Reality Stacks, by Slater King
Introduction
I’m going to have to break this to you gently. Until around the 1700s, simple questions like ‘how many teeth do women have?’ exceeded all of our intellectual capabilities. Among other peculiarities, we thought our hearts did our thinking and our brains cooled our blood. Our world abounded with what we might nowadays call nonsense because we had no concrete way to refute the mountains of disinformation that surrounded us. Not because we were stupid, but because we lacked the wherewithal to devise different relationships for and between ourselves.
Once we got a handle on how to run an effective bullshit test, a collective technique we now usually call Science, our abilities came on in astonishing leaps and bounds. But despite these magnificent feats, then as now, we were unable to satisfactorily answer most why questions because these largely rely on knowing what something is, rather than what it does or what it contains.
The light in the dark that our scientific abilities offer is based on a capacity to observe, predict, and be consistent, which promotes us into experts at foreseeing what a thing does, while necessarily leaving us witless about what a thing actually is. Sadly you and I have no greater insight into the interiority of things – the zone of interest that deals with what it is like to be – than did Alfonso The Slobberer back in the 1100s. This lack doesn’t stop us from having cars, flying to the moon, or replacing a person’s fluttering heart with another, but we do so while remaining ignorant of an abundance of foundational questions.
Once we cross into something’s interiority we are largely abandoned by the only credible light we’ve ever had, and so we lose sight of what lies in front of us. If I say that vanilla ice-cream is my favourite, all of your further understanding has to rely on my help (and it won’t be much) because we just don’t know how interiority works, let alone possess the ability for you to delve within mine.
This book, however, gives us that gift. And so perhaps necessarily, this book is also difficult, enigmatic and disorienting.
Difficult because it explores so many different subjects, and most people will find entire sections that are unfamiliar, exposing an unforeseen lack of expertise – something that was certainly the case for me. Pulling on a thread I would lose myself in bewildering places before finding my way forward, only for the pattern to repeat with the next.
Disorienting because this understanding is a threshold that lights our interior differently. This land has only ever benefited from a distant and faltering sun, one unable to evaporate our apparitions or illuminate our paths. When we look around, we’ve always been blind to where we are, what surrounds us, and how to find our way back home. Bob Dylan was asked if he could write his great songs anymore, and after a long pause, he grunted in the negative. “I don’t know how I got to write those songs… Those early songs were almost magically written.” These pages give us the vision to see and understand what’s been invisible all along.
But of course this book is full of thinking and systematising too. Personally I like it that way, and I imagine that my Uncle Frank’s ability to translate nature as easily as he’d open up and fix everything from cars to toasters all contributed to my love of making connections, of peering inside, of poking things with a muddy stick. In terms of living life, I think of understanding as being the same as the jazz musician’s scales. For me, the type of systematic understanding contained here is part of the wonder and magic.
The journey in these pages encompasses the external, but also concentrates on the internal: the journey that returns us to ourselves, the one that takes us home. This voyage isn’t all sweetness and light as our minds aren’t necessarily the safest places to be: monsters and witches and saints have killed far more people than lions and tigers and bears ever have.
The usual story is that we have a vulnerable inside, precariously dependent on an uncaring outside. This increases the value we place on prefabricated solutions, and so we might come to this book thinking ‘what will it do for me?’ But there’s a noticeable lack of prescriptive answers here because this is not a manual or a series of lessons to be memorised. It is instead a thorough description of what lies inside, as well as out.
The point isn’t to tell you how to write a song, but to help you hear it more easily. The aim isn’t to plan your life for you, but to help you feel it. The insights this new land has to offer are truly life and world-changing, but only because by orienting yourself within it, you will recognise yourself as a far larger, more connected, and more meaningful presence than before.
It’s said that to train a baby elephant, she should be left chained overnight to a huge spike that’s driven hard into the ground, because no matter how desperately she tries to escape, she can never uproot the spike and set herself free. If we fast forward in time, we’ll meet the same elephant but now as a gargantuan and towering adult who is still chained, though to what seems more like a tent peg. To free herself, she doesn’t need to know what to do, she just needs to understand who she is. In the same vein, this book isn’t overly concerned with what things do, but with what they are. The personalised answers that you’ll discover will come from having a new vision of yourself, and a new understanding that you are a type of thing that can, and must, construct its own direction.
What’s presented to you here is a unified theory of reality that encompasses utterly everything. I know that sounds impossible, but the framework that you’ll meet in these pages can be seen flowering into explanations for things as varied as consciousness, gravity, and causation. It does so using just one elegant mechanism: relationships combining to create new levels of organisation, with each level operating according to the same mechanism. In this way, I hope it brings the heart into moral partnership with the head.
The book is structured in four parts. The first, as Chapter One, utilises the Reality Stack without mentioning it. We meet Kitty Hart for the first time, and she will accompany us throughout the book, despite her challenging story. Here, she is the jumping-off point for an examination of moral complicity, and questions about truth, perspective, and the dystopian foundations of the modern world.
The second part, Chapters 2-4, builds the actual framework, starting with the nature of relationships (which I call the 3 Avatars: meaning, connection, and belonging), what they produce (an Envelope), and then how these Envelopes stack together to create the Reality Stack.
Next, the third part, Chapters 5-8, traces this mechanism through causation, quantum mechanics and general relativity, biology, and computing. The final part, Chapters 9-13, returns to the human: society, oppression, liberation, the mind, and enlightenment.
The chapters build on each other, and so I would suggest that if something doesn’t make sense, keep reading and let it wash over you, rather than slowing yourself down in order to catch a glimpse of the thing that I didn’t adequately point to.
The middle chapters are the load-bearing walls of the framework, and some chapters are harder than others – I’m looking at you, chapters four, six, and eight! Particularly if you’re not science-y, just aim to grasp the key concepts and metaphors, knowing that once you move past Chapter Eight, the hardest parts are over and that the most easily understood and transformative personal insights await.
The Reality Stack as a framework is based on the radical claim that things are not concrete objects that start here and end there, but a collection of relationships. Even the process of picking up or moving something changes it, and I grant that this seems counterintuitive, but if we take this idea and develop it, we’ll be given the ability to effortlessly explain a plethora of strange and confusing phenomena. To name just a few: what is language, why does evolution exist, how can we counter despots, why is the atomic world so strange, what is consciousness?
The power of the Reality Stack lies in how it understands these relationships to be simple and constrained. Without this, a world only composed of relationships will be a shimmering, mesmerising, kaleidoscope of constant change – one that’s too entwined and absurd for us to grasp. This framework gives us the ability to see past the wheels within wheels that play out around us as the buzzing confusion of life, to push past this hall of mirrors, and come to touch the serene process itself.
This possibility comes about by showing how these relationships are the same at every level and, crucially, how they are stacked on top of each other, with the product of any layer being the same in nature as the ingredients from which it was formed.
This startling insight of similarity would have us believe that the difference between a particle and a person is only where we find them in this Stack. Returning to the wheels within wheels analogy, we might say that to understand the whole construction all we need do is grasp what a wheel is and how they combine. This repetition means that every slice or layer of the Reality Stack looks the same, just as a continent’s edge does, whether from a satellite’s window or on a beach between our toes.
The Reality Stack starts with the subparts of atoms and ends with the cosmos and stars above our heads, and on the way includes everything in between. Mathematics, perception, self-consciousness, political oppression, personal transformation – all are shown in this book to emerge naturally from the same recursive pattern of relationship.
A framework that claims to explain everything should raise suspicions, because it might explain nothing through accommodating everything. That’s a fair concern, and one I’d encourage you to hold as you read, but as you do remember that the test within these pages comes from whether it’s possible for something with so few ingredients to create so many varied and known results.
This breadth means that any chapter might touch on a dizzying range of subjects – from the abstract (truth, objectivity, love) to the concrete (atoms, causation, gravity) to the personal (meaning, identity, freedom). Chapter One alone moves between questions of truth and subjectivity, justice and complicity, personal experience and historical horror. I’m not trying to lose you, it’s just that each example and dive into the weeds illustrates the same underlying pattern. I understand if this hectic series of jump cuts feels like a case of whiplash at first, but I promise that if you trust the process things will snap into focus.
My greatest wish is for you to reach the last five chapters, not only because they’re the least fussy part of the book, but because by then the framework effortlessly sings about what it means to be human, how we can always create new realities, and how we might counter the utter madness that currently surrounds us.
In some ways I’d have loved to place the last five chapters first, because in comparison to the early philosophising and complexity, they show the framework being applied to the immediate and practical questions of how to live, how to resist oppression, and how to find peace. The personal payoff is real and far reaching, the view breathtaking and astounding.
To help in getting there, I’ve included a summary at the end of chapters one through eight. Think of them like Ikea shortcuts – routes to the exit without walking the entire floor. Chapters four, six, and eight are particularly dense, and if you feel the same enthusiasm for physics and computing that I feel for cookware displays, flick to the summary and then skip ahead. If later insights give you the motivation, you can always circle back.
One final note: I’m not a professional philosopher, physicist, or psychologist. Instead, after a university degree in biochemistry, I became a professional freelance portrait photographer. This combination of scientist, artist, therapist, and feral cat, helped me because I came to this understanding by pulling on a loose thread that just so happened to be dangling in front of me – I was mesmerised by the idea that the inside of my head was completely dark, despite it being the location of all the sunshine I can see. It was like glimpsing some strange part of a majestic creature, shortly before the jungle closed back over, leaving me wondering what it was I’d just seen.
I imagine that things might be similar for you in reading this, and all of a sudden some random tiny thing makes sense. The Reality Stack framework has a habit of doing this, and once enough glimpses of it appear and combine, convincing you of its enduring presence, I hope you enjoy and utilise this brave new world that stretches before you.