Nobody Has Ever Seen a Thing. Including You

Look at the chair you are sitting on, or the nearest table. It seems like the most noun-like thing in the world. It is just sitting there, not doing anything. It is a thing.

Here is a claim that sounds ridiculous at first and that I have become convinced is true: in the entire history of science, nobody has ever observed a noun. Everything we have ever measured turns out to be something happening.

Test that claim at several scales. Start with the chair and go down to the electron, then look at why we see nouns at all, then at empires and at you. Last comes the obvious objection: if everything is a verb, what is doing the verbing?

Zoom In on the Chair

Start with the chair. It is made of wood or metal or plastic, which is made of molecules, which are made of atoms. Those atoms vibrate constantly; temperature is a measure of the average energy of that jiggling. The electrons in them never sit still in one place. They are spread out in clouds of probability, constantly interacting.

Keep going. In modern physics, an electron is not a tiny ball either. In quantum field theory it is an excitation, a ripple, in a field that fills all of space. A ripple is about as verb-like as you can get. It is not a thing that moves; it is the moving.

That is when it clicked for me:

"And even an electron itself is not a noun. A chair then cannot be a noun if it's made of electrons. Nothing can be a noun as everything is doing something, everything is action"

The chair only looks still because the activity happens at scales and speeds our eyes cannot see. "Solid object" is a summary our brains make of a storm of processes.

The Map and the Territory

So why do we see nouns everywhere?

At everyday scales our senses deliver strong impressions of what things are: hard, red, heavy, warm. We trust those impressions. But once science goes below the reach of our senses, we are working only from measurements, from what things do when we poke them. Every property in physics is ultimately defined by a behavior. Mass, for example, is measured by how strongly something resists being accelerated and how it responds to gravity. Charge is measured by how something pushes and pulls on other charges.

That made me wonder:

"Has that led us down a path of mistaking map (does) for territory (is) as we probe deeper?"

I think the answer is partly yes. The "is" was always our model-building. The data itself only ever showed "does."

Empires Are Verbs Too

It is not just physics.

Think about an empire. Rome was never a thing you could pick up. It was a vast pattern of people, roads, laws, habits, armies and stories, constantly being remade. It was born, grew, peaked and fell apart. It had a lifecycle, like a living creature.

Or think of yourself. Most of the atoms in your body are replaced over time. Your cells are constantly being rebuilt. Your thoughts never stop moving. If you are a noun, you are a very busy one. You are much more like a flame or a whirlpool, a stable pattern in a flow.

When the same structure shows up at every scale, particles, organisms and societies, it gets hard to believe it is a coincidence.

None of this is brand new. The Greek philosopher Heraclitus, some 2,500 years ago, is remembered for the idea that everything flows, that you cannot step into the same river twice because the river is never the same water. In the twentieth century Alfred North Whitehead built a whole philosophy around the idea that reality is made of events rather than things. What is new is that physics, our hardest science, keeps arriving at the same place from below.

Then What Is Doing All the Verbing?

This raises an obvious question. If everything is a verb, what is the verb of? Doesn't running need a runner?

I have gone back and forth on this. One option is that there are many separate processes, all interacting. But physics keeps pointing toward deep connectedness, which suggests something stranger: that it is all one big process, which we, as small embedded observers, can only see in slices.

And there is a further twist. Some physicists suspect that time itself is not fundamental. If so, the one big process might look like a single timeless whole from a broader perspective, and only look like process from inside. I don't know. I suspect this is exactly the point where people decide whether they are physicalists or idealists.

Where I Land

This is my own view, offered as a view, not a fact.

The one thing I know directly is not a noun either. Experience is always happening, always flowing. When I look outward at objects, I eventually reach a stopping point where I can name the thing. When I turn attention inward, toward the one who is looking, there is no end. There is no static "me" to find, only ongoing awareness.

That made me suspect the nouns we see everywhere come from how experience works. To witness something, you need something to witness, so experience carves the flow into objects. Then we mistake our own model for reality.

If that is right, the ancients who said "God" and the physicists who say "quantum field" may be pointing at the same thing from two sides: one act, endlessly expressing itself, which we can only see as many things.

Seeing Verbs

Here is something to try today. Pick any object: a cup, a tree, your own hand. Instead of asking "what is it?", ask "what is it doing?"

The cup is holding its shape as its molecules vibrate and bond. The tree is pulling water up from the ground and turning light into sugar. Your hand is pumping blood, repairing skin and keeping itself warm.

Once you start looking this way, you will find that nothing in the room is simply sitting there, and that includes you. You are not a fixed thing that has experiences. You are an ongoing process, and so is everything you look at.