I have been trying to find a word for something that seems to appear everywhere I look; In atoms. In cells. In organisms. In ecosystems. In humans. In planets, stars, galaxies and even spacetime itself.
I first called it love.
Then I called it the law of relations.
But neither phrase quite captures all of it.
Because when I say love, most people immediately think about affection, romance, kindness or some other emotion or trait.
This isn't what I actually mean.
And when I say relations, people imagine relationships, two people dating each other.
That isn't what I mean either.
I am trying to describing something much more fundamental: the fact that reality appears to become organised through relation.
We normally imagine the universe as being made from things.
A particle.
An atom.
A molecule.
A cell.
A person.
A planet.
A star.
We place things first and their relationships with each other second.
So, first the objects exist. Then they interact.
But what if that order is wrong?
What if what we call an object is already the consequence of interactions?
A proton is not an indivisible little ball. It is a composite system involving quarks and gluons bound through the strong interaction. Atoms emerge through interactions involving nuclei and electrons. Molecules emerge from atoms interacting. Cells are vast organisations of molecules. Multicellular organisms arise from specialised cells cooperating, competing, signalling, dying and reproducing.
At every level of reality, new things appear because other things enter into particular arrangements.
In Physics; Quarks form composite particles through the strong interaction, producing entities whose properties cannot simply be described as the properties of one isolated quark.
The relationship has produced another level of reality.
This observation has led me to what I finally decided to call the Law of Relational Emergence:
When interacting entities remain coupled under sufficiently stable conditions, their sustained relations can generate structures, properties and identities that do not exist in the entities separately.
By relations something completely new appears. The universe, the organism, the civilisation, spacetime, all has become by relations. A galaxy is a gravitationally bound system of planets, stars, stellar remnants, interstellar gas, dust, and dark matter.
Reality May Be More Relational Than We Think
There is already a remarkable idea within the foundations of quantum mechanics called relational quantum mechanics.
It was developed by physicist Carlo Rovelli.
Its central idea is not that consciousness magically creates reality. It is that physical properties described by quantum mechanics can be understood relationally: facts occur in interactions between physical systems.
This raises an extraordinary possibility for what I'm describing.
Relations is not merely something that happens inside reality. I believe relation is part of what reality fundamentally is.
There is a philosophical position called ontic structural realism, that argue that structures or relations may be more fundamental than individual objects themselves.
So I'm actually not alone on this, many incredible people have observed this.
We just keep arriving at relational descriptions of reality from different directions.
From Particles to Living Systems
In Biology; A living cell contains huge numbers of interacting components.
No individual protein is the cell.
No strand of DNA is the cell.
No membrane is the cell.
No mitochondrion is the cell.
The living systems exists through the organised activity amongst these individual things that are otherwise useless by themselves.
Modern biology describes self-organisation as the appearance of overall order through collective interactions among components.
And the pattern repeats everywhere.
Cells form tissues.
Tissues form organs.
Organs form organisms.
Organisms form populations.
Populations form ecosystems.
At each stage, the components remain present, but something appears at the next level that wasn't contained in any component individually.
A neuron does not think.
But billions of interacting neurons somehow produces the nervous system through which I can write this sentence and you can understand it.
This transition from components to organised wholes is the deepest pattern in all of nature.
Even Spacetime Have a Relational Story
One of the major unsolved problems in physics is how quantum mechanics and gravity ultimately fit together, quantum gravity.
General relativity describes gravity through the geometry of spacetime. Matter and energy affect spacetime geometry, and that geometry affects how matter moves.
But; Researchers studying particular theoretical systems have discovered profound relationships between quantum entanglement and spacetime geometry.
This research, even though its not accepted completely has produced the provocative phrase:
Entanglement builds spacetime.
So, the possibility is astonishing.
The space separating things may itself, at some deeper level, depend upon patterns of relation between quantum degrees of freedom.
If anything remotely like this picture I'm trying to paint ultimately survives, then relation would not merely occur within spacetime.
Relation would participate in the emergence of spacetime.
The Universe Is Not Perfect Harmony
I am not going to romanticise nature, or reality.
Stars explode.
Species disappear.
Black holes consume matter.
Animals kill each other.
Cells become cancers.
Galaxies collide.
Relationships collapse.
The universe contains construction and destruction simultaneously.
Relation does not mean harmony.
Relation means consequence.
Things affect other things.
Things constrain other things.
Things combine.
Things separate.
Things transform one another.
And through this endless network of interaction, reality continues becoming, it keeps evolving.
My Proposition
Nothing becomes what it is entirely by itself. The ultimate law in the universe is the Law of Relational Emergence, and there's no formula for it, it the very law that creates patterns (formulas).
Reality is not fundamentally a collection of isolated things connected by relations. Reality is an evolving network of relations from which temporarily stable things emerge.
The atom.
The molecule.
The cell.
The organism.
The family.
The civilisation.
The planet.
The galaxy.
And even spacetime.
They are not merely objects in reality but histories of organised interaction.
Maybe this is also why, when human beings have searched for the deepest possible word for the thing connecting self to other, existence to existence, generation after generation has returned to one strangely inadequate word: Love.
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