This is an automated rejection. No LLM generated, heavily assisted/co-written, or otherwise reliant work.
Read full explanation
I am writing this piece as a reflective non-academic who has spent years thinking about these basic questions, what it means to exist, why change occurs at all, and what time truly is beneath our experience of it.
What follows is a philosophical metaphor, a way of seeing reality rather than explaining it scientifically. I call it the Ping-Pong Universe.
Rather than starting with cosmology, spacetime, or the Big Bang, I began with a simpler question:
What is the smallest unit of reality that still deserves to be called “existence”?
I imagined these units not as particles or fields, but as conceptual ping-pong balls — not because of their physical properties, but because of how they behave.
They are: discrete rather than continuous, always in motion and defined by interaction rather than substance
In this metaphor, a unit of existence does not meaningfully exist in isolation. It becomes real only through interaction. Each “collision” represents a change of state a transfer of energy or informat a moment of existance. From this perspective, reality is not a smooth fabric thal flows. It is a chain of events.
Interaction as the Engine of Reality
If existence occurs at interactions, then interaction is not secondary — it is ontologically primary.
Every collision creates a new state. Every new state sets the conditions for the next interaction.
Change is not imposed from outside; it is intrinsic. Stillness becomes impossible. To exist is to interact, and to interact is to change.
This framing helped resolve a long-standing puzzle for me: why does the universe evolve at all? In this model, evolution is not optional — it is the natural consequence of existence itself.
Time as Update, Not Flow
From an interaction-based ontology, time appears differently.
Rather than a smooth river flowing from past to future, time becomes a count of state changes — a record of interactions.
I imagine two conceptual boundaries:
- one representing the current state of reality
- one representing the next possible state
The universe, driven by its internal interactions, “moves” between these states. Each interaction is a moment. Each moment creates the next.
In this sense, time does not flow — it updates.
What we experience as continuity may be an emergent illusion produced by unimaginably rapid discrete events, much like a fast-refreshing screen appears smooth.
Scaling the Metaphor Upward
If the smallest units of reality behave this way, then the universe — as the totality of these interactions — should reflect the same structure.
In this metaphor, the Big Bang becomes the first impact: the initiating event that set the entire causal chain in motion.
From that first interaction, the universe changed state and that change generated the next interaction, and the sequence continue. Cosmic history becomes not merely expansion, but a rhythm of impacts — a succession of state changes stretching from the origin of existence to the present.
What Exists Between the Impacts?
A natural objection arises: what exists between interactions?
In this framework, the answer is not “nothing” in a nihilistic sense, but no determinate reality. Existence crystallizes at events. Between them lies potential rather than presence.
What This Is — and Is Not
This is not a scientific model. It makes no predictions, offers no equations, and seeks no experimental confirmation. It is a philosophical metaphor with a conceptual lens and an attempt to unify change, causality, and time into a single intuitive picture.
I’m sharing this to invite serious philosophical critique, not agreement. In particular, I’d appreciate thoughts on the following:
1. Is it coherent to treat interaction rather than substance as ontologically primary?
2. Does understanding time as an emergent update process meaningfully differ from existing views of time?
3. Does the claim that existence occurs only at interactions introduce hidden assumptions (e.g. determinism)?
4. Is this merely a rephrasing of process philosophy, or does the framing add anything conceptually useful?
I welcome objections, references, and counterarguments. My goal is to understand where this way of thinking holds — and where it fails.
I am writing this piece as a reflective non-academic who has spent years thinking about these basic questions, what it means to exist, why change occurs at all, and what time truly is beneath our experience of it.
What follows is a philosophical metaphor, a way of seeing reality rather than explaining it scientifically. I call it the Ping-Pong Universe.
Rather than starting with cosmology, spacetime, or the Big Bang, I began with a simpler question:
What is the smallest unit of reality that still deserves to be called “existence”?
I imagined these units not as particles or fields, but as conceptual ping-pong balls — not because of their physical properties, but because of how they behave.
They are: discrete rather than continuous, always in motion and defined by interaction rather than substance
In this metaphor, a unit of existence does not meaningfully exist in isolation. It becomes real only through interaction.
Each “collision” represents a change of state a transfer of energy or informat
a moment of existance.
From this perspective, reality is not a smooth fabric thal flows. It is a chain of events.
Interaction as the Engine of Reality
If existence occurs at interactions, then interaction is not secondary — it is ontologically primary.
Every collision creates a new state.
Every new state sets the conditions for the next interaction.
Change is not imposed from outside; it is intrinsic. Stillness becomes impossible. To exist is to interact, and to interact is to change.
This framing helped resolve a long-standing puzzle for me: why does the universe evolve at all?
In this model, evolution is not optional — it is the natural consequence of existence itself.
Time as Update, Not Flow
From an interaction-based ontology, time appears differently.
Rather than a smooth river flowing from past to future, time becomes a count of state changes — a record of interactions.
I imagine two conceptual boundaries:
- one representing the current state of reality
- one representing the next possible state
The universe, driven by its internal interactions, “moves” between these states. Each interaction is a moment. Each moment creates the next.
In this sense, time does not flow — it updates.
What we experience as continuity may be an emergent illusion produced by unimaginably rapid discrete events, much like a fast-refreshing screen appears smooth.
Scaling the Metaphor Upward
If the smallest units of reality behave this way, then the universe — as the totality of these interactions — should reflect the same structure.
In this metaphor, the Big Bang becomes the first impact: the initiating event that set the entire causal chain in motion.
From that first interaction, the universe changed state and that change generated the next interaction, and the sequence continue.
Cosmic history becomes not merely expansion, but a rhythm of impacts — a succession of state changes stretching from the origin of existence to the present.
What Exists Between the Impacts?
A natural objection arises: what exists between interactions?
In this framework, the answer is not “nothing” in a nihilistic sense, but no determinate reality. Existence crystallizes at events. Between them lies potential rather than presence.
What This Is — and Is Not
This is not a scientific model. It makes no predictions, offers no equations, and seeks no experimental confirmation. It is a philosophical metaphor with a conceptual lens and an attempt to unify change, causality, and time into a single intuitive picture.
I’m sharing this to invite serious philosophical critique, not agreement. In particular, I’d appreciate thoughts on the following:
1. Is it coherent to treat interaction rather than substance as ontologically primary?
2. Does understanding time as an emergent update process meaningfully differ from existing views of time?
3. Does the claim that existence occurs only at interactions introduce hidden assumptions (e.g. determinism)?
4. Is this merely a rephrasing of process philosophy, or does the framing add anything conceptually useful?
I welcome objections, references, and counterarguments. My goal is to understand where this way of thinking holds — and where it fails.