The Theory

2.3 Premises for Understanding ORT

Before entering Original Reality Theory itself, some premises should remain a reference for reading. They condense principles presented earlier and establish the limits within which the following concepts should be interpreted.

Reality is one and indivisible. Division belongs to explanation and knowledge.

Knowing requires differentiating. To perceive, interpret, represent, compare, and relate, we need to draw distinctions. We separate objects, events, properties, scales, disciplines, and concepts because these divisions increase our capacity to know and explain.

This does not mean that the same divisions exist in reality in the way they exist in our representations.

The parts belong to the map. Reality need not follow the boundaries we use to explain it.

Therefore, when ORT conceptually divides a phenomenon, presents an explanatory sequence, or uses different abstractions, these divisions should not automatically be turned into ontologically independent parts, stages, or events.

If knowing requires differentiating a reality that is one, what we identify as a thing also depends on the differences we can or choose to consider.

No two Arrangements are absolutely identical.

Two atoms can be classified as hydrogen because they sufficiently meet the criteria used in that classification. This does not require them to be absolutely identical in all their relationships, states, and histories.

The same impossibility persists through time. An Arrangement is not absolutely identical even to itself at two different instants. It continues to interact with itself and with the context to which it belongs. Preserving an absolutely invariant identity would require, conceptually, freezing it in time and eliminating any change in its relationships.

The equality and identity used in knowledge therefore depend on the resolution and purpose of the comparison.

To say that two things are equal means that, within that frame of analysis, certain differences have been disregarded.

Classification remains useful. What disappears is only the requirement that classificatory equality correspond to absolute identity.

Knowing and communicating require representation.

Letters, words, numbers, images, concepts, diagrams, models, and theories are ways in which perceived and interpreted differences can be encoded and related.

But the sign is not what it represents.

The word tree is not a tree. A photograph of a tree is not the tree either. A concept of an atom is not an atom. A model of reality is not reality.

ORT itself is subject to this premise.

Everything presented below—Original Reality, Derived Reality, Human Derived Reality, and any other concept—constitutes representation used to explain what the theory seeks to understand.

Representation can increase our capacity to know reality without ever becoming reality itself.

Communication does not directly transfer one individual’s interpretive state to another.

The sender produces an encoded representation and makes it available through a message. The receiver receives this representation and must interpret it.

What reaches the receiver is therefore not the interpretation existing in the sender, but a message from which another interpretation will be constructed.

The greater the correspondence between the codes, references, experiences, and contexts available to the participants, the closer their interpretations may become. Even so, communication does not imply identity between them.

This premise also applies to ORT itself.

The following text does not transfer the theory directly to the reader. It makes representations available from which the reader will construct their own interpretation.

ORT uses different abstractions to increase or reduce explanatory resolution without assuming that the boundaries produced by those abstractions are boundaries of reality itself.

The same applies to existing knowledge.

Physics, chemistry, biology, astronomy, neuroscience, psychology, and other fields produce fundamental knowledge through their own frames of analysis, scales, methods, and languages. ORT uses observations, measurements, experiments, and models produced by these fields, but does not assume that their disciplinary divisions constitute ontological divisions of reality.

An ORT concept should therefore first be understood within the abstraction in which it was formulated.

One should not immediately conclude that an ORT concept “is” a particular concept from physics, biology, philosophy, or any other field simply because there is some correspondence between them.

Likewise, different abstractions within ORT itself should not be merged simply because they refer to the same phenomenon.

Understanding comes before comparing.

Comparing comes before concluding equivalence, compatibility, or conflict.

ORT may formulate inferences from patterns found across different scales and perspectives even when a particular relationship has no established explanation within a specialized discipline. This does not turn inference into evidence.

When comparing with external knowledge, the distinction between observation, evidence, model, correspondence, compatibility, inference, hypothesis, and conflict must remain explicit.