The grossest constituents of life make themselves available to the senses; more significant items—DNA, atoms, nerves—abide invisibly. That’s why it doesn’t matter whether we penetrate to morphology in looking at a flower, because seeing the flower in its truest reality doesn’t help, given the idea “flower“ that’s already filled the mind. So when we discuss the flower scientifically—its parts, its apparatuses, its systems—that description has little to do with our previously held idea.

Apparently the universe is not one thing, but rather an amalgamation of systems and things, and there is a bigger picture, which takes in these interrelated systems. The picture’s big because it’s inclusive; there are big things and microscopic things, orderly things and chaotic things, human and inhuman things. And certainly in talking about the universe it’s strange to talk about the human. Given all the time that’s passed until this moment, why would a few million years of humanoid activity matter at all?

Well, because we’re the ones who’ve conceived of the universe.

So the big picture is variegated; it’s one universe embedded in another embedded in another ad infinitum. And because it’s big, describing it effectively calls for varying languages. We have to talk about relativity and gravity, quantum fields and uncertainty, chromosomes and microbiology; and last but not least, emotions, thoughts, ideas. The last three are most easily accessed, and perhaps therefore thought to be less reliable, or succinctly definable. I am interested in how mind has come to emerge from brain, how the sense of agency has emerged from a field of neural activity.