Table of Contents
Preface
The Mind’s Stage
Processes, Not Things
An Inside, an Outside, and a Boundary
A Process’s Reality
Other Processes
Navigating the Internal Model
The Human Condition
A Brief Introduction to Natural Reality
Practicing Natural Reality
Frequently Asked Questions
Preface
In the fall of 2024, I was finishing a series of writings that would become The Abstractionist’s Papers when I asked myself:
Could the entire Natural Reality framework be told in ten minutes?
I still don’t know.
What I do know is that Glitches in Reality helped me find the clearest path through the material. It showed me which concepts were truly foundational: meaning and happening, the inside–outside–boundary, and paradox.
Glitches remains what it was meant to be all along, a brief introduction to Natural Reality. If you want a glimpse of what The Papers explores before committing to the full work, this book offers the essentials.
The Papers builds the framework from first principles. It uses diagrams, models, and examples from everyday life. Each chapter is arranged so that your understanding develops as you read.
Glitches also stands on its own. It’s a doorway that may satisfy your curiosity or invite you further into The Papers.
Let’s begin.
Luiz von Paumgartten
The Mind’s Stage
“A mind that is stretched by a new experience can never go back to its old dimensions.”
— Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.
You’re starting to question reality.
Perhaps you’ve always suspected there’s more going on than meets the eye. Is life a simulation? Are we living in parallel universes? What is consciousness? Does time exist? Maybe you watched The Matrix one too many times. Then you read about quantum mechanics, dark matter, the Big Bang, black holes, and now nothing makes sense.
Yet what’s been hiding in plain sight is far more basic:
You don’t see happening. You never have.
Everything you experience is meaning your mind creates.
Draw a line through all of existence. On the inside lies meaning, on the outside, happening. You participate in happening. You move, interact, affect things. But you only ever experience meaning.
What counts as meaning? A thought, a feeling, a dream, a pain. Meaning here has nothing to do with significance, purpose, or dictionary definitions. It’s everything you produce inside, whether you’re aware of it or not.
What counts as happening? Whatever exists outside and continues whether you describe it or not. The moment you describe it, you’ve made a meaning-based model you can think with. Even our most rigorous scientific descriptions work the same way.
Your mind has no direct access to what’s happening out there. What you see and hear are constructions built in response to signals.
Consider a coffee cup. Light reflecting from it reaches your eyes and travels through your nervous system as electrical signals. Your mind converts those signals into a visual image: the shape, the color, the steam. That image feels like the cup. In the causal world, the cup is something else: molecular processes, atomic interactions, none of which carry the image you perceive.
Two things exist here at once. One is your experience of a cup. The other is the happening that gives rise to it. They belong to different categories and never become each other.
Watch an apple fall. Light bounces off the apple and the tree and reaches your eyes. Those signals correspond to processes happening out there, and your mind builds the apple and the tree from them. But nothing bounces off “falling.” No signal carries the action itself. What you experience as the apple moving downward is a sequence of images your mind assembles. If you measure it, you get a sequence of data points. Neither the images nor the data is the happening.
Even gravity is something we invented to model the happening, and it came from the inside. Newton came up with an equation that works. If we could have seen happening all along, we wouldn’t have needed him to. We don’t see happening. We build models that help us work with it without ever knowing what it is.
The reverse holds too. Meaning isn’t in the happening. Hear a word in a language you don’t speak and nothing arrives with it. The pressure waves reach your ear the same way they reach a native speaker’s. The happening is identical. But inside, you have no way to make sense of it. Meaning didn’t come with the happening. You’ve always been supplying it from within, for everything, whether you noticed or not.
Mixing meaning and happening is a category error. Asking what color Wednesday is makes no sense because days and colors are different kinds of things. The same applies here. Treating interpretation as if it were the event creates unsolvable problems.
Humanity has never had a working theory of mind because of one unexamined assumption: that we perceive happening. When we believe our minds have direct access to causation, our own inside is commingled with an imagined outside.
The mind hides what it does. You feel as though you’re observing the external world, yet you’re only ever seeing your individual mind’s own stage.
Processes, Not Things
“Look deep into nature, and then you will understand everything better.”
— Albert Einstein
At first, the universe seems made of things.
A tree stands tall, a rock sits solid, a river flows by.
But the rock that looks permanent is eroding. Geological forces work on it constantly. Wind, water, and temperature swings break it down grain by grain. Today’s rock is one moment in millions of years of transformation.
The river alters the land as it flows, moving soil and rock, carving new channels. Tomorrow’s river will follow a slightly different path because it has changed its landscape.
The tree grows, converts sunlight into sugar, exchanges gases with the air, drops leaves that enrich the soil. Eventually it will decay and feed other organisms.
Each example shows the same principle. What appears solid and separate is formed through countless interactions.
Electrons jump between energy levels. Atoms vibrate and bond. Heat flows through everything while pressure builds and releases. The rock connects to its environment through rain washing away minerals, roots that split its cracks open wider, lichen slowly consuming its surface. The river exists through glaciers melting upstream, clouds forming overhead, aquifers filling below.
Everything participates in everything else, and nothing stands apart.
We rarely see this vast web. Our minds turn the flow of change into manageable concepts such as rock, river, and tree. We need these labels to make decisions, communicate, and move through the world, but they create an expectation of separation with no basis in happening.
Instruments let us measure more, but measurements remain interpretations. Despite all our advancements, we still only know one thing: change is all there is.
The rock’s dissolution happens whether any of us observes it or not. “Rock” is the meaning we create when we encounter that process. We see a solid object (meaning). What’s going on is change (happening).
The universe is made of processes. A “thing” is a snapshot of a process.
Once you recognize processes instead of things, the interactions are everywhere. The boundaries we draw are meanings our minds create, useful for thought but not features of happening.
An Inside, an Outside, and a Boundary
Every natural process has three parts: an inside, an outside, and a boundary. An electron has them. So does an atom, a molecule, a cell, an organism.
The red region is the inside, where meaning lives. The blue region is the outside, where happening occurs. Between them lies the yellow boundary that separates the two.
Take a biological cell. We often describe the membrane as its boundary, yet the real boundary lives in the interaction between inside and outside. Beyond the boundary, in the Blue Space, molecules collide, temperatures change, and reactions occur. These are happenings.
Inside, the cell generates its responses. When the outside changes, the boundary induces activity in the cell’s Red Space. The cell experiences meaning built entirely from inside.
The boundary functions as a transformer.
Outside happenings induce meaning inside. When behavior follows, the boundary induces new happenings in the world beyond.
For us, light reaching the retina, pressure waves reaching the ear, and molecules reaching receptors all become electromagnetic activity carried to the brain. The brain transforms that activity into meaning. When you decide to move, your brain sends electromagnetic signals that drive motor action. Perception flows inward, action flows outward.
Happening induces meaning, and meaning induces happening. They remain independent. Every process builds an internal model that works from its meaning alone. This indirect knowledge still lets the process operate effectively in a world it can’t see.
A Process’s Reality
From any observer’s point of view, its internal model is all there is. The model creates a workable version of reality to act within. To the observer, that inner reality feels external even though it isn’t.
Every natural process wears a blindfold. The interpretation happening inside feels like direct contact with the outside, so the boundary is never in view. You don’t experience your model. You experience through it, and you take what you experience for the external world.
Each process builds a universe from what it detects. A mushroom responds to chemical signals and moisture. A planet responds to gravity and electromagnetic forces. A moth’s antennae detect a narrow range of chemicals compared to all that exist. A compass needle aligns with magnetic fields, one type of force among many. Each engages with some happenings and not others.
These models have parts that work together: one produces what the process perceives, one predicts what should come next, one compares the two, and one sets the orientation. When they don’t match, adjustments follow.
Natural processes operate from within their respective constructed realities yet participate in one shared happening. Meaning is inside. Action is outside. They remain separate, connected through the boundary.
Other Processes
No process exists alone. Each moves through a world already alive with other processes.
As their actions meet, the effects of one create conditions for another. What we experience as resistance or obstacles are other processes stumbling through their own blindfolded realities.
Every natural process has its own Red Space, here labeled Inside A, Inside B, and so on. These Red Spaces connect only through the outside, the shared Blue Space that serves as the medium of happening.
Although a Red Space remains blindfolded by its own boundary, the meaning it contains induces happening in the Blue Space that reaches and influences others indirectly.
Meaning never transfers. There’s no “red medium” between minds. One acts, and that action creates conditions that another interprets inside its own Red Space, from scratch.
When people communicate, it feels as though ideas pass between them. In fact, what occurs are movement, pressure waves, and light in the Blue Space. These signals carry no meaning. Each person interprets those signals in their own way, creating meaning privately within their respective internal models.
Both participants respond internally to what the other does, yet neither ever reaches the other’s inner world. What feels like shared understanding is a functional approximation that works well enough for interaction to continue.
A person walks past without making eye contact. One observer interprets rejection. Another assumes they’re lost in thought. A third barely notices. Same event, three different meanings.
These interpretations don’t always reflect a process’s choice. Every process operates within conditions it didn’t choose, responding to forces beyond its control. This creates an imbalance. Outside conditions, including encounters with other processes, tune most of any process’s internal model.
Navigating the Internal Model
“The map is not the territory.”
— Alfred Korzybski
Every natural process relies on its internal model within its environment. This model is a map. In Natural Reality, the map represents meaning while the territory represents happening.
The idea that the map is not the territory is familiar. Natural Reality goes further: the map and the territory belong to different categories of existence.
The outside world doesn’t dictate how a process interprets it. Ten people can witness the same event and form ten different meanings. Each builds its version based on what it detects and how it organizes information. It only needs to work; accuracy and completeness are secondary.
Every internal model has four parts working together:
- Interpretation produces what the process perceives.
- Expectation predicts what should come next.
- Logic compares the two and notices the gap.
- Perspective sets the orientation, determining how the logic applies and what matters.
Interpretation and expectation pull against each other constantly. The mismatch between them is what the model is built to detect. These mismatches are paradoxes: any discrepancy between what you interpret and what you expect, any conflict within your internal experience.
Paradox is the ordinary condition of a mind at work.
A glitch is a paradox you notice.
You reach for a cup and your hand moves slightly too far. What you see doesn’t match what you predicted. The mismatch registers, your hand corrects, and the paradox resolves. Every sensation, belief, and movement involves this same cycle of comparison and resolution.
Most paradoxes resolve instantly, behind the scenes.
Some take longer.
You flip a light switch and the room stays dark when it should brighten. You look for explanations. Is the bulb burned out? Did a breaker trip? Each idea gets tested. When you find the cause, your expectation updates and the gap closes.
Other paradoxes resist resolution because emotion and attachment play a role.
A husband expects that working harder will strengthen his marriage. He takes more hours, provides more security, and manages more responsibilities. Yet his wife grows more distant. The gap persists. He can’t reconcile it because the belief touches his sense of fairness, his understanding of love, and his framework for relationships. He keeps generating the same expectation despite contradicting interpretations. Questioning it never occurs to him. He hasn’t understood that providing and connecting are different worlds.
Like a needle caught on a record, the same pattern repeats. New experiences don’t update anything, and the same interpretations keep returning despite the contradictions.
When paradoxes persist without resolution, they accumulate. Once the cost of holding the contradiction exceeds the cost of reorganizing, the model reorganizes and gives the process a new perspective. The paradox resolves.
The same dynamic operates throughout nature. Every natural process compares interpretation with expectation and encounters mismatches. These mismatches drive learning and emergence.
Life feels hard because you’re constantly comparing what you interpret with what you expect, detecting mismatches, trying to close them. Usually, your model works well enough. But when it doesn’t, when the same mismatch keeps returning, you feel stuck.
Paradoxes don’t announce themselves. You feel the dissonance, the sense that something’s off.
The Human Condition
Some paradoxes define what it’s like to be human.
Loneliness is the first. Other minds never arrive inside your Red Space. The people closest to you sit on the other side of a boundary you can’t cross. You share the Blue Space with them, but their inner world never shows up in yours. What you engage with is always your interpretation of them, not them. No amount of company changes this. The mind expects that what looks shared will feel shared. Yet feeling alone isn’t the same as being separate.
Anxiety is the mind trying to close a future it can’t see. It runs scenarios against a need for certainty that no model can supply, and the running never stops. Depression works the other way around. It compares what already happened, or what can’t be changed, with what was hoped for. When the mind can’t find a way from where it is to where it wants to be, the energy that would go into action gets absorbed by the comparison itself.
Controlling behavior tries to make events match an internal story. Every deviation from the script feels like a problem that needs fixing. Chronic criticism is the mind doing what it does best, finding mismatches, never resting. When you take those judgments as truth rather than as the mind doing its job, every flaw hardens into contempt.
On the surface these feel like different problems. They aren’t. Each one is the mind trying to reconcile a paradox, a distance it can’t close, using the same logic that opened the distance to begin with. Loneliness tries to reach another Red Space. Anxiety reaches into the future. Depression reaches into the past. Control and criticism try to force the world to match what’s inside.
The mechanism is the same, and these are features of how minds work. When we don’t understand this, we feel like something’s wrong with us. Once we see these as a mind doing what minds do, they stop feeling like defects.
The husband from before believed that working harder would strengthen his marriage. He could continue that way for years, gathering frustration. Or his model could reorganize. He might see that work and love follow different kinds of rules. Money buys better vacations or gifts, but it doesn’t buy connection. The activities that sustain a household don’t sustain intimacy. Once he sees these as separate worlds that influence each other without controlling each other, his whole framework for relationships changes.
When a contradiction won’t resolve inside the old model, the model has two options. Keep carrying the contradiction, which costs energy every day. Or reorganize, which costs something up front but ends the daily drain. Minds reorganize when the daily cost exceeds the price of rebuilding.
So does every other natural process. Every new level of existence arrived this way, through contradictions at the previous level that forced a change in the status quo.
A Brief Introduction to Natural Reality
Natural Reality is a map that describes reality across two distinct domains of existence: a Causation Domain represented by the Blue Space and an Interpretative Domain represented by Red Spaces.
Each natural process has an inside, an outside, and a boundary. The inside is a Red Space where meaning lives. These Red Spaces run parallel to one another, unable to touch, and connect only through the Blue Space, the shared domain where happening occurs.
Red Spaces collectively form the Interpretative Domain, where natural processes build internal representations of the outside. Each process uses its internal world to operate within its surroundings and create meaning.
The Blue Space is the Causation Domain, where happening occurs without interpretation. Everything takes place here, but no individual process experiences it.
Causation carries happening, while interpretation produces meaning.
These domains are orthogonal, like lines that meet at a point but extend in different directions. Though independent, they constantly influence each other through induction.
The induction happens through light. Light is the boundary between causation and interpretation.
A process acts in the Blue Space, producing changes that induce new meaning in other processes’ Red Spaces. Those processes act in response, generating new patterns in the Blue Space as the cycle continues.
Each process remains blindfolded, engaging the outside world only through its interpretations. From within your Red Space, other Red Spaces remain invisible. You can’t see that others are building unique meanings from a common happening.
Different processes interpret the same events differently, though all share what happens in the Blue Space. What it means varies by interpreter. A rainstorm is one causal event, water molecules moving through space. To a farmer it means salvation. To a wedding party it means disappointment. To a frog it means opportunity. Each creates a different meaning from the same happening.
When processes communicate, it feels direct, but meaning stays within individual internal worlds. Your words create pressure waves in the Blue Space carrying no inherent meaning. The listener forms their understanding from those signals, which may differ completely from what you intended.
This separation between the domains also resolves long-standing paradoxes.
Consider what physicists call a “photon.” There’s no such thing as a light particle. What you detect is how a process responds when electromagnetic propagation reaches it.
When an electron changes state, when a detector clicks, when a reaction occurs in your eye, you’re observing that process’s behavior, not light itself. Each response is discrete. The photon is your interpretation of those discrete responses. Wave behavior and particle behavior come from the same continuous propagation, interpreted through different kinds of measurement.
That’s how orthogonality solves wave-particle duality.
To see how the domains work together more broadly, imagine a turntable with multiple needles.
The turntable and record together represent the Blue Space, the continuous world of happening. Each needle, representing a Red Space, traces the same grooves yet registers different vibrations based on its properties. Each interprets the same physical pattern differently.
In Natural Reality, the record has no beginning or end. It turns counterclockwise with the needles moving outward from the center, and each loop represents a line of reasoning.
Each time the needle moves outward, the loop spirals. That’s what learning looks like from inside, even though we never see causation. Our best models mirror the causal world closely enough to let us work with it. When the needle repeats, something inside reorganizes. The record keeps turning either way.
Practicing Natural Reality
“Happy is the man who has been able to learn the causes of things.”
— Virgil
When we don’t understand how reality works, we tangle ourselves in problems we can’t unravel. We make life harder than it needs to be.
Natural Reality cuts through some of that confusion.
Seeing the distinction between causation and interpretation lets us work with the mechanics of the world instead of our projections. We learn which responses are automatic interpretations and which are genuine choices.
With practice, we see the boundaries of our influence. Some things we control entirely, others not at all, and most fall somewhere between. The paradoxes of the human condition are more manageable once we understand them as natural features of how minds operate. Our reactions change as we learn to choose our responses.
This is what we’re working with:
Events in the Causation Domain reach your boundary and induce reactions inside your Red Space. You never respond to the event. You can only respond to your reaction to it. The reaction feels like the event itself, which is why the distinction disappears.
Your response goes the other way. You produce an action that sends something back into the Blue Space, but what actually happens out there, you never see. You only know your interpretation of what you did. The blindfold covers both ends.
A space exists between reaction and response, and that’s where agency lives. Practicing Natural Reality means learning to recognize that space, moment to moment, and use it.
Not being able to tell happening from meaning keeps life smaller than it could be. We chase what we want directly. When reality doesn’t cooperate, we think something’s wrong with us or the world is rigged against us.
What we want lives in our Red Spaces as meaning. How we get there happens in the Blue Space through causation. The action that produces any outcome usually looks nothing like that outcome. Chasing butterflies doesn’t get us butterflies. Planting flowers does.
We create conditions that make what we want first available, then likely, then real.
Once we realize that we experience only our interpretation of another person and never the person, we get curious about who they are. We offer them the benefit of the doubt because what we see is a construction of our making.
We make space for otherness. And for ourselves, too.
Start now.
Frequently Asked Questions
1. What is the central thesis of Glitches in Reality?
Our experience of reality is not a direct perception of the world but an interpretation created within our minds. The book distinguishes between the hidden world of happening and the experienced world of meaning. “Glitches” are moments where the misalignment between these two worlds is apparent, revealing paradoxes within our internal models. Glitches explains how this applies to all natural processes and paradoxes drive emergence.
2. What is the difference between happening and meaning?
Happening refers to the occurrence of events in the external world, independent of any interpreter. It is the domain of causation. No one has ever seen or experienced happening.
Meaning is the internal interpretation that a natural process (like a human being) creates, much of it in response to signals from the world of happening. Everything we perceive (images, sounds, touch, objects) is meaning, not happening.
3. If “things” aren’t real, what is a rock or a tree?
The universe is made of processes, not things. A “thing” is a concept, a label we use to make sense of and manage the flow of change. A rock is a snapshot of a million-year process of geological transformation, erosion, and interaction. A tree is a process of growth, photosynthesis, and decay. The labels “rock” and “tree” are meanings we create, but the underlying reality is one of constant interaction and transformation.
4. How can processes interact if their internal worlds (Red Spaces) never touch?
Processes interact indirectly through a process of induction via the shared external world of happening (the Blue Space). One process’s action is a happening in the outside world. This happening can then induce a response at the boundary of another process, which in turn creates a new meaning inside it. Communication, for example, does not involve the transfer of meaning. Words and gestures are external happenings that a listener interprets through their private, internal model.
5. What is an internal model and how does it work?
An internal model is the functional version of reality that every natural process constructs to work within its environment. It is the “map,” while happening is the “territory.” The model operates entirely with its meaning and is composed of four interacting parts. Interpretation produces what the process perceives. Expectation predicts what should come next. Logic compares the two and notices the difference. Perspective sets the orientation, determining how the logic applies and what matters
6. What is a paradox and why is it so important in this framework?
A paradox is a conflict that forms inside an internal model when its existing logic cannot resolve new information it encounters. It is a mismatch between what the model interprets and what it expects. Paradoxes are important because they drive change and emergence. When contradictions accumulate, they create pressure that forces the model to reorganize. Emergence happens when maintaining the contradiction costs more than rebuilding.
7. What is Natural Reality?
Natural Reality is the framework that describes the world across two distinct but interacting domains:
- The Causation Domain: The realm of happening, where events occur independently of interpretation. It is visualized as the Blue Space.
- The Interpretative Domain: The realm of meaning, where individual natural processes form their internal representations of the world. It is visualized as a series of parallel Red Spaces.
These two domains are orthogonal. They are independent and of a different nature but constantly influence each other.
8. What does it mean to practice Natural Reality?
Practicing Natural Reality means recognizing the distinction between happening (causation) and meaning (interpretation). You learn that you operate from within your internal model (the “blindfold”) and what you see are interpretations, not external reality. This awareness lets you identify when your model is stuck in a repetitive loop (a paradox) and deliberately nudge the needle forward. The practice helps you make better choices, work more purposefully, and hold space for otherness, recognizing that everyone operates from their separate Red Space.
9. What is the relationship between Glitches in Reality and The Abstractionist’s Papers?
Glitches in Reality is a condensed, accessible introduction to the Natural Reality framework. It finds the clearest path through the material and focuses on the foundational concepts. The Abstractionist’s Papers is the full, comprehensive work that explores these concepts in much greater detail, with additional diagrams, formal mathematics, and extensive development of each idea. Glitches can either satisfy a reader’s curiosity or serve as a doorway to The Papers.
10. How does Natural Reality handle light and wave–particle duality?
Light propagates continuously at the boundary between causation and interpretation. We never detect light itself; we detect how processes respond to it. When responses are discrete, we call them photons. When propagation continues without discrete measurement, we observe wave behavior. Both arise from the same continuous electromagnetic propagation.
