Heroes Not Zombies

This made me stop. It looks like two trees who got together a long time ago, and have continued to grow, relate, entwine, even dance and kiss together ever since!

The physicist, Carlo Rovelli, says “the universe is made up of networks of kisses, not stones”

He also says

I think that quantum theory can make sense as it is: we just have to give up some cherished metaphysical prejudices and accept the deep relational aspect of nature that the success of the theory has revealed

Another physicist, Lee Smolin, says “the universe is a network of events”.

Asked about his theory he says

It’s a theory about processes, about the sequences and causal relations among things that happen, not the inherent properties of things that are. The fundamental ingredient is what we call an “event.” Events are things that happen at a single place and time; at each event there’s some momentum, energy, charge or other various physical quantity that’s measurable. The event has relations with the rest of the universe, and that set of relations constitutes its “view” of the universe. Rather than describing an isolated system in terms of things that are measured from the outside, we’re taking the universe as constituted of relations among events. The idea is to try to reformulate physics in terms of these views from the inside, what it looks like from inside the universe.

Aside from physicists, daily life begins to take on a different flavour altogether when we shift our focus from things to events, from objects to relationships, from separate items to connected contexts.

Try it for yourself, see what’s it like to focus more on kisses, relationships and events than on “stuff”.