What is the World? Or, How to Talk to God.

"What is the world, Grandma?" asked little Anya, her small hand tracing the wooden grain of the rocking chair.

Grandma smiled, her eyes crinkling at the corners. She didn't answer right away, but leaned forward and whispered, "The world isn't a place, little one. It's a tapestry. A vast, endless loom where every thread is a relationship and every knot is a moment. When we are born, a new motif, a new little pattern, is woven into the tapestry."

Anya tilted her head. "But what about time? We walk, and things change. We grow older."

"Ah, that's just how we see it," Grandma said, rocking gently. "Imagine you are a beetle, crawling on the tapestry. You can only see the thread directly in front of you. To you, it feels like a long road, with a 'before' behind you and an 'after' ahead. You see other beetles moving, and you call it 'motion.' You feel the fabric getting thicker and denser in one direction, and you call that 'the flow of time.'"

She paused, her gaze distant as if she were looking at something only she could see. "But if you could fly high above the tapestry, high enough to see it all at once, you would see that the threads aren't really moving. The beetle's journey isn't a long line being drawn; it's a complete shape already woven into the cloth. The moments you call 'past' and 'future' are just different knots in the same pattern, all there at once."

Anya's brow furrowed. "So, is a person's life a picture?"

"Exactly," Grandma said, her voice soft. "A life is a picture, a beautiful, unique pattern woven into the whole. Birth is a tight knot, full of new threads. Death is when your motif gently frays and your threads are re-woven back into the great tapestry. It’s not an end, just a change. Your threads will go on to become new patterns, new relations, new knots."

Grandma took Anya's hand and held it. "What we call the 'laws of the world' are just the way the threads like to knot together. What we call 'distance' is just the space between the knots. The world feels like a place with directions and a beginning and an end, but that's only because we're inside the pattern. From the outside, there's just the tapestry. Endless, timeless, and completely whole."

Grandma finished her story, and for a moment, the only sound was the gentle creak of the rocking chair. Anya was quiet, her little mind working to grasp the big ideas.

"Grandma?" she finally asked, her voice small and hesitant. "What was before the world?"

Grandma smiled. "Ah, that's a clever question. It's the kind of question a little beetle on the tapestry would ask. But the answer, my dear, is that there was nothing."

Anya's eyes widened. "Nothing at all?"

"That's right," Grandma said. "Because the word 'before' only makes sense if you're inside the tapestry, walking along a thread. But from the outside, there is no 'before.' The tapestry isn't a line that starts somewhere; it's a whole picture that simply is. There's no origin, no first knot. The world, the whole weave, simply exists."

Grandma gently tapped the side of Anya's head. "The idea of a beginning is a shadow cast by our own limited eyes. It's a way for us to make sense of the piece of the tapestry we can see. But the whole picture, the one you'd see if you could fly high above it all, has no beginning and no end. It just is."

P.S. I wrote the above after entering a rabbit hole that started with the question "what if time was the 3rd dimension and depth was the 4th dimensions?". It led to several realizations, the chief of which is the huge disconnect between our level of reality (observable universe) and whatever it is on a cosmic scale, if the term is even applicable.

In the rabbit hole, I chose to assume that in what may be called "God's-eye" view of the universe (looking at the universe from outside of it), you would not experience things in a similar way at all. For example - no axes for space and time. Instead, there is no up, no down, no before, no after.

What you would see is a vast, seething lattice of connections. Each node glows for an instant, then vanishes, but its light threads outward, binding to others, building structure upon structure. It is not laid out in a straight grid but a sprawling, intricate network of causality.

You, the godlike viewer, do not see “objects moving through time.” You see entire worldlines already traced, whole skeins of knots stretched across the weave. A person’s life is not a figure walking from past to future - it is a complete shape in the fabric, beginning, middle, and end visible all at once.

You see not “events following each other,” but all events coexisting, linked by strands of influence. Cause and effect are not arrows, but tensions in the web, pulling one knot into being because others are already taut.

To you, there is no flow. The idea of “passing through time” is an illusion of the creatures inside, who can only feel one slice of themselves at once. You see them whole, sculptures carved into the weave, their consciousness flickering from knot to knot like a lantern lighting its own path.

From your vantage, the axes those beings swear by - length, width, height, time - vanish. You see that they are not fundamental lines, but emergent harmonies, regular ripples in the larger chaos. The cloth can be folded, twisted, rewoven, yet its essence is unchanged: it is only the pattern of relations that matters.

And you realize: what they call “space” is the spacing of threads, what they call “time” is the thickening of the weave, what they call “laws” are the rules by which the loom knots itself.

But the loom itself? It has no axes. It only has becoming.

The vast disconnect between the views - God's-eye and Human-eye demanded a bridge, a dictionary to help the two sides understand one another. For example:

God’s-eye concept	Human translation	Notes
The Weave / Web of relations	Spacetime	What we see as 3D space + 1D time is just the emergent smoothness of countless relational threads
Knots (stable intersections of relations)	Events	What we call “an event in time” is just a knot in the weave where multiple threads meet
Strands (links between knots)	Causality/light cones	We see them as cause → effect. Outside, they’re just tensions that connect knots
Thickening of weave in one direction	Passage of time / Entropy increase	Our sense of “flowing forward” is the emergent effect of the weave’s asymmetric structure
Whole motif or figure	A life, a worldline	From outside, a person’s life is a complete pattern already woven, not a sequence unfolding
Patterns of threads repeating	Laws of physics	What we call “laws” are simply the repeating regularities of how knots and strands are woven
Resonant harmonies in the weave	Dimensions	The stable “directions” we treat as x, y, z, t are just large-scale rhythms in the weave
The web itself	Existence	From outside, there is no “universe in time” - only the web as a whole
No first knot	No origin	“Beginning” is a concept meaningful only inside the weave. Outside, the whole thing is timeless
Reweaving	Change	To us, “things changing” in time; to the outside, just shifts in the configuration of threads
Fraying / loosening knots	Death, decay	From inside: entropy, endings. From outside: part of the pattern relaxing

Such a gap in existence and concepts will also lead to gaps in understanding - in both directions. Humans cannot understand the God-like, and the God-like, if it exists, by its very definition and existence cannot comprehend humans.

It's a little sad, so I didn't want to leave it there. Suppose there was a way to communicate, what could it be? The obvious answer is mathematics/music, as it encroaches in both directions.

Successful human→god communication requires three things:

1. Clarity (unambiguous, low-entropy code): pick structures that are unmistakably non-random and conceptually universal (primes, Fibonacci, simple group symmetries).

2. Scale & persistence: make the motif large or long-lasting enough to have a significant footprint in the weave. Single fleeting events are noise.

3. Redundancy & echoing: repeat the pattern across many media, times, places, or participants so the motif resonates through different parts of the lattice.

Human→god communication, on this model, looks less like sending a sentence and more like weaving: intentionally shaping motifs that are distinctive in form and persistent enough to be noticed by an observer whose ontology is relational and pattern-based. Music provides temporal resonance and entrainment; mathematics provides timeless, unambiguous structure. Together they make the strongest signal.

Obviously, this means a novel or two. Stay tuned.