The first gulp from the glass of natural sciences will make you an atheist, but at the bottom of the glass God is waiting for you.
– Attributed to Werner Heisenberg
There is uncertainty about the attribution of the above quote which fittingly reflects the uncertainty of reality (a quantum pun on the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle).
The Stack
One of my favourite topics to think about is the Reality Stack and what is at the bottom. From the early days of humankind we have always wondered what makes the world tick and we have been peeling back the layers one step at a time.
The Reality Stack is as follows:
- Dependent Theories (Biology and Chemistry) that depend on physics and one day might get a full physical representation.
- Classical and enabler theories that describe the reality of everyday experiences (Thermodynamics, Classical Mechanics, Gravity, Statistical Physics etc.)
- Advanced theories that start to describe reality at the edge (General Relativity – at cosmic scales, Special Relativity – approaching light speed, and Quantum Mechanics/QFT/Standard Model – defining the building blocks of reality).
- Conceptual theories that are attempting to unify cosmic scale effects with the building blocks of reality (AdS/CFT, SO10, SU(5)).
- Does another layer exist…?
We know also that this stack is fast approaching limits of human cognition especially as AI is helping with research.
Items (1) and some of (2) are taught during school years and then five years of graduate/post-graduate study is enough to make you aware of (3). But (3) and (4) will take you years to master and the route lies via a Ph.D., and post doc followed by a research career in Mathematics or Theoretical Physics (or liberal use of Claude as per recent news items).
By the time you start (5) you agree with the above quote and think maybe there is a supreme entity, master controller, God, game master etc. running the show.
Similar stacks exist in other areas as well but they all end up at (5) above (at the time of writing this). For example in Computing:
- No code: drag and drop software creation where the developer is completely unaware of the application structure and how it executes.
- Low code: some portions of the application are crafted by a human therefore limited visibility of application structure and execution flow.
- Software Development using business focussed languages (e.g., Java, Python): focus on application structure and logic flow but low level details such as memory management, network communication, process management, and execution optimisation still outside the developer’s knowledge.
- Software Development using low-level or assembly languages: full visibility right down to how each data item is being stored, managed, moved etc.
- Binary: writing out applications on specific micro-architectures where you are painfully aware of the hardware, that is ultimate nerd heaven at the cost of a good night’s sleep.
- Continue from Layer (2) of the Reality stack…
Entering the Fog
The fog that hides a complete description of reality behaves differently for physics (where it pushes down) and logic (where it pushes up). Two famous results (Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem and Turing’s Halting Problem) keep the fog firmly in place going up the layers, and a missing Theory of Everything keeps the fog in place going down the layers.
Looking at the computing stack the bit on the system is not aware of the electrons that we are using to give it that value just as the silicon substrate is not aware of the protons and neutrons that make it up. Those protons and neutrons are not aware of the quarks that make them. We have entered the fog of reality. In fact, are quarks at the bottom? If yes then what is that ‘bottom’ resting on? Is it even a real thing or just a ‘field’? Are ‘fields’ real?
Just like a computer program cannot reason about the system driving nor prove consistency as there will always be statements that cannot be proven within that system. We can escape to a layer above but then end up with a different set of unprovable statements (locked in by Gödel’s Theorem).
The Fog in the Brain and AI
Similarly the human brain is made up of different network types responsible for specific functions such as processing sensory data, problem solving, and reasoning. One of the big mysteries is what makes these networks work together to provide us with what we experience as ‘consciousness’. The stack here extends from us observing some text on the screen down to chemical and electric signals in our brain back to layer (2) of the Reality stack. The fog then takes over.
Often we cannot articulate (pierce the fog) the reason behind a decision. We use words like ‘instinct’, ‘gut feeling’, ‘intuition’ etc. to acknowledge the fact that the brain cannot directly observe its own workings. Philosophy takes the approach of a mini virtual human inside our brains driving the real us. But then we come to the same question about the ‘bottom’: who is driving the mini virtual human inside our brain?
Looking at AI models we find similar stacks and as we go from small sections of the network to the whole model scale we start to lose situational awareness. The training process for AI brings all the networks together and bakes in the coordination (e.g., MoE approach). But even if we ask an AI model for an explanation for a given output it often just generates a plausible response rather than the actual method followed as it suffers from the same fog. It cannot completely analyse its own reasoning. This has been highlighted in various papers from OpenAI and Anthropic.
- Anthropic’s “On the Biology of a Large Language Model” (2025): Claude described doing addition by carrying the one, while internally it used parallel approximate and exact paths.
- Anthropic’s “Reasoning Models Don’t Always Say What They Think” (2025).
- Turpin et al. (2023), “Language Models Don’t Always Say What They Think”.
- OpenAI’s 2025 work on chain-of-thought monitoring.
Conclusion
We are now very far in from our first gulps. We are not yet sure if we are drinking from a glass or a hosepipe. Nor do we know if someone else controls the glass/hose-pipe and how much influence we can exert.
Cheers to the next gulp!
