The Project Philosophy

Modern cosmology and fundamental physics often begin not with the question “what and how is observed?”, but with the postulation of primordial entities and laws that supposedly existed before any act of observation.

Yet any attempt to speak about the origin or structure of the Universe without first defining the nature and structure of observation itself remains logically incomplete. It lacks an answer to a fundamental question: who or what, in what relation to reality, and on what basis registers a difference — for example, between ‘was’ and ‘was not’, or between ‘is’ and ‘is not’?

In our approach, the observer is not an external entity standing apart from the world. On the contrary, the observer is intrinsically embedded in the very fabric of what is happening — an integral part of the mechanism through which reality acquires definiteness. Such an observer does not passively contemplate a pre-existing world; they actively participate in its actualization.

This notion does not necessarily refer to human consciousness, as in speculative interpretations, nor merely to a measuring device, as in strict physics.

We define the “observer” as a fundamental structural role — a principle that makes possible the registration and reproducibility of phenomena. This concept is related, on one hand, to John Wheeler’s “observer–participant,” who actively brings forth reality, and on the other, to Alfred North Whitehead’s “actual entity,” where every element of the world, down to an electron, is an “organism” experiencing its own unique process of becoming.

This constitutive observer (or, more precisely, the principle of observation) does not rely on pre-existing space and time. Rather, space and time emerge as the result of repeated and stable registration of fundamental distinctions that manifest at the foundation of the perceivable world.

We claim that it is precisely the dynamic process of forming, differentiating, and stabilizing these basic structural units — out of an initially undifferentiated ground — that determines all subsequent physics.

Within this model, space appears not as an empty background but as a form of organization of registered distinctions, a structure of relations between actualized events. Time, in turn, can be understood as the rhythm or sequence of the acts of registration and becoming themselves.

Perhaps the core mistake of standard models lies in the implicit assumption that there exists an objective universe that simply “was” or “is” independently, and in which the observer merely “appeared” at some late stage.

We propose a different starting point: might it be that the very structure and possibility of observation is the primary principle from which the ordered picture of the universe crystallizes — as the result of stable processes of registering distinctions?