Narrative Dynamics 6 – The Grand Unifying Theory of Everything

Okay, so this is where I go a little nutso. Yeah, I know… But I’m going to be crossing the line that will prevent anyone from every taking my theories seriously again. Because I can.

Here’s the scoop….

The Grand Unifying Theory of Everything is:

The degree to which something exists is variable, and we perceive this as time.

There. I said it. And I believe it with all my heart. But what the heck does it mean?

It is a recipe for converting space into time and vice versa. It provides a map of the interface that stands between structure and dynamics, mind and matter, order and chaos, existence and oblivion. It is Einstein’s equation coupled with the Story Mind. It is the understanding I have been seeking for more than half a century. It is the culmination of my life’s work.

Here we go….

Go back to the Greek philosophers. Is there the prefect form of a things already in our heads, like the shape of a table or the essence of a bed, and we seek to achieve it in the material world, or do we create function in the real world, by building tables and beds, and from this arrive at a conceptual form to enclose a variety of things with similar criteria? In an overused phrase does form precede function or vice versa? This is another structural/dynamic paradox, for it depends upon perception: one man’s table is another man’s bed.

As in my last article, “The Interface Solution,” both form and function depend upon context, where one places the line, what one considers inside or outside the group. In short, we draw a circle around a number of things or attributes of a concept and define all that is inside as being of that nature and all that is outside is not.

Is a bed a mattress, a board, the ground? Can a table be a bed? Can a bed be a table? Of course they can! It all depends (from one philosophy) on what you use it for, and (from the other) on what you intended it to be. Both are correct, but not at the same time from the same perspective.

And then there’s the matter of time. A table may be made of stone or plastic or wood. Take a wooden table. One it was a tree. Some day it will dissolve into its component elements. When, exactly does it stop being a table? When you can’t use it as one any more or when you can’t recognize it as one any more?

Nothing exists absolutely. It only exists to a certain degree. Similarly, nothing does not exist absolutely. It always has the potential to become more fully what it has the potential to be.
Hence, the first part of the Grand Unifying Theory, “The degree to which something exists is variable.”

Now, imagine for a moment that time does not exist at all. Rather, there is only an ongoing rearrangement of how firmly anything exists. Everything has the potential to become anything else or to stop being anything at all.

This smacks of quantum theory which has described quanta as “vibrating packets of probability.” But as we have seen in my last article, a packet would have to be a closed system and no system is ever truly closed. Nor is any system ever fully open. It is all a matter of how we choose to perceive it.
Change, then, from being to not being or vice versa, from falling within a set or outside of it, from being open or closed, is a matter of perception.

Hence, time is not required to exist in the external world. All that must be is change in the degree to which something exists, which is then interpreted as a pathway that spawns the notion of causality.
Which leads us to the second part of the Grand Unifying Theory, “and we perceive this as time.”
The inference is that there is no time without perception, just as there is no existence. But perception alone is not sufficient to account for existence, for we must have something to observe in order to contextualize it as this or that, before or after.

The ramifications of this contention are that all we can know is a combination of change and awareness. We do not exist without the universe and it does not exist without us.

The essence of all this is that it requires both universe and mind, in perpetual equilibrium, ever re-balancing through endless process and endless reconsideration.

Deal with it.

Melanie