🌱 Patterns of Existence

A Preface to Similarity Theory
By Simon Raphael

This page introduces the experiences, observations, and patterns of thought from which Similarity Theory developed. It is intended as a philosophical preface rather than a formal statement of the framework. For the theory’s core concepts in their simplest and most stable form, see Foundational Definitions of Similarity Theory.

🌀 Philosophical Reflection

🌱 How Similarity Theory Was Born

From a young age, I found myself drawn not only to questions of existence, but to the patterns that seemed to underlie it. One of my earliest encounters with this idea came through the Lord’s Prayer, particularly the phrase “on Earth as it is in Heaven.” Even as a child, something about those words struck me as profound. They suggested that different realms of existence might reflect one another through underlying relationships and patterns.

As I matured, I encountered the Hermetic maxim “As above, so below” and recognised a similar intuition: that patterns found at one scale or level of existence may reappear, in altered form, at another. The idea of the microcosm reflecting the macrocosm gradually became an important lens through which I examined the world.

I began wondering how anyone could understand something as vast as the universe when direct observation is necessarily limited. Earth offered a useful starting point. Within one relatively small environment we encounter matter, life, consciousness, organisation, conflict, cooperation, growth, decay, and extraordinary structural complexity.

Rather than treating Earth as a complete sample of the universe, I began treating it as a relational laboratory: a place in which accessible patterns could be studied and compared across different scales and forms.

I began looking for recurring structures — similarities that remained recognisable despite differences in size, complexity, and expression. From this investigation grew the central intuition behind Similarity Theory: that relationships observed within accessible reality may provide clues to broader patterns of existence.

This is where the roots of Similarity Theory took hold.

🕯️ The Three Pillars of Reality

At its heart, Similarity Theory is organised around three closely related concepts: Consciousness, Time, and Dimensions.

• Consciousness is primary.

This does not mean that human thought existed before the universe, nor that everything thinks as humans do. Similarity Theory uses consciousness in a more fundamental ontological sense: existence capable of relation, differentiation, response, and transformation.

Consciousness is therefore not understood as something that suddenly appeared when matter became sufficiently complicated. Matter and increasingly complex forms of organisation are instead understood as expressions arising within conscious and relational existence.

The condition described in Similarity Theory as Emptiness was not absolute nothingness awaiting consciousness. It was already a conscious configuration — a Frame of Time — although without the articulated structures and reflective awareness familiar to us.

Self-recognition therefore did not create consciousness. It represented a new development within consciousness: a change through which consciousness became capable of recognising itself and thereby generated another Frame.

• Time describes progression and change.

It is not treated as a substance flowing independently through the universe, nor as a container through which consciousness travels. Seconds, days, years, and epochs are scales by which relationships among changes are measured.

Whenever consciousness changes, a new Frame of Time is generated. The Frame is not merely a record of what happened; it is consciousness itself as it existed in that particular relational configuration.

Earlier Frames are not erased when further Frames arise. They remain determinate parts of existence, while new relations and continuations may develop from them.

• Dimensions, in Similarity Theory, do not mean additional spatial directions in the physical sense. They describe differing modes and capacities of conscious experience.

As relational complexity develops, consciousness may acquire greater capacities for perception, integration, agency, understanding, and interaction. A consciousness operating through a more developed dimensional capacity may therefore be capable of perceiving or interacting with forms of existence that are less accessible from a more limited experiential position.

This does not mean that a higher-dimensional consciousness necessarily observes or interacts with lower-dimensional existence at all times. It means that it may possess the capacity to do so.

The movement from relatively undifferentiated consciousness towards increasingly complex relational organisation is therefore not a movement from literal nothing to something. It is development: new structure arising through changes and relations within what already exists.

The emergence of complexity should also not be imagined as the product of one isolated act.

A carpenter does not make a chair independently of everything that came before. The carpenter depends upon wood, tools, learned techniques, earlier discoveries, social knowledge, material processes, and countless relationships that made the act possible.

Similarity Theory applies the same relational principle more broadly.

As configurations of consciousness develop greater complexity, intelligence, and relational capacity, they may participate in increasingly sophisticated forms of organisation and creation. Complex matter, life, environments, and organised worlds can therefore be understood within the framework as products of cumulative relational development, rather than as the work of a completely isolated agent.

Creation, in this sense, is relational.

🔭 Branching Frames and Higher Dimensions

An important distinction is needed between branching continuations and higher dimensions.

What is sometimes informally imagined as a parallel dimension is better described within Similarity Theory as a branching of Frames of Time.

If an earlier Frame becomes the basis for more than one genuine continuation, those continuations may develop in different directions. From the perspective of either continuation, the other might resemble what is popularly called a parallel reality or parallel world.

However, Similarity Theory does not need to treat such branches as separate spatial dimensions. They are different developmental continuations arising relationally from an earlier Frame.

Higher dimensions are different.

Within Similarity Theory, a higher dimension describes a different capacity or mode of conscious experience. A consciousness with capacities substantially beyond our own might perceive relations, structures, or forms of experience that we cannot presently recognise or interpret.

Such a consciousness might appear extraordinary from a human perspective, not necessarily because it is supernatural or divine, but because human perception and cognition are themselves limited by the forms through which we experience reality.

The difference is therefore important:

branching concerns alternative continuations from Frames; dimensional development concerns the capacities through which existence is experienced and related to.

🌌 A Living Framework of Patterns

At its core, Similarity Theory proposes that reality contains recurring relational patterns across different scales, forms, and levels of organisation.

Consciousness is the foundation; similarity is one of the principal means through which relationships among different structures can be recognised.

Similarity does not require identity.

Patterns may repeat, echo, transform, and reappear without two things becoming the same thing. A relationship recognised at one scale may therefore offer a conceptual clue to relationships found elsewhere, while differences in context remain important.

Frames of Time give this process continuity. Whenever a conscious configuration changes, a new Frame arises. Earlier Frames remain determinate rather than being overwritten by subsequent development.

Reality is therefore not understood as a sequence in which each new state destroys the one before it. It is an ongoing relational development in which new configurations may arise while earlier ones remain part of the structure from which continuity is understood.

🎵 Analogy: Resonance Across Scales

Similarity is not sameness.

Two things may resemble one another structurally without being identical and without one causing the other.

The spiral of a seashell and the spiral structure of a galaxy, for example, belong to entirely different physical systems. Their resemblance does not mean that the same mechanism produced both. What matters for Similarity Theory is that a recognisable form can occur in very different contexts.

A tuning fork offers another useful analogy.

When two tuning forks possess compatible frequencies, energy transferred through their environment can cause one to respond to the other. The analogy illustrates how relation depends upon compatibility without requiring identity.

Similarity Theory uses the idea of resonance more broadly and philosophically. A rhythm in biological life and a rhythm observed in a larger physical system need not share a direct causal connection to be compared. Their similarity may still help us ask whether a deeper organisational principle is present.

The purpose of comparison is therefore not to declare different phenomena identical, but to ask what their relationships may reveal.

A star is not a cell. A human lifespan is not a planetary orbit. Yet patterns of organisation, interaction, development, repetition, and relation may still be meaningfully compared.

Similarity is the lens through which those comparisons become possible.

🌠 A Philosophical Framework in Dialogue with Science

Similarity Theory is a metaphysical and philosophical framework, but it is intended to remain open to scientific investigation rather than insulated from it.

It does not require established science to endorse its metaphysical claims. Nor should resemblance between an ST concept and a scientific theory be treated as proof of Similarity Theory.

Instead, scientific findings provide important points of comparison, constraint, and possible investigation.

The framework also remains open to aspects of conscious experience that are not yet well understood.

Some experiences traditionally described as spiritual, anomalous, or difficult to explain may, within Similarity Theory, be considered possible expressions of conscious relations whose mechanisms are not presently understood. The framework does not require any particular interpretation of such experiences, nor does it treat their existence as established scientific evidence.

Their causes remain open to philosophical and empirical investigation.

Similarity Theory is therefore not intended as a fixed doctrine. It is a developing framework that encourages dialogue across philosophy, science, cosmology, systems thinking, consciousness studies, and lived experience.

Its purpose is not to force these domains into one explanation, but to ask whether patterns of relation visible in one domain may help illuminate another.

🔬 Scientific Points of Contact

The following scientific ideas do not constitute proof of Similarity Theory. They are areas in which established research provides useful comparisons with some of the structural intuitions explored by the framework.

• Fractals and Scale-Dependent Self-Similarity

Mathematics demonstrates how relatively simple iterative processes can generate remarkably complex structures. Fractal geometry provides clear examples in which similar forms recur at different scales (Mandelbrot, 1982).

Approximate self-similar patterns also occur in parts of nature, including branching structures, coastlines, vascular systems, and certain growth processes.

Not every pattern in nature is fractal, nor does similarity across scales imply that the same mechanism operates everywhere. For Similarity Theory, the relevance lies in the more modest observation that complexity and recurring form can emerge across multiple levels of organisation.

• Systems Theory and Feedback Loops

Biology, ecology, and systems theory demonstrate that many natural processes operate through networks of interdependence and feedback (Capra, 1996).

Cells participate in tissues, tissues in organs, organisms in ecosystems, and ecosystems in wider environmental systems. At each scale, the behaviour of the whole depends partly upon relations among its components, while the larger system can also influence the behaviour of those components.

This provides a useful scientific analogy for Similarity Theory’s emphasis on nested and relational organisation.

It does not establish the metaphysical claims of the theory, but it demonstrates that understanding relationships among levels of organisation is already essential in many areas of science.

• Relativity and the Measurement of Time

Einstein’s theories of relativity demonstrated that measurements of duration and simultaneity depend upon physical conditions and frames of reference (Einstein, 1916).

Similarity Theory does not derive its account of time from relativity. Its claim is different: time is a measure of progression and change rather than an independently flowing substance.

The point of contact is therefore limited but useful. Both approaches caution against treating one universal human experience of time as though it were the only possible description of temporal relations.

Relativity should not, however, be taken as evidence that ST dimensions are physical dimensions, or that higher-dimensional consciousness can literally navigate time as a spatial landscape.

• Consciousness Across Levels of Complexity

Modern consciousness research explores how conscious experience may relate to information processing, integration, organisation, and complexity.

Integrated Information Theory, for example, proposes a formal relationship between consciousness and integrated information within a system (Tononi & Koch, 2015). It is one influential approach among several competing theories of consciousness.

Its relevance to Similarity Theory is therefore comparative rather than evidential.

Similarity Theory independently proposes that consciousness is ontologically primary and that different forms of existence may express consciousness through different capacities and levels of organisation.

IIT does not establish this claim, nor does it demonstrate that all matter or individual atoms possess consciousness in the sense proposed by Similarity Theory.

The scientific question of how conscious experience relates to physical organisation remains open and actively debated.

Within Similarity Theory itself, consciousness is not divided into substances that are alternately “alive” and “dormant”. A Frame of Time is a determinate conscious configuration. When change generates another Frame, the preceding Frame remains what it was.

An earlier Frame may later enter into relation again. Such renewed relation constitutes further change and therefore generates new Frames rather than simply replaying a predetermined history.

Similarity Theory began not as a finished doctrine, but as a way of noticing recurring relationships across different forms of existence. The framework has since developed into a more precise account of consciousness, time, dimensions, Frames of Time, and relational continuity. This Preface preserves the path by which those ideas first took shape, while the foundational pages present the theory in its current and more formalised form.

📚 References

• Capra, F. (1996). The web of life: A new scientific understanding of living systems. Anchor Books.

• Einstein, A. (1916). Relativity: The special and the general theory. Henry Holt.

• Mandelbrot, B. B. (1982). The fractal geometry of nature. W. H. Freeman.

• Tononi, G., & Koch, C. (2015). Consciousness: Here, there and everywhere? Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 370(1668), 20140167.

• Raphael, S. (2025). Similarity Theory.