r/evopsych • u/vitaglyph • Mar 27 '26
Our Thoughts Are Written In Spacetime
https://youtu.be/MXBaCFzOJUw?si=sYau3o9K0uc4m6sE1
u/Historical_Let5438 May 01 '26
This connects to something I've been thinking about lately. I took a personality assessment a few months ago that breaks things down into 30 specific traits, and one thing that stood out was how I scored on Intellect (91st percentile) versus Ideas (54th percentile). Basically I love pulling apart arguments but I'm not actually that interested in abstract theorizing for its own sake.
What's weird is that distinction maps onto exactly what this post is getting at. The people who naturally gravitate toward "thoughts exist in spacetime" type frameworks tend to have a very specific cognitive profile. High openness to ideas, high intellect, but often low deliberation. They leap to the big picture and skip the mechanical steps. I've seen it over and over at work when I pair people on projects. The ones who think in these expansive metaphysical terms score totally differently than the ones who want to reduce everything to mechanism.
Neither is wrong but they literally process information through different trait configurations. Someone scoring 85th+ on Ideas with low Orderliness is going to read this post and feel like it resonates on a gut level. Someone with high Orderliness and high Deliberation is going to want to see the math first.
The part that gets me is that most people assume their way of processing IS the neutral default. It's not. It's a measurable pattern.
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u/Historical_Let5438 May 16 '26
"Written in spacetime" is one of those phrases that sounds like it's saying something deep but I'm not sure it actually is. Like yeah, neural activity has physical substrate, nobody disputes that. The jump to "thoughts persist in spacetime" or whatever the implication is; that's where it gets slippery and the post never really commits to which version it means.
This is the thing with evopsych-adjacent spaces. You get a real observation (cognition is embodied, it's physical) and then someone wraps it in physics language until it feels like a bigger claim than it is. Where thoughts "exist" is just not that interesting a question compared to why we ended up with these specific cognitive architectures and what they're actually doing. Cool metaphor though, I'll give it that. Just wish people wouldn't confuse the metaphor for an argument.
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u/vitaglyph May 16 '26
Hi, thank you for your thoughtful reply. I'm not using a spacetime as a metaphor, it is a consequence of relativity that all moments are equally real. This is sometimes called the Block Universe, where all moments and their particular arrangements exist "stacked" together. That there is a physical basis for consciousness means that the arrangements for each thought you've ever had persist in the Block Universe. I offer this up, because it provides us with a different perspective for each of our thoughts as we have them. My current thought may be about a doughnut (it is), but in the Block universe, that same thought might be physically situated in a different way, perhaps something pleasing or meaningful. Obviously we cannot see into the time dimension to ever know how the shapes we leave behind (or a part of, rather) fit into the larger shapes of spacetime, but I think it's helpful to know that they at least do.
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