Preface

Introduction
Nimbin’s Paradox
A False Start
Out Come the Crayons
Emergence of a First Principle
The Problem with Materialism
Why You Don’t Go Back
The Eddy Network
No Way Out
Conclusion

Epilogue: Abstraction Under Pressure

Appendix A: The (Un)Happiness Letter
Appendix B: A General Theory of Reality
Appendix C: On the Human Condition

Preface

The Abstractionist’s Papers tells you how Natural Reality works. It’s a map built for understanding reality and what it means for how we live.

This book tells you where it came from.

A year after publishing The Papers, readers kept asking the same question: how could something like this come from a patent attorney?

I wrote The Only Show in Town to answer it. It’s a book about how Natural Reality emerged and how the character I invented 8 years prior became real in 2025.

We’ll assume some familiarity with Natural Reality, but we also provide basic explanations along the way. Enough for readers discovering this material for the first time to follow the story.

Welcome to the Blue Space.

Luiz von Paumgartten, The Abstractionist

PS. If you haven’t read The Papers, feel free to check out Glitches in Reality, the 10-minute version.

Introduction

My search for Natural Reality began in December 2017 with a letter to my children about happiness. Two days later, another letter trying to formalize some early ideas about reality, many of which were dead ends.

Three months after that, letters became papers and crayons appeared. Blue for the physical world. Red for human reality. The visual system worked. The original documents are in the appendices.

In the Fall of 2018, I wrote a story titled Nimbin and The Abstractionist. The Abstractionist was a character who could take a model and show how it worked from the inside and outside at once.

By spring 2019, I was writing explanations for how he did that. The lab notebook years began. Crayons on every page. Years of notes that became blog post after blog post. What started as explanations for a story turned into a functional description of how reality works.

In 2023, I published Principles of Natural Reality only to take it down because I had misidentified what I’d built. I’d presented it as a theory of everything, but it wasn’t a theory. It was a map.

By early 2024, the framework was finished. I released The Intact and the Flightless. The Abstractionist’s Papers came out in February 2025.

Ten months after The Papers, I went on the No Way Out podcast with Mark McGrath and Brian Rivera, two practitioners who teach John Boyd’s OODA loop to military strategists. We spent hours exploring how Natural Reality applied to what they do.

In that conversation, the character I created in 2018 came to life.

If this book shows you nothing else, take this: All good things come from work.

Nimbin’s Paradox

In December 2017, I wrote a letter to my children from Australia.

They were still very young. The letter was for the people they would become. It addressed a future I could imagine, speaking to them as if they were sitting right beside me in an ever-present now.

I was trying to explain happiness, but I couldn’t. I sidestepped the problem instead, turning to unhappiness to see things from another side.

The letter read:

“I returned to Nimbin Valley to write this letter. Earlier this year I had the idea to write an essay about happiness. My goal was simply to teach you how to be… HAPPY.

Well, it turns out that happiness is hard. There is no common thread, no single formula that can teach a human being how to be happy. To make matters worse, the more I thought about happiness, the more I realized that I didn’t even know what that meant, either.

So I eventually decided to leave happiness alone.

Instead, I chose to write about unhappiness.”

What came next was a model:

“The unhappiness potential of an experience, to a person, is directly proportional to the difference between that person’s expectation (E) of that experience, and the outcome (O) that corresponds to that expectation. In other terms:

Unhappiness Potential ∝ (E – O)

This model gives a qualitative indication of how negatively an experience may potentially be perceived by a person.

To reduce unhappiness, one must reconcile E with O.

Reconciliation can be done by changing E at an emotional cost, changing O at an energy cost, or, in practice, by doing a combination of both.

There is no other way.

Without reconciling E with O, the experience becomes a weight you choose to carry.”

The letter stopped short of identifying attachment to expectation as the emotional cost, or action as the energy cost.

I thought I was finished.

But the letter uncovered a paradox:

“At some point I realized that the ‘unhappiness-as-a-road-to-happiness’ approach had some problems: How would YOU reconcile YOUR OWN Es and Os without perspective, if YOU cannot have perspective, without first having had to reconcile YOUR OWN Es and Os? And how could YOU possibly ‘choose’ the weight YOU ‘want’ to carry? I was stuck, again.”

This was the old chicken-and-egg riddle. You need perspective to reconcile expectations with outcomes. You get perspective from reconciling expectations with outcomes. Which comes first? The circularity was irreconcilable because the loop requires what it produces.

The letter ended with a promise:

“GOOD NEWS FROM NIMBIN!

I believe I may have found answers to all these questions.

My General Theory of Reality will give you an understanding of how every environment works, and it serves as a guide for the amelioration of the human condition. (It also reconciles quantum physics with relativity using the Principle of Causation Incoherence.)

I’m coming home to share this with you.

Love,

/Dad.”

I had a method and a paradox. The method was useful. When you can’t define the what, work with the how. But it was the paradox that would drive me forward.

I also had a primitive concept of Incoherence. A month earlier, during a Continuing Legal Education class in Texas, I’d written on a napkin: “causation coherence changes logic.”

That distracted sketch would matter more than I knew.

Two days later, I tried.

A False Start

“A General Theory of Reality” came at the end of 2017. The letter explained some ideas I’d been accumulating over a lifetime, long before I had a clue I’d ever write them down.

I wasn’t well versed in philosophy or science or religion. My whole life I worked with inventions, but nothing quite like this. I only had some initial instincts and the tools I learned in my professional career as a patent attorney.

This turned out to be an advantage.

It all started with a question: “Why doesn’t human experience match physical reality?”

The results were mixed. The observation about physical and abstract layers of reality was interesting. The way I described how those layers connected through a “causation function” was mostly hand waving, but you can see what I was reaching for.

The board game “Game of Life” was a good illustration:

“In this example, the board game environment is an overlying reality supported by an underlying, human reality. In the board game reality, players move tokens across the board, and each square on the board has an equivalent human reality experience… The human experience of obtaining a college degree, for instance, is much richer than its counterpart board game experience: in human reality, the college experience may involve traveling to and from school every day, attending dozens of lectures, passing a number of examinations, and so on, for several years. In contrast, to get a college education in the board game, a player simply spins a wheel and moves a plastic token to the ‘college’ square.”

Then the suitcase realization:

“With respect to abstractions, consider a scenario where a first person is sitting on a bench with a suitcase by his side. A second person passes by, picks up the suitcase and moves along entirely unnoticed by the first person: (A) if the suitcase belongs to the first person, it may be said that the second person stole it; (B) if the suitcase belonged to the second person all along, it may be said that the second person retrieved it. In both scenarios, the exact same physical event takes place, atom-for-atom. That is, human concepts of property, stealing, etc. have no physical counterpart.”

The conclusion was sound:

“Operation: Experiences in an overlying reality can be wholly distinct from experiences that take place in its underlying reality during their concurrent operation.”

In the board game, overlying was the game and underlying was the human reality supporting it. I was drawing shared thought bubbles between people.

I tried to show the layering more explicitly in a diagram with a physical layer at the bottom and individual human realities at the top. But between them, I needed a bridge. “Approximation” seemed like a reasonable placeholder.

I couldn’t see orthogonality or parallelism. These were just layers stacked on top of each other, and such distinctions were still months away.

I added a “Unifying Law.” The figure showed interaction and variation feeding into selection and accumulation. This would later become General Selection.

“In operation, human reality collects sensory information and generates abstractions based upon approximations. In human reality, there is a dynamic exchange of abstractions between individuals (and groups of individuals), such that, over time, more effective abstractions modify or replace other, less effective abstractions.”

The bit about abstractions replacing each other was right, but the idea that “meaning doesn’t transfer between minds” was missing. They were exchanging meaning directly.

Then came the part where I tried to reconcile quantum physics with relativity. The causation section was my attempt:

“In the physical layer, however, the link that glues the unifying law together and therefore ensures its operation is a relationship between cause and effect, or causation.”

I was thinking about happening.

In the board game, what links events is the spinning wheel. In human reality, what links experiences is time. In the physical layer, what links events is causation. Each context had its own mechanism.

I wrote:

“More fundamentally, in the physical layer, a causation function appears linear or ‘flat’ as in the Earth is flat, or ‘fundamental’ in the Newtonian environment. The causation function explains the concurrent operation of these environments by using a variable relationship between cause and effect that presents causation incoherence; both in phase and magnitude, as a function of mass.”

The notion that “causation” varies across scales felt new.

I was trying to express a distinction between what makes things go in different realities, but I had naively started from the physical world, atoms, mass, Newtonian mechanics.

This assumption pretty much guarantees failure because the physical world is an interpretation. It doesn’t contain happening.

The letter closed:

“Our sense of reality is human only. Human reality is based upon our own interpretation of an underlying, physical reality that exists independently of us; our abstractions are naïve, deceptive, or wrong. To appreciate the state of things as they are, the human condition must be abandoned, if only temporarily.”

I was looking for a perspective that wasn’t bound to the human experience.

The letter posed good questions, but there was no way to answer them. Every problem it identified became years of work. Many of the concepts which eventually resulted in Natural Reality were seeded here, but much of it was wrong.

Back then I knew the room was still dark, but I had no idea how dark. I couldn’t see what I was missing, and I couldn’t see what I didn’t know I was missing.

One month later, I tried again with a more colorful approach.

Out Come the Crayons

I wrote “On the Human Condition” in March 2018. By then, the format had changed. This was the third thing I’d sent the kids in four months. Somewhere along the way, letters turned to papers.

By then, my youngest son had just turned two. The house was full of crayons. So this paper did something the earlier ones didn’t. It introduced color.

Blue for Physical Fabric. Red for Human Reality. The visual distinction appeared months before the framework had proper names for these domains.

The paper opened:

“All matter shares a common Physical Fabric (PHY). Human Reality (HR), however, is abstract.”

I was still treating the physical world as fundamental.

The paper continued:

“Human beings experience a grossly simplified version of everything around us, including ourselves. To create an individual HRi, our biology uses sensory approximations and minimalist representations of PHY entities and processes.”

I was referring to perception as a simplification or approximation of a physical outside, a problem that runs through everything.

The paper identified Incoherence:

“Vertical incoherence occurs due to approximations and weak dependencies between HR and PHY, such that abstractions in HR do not match corresponding physical entities and processes in PHY:”

Two examples followed.

Life:

“Two already-living cells, a sperm and an egg, interact in space and time, performing a transformation of matter that results in a child. In HR, life begins here. In PHY, however, no new life is created.”

The cells interact and transform matter. In human reality, a new life is born. Same event, different meaning.

Death:

“In HR, flowers are alive while they appear natural, and dead or dying when they lose color or fall apart. In PHY, however, only decay goes on.”

The diagram showed HR versus PHY across days. Your mind marks transitions: alive, dead, dying. The process is simply continuous decay. Yet the meaning you assign changes at arbitrary points.

The paper also addressed the concept of dissonance as “horizontal incoherence”:

“Horizontal incoherence occurs when abstractions in HRi do not match corresponding abstractions in HRi+1:”

Because PHY is shared, and because sensory signals respond to the same causation, people assume they must share HR too. That everyone’s interpretation is just a perspective on one shared world.

The paper corrected this:

“In reality, however, each HRi is an isolated abstract environment, vertically and horizontally accessible exclusively through their discrete physical entities in PHY.”

The mathematical notation was everywhere: HRi, PHY, HRi+1, Δ.

This was an effort to pin down distinctions I could feel but couldn’t articulate. I thought there was a delta between HR and PHY, as if they were two different types of things.

Little did I know, the real Incoherence was somewhere else entirely.

My takeaway was that colors worked better than language. Crayons don’t pretend to explain themselves the way words do. They just show.

By the end of the paper, blue stick figures had their heads inside their respective Red Spaces. One of them was pushing it away from himself, creating distance, trying to separate himself from his own interpretations.

That stick figure was me.

Emergence of a First Principle

The kids were too young to understand what I was doing.

So I wrote them a story.

The Baroness commissioned a toy maker to build a model of the world for her son. The toy maker created it with puppets. The Baroness demanded the puppets be made to act like real people. The toy maker called in the Abstractionist, who made them function that way.

When Nimbin entered the model, he didn’t come back. The Baroness put on Opera Glasses the Abstractionist gave her. The model lit up blue. She found Nimbin comforting a weeping puppet trapped under a translucent red veil floating above his head.

The Abstractionist explained what he’d built into the model to make the puppets human. Two parallel layers. A shared Blue Space at the bottom where all things exist as they are. Individual Red Spaces above, one for each puppet, where each one lived in meaning they created alone.

Nimbin saw improvements everywhere in the Blue Space. Longer, safer, healthier, better lives. But the puppets in their red veils remained dissatisfied. Therein lay a gap. That “incoherence” was what made them human.

Nimbin gave the Opera Glasses to the weeping puppet and asked him to pass them on. The puppet who received them learned to see the Blue Space and became the Puppet King.

Nimbin and the Abstractionist raised every question but answered none.

How exactly do red and blue relate? What separates them? The Puppet King could see both, but the story never explained how. It just showed it.

After that, I started publishing explanations online. The Toy Maker’s Model and how it operated. The puppets and their red veils. The Opera Glasses and their purpose. What it meant to escape.

Everything was there in the story, but I had to extract it, expand it, explain it, and hopefully test it. A lab notebook was where I developed the thinking. The blog posts came from that.

At some point I took a step back. The letters, the papers, the story, the notebook, the dozens of blog posts. It was all one process, one sustained engagement with a problem that wasn’t just about a fable anymore. It was about reality.

I eventually published a book called Principles of Natural Reality.

But soon after I realized I hadn’t figured out the proper scope of light as the connector between red and blue. I took the book out of print, and I briefly gave up on the entire project.

But work was impossible to avoid. I was like Thomas Edison looking for the right filament. He already knew how to build the bulb. He had all the pieces. What he needed was the one element that would make it work, the part that would glow without burning out.

What I needed was a proper boundary. The connection that would make the whole thing function without overstepping itself.

The role of light finally fell into place when I acknowledged Natural Reality wasn’t a theory of everything, but rather a map of how reality works. It followed the same approach from my first letter. If you don’t know what something is, figure out how it works, and sometimes that’s even better.

By then, I knew the map worked. Natural processes, each with an inside, an outside, and a boundary.

To celebrate, in 2024, I wrote The Intact and the Flightless. A bird born with giant wings, hiding from the Flightless who always clipped everybody’s wings. The Intact kept his and learned to fly. The yellow triangle at the center of the story represented his discoveries.

Wings are whatever trait or gift makes you who you are. Whatever you’re born with that the world wants to clip away. In my case, wings represented neurodivergence. It was thanks to the power of distraction that the Napkin Sketch was conceived.

I realized I had to turn this material into a book and started expanding my blog posts to long form articles. For a full calendar year, every day at 3:00AM, I wrote. At some point I had enough to fill three or four books, or so I thought. I didn’t know which direction to go.

Glitches in Reality was my way of finding out. Eight years of work compressed into ten minutes. It proved the material could work as one piece. I organized the articles to explain the framework recursively, emergently.

The Abstractionist’s Papers went live in February 2025.

It felt like I had accomplished my mission. I had delivered Natural Reality. But revisions continued for ten months after publication. Some based on feedback, others on my own realizations.

When the pace of editing slowed down, I went back to Glitches.

The second time through, with everything I’d learned from writing The Papers, I tore it apart and rebuilt it. All complication fell away.

Meaning and happening arose as everyday words where I’d needed technical language before. So I returned to The Papers and reworked a few chapters.

But this time, it felt like that was it. The pass thrown in 2017 was caught.

Whether anyone cares is another matter.

That meaning and happening are orthogonal makes Natural Reality a multigenerational project. Euler worked with imaginary numbers in the 1700s, the square root of minus one, something you cannot see or touch. It took Legendre and Chebyshev and mathematicians the entire nineteenth century to accept it.

So why do I still work on this project now that my children are grown?

Because of oneness and otherness.

The Problem with Materialism

I spent the entire first year of this project treating the physical world as the place where happening occurs.

Once I separated them, the problem with that became obvious. When you hold the physical world as containing happening, you mix your interpretation of what’s happening with the actual happening.

You lose the distinction between what happens and what it means. There’s no separation between the meaning you produce and the causation that underlies it. One bleeds into the other.

This is a category error, and it creates problems that cascade through everything. The indirectness of causation stays hidden. Emergence becomes invisible. Science circles the same paradoxes without resolving them. You miss the possibility of otherness and the recognition of oneness.

You never perceive happening.

You build meaning from signals that reach you. When you think you’re perceiving happening through the physical world, you project your own inside upon an imagined outside. You miss the orthogonal dimension where change operates. All that remains invisible when you’ve collapsed two distinct types of things into one.

Understanding emergence requires seeing a dimension you cannot access when you live in a flat world of interpretation. When you look at change from above, viewing only the interpretative plane, the loop of General Selection appears circular and flat. When you account for orthogonality, you make room for spirals. Without it, emergent complexity remains a mystery. You cannot explain how novelty arises or how combined parts create capabilities that none of the parts had alone.

Science has always struggled with paradox because it starts from the unexamined assumption that the physical world is where happening lives. Wave-particle duality shows light propagates as a wave. When an electron receives that influence, it responds to it. We measure that response, a discrete energy jump. We attribute the response to a particle and call it a photon, confusing our interpretation with the happening.

We then build elaborate frameworks trying to resolve these contradictions. But the contradictions exist because we’re working from the wrong premise. If we understood that the physical world is interpretation, that causation operates through dimensions we cannot perceive, those paradoxes would dissolve.

Materialism is highly effective for dealing with immediate interactions. You see wet pavement and assume rain. You watch a car accelerate and you move. A fever breaks and you know the infection is responding. It’s so effective at the short scale that we never feel the cost of missing the long scale.

Yet the cost is real and personal.

Materialism prevents us from holding space for otherness and oneness. When we assume the physical world contains happening, there’s no distinction between meaning and happening, and we can’t fully appreciate the parallelism between minds or recognize the shared Blue Space where all those separate minds participate.

All our lives we think we’re dealing with other people, but we’ve always only been handling our own interpretations of them, without any way to account for who they are.

There’s nothing to hold space for because we don’t know where the boundary between minds lies.

We trade away the possibility of otherness entirely. We can live our entire lives stuck in a place where we can’t see that every mind around us is in the same condition we are. You also lose recognition of your participation in the one happening all minds share, where your influence continues whether you see it or not.

That’s where loneliness lives.

Why You Don’t Go Back

Throughout this project, I kept repeating the same thing: once you begin practicing Natural Reality, you don’t go back. Here’s why.

The old way appeared seamless. When you spoke, meaning seemed to leave you and enter someone else. Disagreement was seen as error or malice, because everyone appeared to be standing in the same place looking at the same thing.

You explained carefully. You repeated yourself. Yet you never heard back. You carried the quiet assumption that meaning should travel if it was packaged well enough.

You felt dumb every time you didn’t understand something, because the meaning should be right in front of you.

Your reactions defined you. When you got hurt, the pain seemed to be caused by someone else.

You thought time was what made things happen, so you waited for it to do the work. You didn’t see that causation operates through indirect propagation of influence.

Control was assumed to be possible. When you couldn’t control outcomes, it felt like failure. What you didn’t see was that you were so often creating the loops that perpetuated your problems. You responded to your own interpretations. Your behavior triggered responses from others. You interpreted their responses through the lens of your original belief, and their reactions reinforced it. The loop was invisible from the inside because you couldn’t see your role in perpetuating it.

Much of everyday life was exhausting, lived somewhat reluctantly.

The new way breaks that spell.

When you practice Natural Reality, you recognize minds run in parallel. You stop mistaking communication for transfer of meaning. You see everybody responding to their own interpretation of what’s happening, treating that interpretation as the happening itself, as if they were blindfolded to the external world. That observation gives you a fighting chance to become who you want to be.

Within the mind, a space opens between reaction and response. You distinguish between the stories you tell and what you do. That distinction is an incredible power. Your actions can harmonize with your meaning, with who you want to be.

You learn to detect what cycles you’re reinforcing, what patterns you’re creating. You learn to see influence moving indirectly through the world.

You begin to work with your own mind in ways you never imagined possible: how you interpret the world, how you handle life and death. You find your own path and stop waiting for external permission.

You also develop a fundamentally different appreciation for oneness and otherness. Otherness means recognizing that other minds are parallel to yours, each building their own Red Space in its own way. Oneness means you’re all participating in the same happening, the Blue Space. Understanding one reveals the other.

They’re two sides of the same coin.

The real reason you don’t go back is simple: the cost of the old way is much greater than the cost of practicing Natural Reality.

Everything you carried, the loneliness, the loops, the unmanageability of the human condition, the exhaustion of trying to transfer meaning that never arrives. All of it weighs too much.

The good news is, once a mind is stretched, it does not return to its original form. As I worked through these ideas over the years, their importance became undeniable.

That’s why I made The Papers freely available, and months later began efforts to disseminate it.

The Eddy Network

Ed Brenegar invited me on his podcast.

I had three months before the recording, so I asked my oldest son if he’d help me practice. We did several conversations about Natural Reality together.

On December 5, 2025, Ed and I recorded without a script and just improvised. I told him at the start: “This is my one podcast book tour.”

The Eddy Network podcast focuses on global conversations with local leaders exploring how people think about leadership and the work they do in their communities.

Here are some excerpts. The full episode is available on YouTube.

Ed opened by describing what concerned him.

Ed: ” We live in a time of unreality and disconnection from reality. I find that people trapped in simulation or false reality. It does not make their lives better. It does not elevate their agency as persons. It does not make their relationships more respectful or trusting. A large number of the problems that we face today in the world are because we accept a false reality that we choose because it actually relieves us of responsibility.”

I concurred with that diagnosis. The solution might be simpler than we think.

Me: “I agree with you. We’re left with the question of how do we address the problem of getting lost in our own worlds of make-believe. The proposed solution is a map.”

But I had to clarify what we meant by reality.

Me: “We’re talking about reality, but we could be talking about different things. The Abstractionist Papers deal with reality differently than philosophy, science, or religion. It’s a map. Not a theory of where we came from or where the universe is going. It doesn’t answer those bigger questions about what things are. Instead it goes into the world of how, which is how reality works. It’s very practical. Its primary use in daily life is to live better day-to-day with other people, other processes emerging just as you are.”

Ed: “I know exactly what you’re saying. Well, exactly is the wrong word. I do understand what you’re trying to say.”

Me: “That’s why I say at the end of the book, this is the largest abstractionist job I’ve ever attempted. You have to find the relationships that give rise to the forms that we see.”

Ed nodded and then pulled out a sheet of paper. He wanted to read a passage from The Papers.

Ed: “I’m looking at some of it. I printed off some of this this morning because there was one piece that I wanted to read. This is part of a letter from the abstractionist. It all began with a simple need to understand how we navigate a universe. We live inside but never see directly. As a child in Brazil, I watched our fish in the glass of their bowl, wondering what they thought about the world moving beyond. To them, everything must have seemed contained in that small space. They had no idea anything was happening outside. Years later, I recognized this as my childhood version of Plato’s cave. We all start with one way of seeing. Learning to see differently takes effort. Picasso created 11 lithographs of the same bull, each one simpler than the last. He kept removing details until just a few essential lines remain. And somehow that captured the bull more truly than the realistic version. Abstractionism strips away what obscures until what matters stands alone.”

He paused and reflected on it.

Ed: “I thought that was really well said and it makes the idea of something that’s being abstracted worth looking at because I think that abstractions have become tools for denying reality. And what you’re trying to say, I believe, is you’re trying to create a sense of an appreciation for these abstractions as a way of revealing what reality is. Am I correct in that?”

Me: “It’s an interesting way to try to make sense of things without knowing what they are. Reality is relative, relational. Learning a little bit more about relationships and how they work, which is an abstract world, pays off big time.”

Earlier in our exchange, when we were working through how the two realities interact, I’d tried to use signal processing as an analogy that maps reasonably well onto Red Space and Blue Space. I knew even as I was saying it that it was way too technical.

But we moved on. I said:

Me: ” Each one of us has our own version of reality we produce inside. And to each of us, that reality being produced inside feels like it’s the outside. In other words, we’re living our inside lives outside. Without being aware of it, at least not fully aware.”

And why this matters for otherness:

No Way Out

Mark McGrath teaches John Boyd’s OODA loop. Observe, Orient, Decide, Act. It describes how living systems navigate uncertainty and make decisions. It’s fundamental to strategy and cognition, essential to how organizations adapt.

When we talked, Mark was working through teaching frustrations. Most people looked at the OODA loop and came away seeing it as sequential steps. They treated it like a template, one phase after another in sequence, and they couldn’t generate novelty that way. And when orientation did get attention, its depth got overlooked. Mark was trying to show them that orientation is the engine. It determines your observation, your decision, your action.

I recognized both problems immediately. I’d been working through these exact same issues.

After we had an initial conversation, Mark invited me to his podcast, No Way Out, with his co-host Brian Rivera, also available on YouTube. They examine the OODA loop across different domains and disciplines.

I said yes. I had teaching tricks that might help them see it, and they were exactly the kind of experts I needed to stress test Natural Reality against.

My plan has two prongs. The first addressed the map and territory problem: the distinction between meaning and happening. The second addressed how orientation emerges.

I started with the red and blue that anchor the framework.

Me: “Meaning, what is meaning? How am I defining meaning? Meaning is everything that the mind produces. Every thought, every visual image that you perceive, every sound that you hear, absolutely everything. Your understanding of what I’m saying, your feeling of sitting on a chair or standing. All of this stuff belongs to meaning, to the category of meaning.”

Then I held up blue.

Me: “And then on the other side, you have the world of happening. Happening is what occurs. One way to think about happening is actions, interactions, responses, behaviors. But the truth is, as soon as we start naming the happening, measuring the happening, we’re no longer dealing with the happening. We’re dealing with meaning again.”

I held the papers perpendicular to each other.

Me: “Meaning connects to happening and happening connects to meaning through something that we’re used to calling light. Light is the boundary between meaning and happening. Let me take a moment to make sure this makes sense. When I look at my cup of coffee, there’s light that hits this thing and then reaches my eye. In response to that light, my nervous system from the eye all the way to eventually lands on some mind on the inside. That light gets interpreted as an image. Sound works the same way. You have pressure waves reaching your eardrum, and then it’s light. It’s electrical. The nervous system is electrical. So it’s light that flows from the eardrum all the way to eventually becoming sound in the mind. And on the way out, how do we connect from the inside towards the outside? It’s also through light.”

Mark was nodding. Brian was watching.

Brian then walked through active inference and the free energy principle, connecting what I was describing to their work. I followed with a question that would separate direct causation from responsive action.

Me: “Let me ask you something. This is just natural world stuff. If I play some music, whatever music it is, and then you dance. Did the music make you dance? Or did you dance in response to the music?”

Mark interrupted. He had a story.

Mark: “Oh, that wouldn’t hit me because it actually happened to me last night. I was taking the recycleables out, which is otherwise tedious, and I put on the song, New Age Girl by Dead Eye Dick from the 90s, and I just start jiving and it makes the thing. When you asked me, I really started to think, wow, that just happened to me. What was it?”

He’d found the answer in his own experience. I pressed the point.

Me: “So did the music cause you to dance?”

Mark: “If you don’t want to dance, you’re not going to dance. Sometimes you’re not paying attention to it. But nothing from the outside like that can make you do anything. You’re doing it in response to it.”

Me: “Right. Nothing from the outside causes you to do anything. You respond to signals. Your mind responds to a signal. The only thing that the signal brings is a variation that we then interpret as something, but the signal itself is just the way we model it. It’s up and down variation. It doesn’t carry any meaning. For example, when you see an image of something, the image doesn’t come in through the light into your eyes. Light gets to your eyes and then you produce that image inside. And I think when you’re right,”

Brian: “Exactly. We would call that perception. And then Boyd wrote it down as implicit guidance and control that goes from orientation to observation. It’s a negative feedback loop, which actually acts as a filter.”

Me: ” That’s one of the things we get trained in. We’re always figuring out causality in a different way. It’s not enough to see the sequence and say what came after was caused by what came before. Because you do have a lot of responsive behavior. That’s how nature works. It accepts responsive behavior. When some signal reaches the entity, the entity inside produces its own interpretation in response to the signal. But nothing from the signal itself determines this. The only thing that the signal brings is a variation.”

Now I needed to show what happens when these distinctions aren’t made, so we moved to Chapter 4 of The Papers.

Me: “Imagine you’re young and you learn a rule. Everything that goes up must come down. You see apples falling from trees. You see things jump and fall back down. That reasoning always works for you until one day you look up at the sun and realize: the sun’s been there since yesterday. The sun’s not falling. What’s going on?”

Brian: “That’s a paradox.”

Me: “That’s a paradox. I wonder if they can’t reconcile: how come the sun is up in the sky if everything that goes up must come down? That’s just the world they have inside. It’s a simple rule. It’s not what we know to be gravity today, but we all have to start somewhere and that’s the reasoning they have. What this diagram in Chapter 4 shows is the Causation Domain, or Blue Space. This world of happening. You have that circle number 1, and what that represents is a happening where the sun is up in the sky. Number 2, still in the Blue Space, is another happening, a subsequent happening where the sun is still up in the sky. So how does our person, our observer, see any of this? They see from inside their minds. Up until now, blue and red are perfectly fine. You have the sun at item one and you have the meaning of the sun at A. But the person’s mind applies the reasoning: if the sun’s up there, it should be coming down, which leads to C. C is the idea that the sun shouldn’t be there, it should have come down. But what they see when they look up at the sky is something else. Their interpretation of event number 2 is not that the sun fell. B is that the sun is still up in the sky. They expect C because of their reasoning, but what they see is B, and in that gap lives the paradox.”

The territory operates in an entirely different domain than the map. They’re not approximations of each other. One is meaning, one is happening.

Me: “So why do people look at the OODA loop, for example, and their takeaway is sequentiality? The idea is they’re looking at a map, which is a map of meaning that’s representative of some happening. It’s good for us to understand the happening, but the map itself is obviously the map-territory distinction, right? The map’s not the territory. But what people have been missing, and what I try to add to this discussion, is that of course everybody has talked about map and territory before. But usually we look at a map as an approximation of the territory, a simplification of the territory, a limited version of the territory. What this work says is that the territory is of a different nature than the map altogether. The map is paper with symbols, and the territory is dirt, trees, roads. They’re not just different things. They’re different types of things. When you confuse the two, like we usually do, you look at the inside of your mind and imagine it’s outside. You expect your interpretation to be the happening itself. That’s confusing meaning with perception of causation. And that’s where the map-territory gets funky.”

At some point, the question turned to: how do you make sense of two domains that are fundamentally different?

Me: “You guys are very technical, so you will understand this right away. If you think about signal propagation, if you look at a waveform propagating in time. The analogy would be let’s look at the waveform propagating in time as if it were happening. Okay, it’s obviously not. It’s our model of happening, but let’s just say it’s happening for the analogy. Then we are looking at something that we usually call the time domain. We’re looking at how the wave propagates in time. But how do we find out what’s inside the wave? We apply a transform, a Fourier transform. And next thing I know, we’re in a different place called the frequency domain. Now we have the whole spectrum of the signal, the frequency content. The inside and the outside are connected by a transform and they’re orthogonal domains. That same principle applies here. The inside being meaning, what’s in the mind, and the outside being happening, the Blue Space. Now it’s not a perfect analogy, but it kind of gives you the idea of two orthogonal domains operating concurrently, with things happening or things existing in both domains concurrently.”

Brian: “That’s exactly what you’re describing here. Red Space and Blue Space are orthogonal domains.”

Me: “Operating concurrently. Everything in red is meaning. Everything in blue is happening. They’re connected by light, which is the transformation between them. And the critical part is that they operate by different rules. You can’t access blue from inside red. You can only respond to signals from blue that reach the boundary and produce meaning inside red.”

Me: “Now, this orthogonal idea applies everywhere, even to information. We split information into two sides: the meaning side and the variation side. When you get a signal, air pressure waves are progressing toward you. There’s no meaning in that, no sound. Just variation. You produce the sound, you produce your understanding of it. When you get a light signal going up and down, your internal model interprets that variation as meaning. If it goes up twice, you interpret that as the letter A. That’s the meaning you attribute to it. Without knowing how to interpret a signal, it means nothing to you.”

It turns out the concept of two separate domains isn’t entirely new. Eastern philosophy has been pointing at this for thousands of years.

Me: “The only thing I know about the Tao, I read a book about Winnie the Pooh. The Tao of Winnie the Pooh. What a fantastic book. And that’s all I know about the Tao.”

Me: “We don’t claim to be modeling the happening ever. Until we decide to, and then on purpose, we wrangle it with minimal interpretation. We do that in Part III of the book, but that’s very contained on purpose. Outside of that context, we’re trying to make it useful. So we have to add meaning to be able to handle it. But outside of that, the Blue Space is not a space that we see or we deal with. It’s just like in the Tao.”

Mark: “I got holy spirit chills.”

What makes orthogonality powerful is that it solves problems that seem impossible within a single domain.

Me: “I’m not a historian. This is just my version of the story. My life is fifth grade math, that’s what I do. But Euler was a genius, and his genius was recognized because his solutions dealt with orthogonality. At some point mathematicians couldn’t find the square root of a negative number. It’s not in the world of real numbers. What Euler did was create another dimension. He saw a different domain, called that an imaginary domain, and started working with it. He created a real plane and an imaginary plane and said the square root of negative one is what we’ll call the letter ‘i’, an imaginary number. And he solved so many problems that way.”

When we got to wave-particle duality, that same principle applied. Here, explained through Red and Blue Space, Mark and Brian saw it immediately. By splitting the orthogonal domains, the paradox resolves.

Mark paused, looking at the diagrams.

Brian: “I’m going to say this in the rudest way I can. A patent attorney came up with this shit, okay?”

Mark: “Well, it looks like he was an electrical engineer or something like that.

Me: I can address that at the end, but that’s exactly what we are. We’re all engineers before going to law school and we still think like that after law school.”

Now, with the first deliverable out of the way, we moved to: how does any of this affect how we live? If meaning and happening are separate domains, what types of things change?

Brian: “My mind, just standing here, I would think that my skin separates me from the external world, right? Because that’s what it kind of looks like. Somebody else may say, hey, I’m actually part of this world, the boundary’s further out than me, and that’s the extent of my mind, where the enacted part of this is.”

Me: “In Natural Reality it’s different. The skin is not the boundary of you. It’s in the happening, so the Blue Space. In natural reality, the Blue Space is one. There’s one world of happening and there are no divisions. There’s no meaning, so we can’t separate. We can’t sit here and start labeling things and separating things. There’s no meaning in the world of happening.”

Me: “What we call the body is the mind’s interpretation of the processes, the happening that gives rise to it. It’s trippy. When you walk around and see all the bodies in the world, you’re not seeing the bodies directly. You’re seeing your own interpretation of the happening that gives rise to somebody else’s mind, which you never actually get to see. Because the world of meaning is not shared. Everybody has their own individual mind. It’s a distributed reality.”

Now came the second deliverable. This is where we move from understanding the distinction to understanding how that distinction forces reorganization in how we think. The lemonade stand of Chapter 2 shows how perspective reorganizes when the cost of carrying a paradox exceeds the cost of restructuring.

Me: “Imagine you’re eight years old and you set up a lemonade stand with a friend. And the agreement that you have with your friend is we’re going to do a fifty-fifty split of the profits. You set it up and make some money. On the day you’re supposed to set up the stand, your friend doesn’t show up. So it’s just you there working all day. At the end of the work day, your friend shows up and says, where’s my fifty percent? And you give it to them. Why? Because up until that age, you’ve been taught and you’ve learned that fairness is a fifty-fifty split if there are two people.”

Mark: “That’s the rule.”

Me: “That’s the rule. Next week, same thing. Your friend doesn’t show up, wants their half. You give it. Week after that, same thing again. And at some point you realize that fairness isn’t fifty-fifty when one person didn’t work. It’s proportional. Equity.”

Brian: “Your perspective reorganizes.”

Me: “Here’s what happened: it’s cheaper in an economic sense here for the mind to readjust what it thinks fairness is than to carry those gaps along. You don’t want to keep paying the guy fifty percent. So you naturally learn to see it in a different way. Your resistance to the rule that says fifty-fifty is right increases. You don’t apply that rule the same way anymore. The rule that used to say fifty-fifty effectively becomes something else because it was cheaper at some point to restructure your idea of fairness. That’s emergence. That’s how orientation reorganizes.”

We skipped back to a diagram in Chapter 4.

Me: “This is what we call Incoherence. It’s a change in your impedance, your resistance to the application of the rule. Remember the lemonade example where you have that fifty-fifty rule that’s causing you a lot of problems? Eventually that rule transforms into a different rule. And what we call that change in the rule application, which effectively creates a different rule, we call that Incoherence. It’s a change in the resistance. When you look at the hard problem of change, yes, that’s where novelty comes from. It invariably comes from some process that figured out a different relationship to some rules that weren’t there before. Imagine the loop we’ve been discussing as sitting on a plane. You can move around that plane, make small adjustments, fight decay directly on the same level. But when the cost of carrying the paradoxes inside gets too high, something different happens. You move orthogonally to that plane. You pop off in a different direction. Your relationship to the rule changes. Your impedance to that rule increases. The rule that used to work for you effectively becomes something else. That’s where novelty comes from. It’s not from making things better on the same plane. It’s from changing your relationship to the rules themselves when the pressure builds enough. That’s emergence.”

Brian: “One of the things that comes to mind when thinking about all this is yin and yang, and Boyd’s idea that if you’re waiting for equilibrium, you’re dead.

Me: There’s no such thing. Equilibrium is our idea of stability, but it’s not real in the world of happening. When you’re driving a car with a steering wheel in front of you, if you want to go straight, the last thing you’re going to do is set it straight and keep it there. You’re going to have to go to the left, you’re going to have to go to the right. There’s no other way to go straight. You’re always adjusting from side to side. And on average, if you look at it for a number of iterations, you might call that stability. But ultimately, the only way to really move forward is to go side to side. And we see that everywhere. The only way to move forward is through that constant adjustment. That’s not a decision. That’s not linear. That’s just how minds work.”

These principles apply everywhere, to all systems, at every level. We returned to General Selection in Chapter 5.

Me: ” In the world of happening, General Selection isn’t four steps happening in sequence. They’re all happening at once. And when you think about what the happening is, it’s just one. It’s the interaction. The variability is our interpretation of a consequence of the interaction. Three, which is selection, is just an effect in the presence of decay. Whatever decays more will last longer, so we have that selection effect. It’s an interpretation again. And number four, the accumulation. We’re just making an observation in our world that these things accumulate. So when you think about the meat of this, it’s really just one step. It’s just the interaction. Everything else is sense making that helps us understand what might be going on outside, but it’s not what’s going on outside. And I think that ties very well in some ways to the idea that orientation really is everything.”

Me: ” When we look at the general selection loop from the top of these stacked boxes, which is our natural way of seeing things, we see a loop that doesn’t really go anywhere. To really see where novelty comes from, where new rules appear and people start behaving differently, you have to account for a world we don’t usually seem to care about, which is the world of happening. You have to almost see it sideways. You can’t see it from the top. When I had the piece of paper, that’s the flat loop in front of me. The rest of the loop you’re talking about, the reason I don’t see it is because it’s like this behind it. It’s the causation axis. It goes in a different direction.”

Both my goals had been met. The map and territory distinction was clear. The mechanism of how orientation naturally emerges through accumulation of Incoherence was demonstrated.

They understood what I’d been working on for so long because they’d been working similar problems in a different context.

Me: “I worked on this project for a long time. And the whole time it was just inside. I wasn’t really trying to meet people to talk about these things. It was nice to come out here and discover that there are other people on similar journeys doing the same sorts of things. It’s a beautiful way to share.”

Mark: “We’re going to have to pause because this is clearly the first of several more discussions around this.”

He was right. We could have kept going for hours. This was a two-hour conversation, and there was too much territory to cover in one sitting.

All this happened because Natural Reality works.

Conclusion

In Nimbin and The Abstractionist, I created a character with ideas I barely understood. In The Intact and the Flightless, an odd bird returned with the yellow triangle.

Between the two stories: eight years of Natural Reality.

When I went on No Way Out, I was doing what the Abstractionist and the Intact did. Those characters walked out of the stories and into real life.

The same day the episode went live, a military teacher from Sweden reached out. He’d watched the show and recognized how to add Incoherence to Boyd’s OODA loop. He’d mapped Red and Blue Spaces onto his own sketches and shared a few of them with me.

With this, the spiral completed one revolution, back where I started but in a different place.

Emergence is the only show in town.

Epilogue: Abstraction Under Pressure

Let’s go back to the beginning.

When Brian Rivera asked, “A patent attorney came up with this shit?”, I decided to answer it by writing The Only Show in Town.

But the real question is why a patent attorney specifically.

Many professions use abstraction as a tool. Physicists develop equations. Philosophers work with ideas.

But in patent prosecution, abstraction is all you do.

Every day you strip an invention of its accidental form. You separate what it does from how it happens to be built. You identify what persists across different embodiments. You hold multiple perspectives simultaneously: inventor’s vision, examiner’s skepticism, competitor’s workarounds, litigation.

You draw boundaries that must survive sustained attack.

By the time I went on No Way Out in December 2025, I had been doing this every day for twenty-four years.

A working map of Natural Reality could only come from here.