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Quantum Field Theory — the foundation of the Standard Model — reveals that the bedrock of reality is not classically physical. The particles of experience are excitations of underlying fields, whose states are represented in the abstract geometry of a complex vector space. What we call ‘matter’ emerges from mathematical structure and symmetry. Thus:
If mind has an irreducible experiential aspect—as both philosophers of mind and neuroscientists acknowledge—then a profound possibility emerges:
Mind and matter may both arise from a deeper, neutral substrate.
This is the cosmological frame known as Dual-Aspect Monism, updated here as the metaphysics of the Loom. Where Materialism insists that mind is a by-product of matter, and Idealism that matter is a construction of mind, Dual-Aspect Monism proposes:
There is only one underlying reality — the Loom — and mind and matter are simply two aspects of its patterning.
In this view, the "Loom" is the Psychophysical Neutral Substance.
Aspect A (Matter): When we measure the Loom from the "outside" using rulers and clocks, it looks like mass, spin, and charge.
Aspect B (Mind): When we experience the Loom from the "inside" (qualia), it looks like consciousness, thought, and sensation.
Measured from the outside, the Loom appears as mass, spin, and charge — the language of physics.
Experienced from within, the Loom appears as thought and sensation — the language of consciousness.
Both are real; both are incomplete alone.
This worldview might dissolve the Hard Problem of Consciousness. There is no need to explain how “dead matter” suddenly sprouts awareness—because matter was never dead. It has always been the outer face of a psychophysical process, and mind its inner resonance.
As the philosopher-physicist David Bohm wrote, the deeper reality that generates our visible world is the Implicate Order—a continuous, enfolded unity from which the Explicate Order of objects and egos unfolds.
Ethics as Natural Law: Rta Renewed
If consciousness is not an isolated property of individual brains but an expression of a shared ground, then the consequences are not only metaphysical—they are ethical.
To harm another being is to distort the Loom itself. To introduce violence is to introduce dissonance into the cosmic pattern.
Here, the ancient concept of Arta/Rta—Truth as both natural law and moral order—returns with scientific force. Right action is not merely virtuous; it is structural. It maintains coherence in the substrate that gives rise to all minds and worlds. Does compassion become rational self-maintenance in a literal sense?
The Fiction That Points Beyond Fiction
The Loom does not merely imagine a mystical universe; it dramatizes a hypothesis emerging from the limits of physics, cognitive science, and philosophy:
We do not inhabit the cosmos—
we are the cosmos, speaking to itself.
We are sentences of the same unbroken language.
What the fictional narrative contributes is not only a vision of unity, but a method of seeing: a reminder that the border between science and spirituality may itself be a temporary fold of the Loom.
When the weave smooths and the pattern is seen whole, mind and matter reconcile—and we return to Arta/Rta, the Truth that has always already been.
