The Emptiness Beneath Everything
What physics, perception, and Eastern philosophy suggest about the things we call real
Look around you. A table. A wall. A tree outside the window. Your hands resting in front of you. The world appears to be filled with things. Solid things, separate things – Things that seem unquestionably real. But suppose we could keep looking deeper—past appearances, past biology, past molecules and atoms, where, exactly, would we find the thing?
And there is an even more fundamental question: Are we capable of experiencing reality as it actually is?
The Disappearing Table
Consider the table in front of you. To ordinary perception, it is solid. Your hand cannot pass through it. You can place a cup on it. It occupies space and has weight. But magnify it far enough and the familiar table begins to disappear. The wood becomes molecules, The molecules become atoms. Atoms reveal nuclei and electrons. And the simple picture many of us learned in school—tiny particles resembling miniature billiard balls—gives way to something much stranger.
At the quantum level, matter is described through quantum states, fields and interactions, with measurement outcomes generally expressed probabilistically. The solidity we experience is real at the scale at which we live. But it is not quite what it appears to be.
There isn’t necessarily a tiny piece of solid “table” waiting at the bottom of reality.
So where did the table go? It didn’t go anywhere. Perhaps the problem was the question.
Empty Doesn’t Mean Nothing
It is tempting at this point to say that matter is “mostly empty space.” That phrase is useful, but it can also be misleading. Because empty space, according to modern physics, is not simply nothing.
Quantum field theory describes fundamental fields extending throughout space. What we call particles can be understood as excitations of those fields. Even the vacuum—the lowest-energy state of those fields—is not philosophical nothingness. So science does not tell us that nothing exists. It tells us something considerably more interesting.
The everyday categories of thing, object, solid and empty may not describe reality at its deepest level. They describe reality as it appears at ours.
And strangely, this brings us close to a question Eastern philosophers were asking long before anyone knew what an atom was.
The Meaning of Emptiness
In Buddhist philosophy there is the concept of śūnyatā, usually translated as emptiness.
It is sometimes misunderstood as saying that the world does not exist. But emptiness is not nothingness. Rather, it points toward the idea that things do not possess completely independent, permanent, self-contained existence. They arise through causes, conditions and relationships.
Consider a wave. Does the wave exist? Of course. We can see it. Measure it. Watch it travel toward shore. But try to separate the wave from the ocean. Remove the water and what remains? Nothing that could independently be called a wave. The wave exists, but it exists through conditions. The same is true of a whirlpool. There is clearly something there. Yet the whirlpool isn’t an object added to the water. It is a temporary pattern of the water.
Perhaps much of what we call reality is like this – Patterns mistaken for things.
And Then There Is You
Now turn the question inward. Where exactly are you?
Your body? Your body continually exchanges matter and energy with its environment.
Your thoughts? They appear and disappear.
Your memories? They change, fade and sometimes prove unreliable.
Your personality? It has changed since childhood and will continue changing.
Your cells? Your body is continually repairing, replacing and reorganizing itself.
And yet through all of this we experience an extraordinary sense of continuity: I am still me.
But what exactly is this “me”? Perhaps the self is less like a stone and more like the whirlpool—a persistent pattern created by countless interacting processes. The whirlpool is not unreal. But neither does it exist independently of the river. Perhaps the same is true of us.
The World We Never Directly Experience
There is another problem, and perhaps an even deeper one. Everything we have said assumes that we are observing reality. But are we?
We never encounter the external world completely unmediated. Light reaches our eyes.
Vibrations reach our ears. Molecules interact with receptors involved in smell and taste.
Pressure, temperature and other physical interactions stimulate receptors throughout our bodies. Our sensory systems convert these interactions into electrochemical signals. Those signals travel through neural pathways and are processed by immensely complex networks of neurons. And from all of this arises something extraordinary: experience.
Color, sound, taste, touch, shape, distance. A world – But the world we experience and whatever exists outside our nervous system are not necessarily identical.
Consider the color red. Outside us, there are electromagnetic wavelengths and surfaces with particular reflective properties. Light interacts with receptors in our eyes, signals are processed through the visual system—and somehow there arises the subjective experience we call red.
There is an important distinction here. The physical stimulus is not the same thing as the experience. Sound presents a similar puzzle. Outside the perceiver there are pressure variations traveling through a medium. Yet when those vibrations interact with the ear and nervous system, we experience a violin, thunder, laughter, a human voice. The experience is real. But it is an experience produced through an interaction between the external world and a particular kind of biological system.
Which Reality Is Real?
Other creatures make the problem even more obvious. A bee can perceive ultraviolet wavelengths invisible to us. Dogs experience an olfactory world enormously richer than ours. Some snakes can detect infrared radiation. Other animals possess sensory capabilities involving electric or magnetic fields that humans do not consciously experience in comparable ways.
All of these creatures inhabit the same universe. Yet they do not experience the same world.
So which one perceives reality as it truly is? Perhaps the question itself is mistaken.
Each nervous system samples certain aspects of its environment and constructs an experience appropriate to the organism possessing it. Human beings may simply be another example. Our senses are extraordinarily useful. They allow us to navigate our surroundings, communicate, build civilizations and investigate the universe itself. But usefulness does not guarantee completeness.
Our sensory systems evolved within a particular environment and under particular biological constraints. There is no reason to assume that the resulting human experience presents reality exactly as it exists independently of us. We perceive what our biology allows us to perceive. And then our brain interprets it.
The Mind That Divides the World
This brings us back to the idea explored in The World Your Brain Creates. The brain is not simply a window through which reality pours. It receives limited sensory information and interprets it using neural processes influenced by biology, previous experience, context and expectation. What we consciously experience may therefore be better understood not as reality in its entirety, but as an extraordinarily useful human representation of it. And that representation divides the world.
This is my hand, that is the table, this is the tree, that is the sky, this is me, that is everything else. These distinctions are essential. An organism incapable of distinguishing itself from its environment would not survive very long.
But a distinction necessary for survival is not necessarily a fundamental division in reality.
Look at a tree. Where does the tree end? At its bark? What about its roots intertwined with fungi beneath the soil? The carbon it absorbs from the atmosphere? The sunlight driving photosynthesis? The water moving through its tissues? Remove those relationships and the apparently independent object called “tree” becomes increasingly difficult to define.
The boundary is useful. But nature may be less interested in our boundaries than we are.
The Strange Position We Find Ourselves In
This leaves us in a remarkable position. We are using a brain produced by the universe, receiving a narrow range of signals through senses produced by evolution, to construct a model of the very universe we are trying to understand.
We then look at that model and call it reality. Perhaps it is. But perhaps what we experience is reality translated into a language a human nervous system can understand.
Imagine trying to understand an entire symphony while being able to hear only a handful of its frequencies. The music we hear would be real. But it would not be the whole symphony.
Perhaps human experience is something similar. We see a world of colors, objects, boundaries and separate things because that is how reality appears after passing through the particular sensory and neural architecture of a human being. What reality might be without that translation remains a much harder question.
A Universe of Relationships
This is where science and Eastern philosophy can sit beside one another without pretending they are saying the same thing. Quantum physics does not prove Buddhism. Buddhist philosophy did not predict quantum field theory. Trying to force the two together diminishes both. But they can provoke a remarkably similar question:
Are separate things as fundamental as they appear?
Modern fundamental physics describes nature through fields and interactions rather than only as a collection of tiny solid objects. Eastern philosophy has long questioned whether phenomena—and especially the self—possess independent, permanent existence.
Neuroscience reveals how much processing occurs between physical stimulation and conscious experience. These are very different disciplines making very different kinds of claims. Yet together they give us reason to question the ordinary picture of reality as a collection of isolated, permanent things directly presented to an observer.
Perhaps the universe is less like a collection of objects and more like an unfolding network of relationships.
What, Then, Actually Exists?
Perhaps this is the wrong question. A wave exists. A rainbow exists. A flame exists. A thought exists. You exist. But none of these need exist as permanent, self-contained objects in order to be real.
Consider a rainbow. It depends upon sunlight, water droplets, geometry and an observer positioned in the right place. There isn’t a rainbow sitting somewhere in space waiting to be discovered like a physical object. Change the relationships and the rainbow disappears. That doesn’t make the rainbow unreal. It makes it relational.
Perhaps reality itself is more like this than we imagine. Not a warehouse filled with separate objects. But an unfolding web of relationships, processes and patterns.
Nothing Becomes Everything
There is an old question in philosophy: Why is there something rather than nothing?
It may be one of humanity’s deepest questions. But perhaps another question is hiding beneath it. What if the distinction between “something” and “nothing” is itself partly shaped by the way human beings perceive and conceptualize reality?
We look at the universe and see billions upon billions of separate things. Stars, planets, trees,
animals, other people, ourselves. Yet beneath those divisions, reality may not resemble an inventory of independent objects at all.
There are fields, interactions, relationships, Processes, patterns appearing, changing and disappearing. And then there is consciousness—the mysterious arena in which any of this becomes an experience at all.
The ancient language of Buddhist philosophy spoke of emptiness. Modern physics uses very different concepts and methods. Neuroscience investigates how our nervous system constructs perception from physical signals. None should be confused with the others.
And none establishes that the universe is literally “nothing.”
But together they invite us to question something we normally take completely for granted:
that the world we experience is the world exactly as it is.
Perhaps reality is neither the solid collection of objects it appears to be nor the absolute nothingness suggested by the word void. Perhaps what we call things are temporary forms, relationships and patterns within something far more interconnected than our everyday perception allows us to see.
The table remains a table. The wave remains a wave. And you remain you. At least at the level of reality in which those distinctions have meaning. But beneath them may lie something our senses were never designed to reveal directly. We may be looking through a tiny window onto an immeasurably larger reality—and mistaking the view through the window for everything that exists. Perhaps the deepest mystery of the universe is not why there is something rather than nothing. Perhaps it is why emptiness appears to us as so many separate somethings.
