temporary suspension of the various consensus trances of your culture. But to what extent a young human can really apply a lot of this abstract-seeming stuff about virtual worlds, biases, and delusion to their inner processes, as opposed to it all seeming like a silly story, remains an open question for you to explore.
The Bottom Line: There are physical rules of reality. We find and describe them with science.
Emergence
Our universe has different rules and appearances at different size scales and levels of complex organization. These derive from the microscopic nature of reality — the shapes, forces, and potential combinations — but are qualitatively different. Complexity can arise from simplicity, or simplicity from complexity, as smaller parts fit and flow together in novel ways. Emergence creates the unexpected higher-order rules of the universe and qualities of complex systems 6 . Pretty much everything we experience is emergent, and indeed we ourselves, like all life, are emergent from lower-order effects. Such effects may be directly predictable from the microscopic characteristics of their parts or be inherently unpredictable. Six-sided snowflakes can be predicted
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