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Figure 1. From Substance to Process. The meta- physical shift from static substances to relational becoming. |
Figure 1. Classical (scientific) metaphysics understood reality as a hierarchy of static substances - matter, forces, space, and time stacked like immovable blocks. Process philosophy replaces this imaging with a relational field of events, constraints, and becoming. Reality is no longer built from things, but from interactional experiences in motion.
Note. The use of illustrations are not decorative. They are conceptual anchors intended to slow reading, clarify structure, and reinforce the process-relational framework developed throughout this essay.
Poetic Note. Here I make the following distinctions between non-processual cosmic simulations vs legitimate processual cosmic holograms. The former assumes: A pre-existing substrate (such as a cosmic-like computer, external reality, higher-level universe); Fixed rules encoded in advance; Reality as a rendered output; Time as a clock cycle; Information as stored data; and, Cosmic observers as contained within a system they had not helped constitute. But metaphysically, this is: Substance-based language; Deterministic or quasi-deterministic; and, Externally grounded even when stochastic elements are added, hence, its ontological center lies outside the universe. Thus, the Cosmic Simulation Model is fundamentally non-processual.Whereas, a processual cosmic hologram assumes something very different: No external substrates; No “computer behind the curtain”; Reality as self-generating relational coherence; Time as emergent sequencing; Information as difference-with-consequence; and, Cosmic observers as actual participatory events. Essentially, "hologram" does not mean “projection from elsewhere.” It means: "Each local event enfolds and expresses the whole relational field." Thus, the Cosmic Hologram Model is fundamentally processual.Where language misleads - and causes confusion - is that both simulative vs. holographic camps borrow from the same vocabulary: information, encoding, rendering, holographic, computational, etc. However, they each mean radically different things from one another. Simulation language tends to: Reify information into things; Treat laws as instruction sets; and, Treat emergence as execution. Whereas process-holographic language treats: Information as relational; Laws as habits of becoming; and, Emergence as creative advance. And so, though simulation and holographic sound like wordplay, ontologically they differ by quite alot. The first is a non-ontologically generated metaphoric stylistically whereas the latter is ontologically fundamental to the grammar of processual language.R.E. Slater
Imagining Consciousness, Time & Gravity: Essay 1 - Process as an Integral System
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| A Gravity Well. Why our universe is not a simulation but a comprehensive illustration of processual reality. |
A recent piece in "Popular Mechanics" needed a rejoiner. Today's article makes its clear why a cosmos running as a cosmic simulation is not the same as a cosmos running as a cosmic hologram. They differ by non-ontologically grounded language while confusing scientific-readers by their wordplay. In short, until science, or science journals, learn to understand and use processual emergence as an ontological category rather than as a metaphor, it will continue to mistake relational becoming for external computation, and event-participation for processual execution. - re slater
Over the past months, this body of work has argued - patiently, repeatedly, and from multiple perspectives - that consciousness, time, gravity, and even spacetime itself are not fundamental substances, but emergent systems arising from relational process.
These claims were not offered rhetorically, nor as philosophical indulgence, but as a disciplined response to converging evidence across physics, philosophy, and lived experience.
Recent claims that gravity may be “simulation-like” do not overturn this framework. They are late speculations by science attempting to explain gravity.
This essay therefore does not ask whether such theories are intriguing. It asks a more demanding question: why are we still surprised when process appears, and why do we reach for comforting metaphors rather than reckon with process' implications?
The purpose of this additional essay is not to persuade by novelty, but to slow the reader down - to insist that what is now being framed as shocking or groundbreaking has already been named, explored, and situated within a coherent processual vision of reality.
If this feels unsettling, that is not a failure of clarity. It is the cost of thinking carefully in an age that prefers quick non-integrative, speculative exits.
I. The Headline and Its Seduction
A recent wave of articles claims that gravity may be key evidence that our universe is a simulation. The phrasing is dramatic, provocative, and carefully calibrated to capture attention. It suggests that one of nature’s most familiar forces may be doing something far stranger than we ever imagined.
Yet upon closer examination, the underlying research does not actually claim that the universe is simulated. What it suggests is more restrained and more interesting: that gravity behaves as if it were emergent byproduct, arising from deeper informational or relational structures rather than existing as a fundamental force.
The simulation language is not the conclusion of the science. It is an interpretive gloss - a metaphor layered atop technical claims about emergence, entropy, and information. That metaphor resonates with contemporary culture, where computation has become our dominant explanatory frame, but resonance should not be mistaken for necessity.
Physics is not announcing that reality is artificial. It is announcing once again that reality is not built the way we once thought it was.
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| Figure 2. Gravity is not a force. It is an emergent geometry caused by fundamental interaction. |
Figure 2. Gravity is not a push-or-pull force between objects. In modern physics, it is the curvature of spacetime itself - an emergent geometric effect arising from mass-energy and relational structure. What appears as force is, at scale, the shape of relational-interactive reality.
Gravity has always been the most philosophically troublesome of the fundamental interactions. It is extraordinarily weak compared to the other forces, yet universally influential. It does not behave like a push-or-pull force so much as a geometric condition - a shaping of spacetime itself.
Einstein already displaced the Newtonian picture by showing that gravity is not a force acting within spacetime, but an expression/byproduct/secondary-result of spacetime’s curvature. That alone should have unsettled substance-based metaphysics more than it did.
Recent theoretical developments push this insight further. In approaches such as entropic gravity, holographic dualities, and spacetime emergence models, gravity no longer appears as something fundamental at all. Instead, it arises statistically or relationally, much as temperature arises from molecular motion or pressure from particle interactions. In this sense, gravity is also a descriptor of interactions between forces.
In these models, gravity is not an entity but a regularity - a pattern which appears when relational systems reach sufficient scale and structure.
This is not an attack on gravity’s "reality". Emergent phenomena are not illusions. They are real precisely because they work, because they constrain behavior, because they are stable enough to be measured and predicted. The mistake lies in assuming that “real” must mean “fundamental.”
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| Figure 3. The Emergent Triad: Time, Consciousness, Gravity. Each arise from a shared processual field. |
Figure 3. Time, consciousness, and gravity are not separate puzzles. Each relational process emerges from the same underlying field of comprehensive relational processes. Simplistically, time arises as ordering, consciousness as experience, and gravity as geometry - each are distinct expressions of a single dynamic becoming.
One of the most important recognitions from our previous essays 1-5 (listed abov e) was that consciousness, time, and gravity are not isolated mysteries, but members of the same family of problems.
- Each resists reduction to static substance.
- Each depends upon relational structure.
- Each manifests only through process and interaction.
- Each scales differently depending on complexity.
- Time is not a background container within which events occur; it is an ordering that emerges from change, memory, anticipation, and causation.
- Consciousness is not a thing added to matter; it emerges from integrated experiential processes.
- Gravity, likewise, appears not as an intrinsic force but as a large-scale relational outcome.
This is not coincidence. These phenomena occupy the boundary between structure and experience, between the measurable and the lived. They are precisely where substance metaphysics fails and process ontology becomes unavoidable.
To recognize their emergence is not to dissolve them into vagueness, but to place them correctly within a layered reality.
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Figure 4. The universe is not a simulation running atop of something else. It is a process generating itself. |
Figure 4. Emergence ≠ Illusion. Here we clarify scale-dependent reality and avoid reductionism. Emergent phenomena are not unreal. Temperature, gravity, and thought are all real at their respective scales, even though they depend on underlying interactions. Emergence locates reality in relation and scale, not in metaphysical primitiveness.
One reason the simulation metaphor gains traction is that emergence is still widely misunderstood. Emergent phenomena are often treated as “less real” than fundamental ones, as if reality were a hierarchy of authenticity.
But emergence processes do not mean unreal. It means that they are dependent, relational, and scale-sensitive.
- A melody is emergent from vibrations, but no one calls it illusory.
- Temperature is emergent from molecular motion, yet it determines the physical behavior of systems.
- A thought is emergent from neural processes, but it can alter the course of a life.
Gravity, understood as emergent, belongs to this same category. Its reality lies not in metaphysical primitiveness but in constraint and consequence.
The insistence that gravity must be fundamental in order to be real is a relic of an outdated ontology - one that cannot survive contact with modern physics.
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| Figure 5. Why Process Is Avoided as it removes the comfort found in fixed foundations and eternal controls. |
Figure 5. Why Process Is Avoided. Illustrates the psychological and cultural resistance to process ontology. Process philosophy removes the comfort of fixed foundations and external control. Faced with an unfinished, participatory universe, many retreat toward simplifying metaphors or reductions. Process is not rejected because it is unclear - but because it implicates in us the fear of the unknown
If emergence is so powerful, why does the simulation metaphor keep appearing in print? Because it offers speculative distance.
To say reality is a simulation suggests:
- an external programmer,
- a finished codebase,
- a prewritten rule set,
- and a separation between observer and system.
It preserves a comforting hierarchy: something behind the curtain, someone in control envisioning something like "a Wizard at the controls of Oz."
Process thought removes that distance. It says there is no external frame. Reality is not running on something else. It is self-generating, self-relating, and unfinished.
In a processual universe, there is no ultimate backstage. There is only creative advance - events arising from prior events, constrained but not determined, and always open to novelty.
For many readers, that is far more unsettling than the idea of a cosmic computer. The greater majority of people generally insist on speculations of fixity, control, or determined outcomes in order to provide a measure of comfort which is unreflected in life itself. Reality is never fixed, controlled, nor determined. It always moves toward evolving relationships and experiences which add measures of instability, contingency, and risk - yet it is precisely within this openness that novelty, meaning, and creativity arise. What unsettles us is not the absence of certainty, but the recognition that participation replaces prediction, and responsibility replaces assurance, in a universe that is still becoming.
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| Figure 6. A Process Ontology: Reality is Processual. |
Figure 6. Both metaphysically as well as cosmologically, reality is processual. Processual emergence is reality without any speculative need for cosmic simulation. Here, we integrate our full argument into a single process-centered image that Process-relational becoming forms the foundation of reality. From this processual field emerges time, consciousness, and gravity. The “simulation” speculation appears only as a metaphorical overlay - as a cultural lens to inform the reading public, but not as an ontological ground of becoming.
Much of the recent scientific discussion frames gravity as an informational phenomenon. This, too, must be handled carefully.
Information is not a substance. It is not a new kind of metaphysical stuff. Information is a relational measure - a way of describing difference, distinction, and constraint within a system.
- Information requires context.
- It requires interpretation.
- It requires relation.
To say gravity is informational is not to say reality is made of bits. It is to say that reality is structured relationally, and that those structures can be formally described.
Process philosophy already has language for this: prehension, relation, pattern, becoming. Information theory does not replace process ontology; it re-describes part of it mathematically.
The danger lies in mistaking descriptive power for ontological depth.
There is a curious pattern in contemporary discourse. When evidence accumulates that undermines substance-based metaphysics - fixed objects, absolute time, fundamental forces - many are willing to follow the argument right up to the threshold, and then abruptly retreat.
At that threshold stands process. Rather than step forward, readers often:
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substitute metaphor for ontology (“simulation”),
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reduce emergence to clever analogy,
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or flee into homespun antidotes that domesticate the implications (“it’s just information,” “it’s all code,” “it’s probably nothing”).
This avoidance is understandable, but it is not neutral.
Process thinking is demanding because it does not allow us to preserve:
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a static (intemporal) self,
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a finished (closed) universe,
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or a (mitigated) reality that merely is rather than is becoming.
A processual universe is participatory. It implicates the observer. It implicates consciousness. It implicates responsibility.
To say gravity is emergent is to say the universe is not a frozen structure, but an ongoing act of evolving creation. That is a claim with consequences.
VIII. Quiet Confirmation, Not Revelation
What is striking about the current moment is not the novelty of these claims, but their convergence.
Physics is increasingly forced to acknowledge that:
- spacetime may not be fundamental,
- locality may be derivative,
- forces may be emergent,
- relations may precede objects.
This is not a revolution against process philosophy. It is its empirical confirmation OF process philosophy.
Alfred North Whitehead articulated these processual insights philosophically during Einstein's relativity era and its incipient (Niels Bohr) quantum era that was quickly following, long before they were technically defensible. Contemporary physics now approaches processual reality through mathematics rather than metaphysics.
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| The 1927 Slovay Conference: Einstein, Curie, Bohr, Planck, Heisenberg, Schrödinger... all in one frame. |
This processual-metaphysical convergence matters because it reshapes how we think about causality, freedom, meaning, and responsibility. A processual universe is not a machine and it is not a simulation. It is a living structure of relations, where novelty is real and outcomes are not prewritten.
To reduce this to spectacle is to miss its significance.
The deeper question is not whether we live in a simulation, but whether we are willing to inhabit a universe that is unfinished - one in which participation matters and (fixed, even scientific) certainty is provisional.
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| Figure 1. From Substance to Process. The metaphysical shift from static substance thinking to relational becoming. |
Figure 1. Classical (scientific) metaphysics understood reality as a hierarchy of static substances - matter, forces, space, and time stacked like immovable blocks. Process philosophy replaces this imaging with a relational field of events, constraints, and becoming. Reality is no longer built from things, but from interactional experiences in motion.
What recent quantum physics gestures toward is not artificiality, but relational depth. The mathematics does not whisper “programmer.” It speaks quietly, but insistently, of emergence, constraint without determinism, and order without blueprint.
That language already has a name.
It is called process.
To continue translating scientific insights into ever-new, contemporized, metaphors while avoiding their philosophical consequences is to delay the conversation that actually matters. A processual universe does not evacuate meaning. It deepens it by locating meaning where it belongs: in relation, responsiveness, and becoming.
This addendum essay #6 therefore stands as a marker, not a conclusion. It notes that what is now arriving under the banner of “groundbreaking” has been forming for some time within a broader process-relational tradition which deserves more careful attention than it is usually granted.
If the reader feels the urge to step aside, to soften the claim, or to translate it back into something more familiar, that impulse itself is worth noticing. Speculation of this kinds can be helpful in this regard but should not be fundamental as a replacement science for the processual metaphysic extuant in cosmic reality.
Those willing to linger may find that the universe is not a simulation after all - but something far more demanding in philosophical and scientific thought, and far more alive.
This bibliography is intentionally interdisciplinary, reflecting the essay’s convergence across process philosophy, theoretical physics, philosophy of time, consciousness studies, and information theory. It privileges works that either (a) explicitly argue for emergence or (b) implicitly require a process-relational ontology.
I. Process Philosophy & Metaphysics (Foundational)
Whitehead, Alfred North.
Process and Reality. Corrected Edition. Free Press, 1978.
→ Foundational articulation of process ontology, emergence, and relational becoming.
Whitehead, Alfred North.
The Concept of Nature. Cambridge University Press, 1920.
→ Early dismantling of substance-based metaphysics and absolute time.
Whitehead, Alfred North.
Science and the Modern World. Free Press, 1967.
→ Critique of scientific materialism; early convergence of physics and metaphysics.
Hartshorne, Charles.
Reality as Social Process. Beacon Press, 1953.
→ Relational metaphysics and emergence applied beyond physics.
Cobb, John B., Jr.
A Christian Natural Theology. Westminster Press, 1965.
→ Process metaphysics as a coherent natural theology (useful for broader corpus).
Rescher, Nicholas.
Process Metaphysics. SUNY Press, 1996.
→ Systematic defense of process as a serious ontological alternative.
II. Emergent Gravity, Spacetime & Physics
Einstein, Albert.
Relativity: The Special and the General Theory. 1916.
→ Gravity as geometry, not force.
Verlinde, Erik.
“On the Origin of Gravity and the Laws of Newton.” Journal of High Energy Physics (2011).
→ Gravity as emergent, entropic phenomenon.
Verlinde, Erik.
“A Note on Holographic Gravity and the Dark Universe.” SciPost Physics (2017).
→ Gravity tied to information and entropy.
Jacobson, Ted.
“Thermodynamics of Spacetime.” Physical Review Letters 75 (1995).
→ Einstein’s equations derived from thermodynamic principles.
Rovelli, Carlo.
Quantum Gravity. Cambridge University Press, 2004.
→ Spacetime as relational, non-fundamental.
Rovelli, Carlo.
The Order of Time. Riverhead Books, 2018.
→ Time as emergent ordering, not fundamental flow.
III. Time, Process, and Becoming
Bergson, Henri.
Time and Free Will. Dover, 2001.
→ Duration as lived process rather than metric abstraction.
Prigogine, Ilya.
The End of Certainty. Free Press, 1997.
→ Irreversibility, time, and process in physics.
Smolin, Lee.
Time Reborn. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2013.
→ Time as fundamental process (useful contrast point).
IV. Consciousness & Emergence
James, William.
Essays in Radical Empiricism. University of Nebraska Press, 1996.
→ Experience as primary datum; proto-process psychology.
Chalmers, David.
“The Hard Problem of Consciousness.” Journal of Consciousness Studies (1995).
→ Useful foil for emergence discussions.
Tononi, Giulio.
Phi: A Voyage from the Brain to the Soul. Pantheon, 2012.
→ Integrated Information Theory (emergence without substance dualism).
Goff, Philip.
Galileo’s Error. Pantheon, 2019.
→ Consciousness and panpsychist emergence (dialogue partner, not endpoint).
V. Information, Computation & Simulation Discourse
Wheeler, John Archibald.
“It from Bit.” In Information, Physics, Quantum, 1990.
→ Information as descriptor, not substance.
Deutsch, David.
The Fabric of Reality. Penguin, 1997.
→ Simulation and multiverse discourse (contrastive).
Bostrom, Nick.
“Are You Living in a Computer Simulation?” Philosophical Quarterly (2003).
→ Simulation hypothesis as cultural artifact.
Floridi, Luciano.
The Philosophy of Information. Oxford University Press, 2011.
→ Information as relational structure, not ontology.
VI. Integrative / Convergent Works
Kauffman, Stuart.
Reinventing the Sacred. Basic Books, 2008.
→ Emergence, creativity, and unfinished reality.
Deacon, Terrence.
Incomplete Nature. W.W. Norton, 2011.
→ Emergence, constraint, and absence as causal.
Barad, Karen.
Meeting the Universe Halfway. Duke University Press, 2007.
→ Relational ontology in physics (useful resonance).
