The Universe has a dial. It is your mind, on science. Turn that dial, and reality’s pixel count, the sharpness of the lens through which you experience everything, goes way up. You begin to see the world with as clear and objective an eye as possible. Boost your resolution, and you might just catch a glimpse of its grinding cogs, its emergent complexity, its deep structure, binding everything to everything else:

You — Me — the Moon — the first glimmers of life in primordial oceans — Voyager I venturing beyond the heliopause — the seething ancient seas beneath Europa’s icy shell — entranced revellers at Burning Man dancing under a sea of stars — slippery spectral neutrinos hurtling from the far ends of the Universe through Earth : Sagan’s Pale Blue Dot, the only home we’ve ever known.

The Earth is the only world known, so far, to harbor life… To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known — Carl Sagan

That’s here. That’s home. That’s us (Sagan,1997) — Earth photographed by Voyager 1 from beyond the orbit of Neptune.

That feeling of discovering even a small fraction of Nature’s riddles is addictive. It’ll have you hooked. Why? Because you’re discovering about where you came from. About you. In a different shape, a different combination of atoms as living or nonliving matter. Untold permutations of you. Floating as giant cloud castles over the roof of the world. Glowing as bioluminescent algae blooms. Bursting in a violent fury as type II supernovae in the night sky above your ancestors and descendants — who are also you — with the irradiating afterglow of stellar nucleosynthesis, the process that crafted the very elements that made you, and to which you, at this very moment, can affix one tiny pixel.

Bursting in a violent fury as type II supernovae — Artist’s impression of Supernova 1993J, image courtesy NASA, ESA, G. Bacon (STScI)

And yet, maybe curiosity will get the better of you, and you’ll find you just can’t see well enough through the pixel lens you’ve got. Maybe it’ll make you want to up the count of pixels tumbling across your mind’s eye onto the worlds within worlds you seek to understand.

But wait — what exactly are these pixels? They’re the building blocks of knowledge, mediating how you see and experience everything:

a priori knowledge governed by genetic instincts or arrived at independent of experience,

tacit knowledge “acquired through practice and that cannot be articulated explicitly”¹,

declarative knowledge “represented by beliefs expressed as declarative sentences”² such as, “Fish breathe by extracting oxygen from water with their gills.”, “By our unholy hubris have we angered the Volcano Gods.”, and “The Universe is incomprehensibly large.”

By our unholy hubris have we angered the Volcano Gods — Photo by Sebastien Gabriel on Unsplash

These tiny pixels are the categories, concepts, and algorithms that colour all manifold manifestations of matter and energy, whirling, whisping, and whizzing around in the natural world surrounding you. Creating structures that couldn’t possibly be, but are, inspire, awe, live, die, kill and love. They are the tokens of your understanding of what’s out there: Real knowledge of the truth, or as close an approximation as your pixel lens can muster.