by Lloyd Harrison Whitling

Ask any mathematician and they all will tell you it’s true. Ask anybody who works in the construction trades, and they will look at you and wonder why you have to question something so obvious. Find yourself a mechanical engineer, and make sure you check it out with more than one to see if they universally agree. By then, I feel sure, you can accept it without worry.

It’s a simple statement that, if you stop to think about it, offers astounding implications. “Every bit of material in existence is three dimensional.” That sounds reasonable— Right?— even if you’re one of those who suffers from the craving to attack everything some other person says is true. Okay, so, the other response is to demand, “So what?”

So, what? It is in the implications that we find the importance of that statement. It holds more meaning than just simple geometrical calculations required for building bridges, houses, or plotting a rocket’s pathway for a future launch. It holds the entire key to an understanding of existence that I am hoping to explain well enough, right here, so every one of us can see it.

I have made a living for years by understanding length and width and thickness. Knowing how to measure them with verifiable accuracy, and knowing the inter-relationships of parts in various mechanisms has enabled me to predict mechanical problems in the cassette industry, to lay out cabinetry for electrical installations in the construction industry, and for sample and production parts in a metal cabinet factory.

Here are some facts I know: We can only sense objects when all three physical dimensions are present. They are the only dimensions we can sense. The senses we use are mainly of vision and touch. If we cannot sense all three dimensions, the object may as well not be there. And, finally, time is recognized as a dimension, although I do not agree with how we go about that. I think we miss a lot that we could directly or by inference add to our awareness. All we need for that is to understand a way of looking at things, and then find a way to verify whatever we think we see.

Although one-dimensional objects may be all around us, we have no way to sense them. One-dimensional objects have no width or thickness. They only have what we might call length: They go from here to there, but we can’t see them or feel them. To us, they might as well be invisible. In fact, they are, if they exist.

Yes, you can draw a line to represent a one-dimensional object, but it will not be that object. It will, in fact, be measurable in three directions. The line is three dimensional, however thin or narrow you wish to draw it. Make it truly one-dimensional and it will be lost to all your senses. What a waste of your artistic talents. What a boon to my lack of them.

I once read a book named Flatland about a two-dimensional existence. If the straight one-dimensional line bent into a circle, it would encompass an area with only two dimensions, which you would calculate using the formula Pi times r². Notice there is no calculation for thickness. With the third dimension absent, there is no material substance because it has no thickness. If the circle bent, as if it were to warp, a third dimension would then be present. This is the manner by which strings supposedly formed three-dimensional material and began what many people today have named "Creation".

What is time, something modern scientists call the “fourth dimension”? I define time as the distance from one occurrence to another: “The time is 3:40. You will arrive in Dallas at 3:45. Please fasten your seatbelts while we begin to descend.” You have a sense of a span of five minutes between the occurrence of ‘now’ and the occurrence of ‘arrival’. You have enough experience to judge about how that length of time will feel. You will likely quite accurately guess when it is about to have run its course.

Among the measurements of time I have experienced is the need to know with high accuracy the location of something “now” compared to where it will be “then”. You press a button on a tape player after dropping in a cassette and an assembly of small parts moves into a new position. They must do so with acceptable precision, in such a manner that the unit does not jam with any standard cassette that will ever be inserted into it, and then it must actuate itself back into the start position when the cassette has been played. Those are motions plotted through time. A description of them describes what is called a ‘continuum’, activities that take place in a length of time that stretches between the first event and the last. Nothing in the universe will be exactly where it was when that continuum has run its course, but that will not be part of our description of events in the tape player.

Everything in any continuum will be subject to the interactive ¹Laws of Nature, which describe the requirements of interacting events according to Cause and Effect. The actions required to play the tape are known as “the process of playing a tape”. All events that work together, for natural or artificial purposes, are processes. Processes themselves can also be events; such as, “the event when the tape was played is a process that ended when the event of the player clicking off occurred.” Please understand that before we go deeper into this, or you will get lost.

Once you do understand that, it becomes clear that all of existence is composed of events and processes interacting with each other in a hierarchy of processes. The ultimate process is Nature; Nature is the result of all the processes that occur through time. All that exists are events and processes. All to exist results from events and processes. All of existence can be broken down and defined by the events and processes that result in it. Because Nature is the ultimate process, and Nature is commonly recognized to be the proper name of that process, I always spell it with a capital 'N' to differentiate it from other meanings attributed to that word.

Material is composed of the processes resulting from the events of electrons, protons, and all other little particles whirling around nuclei to become atoms, the immediate hierarchy of which is molecules, the hierarchy of which is compounds. Events which are the interactions of all these sub-microscopic particles result in the processes of existence. You and I are very complex processes that result from exquisite hierarchies of these lesser, contributive processes. We each operate within a continuum described by the nature of our particular process, as does each of the contributive processes that combine and interact through time to become recognizable as ‘you’ and ‘me’.

Where does it all start? The smallest possible item speculated to exist is a one-dimensional object postulated by mathematicians under the name ‘strings’. Like time, strings being one-dimensional, they are rendered inaccessible to any of our senses. Strings become two-dimensional by forming bends and circles, and multi-dimensional by forming helixes (coils, like the spring in your click-pen). Strings represent the basis of the interactive event/process building of the universe, if this hypothesis is correct, as it may very well be. We know time ‘exists’ because we observe the results; we can say the same about strings, or something like them, and maintain good integrity. A study of strings may show us how time works, something I attempted in The Complete Universe of Memes and Reality 101.

Among strings (providing the hypothesis proves true) events combine into processes from which the known particles result, and hierarchies of this kind of event/process/continua relationship continues from bottom to top. It has already been expressed that you and I are processes, each of us unique and resultant from a discreet set of processes with which we interact, and that results in processes in an upward hierarchy as we form into groups, societies, cultures, political states and more, all of them processes that result from events in which we become involved.

Does this reduce us to illusions, delusions, chimeras, fantasies, mirages and make us the victims of our erroneous, misleading, deluded senses? Choose a tree, any tree, and try to pass through it as though it were not there. Slow speed doesn’t work? Try it in a car at half again the speed limit. You might, of course, actually pass through it; or, it might pass through you. I guarantee you won’t like the results. I further guarantee you will not call its existence an illusion nor a myth. Our senses were developed through the processes of evolution to serve us for survival, and it does us more harm than good to develop philosophies that try to contradict them. Such philosophies and theosophies may feel good for the moment, but they are counterproductive in whatever processes they interfere.

How does all of this apply to your life? Many kinds of people come at you with agendas designed to usurp your sense of conscious self and turn that to serve their own ends. In religion, self must be negated and turned to the support of a church. In some philosophies, such as Buddhism, determinism or existentialism, self must be denied to exist and one’s efforts turned to the service of some scheme posing as altruism or something related to that. Poverty of thought and poverty of subsistence results from acceptive application of such schemes.

In the human animal, one’s sense of a conscious self serves as a sort of sixth sense that has enabled weak, feeble, slow and clumsy human beings to survive and thrive in the midst of all sorts of natural adversity. Our sense of our own discreet being— that which we describe as our ‘self’ with little hesitation —enables us to sense how others share that characteristic with us, gives us a sense of its importance to them, and so allows us the capacity for empathy that we have given the name ‘morality’.

The sense of morality comes not from gods, or from sources outside ourselves, it comes from within us as a result of our observance of human nature and frailty. To deny the existence of your conscious self is to invalidate the process from which you derive morality, and serves to enable others to override your own internal processes and supersede them with their own. That cannot be a healthy condition, and a society full of people of that sort, to whom Cause and Effect seem like strange notions, or to whom they have become perverted into inviolable laws, and to whom empathy has never been given voice as a path to understanding one's place in the whole of humanity, has to be an unhealthy and regressive society.

If all the events and processes that contribute to material existence have resulted in the objective nature we perceive to be Nature, it appears foolish to deny the worth of that small part of them that constitutes your discernible self. We recognize the most invisible parts of existence according to their effects; it is foolish and counterproductive to deny that for the very self that we must maintain, train, and ordain as real to serve purposes of our own.

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FOOTNOTES:

1.  Even though cause and effect is not recognized as a law by science, it does make a convenient (though misleading) shorthand to represent the overall principle.

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"We believe Reality 101 is one of the best independently published books on the market." Rec'd 3/4/06 in a letter from Airleaf Publishing and Bookselling. Buy it, read it, and see for yourself.
 

"To deny a right to the experience of pleasure is immoral unless that denial can be justified by a valid presentation of how pain will result from that experience in an amount that would render the expected pleasure regrettable; or, if it can be shown that pain will be induced in others innocent of any involvement. The role of science in moral issues should be to test that, predict that, and find harmless ways to demonstrate that."

— L. H. Whitling in the eBook, Secular Morality —