Category: Authors

  • Book Review – Rituals of Inquiry by Kris Herndon

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    Bob Hoyng
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    I had the honor to be an early reader of Ms. Herndon’s book, and would like to share my thoughts about the project here. I’m a deep believer in a need right now for new ways of forming community and finding shared meaning, and this book represents an outstanding step in that direction. “Every meaningful…

  • Does Ultimate Reality Matter?

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    Bob Hoyng
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    There’s a sharp objection to any philosophy built on emptiness as ultimate reality: we don’t live in emptiness. We live here, in conventional reality – in relationships, responsibilities, and deadlines. So what does it matter that reality is ultimately empty, that phenomena arise without intrinsic existence, or that the self is a convenient fiction? None…

  • The Universe in a Single Atom

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    Bob Hoyng
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    With the work on Nothing Becomes and Living in the Moment complete, I’ve turned my focus even deeper on those ideas. During the work on Nothing Becomes, I was introduced to a Buddhist thinker Nagarjuna, who I plan on examining deeply in a future book. However, Nagarjuna’s work is highly demanding, and I want to…

  • One Year Later…

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    Bob Hoyng
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    It’s now been about one year since I started my self-work that led to the experience that launched both of my books and my general calling to writing. I wanted to spend a moment reflecting on that experience. All along, what was beneath the surface in all of my seeking was a desire to have…

  • Causal Fermion Systems and Nothing Becomes

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    Bob Hoyng
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    I’ve always been upfront that my work comes from a lay perspective – observational, philosophical, and based on personal experience. Even so, I’ve argued there’s potential in these ideas for formal mathematical models of reality. Recently, I watched an interview Curt Jaimungal did with Felix Finster on Youtube. While I can’t claim to follow all…

  • What Inspired Nothing Becomes and Living in the Moment?

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    Bob Hoyng
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    Early this year, I went through a period of deep introspection. I was trying to resolve any issues I’d left in the background of my life – working through who I was and what that meant for how I moved through the world. I set about the process of identifying baggage I was still carrying,…

  • The Question I Hadn’t Asked

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    Bob Hoyng
    in ,

    “Behind it all is surely an idea so simple, so beautiful, that when we grasp it – in a decade, a century, or a millennium – we will all say to each other, how could it have been otherwise?”John Archibald WheelerNothing Becomes was born of an experience that I’ve come to understand was my mind’s…

  • What Del Toro Changed About Frankenstein (And Why It Matters)

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    Bob Hoyng
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    Important: Spoilers for Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein – Watch the Movie First! Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein is a wonderfully crafted, mostly faithful retelling of Mary Shelley’s story. However, one critical change – the catharsis in the final encounter between Frankenstein and the creature – provides a deeper meaning, one that may have felt inaccessible in…

  • Living in the Moment

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    Bob Hoyng
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    I spent decades with a mind that wouldn’t shut up. Intrusive thoughts, existential questions, endless loops of regret and anxiety. Meditation helped, philosophy helped, but something was still missing. Then came the moment of alignment I describe in Nothing Becomes – one quiet moment that changed everything. But here’s what I didn’t fully address in…

  • Dual Descriptions and the Shape of Convergence

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    Bob Hoyng
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    The Value of Alternative Descriptions I came to an important realization while thinking about the relationship between physical and informational descriptions of reality: even if information is “just” describing an underlying physical substrate, that doesn’t diminish its value as a framework. Physics already accepts this principle through “dual descriptions” – different mathematical formulations that describe…