Beneath the Floor — Another Floor

Let us suppose that everything described in the previous nine chapters is true. Not “proven truth” (we’ve just gone through how many holes there are in that), but a working hypothesis — a map that has not yet been refuted and that organizes the data better than the previous one.

Suppose:

• The Universe and the brain belong to the same class of systems (Vazza/Feletti).

• Information is more primary than matter (Wheeler, Landauer, the holographic principle).

• The world is a learning neural network (Vanchurin).

• Form is stored in patterns and not in the substrate (Levin, metamorphosis).

• Life exploits quantum effects (quantum biology).

• Consciousness is a fundamental property of reality (IIT, Friston, Hoffman).

• Evolution is learning on several scales (Vanchurin/Katsnelson/Koonin).

What follows from this — for science, philosophy, and life itself?

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Consequence one: under the floor there is another floor.

If all of the above is true, reality is arranged like an onion: you peel off a layer and there is another beneath, you peel that one off and there is the next, and so on until there is nothing left to peel.

The physical world is only the outer skin: what we see, touch, and measure — electricity bills and sunsets. Beneath it lies information; beneath information, forms and self-organization; beneath forms, learning and causality; beneath learning, consciousness. And if you are now asking, “and what’s beneath consciousness?” — welcome to a question to which I have no answer and which this book probably doesn’t have on its menu at all.

Each layer works as a projection of a deeper one — the way a shadow on a wall is the projection of an object placed between the lamp and the wall: spacetime is a projection of information (the holographic principle); information is a projection of learning (Vanchurin); learning is a projection of…what?

We don’t know; perhaps we cannot know. Gödel showed that any sufficiently complex system contains statements that are true but unprovable from inside the system itself. If we are part of the stack, we are not given to see it as a whole — the way an eye without a mirror does not see itself.

Science is that mirror — yet any mirror by its very nature returns only a reflection of the original, and that reflection is always mirror-flipped.