Consciousness of the Real — Sylvain Lebel
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Consciousness of the Real
English translation from the original French version.
Introduction
Where does the world come from?
Where does consciousness come from?
Something is changing. Before any theory, any belief, any scientific model, we have the direct experience of a world in transformation. This perception of change is our first contact with the Real. It is the only irreducible certainty from which a path of understanding can begin.
Starting from this minimal experience, one idea will be explored: that space, time, matter, thought and consciousness could all emerge from a single fundamental dynamic. The aim is not to adopt a pre-given religious, metaphysical or scientific system, but to let this first evidence — something is changing — guide us all the way to its deepest consequences.
This text proposes a progression that is both visual and rigorous: to reconnect what science, philosophy and inner experience often describe separately. The objective is not to proclaim a dogma, but to test a hypothesis: if the Real proceeds from a single principle, can we, starting from the simplest, see the most complex emerge?
Note: Each image in this sequence is clickable. It opens its detailed description as well as its mathematical formalism, allowing you to move progressively from intuition to structure.
Methodology
Our perceptions can mislead us — illusion, interpretation, imagination. But there is one perception we cannot doubt: the perception of change. Even if everything else were illusion, the fact of perceiving a variation cannot be denied.
From this minimal certainty a question arises: what must exist for this perception of change to be possible?
To designate what exists in itself, what makes space, matter and consciousness possible, we will call **CELA** the Substance of the Real. This name is deliberately neutral: it presupposes neither beliefs nor any prior theoretical framework.
The approach taken here has two stages:
- To deduce the attributes this substance must necessarily possess in order for the perception of change to be possible.
- To imagine this substance in its simplest possible state, then to observe how its progressive complexification can give rise to space, time, matter, forces, life and consciousness.
The aim is not to assert a final truth, but to evaluate the coherence of a single principle. If, starting from the simplest, the most complex can emerge without contradiction, then the model gains in legitimacy.
Status and scope of the approach.
This work does not belong to any established school of thought – philosophical, scientific, or metaphysical. It is not based on any doctrine, but on direct attention to the real: observing change, and understanding how it takes shape.
The model presented here is not a physical theory in the strict sense. It is an architecture of intelligibility that seeks to show how a single organizing principle can give rise to coherent physical structures, perceptual dynamics, and symbolic forms. Psychophysics plays a central role: it links what we perceive to the world we describe.
The strength of the framework rests on two simple criteria: first, its internal coherence (any contradiction requires revision), and second, its encounter with reality — through the phenomena it connects, the predictions it suggests, and the aspects of experience it helps illuminate.
The value of this approach depends neither on tradition nor authority, but on its generative power: the more it unifies without multiplying assumptions, the closer it comes to the Real it seeks to describe.
Attributes of the Substance of the Real
The term “substance” is used here in a strictly phenomenological sense: that which endures through change. CELA is not an ontological dogma, but a frame for thinking the continuity of the Real beyond its apparent forms.
Likewise, “to exist” does not imply the empirical existence of an object. To perceive a change is already to be in the presence of an effective difference. This difference is not a thing, but a minimal act of being. It is from this act that the notion of Substance of the Real takes its meaning.
The Substance of the Real designates all that exists in itself. This does not posit its unity as a prior truth, but as a minimal ontological decision of parsimony: if something escaped it, that something would exist in itself and would in turn have to be integrated. Thus, unity is deduced, not asserted.
- Alone: Nothing that exists can be external to CELA. Every real distinction still belongs to its being.
- Eternal: Without external cause. Time does not precede it; time is what arises from its variation.
- Indivisible: There is no internal boundary that splits its being. The differences it bears are internal, not cuts.
- Continuous: Without rupture of being or ontological discontinuity.
- Sensitive: For a change to be perceived, there must be at least one internal differentiation in the substance. To perceive something rather than nothing already implies a minimal distinction: one state stands out from another. This distinction is already a form of sensitivity. It is only later, when this reasoning is formalized, that this internal stability can be expressed as a relation between density and complexity (ρ·C = k). Sensitivity is therefore not derived from mathematics: mathematics express what was already deduced by thought.
- Dynamic: Change has no external cause: it is the act by which the Real maintains itself. Time is the internal measure of this dynamism.
- Intelligible: What can be distinguished can be described. Thought is not foreign to the Real: it expresses its internal coherence.
- Finite: Finitude is not an external limit, but the very condition of discernible existence. If ρ tended to 0, there would be nothing left to perceive; if ρ tended to ∞, all internal differentiation would disappear. In both cases, form collapses. The relation ρ·C = k expresses this necessity: being is maintained only within a regime of density and complexity that is finite and self-determined.
- Immanent: The cause of the Real is not external to it: it lies in its own dynamics.
We thus obtain a substance that is alone, eternal, indivisible, continuous, sensitive, dynamic, intelligible, finite and immanent — a unity without uniformity, capable of internal variations that give rise to forms, phenomena and consciousness.
The test of such an ontology is not adherence, but its generative power: can it account for the world as it manifests itself, without internal contradiction? It is to this test that we will now subject CELA.