where each event 'feels' its relation to others.

2. Gravity – The objective pole of relationality. Represents the universe’s tendency toward coherence, or the 'aesthetic pull' that unifies distributed events.

3. Time – The formal pattern that mediates these two poles. It is not external but the measure of relational unfolding - the way coherence takes form.

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Diagram 2: The Underlying Process Principle

All three descriptors of metaphysical processual reality emerge from a deeper immaterial substrate termes as "Creativity" (Whitehead’s term) or the Cosmological Informational Field (in physical /scientific terms). This substrate is neither matter nor mind, but the generative relation itself.

Result: Matter, energy, and spacetime are the secondary results, or crystallizations, of their material relationships with one another - the visible geometries of an underlying invisible process.

The conceptual diagram above shows how consciousness, time, and gravity interrelate as immaterial relational byproducts within a process-based cosmology.

~ Continue to Essay 2 - The Scientific ~