the-smile released this song called 'skirting on the surface'.

Some time ago, I came across the concept of seeing reality through user interfaces in Lex Fridman's podcast.

They talked about how anything we see is not the truth. For example - writing on this plain text file and seeing the letters through the screen - It's all abstracted, packaged and bundled into a neat little box.
But if given the controls for the bit flips and electronic signals to directly produce this text output wizardry, it would have been quite difficult.

Perception in what we see - is limited and therefore not-complete.

It isn't completely false either - it's the final layer of visible output from layered abstractions with their individual functioning. It makes us aware that we live with a lot of assumptions.

Things start to get interesting when there are multiple such abstractions interacting in complex domains producing both visible and non-visible outputs. Closely observing induvidual components can offer a distilled approximation for how bigger systems might behave.

When looking at life, the breadth and depth of this distillation is vast.
The system could be as wide as life as whole for all the universe or as thin as one instance of experience -> one slice in the continuous rumbling of time and space.
Similarly the depth allows for reaching the electron, the photons - to observe the world from an atomic perspective
while also accommodating a larger than visible universe perspective - suddenly the universe is much vaster than what we know of it. In fact we know nothing of it.

This experience of an object and distillation of it's game physics can be observed from any dimension or angle. You can look at the sky like a tiny mole in the ground or you can see the vast lands and seas like a mighty eagle.

The mind facilitates perception and the lens is quite dynamic with focus flexible to the object of attention.

This distillation is also applicable to the prev post where we talked of a host and the entity hosted being separate from each other.
The host has a user interface which abstracts away all that is autonomous.

Thom's song continues, but could we really drop under the surface?