The Theory

1.1 What Is Original Reality Theory?

To know is to differentiate reality and combine its differences into information. To abstract is to follow the reverse path: progressively eliminating information by reducing conceptual differences.

The theoretical limit of the construction of knowledge is total differentiation. The theoretical limit of abstraction is the absence of differentiation and, therefore, of information. In Original Reality Theory (ORT), Original Reality corresponds to this second limit: a reality without any differentiation, perspective, interpretation, or representation of it.

Original Reality, therefore, cannot be fully known. To know it is already to differentiate it.

The moment something is distinguished from something else, a difference arises. Perceiving and differentiating, in this sense, constitute the same phenomenon, even though they may be separated conceptually for explanatory purposes. There is no perception without difference, because perceiving something necessarily means distinguishing it.

From this differentiation, interpretation and representation become possible. What was conceptually undivided becomes divided into distinguishable elements, which can then be related and combined. Information arises from these combinations.

Perceived, interpreted, and represented reality therefore no longer corresponds to Original Reality at its theoretical limit. It constitutes a derived reality.

This distinction between Original Reality and derived reality is itself also a derivation. The concepts of “Original Reality,” “derived reality,” “differentiation,” “information,” and all other concepts used by ORT are representations. The theory necessarily operates within a derived reality in order to formulate conceptually that which, at its limit, would no longer admit any conceptual formulation.

For this reason, Original Reality is not an object that ORT seeks to reach or fully know. It functions as a theoretical limit of abstraction.

We can represent it by means of a conceptual scale.

At one end would be maximum differentiation: the growth of the distinctions, concepts, interpretations, representations, and information through which a derived reality becomes progressively more complex.

At the opposite end would be maximum abstraction: zero differentiation and, consequently, zero information.

This zero point corresponds conceptually to Original Reality.

The extremes of this scale are theoretical limits. The ORT method necessarily operates between them.

1.2 The ORT Method

If knowing means differentiating and constructing information from differences, abstracting means making the opposite movement.

The ORT method consists of progressively deconstructing conceptual differentiations, moving the analysis toward the limit of Original Reality without assuming that this limit can actually be reached.

As differentiations are removed, phenomena that initially seemed distinct may begin to reveal common structures. Distinctions necessary at a given explanatory layer may disappear when the analysis reaches a more abstract layer.

Abstraction, in this sense, does not add information. It reduces it.

To abstract means to know less at that scale of analysis: to remove details, categories, concepts, and divisions that previously made it possible to differentiate one thing from another. The purpose of this reduction, however, is not simply to destroy knowledge.

Deconstruction is followed by reconstruction.

Human knowledge reaches the individual, to a large extent, already structured. Concepts, categories, explanations, and fields of knowledge are received as constructions already made. The individual can learn these constructions and use them without necessarily reconstructing intellectually the path through which they became possible.

ORT proposes a different movement.

First, it deconstructs.

Then, it reconstructs.

In deconstructing a given body of knowledge, it seeks to progressively reduce the differentiations that constitute it. In reconstructing it, it retraces the path in the opposite direction, recovering the differentiations and observing how progressively more complex structures can emerge from the preceding ones.

The purpose is not to replace inherited knowledge, but to increase its structural resolution.

Deconstructing and reconstructing makes it possible not only to know that a given concept exists or to know its definition, but to investigate how its internal differentiations are organized, which distinctions are necessary to sustain it, and at what depth these distinctions begin to disappear or merge with distinctions present in other concepts.

The movement can be represented, in simplified form, in two directions:

Construction → increase in differentiations → increase in possibilities for combination → increase in information → progressively more complex derived realities.

Abstraction → reduction in differentiations → reduction in possibilities for combination → reduction in information → conceptual approach to the limit of Original Reality.

ORT deliberately follows the second direction in order to then return along the first.

Not because it is possible to reach the zero point of the scale, but because moving toward it makes it possible to investigate what disappears and what remains when differentiations are progressively removed.

It is in this process that phenomena initially classified as different may begin to exhibit common patterns.

The subsequent reconstruction then makes it possible to return to differentiated knowledge carrying a structural understanding that was not necessarily present when that knowledge was merely received in its finished form.

ORT can therefore be understood simultaneously as a theory and as a method of analysis.

The theory proposes Original Reality as the conceptual limit of the absence of differentiation and information.

The method moves toward this limit through abstraction, deconstructing differentiations, and then makes the reverse movement, reconstructing them.

Deconstruct to identify what remains when differences disappear. Reconstruct to understand how differences make possible what we call knowledge.

It is from this movement that Original Reality Theory begins its investigation of reality.