The block universe as a data structure, a thought experiment.
Render Theory describes what is read. This describes how the structure it is read from could be built, if it were described as a data structure. One way to model it, not a claim about how it is.
Lines that refer. There is one kind of thing: a line, the path something follows through the block universe. An electron, a photon, a water molecule, each is a line. A line carries no content of its own; it refers to a continuum where the full information lies. A water line refers to the continuum holding all that water is; an electron line to the continuum holding all that an electron is. The line is thin; the continuum carries the content. Everything is a line; they differ only in what they refer to.
Continua refer to continua. A continuum does not hold its information spelled out in full. The water continuum refers to the continua water is built from, hydrogen and oxygen; those refer to their parts, until the chain ends at a handful of fundamental continua, the fields. The electrons in water refer to the same electron continuum as electrons everywhere else. Nothing is stored twice. All the information about an electron exists once, and the whole of reality points to it.
Only the trajectory is its own. If everything is reference, there must be something that does not refer, or there is no difference between two things. That one thing is the trajectory: the run of places a line occupies through x, y, z and t. Two electron lines refer to the same continuum and are still two, because no other line takes exactly the same path. The shape of that trajectory is the identity of the line: not what it is, but the form of its path. Each line carries just one thing of its own, its unique way through the block universe, and otherwise only references. Space is not a box the lines lie in; distance is a relation between those trajectories, appearing only on reading.
Read on demand. Nothing is computed until it is read. You ask for a point, at a level; the reading follows the references as deep as the level requires, and draws from the continua what is needed. What is not asked for stays uncomputed. The lines are stored as analogue; the grain (planck) arises only on reading.
Time is the fourth axis. A line runs through x, y, z and t together. The whole line is there at once. Reading it point by point is the ordinary mode, and that reading is what we call the passing of time.
Where it stops. What the continua ultimately carry, what does the reading, and why the structure would be built this way: this the model does not explain. An architecture that holds together, no more. Coherent but unproven, to think through, not to take as true.
A complete but unproven framework. Offered to think through, by whatever reads it.
Render Theory → Mental Universe →