The Design of Reality

Backward engineering usually means to deconstruct a product in an effort to understand how it works. Often this leads to a better design based on the accomplishments of the other product.

This works best when the level of knowledge is equal between the parties. When it is not, the process becomes lost in confusion. Imagine an 1840 era scientist trying to understand a Palm Pilot. It is a process that depends on comprehension of the manufacture's techniques.

So can we backward engineer nature?

The easy answer is 'in some ways' with references to particle accellerators, behaviors, drugs, the Genome Project, and principles of mechanics.

But the real answer is 'not even close'. All of our human understanding puts us on the level of a stone age tribesman looking at a handheld computer. How nature communicates and chooses is much more complex than what we can describe. Indeed, to backward engineer nature we will need to be able to speak nature's language and understand every nuance, no matter how subtle.

For example, physics is divided into two main areas based on very large (General Relativity) and very small (various quantum sciences) samples with a continuing effort to unify them. Consciousness studies are a morass of different approaches  rooted in dozens of different disciplines.

Nature, including the mysterious qualities of mind is all derived from a single, endlessly reproducible and permutable quality of itself. Universe creating cosmologies all seem to agree on the idea that everything started with ONE thing.

What was that thing? Ancient texts and Genesis say that it was the WORD. Joseph Campbell says that the word is AUM. Interesting, but hardly the stuff of deconstruction.

If Nature has a WORD, it must be a geometric equation that defines space, time and energy at once.

So, again, can we backward engineer nature to the first thing, the WORD?

We can try. SCIET Dynamics is an effort to do just that and has made a good start of it.

The SCIET is the WORD in the sense that it is a mathematical form built-up from point and line that is combined in different ways to build the universe of nature.

Strangely there is not much effort to find the ONE thing on the part of modern science. The study of particle physics is more like a giant puzzle with little expectation of finding unifying concepts and cosmology and theoretical physicists are starting with only fragments of reality upon which to base their quests.

They won't even consider how consciousness works as part of their puzzle, their effort to backward engineer nature.

So here's one word for them.

Why?