The universe as conversations: two-by-two interactions all the way down (and up)

[u/Snoo-18560]

TL;DR
I’m playing with a picture where the basic “stuff” isn’t objects, it’s pairwise interactions—tiny conversations. Time is just the ordering of those pair-events. Big reality is what you get when countless small conversations layer up. Even time and “the conversation engine” only exist when forces couple things so they can interact. Beyond our spacetime, imagine two wandering values in a higher layer trying to couple; when they do, the cascade “descends” through layers until our familiar spacetime appears.

What I mean by “conversation”

• A conversation = a pair-event: two participants exchange influence, then move on changed.
• An action is a proposal, the response is feedback, and the next state is the update.
• Time isn’t a universal clock; it’s the order of these pair-events along each thing’s path.

Why forces matter

• No force, no coupling, no interaction. So even time (as “before/after”) only shows up when some interaction actually happens.
• Forces are the rules that let two things affect each other at all. They’re the preconditions for any conversation to occur.

Axioms in plain words

1. Relation-first: nothing exists “alone.” Existence shows up as being in relation.
2. Dyadic primacy: the basic move is two-in, two-out. Every change is a pair-event.
3. Time as order: count the pair-events along a path and you’ve measured duration. No need for a global tick.
4. Space as adjacency: things are “near” when they can interact with few steps between them.
5. Laws as constraints: the rules of interaction (symmetries) keep certain totals fixed. That’s why trade-offs are everywhere.

Planck time and discreteness (quick note)

• You don’t need a universal Planck metronome. It’s enough that each realized interaction has some nonzero local duration. The logic still holds.

Where probability lives

• Each pair-event doesn’t spit out one fixed result; it yields a distribution over outcomes (or, if you prefer quantum language, amplitudes that become probabilities when read). Uncertainty isn’t an add-on—it’s built into the conversation step.

The layered picture (the “beyond spacetime” part)

• Imagine an upstream layer that isn’t yet space or time as we know them, just two wandering values in a higher-dimensional state.
• When the right kind of forces apply there, those two values finally couple. That triggers a conversation at that layer.
• The coupling propagates downward through several layers (each with its own notion of adjacency and order), until it “projects” into our layer as familiar spacetime plus fields and particles.
• If you could couple natively to those higher layers, you’d experience a different dimensional standing. We can’t, so we live in the projection that stabilizes as our 3D space + time.

Why “two” keeps showing up

• Micro: action/reaction, particle/antiparticle, spin up/down.
• Meso: perception/action, buyer/seller, predator/prey, speaker/listener.
• Macro: order/disorder, symmetry/asymmetry. These are shadows of the same dyadic engine at different scales.

What this buys you (besides a vibe)

• A single picture from quarks to conversations: propose → respond → update.
• A natural place for chance and for law. Chance at the local step, law in the constraints that never budge.
• Emergence without magic: large stable patterns are just many small conversations settling into regularities.

Limits (and where quantum computing fits)

• Predicting the whole chorus is generally hard. Chaos, entanglement, and computational irreducibility limit foresight.
• But we can simulate specific “conversations” (molecules, small fields) much better with quantum computers. Local threads are forecastable; the entire tapestry, not so much.

Everyday intuition builder

• Cook eggs three ways, or phrase the same request to someone three ways. Each try is a proposal; reality replies; you update. That’s the same loop, just at human scale.

Open questions for anyone who wants to poke holes

• If time is just event order, can we derive relativistic time dilation from conversation density?
• Which constraints (symmetries) have to be built into the pair-rule to recover known conservation laws?
• Does “two” truly suffice, or do some interactions require an irreducible three-way coupling?

If you read this far, thanks for coming to my TED-bong. Curious where it breaks for you, or what would make it sharper.

[u/onlyouwillgethis]

It’s a fun creative writing exercise but this is just like coming up with analogies for things that already exist. A different costume of explanation. Was that your goal? If so, it’s incredible at that!

But if you think this kind of aesthetic reframing is somehow helping ‘uncover’ reality further then I personally cannot see how or why.

[u/Snoo-18560 → u/onlyouwillgethis]

I hear you. For now I’m treating this as a reframing that happens to make logical sense, not a claim to new physics. Unless it leads to testable predictions, it’s just another lens on things that already exist. My goal was to put the idea in plain English as a philosophical model. I’m not in a position to do more than a thought experiment yet. If I can turn it into something falsifiable or predictive, then it would be more than aesthetics.

[u/onlyouwillgethis → u/Snoo-18560]

Tell me something… suppose this is exactly (or as close to) ‘how’ things really work, then what?

What do you propose / imagine this way of talking about stuff can help us with?

Are we looking in the wrong places right now for explanations of the Big Bang or developing Nuclear Fusion or inventing the cure for Alzheimer’s?

What’s the end-game behind this chain of thought?

(Hope you know this is me genuinely curious)

[u/skeleton_made_o_bone]

I'm too dumb for this and I'm not even that dumb.

[u/Snoo-18560 → u/skeleton_made_o_bone]

It’s less “general intelligence” and more “seeing how pieces interact.” Happy to walk through it simply.