It is challenging, in the face of sufficient reason, to continue to believe that the many objects you’ve been taught to think in terms of are uniquely privileged with discreteness. That the arrangement of fundamental particles you call your phone, or your house, or your body, are more legitimate a ‘thing’ than any other random collection of quarks and electrons and neutrinos and so on that can be found in the universe.

But it’s perhaps even more challenging to force your mind to abandon all those fictions and ascend to some higher plane of intellect in which you see the universe for what it truly is, etc etc.

That’s just not something the human mind can do.

Human brains can, under a number circumstances, do more than one thing at a time. Sometimes quite a few things—we don’t operate like typical computer processors; a sensory signal can send info to a bunch of different related concepts, and that can go onward simultaneously, and can (though this happens rarely; as far as I’m aware a lot of decision-making goes through the same reward bottleneck pathways) travel down separate lines of connection all the way to some kind of simultaneous output. But we’re limited, nonetheless; even if the structure of individual neuronal information processing was able to perfectly simulate one, we simply don’t have enough neurons in relevant regions to simulate all the fundamental particles contained within what we think of as a table. Humans are bad at understanding or predicting emergence because we just straight up don’t have the parallel processing ability to approximate it.

Privileged discreteness is a useful—perhaps necessary—fiction, but a fiction nonetheless.

Philosophers who have argued for things like this in the past have suggested to think of sentences like “The cup was on the table” as being in fact shorthand for “The group-of-simples-arranged-cup-wise was on the group-of-simples-arranged-table-wise”—but that’s… well, it’s really clunky, and it still requires a source for what a table is, if they’re arranged ‘like a table.’

I propose an alternative: understanding the sections of reality we use words to refer to as systems.

A system is a group of things—rules or particles or other systems—that interact, resulting in emergent complexity. But as opposed to ‘objects,’ we model and approximate systems with shorthand language, and we understand ourselves to be dealing in useful fictions and approximate models. Systems aren’t ‘real’ in the way that children are taught that objects and properties are real, which helps you to understand, when it matters, that things like ‘table’ are just as socially constructed as rules of etiquette, just as arbitrary and dependent on social expectation as the division between high- and low-functioning autism. It is my hope that this framework—beyond simply being more correct—will help us know what we’re actually doing when we draw circles around a part of the pan-universal emergent spectrum and model their interiors as simpler systems, and that we will thus make fewer mistakes.

A mind is also one of these things—a system of particles with emergent properties. But given that premise, it may indeed follow that you don’t exist and are just a convenient fiction—which may be in direct violation of the Cogito and definitely violates most people's intuitive self-identity, and is thus a serious concern—or that no person (despite their existence) is more important or real than any other thing, which poses serious ethical problems.

Fortunately, the framework of systems allows us to resolve this as well.