Here are some musings on the nature of reality —Piet Hut

Reality (very very very short version)

The only thing we reliably know is that there is not nothing.

Reality (very very short version)

Not Nothing.

Appearance appears.

There is the Presence of Appearance.

There is the potential for appreciation of the Presence of Appearance.

There is the further potential to appreciate the Presence of Appearance as a Presentation.

We can even appreciate the Presence of Appearance as a Presentation of Being.

In short, a very compact manual for living is:

Appreciate the Presence of Appearance as a Presentation of Being

Reality (short version)

There is something

Empirically, based on our actual experience, we know that there is something. This is the one thing that we cannot deny.

Whether there is a self we don't know; it may ultimately be an illusion. Whether there is time, we don't know either; for all we know past and future, too, may be illusions.

But if they are illusions, at least they are appearances, sheer appearances, stand-alone appearances with nothing to contrast them to. Right now, while reading this, something appears. We may label it with terms like self and other, concerning a self living in a world with other selves, and with a past and future. But all these terms appear, and really the only thing that we know about appearance is that appearance appears.

appearance appears

The notion of appearance is more primitive than the notion of experience. Appearance appears. But experience doesn't experience. For experience to happen, we need an experiencer experiencing what is experienced. All three of these elements are tied together and each of those appear.

We can only talk about experience after we acknowledge a subject/object split, a fundamental dichotomy, which we start learning around age one, when we learn to differentiate between self and other. Around the same time we also learn to communicate using language, which implies that we carve up our world into myriad dualities: when something or someone is part of a conceptual class, it differs in that respect from all that is outside that class.

In all this, the most fundamental duality is that between matter and mind. In most, if not all, cultures this duality is accepted as such, even though the ways different cultures deal with it can be quite different. Western culture, broadly speaking, is very unusual, and probably unique, in having adopted a belief that views matter as "real" and mind as secondary, something, whatever it is, that is produced by a brain, an emergent property in modern scientific terms.

I find this dominant belief very surprising, first of all because science doesn't deal with beliefs, only with working hypotheses. While working with these hypotheses, some are found to be wrong, based on empirical evidence, either experimental or observational. Other working hypotheses typically turn out to be very accurate in some domains, but often less accurate in other domains: a fact, once established, then calls for refinement or replacement is required.

Second, because there is no compelling reason to adopt such a working hypothesis. Yes, brain states and subjective experiences do show strong correlations. But correlations don't imply causal connections, for many possible reasons. To mention one: two phenomena may be correlated because both are caused by an altogether different other phenomenon. In addition, nobody has any idea how the dynamics of atoms and molecules can give rise to something so different as the richness of our consciousness. We can never say that something is not possible, but definitely it should not be the only place to look.

waiting for the next weirder unification

In high school, when I stumbled upon meditation and other ways to study the mind, using the mind itself as a laboratory, I was completely surprised that it was even possible to do so. Nobody had ever told me that I could extend my building of telescopes, experimenting with chemistry, and using microscopes to study fungus cultures—scientific explorations I had already begun in middle school—into another empirical domain of studies, namely of the mind.

I then decided to study physics in college, since it seemed completely clear to me that matter/mind unification was around the corner. At that time, in 1971, Maxwell's unification of electricity and magnetism was a century old; Einstein's relativity, which after having unified space and time into one new 4-dimensional continuum, provided that continuum with degrees of freedom that modeled the dynamics of gravity, was just over half a century old; and quantum mechanics was not much younger. Time for a new breakthrough! I fully expected to get a first-row seat, watching and hopefully contributing to the unification of matter and mind.

I was fully convinced that such a unification would occur during my working life as a physicist. Each unification up to that point had been surprising, and the degree of surprise had taken a quantum leap—pun intended—with each new advance. After the weirdness of the quantum world, what could possibly be more surprising? The only candidate I could imagine was a unification of matter and mind.

Let me expand on the condensed remarks above and present them in a bit more detail.

the first major unification since Newton

Maxwell was confronted with the seemingly obvious belief that electricity was more fundamental than magnetism. Electrically charged objects can be produced almost anywhere, either positive or negative. By contrast, no one had ever encountered an isolated magnetic North or South pole; they always appear together. Given that situation, already forty years before Maxwell, Ampère proposed that permanent magnets are filled with countless closed microscopic currents, together producing a macroscopic magnetic dipole. It seemed clear that electric charges were the true building blocks of magnetic effects, and that anything magnetic was caused by electricity.

It was a great surprise when Maxwell's equations of electromagnetism revealed a previously hidden symmetry between electricity and magnetism. An entirely unexpected result was that disturbances in the electromagnetic field in a vacuum give rise to waves traveling at the speed of light. For the first time in history, Maxwell had uncovered the basis of the phenomenon of light, offering a clear explanation. At that moment, he became the first human to realize the true nature of light, when considered within the framework of natural science — and thereby illuminated the very fabric of the Universe.

the second major unification

Fast forward fifty years, from 1865 to 1915, and we arrive at the moment when Einstein had not only achieved a unification of space and time a decade earlier, but also explained gravity as a direct consequence of the dynamic curvature of spacetime. Clearly, this kind of unification was far more surprising than Maxwell's. Maxwell had unified two distinct fields, both of which played their roles upon the stage of space. The dynamics of those players were supplied by time—something regarded as altogether different from space ever since the days of Newton.

The shock that followed the discovery of special relativity—predicting that time proceeds at different rates for different observers—cannot be overestimated. Particularly striking were effects such as the twin paradox: two siblings, one remaining at home while the other undertakes a high-speed journey to a distant point in space, reunite to find that the stay-at-home twin has aged far more than the traveler. And the predictions of general relativity—the Big Bang at the origin of our Universe and the existence of black holes, both now firmly confirmed by observation—were even more shocking.

the third major unification

Still, nothing prepared physicists for what would occur only ten years after the discovery of general relativity: the advent of quantum mechanics. It was not only unpredictable but literally unimaginable—and to some extent, it still is. Changing the laws governing the behavior of time and space is one thing. But altering the very roles of what is real and what is virtual was even more "weird"—a word that has become almost a technical term for capturing just how astonishing this revolution was in the history of human understanding.

Briefly, every phenomenon in the physical world that appears as energy or matter—two sides of the "E = mc2" coin—is made up of quanta, discrete units of matter-energy. A quantum, however, is neither entirely real nor entirely virtual, but a mixture of both. Measuring one property produces definite results, yet the act of measurement itself makes other properties uncertain and indeterminate.

waiting for the fourth unification

After these three unifications—each stranger and more shocking than the last, each one "weirder," to borrow the near-technical term of quantum mechanics, and each arriving closer on the heels of its predecessor—what could a thoughtful observer in 1925 reasonably have expected to follow? With fifty years from Maxwell's equations to Einstein's special relativity, another ten to general relativity, and only ten more to quantum mechanics, what should one have anticipated at that point? Two questions arise: one about timing and one about impact.

What about the timing of the next fundamental shock? Another ten years? Or perhaps only five—or as many as twenty or thirty? And what about its intensity—the degree to which the next revolution in physics would confound us? We could not have known in advance, but a conservative extrapolation would have suggested that the next shock would be even "weirder" than the unification of real and virtual, just as that was "weirder" than the fusion of space and time (and, in its wake, of mass and energy), which itself had been significantly "weirder" than the unification of electricity and magnetism.

Having learned about these developments in broad outline through reading popular science books, I took the most conservative stance possible:

The next revolution could occur at any time and, with very high probability, before the end of the century. And the only unification that could be even more shocking than quantum mechanics would be a unification of matter and mind.

I could not imagine anything else.

from high school to retirement

So I waited, from high school through my PhD and into my years as a full professor—and nothing of the sort happened.

Well, to be precise, something did happen—a harbinger of things to come. Some of the most fundamental aspects of quantum mechanics, namely entanglement (discovered only ten years after quantum theory itself), finally began receiving the attention they deserved by the mid-1990s—fully sixty years after their initial discovery in 1935—when they started to appear in physics textbooks. And only in 2022, a full ninety-seven years after the birth of quantum mechanics, was a Nobel Prize awarded to three leading physicists whose experiments established entanglement beyond doubt.

A year later, in 2023, I faced mandatory retirement at age seventy from my position at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. This proved a boon, giving me even more time for research than I had enjoyed during my thirty-eight-year career in the privileged environment of IAS. Immediately, I turned to developing my own program: laying a foundation for the unification of the still-nascent science of mind with the science of matter, already established for four centuries.

after retirement

Two years later, in August 2025, I completed the essential part of that foundation in entry #023 of my FEST Log on Substack. Following that, I launched a FEST website in October 2025, with the aim of making it a seed for the development of a community of scientists working on the broader program of unifying mind and matter. I expect this program to spawn many more specialized projects, which together can lead to a full-fledged science of mind first, and to a possible unification with the current science of matter later.

Above all, I am grateful to the Institute for Advanced Study for providing the time and quiet to continue working on my high school dream on the side, during the last forty of the fifty-five years it took to complete the foundation for the matter–mind unification I present here. I also owe deep gratitude to all who showed interest in my groping in the dark during that long period. Without their encouragement, coupled with stimulating discussions, I would not have been able to write the current FEST Log.

Reality (long version)

See my book-length FEST Log.  
https://piethut.substack.com

Here is a detailed Table of Contents.  
https://piethut.substack.com/p/table-of-contents