← All writing Final · Oct 2026

Everything: Metaphysics, Minds, Meaning

Is reality scarce or abundant? Why reality is one infinite whole without edges, why every finite mind that tries to understand it runs into the frame problem, and why a good life can be an endless cycle of growth and gratitude.

Introduction

Is reality fundamentally scarce or abundant? This seems to be a significant yet largely unnoticed economic, political, ethical, and academic dividing line. In economics, some people worry that superintelligence will leave us without jobs, while others want to build the next market. In politics, some want to fix the system we have, while others want to move on to what comes next. In ethics, some hold that sexual preference is binary, while others see sexuality as fluid. In academia, some believe matter, minds, mathematics, or information is the bedrock of reality; others believe there is no final bedrock. In each pair, the first answer assumes scarcity and the second assumes abundance.

My answer is abundance. Reality is an infinite whole, infinite in extent and in possibility. Everything that exists is within it, because there is no outside. In itself, reality has no edges. Any finite mind looking at it will be forced to see edges because the finite cannot contain the infinite. The frame problem no mind can escape. Scarcity is real in the same way: within a frame, for as long as the frame holds.

That reality is one infinite whole, without edges, is the essay’s one metaphysical claim. Everything else is about how finite minds cope with it. Scarcity and Abundance shows why the opening question matters to a finite mind. Metaphysics argues for the claim. Minds shows what it means for a finite mind: it can only understand reality through lossy representations, drawn at some resolution and from some perspective, so it keeps running into the frame problem. Meaning proposes how to live with that: a cycle of growth and gratitude, between discontentment and contentment, that never has to end. The essay is a frame too: one finite mind’s attempt to make sense of a whole it can’t see all of.

Scarcity and Abundance

Why does the question matter? Because every mind we know of is finite, and a finite mind always works inside a frame: a boundary around what it will consider. Section 5 explains why no mind can escape one. Scarcity belongs to frames. There can be immediate scarcity without ultimate scarcity. Turning one into the other has been the whole project of human technology, as I describe in Technohumanism, and it is why our present limits don’t have to be our final ones.

Why prefer abundance, if scarcity is real? Because a finite mind has finite attention, and how it spends that attention is a strategy in a game we are all playing. Suppose we have ten meals to feed a family. We could spend our attention rationing them to last longer, or working out how to grow more food. We could try to spend less money, or try to make more. Rationing plays a zero-sum game: it divides what we have, and it never ends the need to ration. Rationing is sometimes wise when scarcity is immediate. But growing plays a positive-sum game: once there is enough food, rationing it no longer needs our attention, and that attention is freed for the next problem.

Scarcity also taxes the attention we would need to escape it. Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir call this the bandwidth tax: people short on money or time get so absorbed in managing the shortage that they have less mind left to end it. Julian Simon described the other side in The Ultimate Resource: human ingenuity keeps turning scarce resources into plentiful ones, so the resource that matters most is minds. Progress doesn’t end trade-offs. It trades old scarcities for ones we would rather have.

The mistake is holding on to a frame after the constraints that created it erode. As technology frees us from old scarcities, the rules and customs we inherited deserve questioning. When a frame no longer applies, we should be eager to discard it, as Galileo discarded the Earth-centered cosmos once his telescope showed it no longer fit.

So abundance is the deeper answer, but scarcity isn’t simply wrong; the two views do different work. Scarcity describes the frame we live in each day: the problems we must solve now, and the present we can be grateful for, limited as it is. Abundance gives us possibility and direction: our ambition to grow. The Meaning part of this essay returns to both.

Metaphysics

1. Reality Is One Infinite Whole Without Edges

Let’s start with something simple and familiar: a pencil. We can describe its length, weight, and color. Each description tells us something true about it, and none tells us everything there is to know about a pencil.

Look closer and what is knowable about a pencil keeps expanding. It is made of atoms held together by physical forces. Its wood came from a tree that grew from sunlight, water, and soil. Its graphite formed deep in the earth over millions of years. People mined, cut, and assembled it, and an economy carried it to the hand that holds it. Leonard Read made this point in his essay “I, Pencil”: no single person on earth knows how to make one. A pencil has a future. What will its owner write? What thoughts will it help them have?

Every answer opens new questions. So where does the pencil end?

We could draw a line at its surface. But that leaves out everything it touches and everything that touches it. We could widen the line to include those interactions, but then there are new interactions just past the new line. Nothing forces the widening to stop.

Maybe we just haven’t found the pencil’s true edge yet. But every line we try has the same flaw: what lies just outside it still acts on what lies inside, and nothing in reality marks one line as the place where the pencil stops.

This leads to the idea that reality is one infinite whole, without edges. The pencil shows both halves of the claim. Everything is related to everything else, so no line marks where one thing stops: reality has no inner edges. And each widening opens onto more, so it has no outer edge either. I argue for reality’s infinity at more length in Practical Metaphysics.

A whole without edges isn’t uniform. Reality varies everywhere, but variation isn’t division. A hillside rises with no line where the hill begins. The edges we see are drawn by minds, not built into reality. The idea isn’t new; versions of it appear in some schools of Buddhism and in Spinoza. What I hope to add is an account of what it means for the minds that draw the edges, and for how they live.

This is what makes reality hard to describe: every description has to draw parts within a whole that has none of its own. The rest of the essay is about that difficulty.

2. Graphing Exercise

How can we picture a reality with no edges? The closest picture I know comes from mathematics.

A graph, in math, is a set of points, called nodes, joined by lines. Mathematicians call these lines edges, but I’ll call them links, to keep them apart from the edges this essay is about. A subway map is a graph: the stations are nodes, and the tracks between them are links. A complete graph is one where every node links to every other node.

Now draw the pencil as a node. Each thing we can say about it becomes a node linked to it: its wood, its graphite, its color, its owner. Each of those opens onto more. The wood links to a tree, the tree to soil and sunlight, the sunlight to the sun. The graphite links to the rock it formed in and the miners who dug it out. The color links to the light it reflects and the eye that sees it. Even a link can become a node: the pencil being on the desk is something we can describe, and it links to more. Follow any path and it never ends. And the links aren’t only chains: the pencil’s graphite feels the sun’s gravity directly, not through the tree. Do the same for everything else, not just the pencil, and the graph holds every distinction a mind could ever draw, with every node linked to every other: a complete graph that never ends.

So any attempt to model reality ends in an endless complete graph. Reality isn’t literally made of nodes and links, since those are distinctions a mind draws. But a model that can never be finished is a good sign that what it models is one infinite whole.

Minds

3. Minds as Observers

If reality has no edges, where does the pencil’s edge come from? It comes from an observer: a part of reality that takes in information about the rest and separates it into sections. The only observers we know of are minds: biological and now digital. So from here on I’ll speak of minds.

A mind takes in reality through what it can do. I’ll call these its capabilities: its sensors, its memory, its intelligence, and its substrate, the medium it runs on, whether neurons or silicon. Capabilities set what a mind can take in. A bat hears the shapes of things in the dark. A microscope shows us what our eyes can’t. A mind with more memory can hold more of what it takes in at once.

Whatever its capabilities, no mind can take in all of reality. Every mind we know of is finite, and reality is infinite. So a mind does something else: it makes copies.

4. Lossy Representations

Everything a mind perceives is a representation: a lossy copy of edgeless reality, made of information. Lossy means it keeps some of reality and leaves the rest out. A word is a representation. So is a measurement, a map, a scientific theory, or a picture in your mind. The loss is what makes a representation useful, and it is why a representation is never the thing itself. Even a relationship is a representation. To say the pencil is on the desk, we first have to separate the pencil, the desk, and the “on.”

A mind separates in two ways, and every representation it makes carries both. The first is resolution: the scale at which a mind sees things as single units. Resolution is a feature of the mind, not of reality, and the mind’s capabilities shape it. A human eye gives one resolution, a microscope another, a telescope another.

Change the resolution and different things appear. At the resolution of atoms, there is no pencil. If we widened our view but kept that resolution, we would see a vast arrangement of atoms, with no line where the pencil stops and the hand holding it begins. At the resolution of a person looking at a desk, the pencil is plain to see, and no atom is. Look at scales smaller than atoms and the units get stranger: particles that behave like waves, described by physics as ripples in fields that fill space. Look at larger scales and new units appear: planets, stars, galaxies. Nothing says this has to stop at our universe. If we could see many universes interacting, our universe might look the way a pencil looks to us: one thing among others, part of something larger.

At every scale, new patterns emerge that a mind at a much finer or coarser resolution can’t pick out. The variance and its regularities are real at every scale, but which units we pick out of them depends on the resolution. Small isn’t more real than large. No resolution is the true one, and none shows reality as it is apart from a mind, because every resolution belongs to one. That includes mine: “no edges” is not a view from outside minds but a conjecture, judged by what it explains.

The second is perspective: what the mind includes and what it leaves out. Even at one resolution, we choose where to separate. To talk about a pencil at all, we have to separate it from everything else. We could define it by its surface, its chemistry, its history, or its use. Each choice serves a purpose. None shows that the pencil exists apart from everything else.

Some edges seem to come from nature, not from us. A cell has a membrane. A planet has a surface. These are good places to draw lines, because at our usual resolution reality changes sharply there. Changes like these repeat, which is what lets us learn from experience. But a sharp change is still a change within one whole, and how sharp it looks depends on resolution. At the resolution of molecules, a membrane is a crowd of molecules trading with the outside all the time. The variance belongs to reality; the wall belongs to us: a place where a mind, at one resolution and from one perspective, finds it useful to draw a line.

Every edge we have ever drawn can be redrawn or explained by something finer, and no investigation has ever reached a final one. A final edge would refute the claim: a unit with no inside and no relations beyond itself. None has turned up, and the claim explains why: every investigation, followed far enough, opens onto more.

5. The Frame Problem

If reality has no edges, every mind faces a problem that can never be fully solved. In its broad form it is called the frame problem: how do we decide what matters when we try to understand something? It began as a narrower technical puzzle in early artificial intelligence research, and philosophers soon saw that it applies to every mind. I wrote about it at length in More Better.

Imagine predicting where a pencil will land when you drop it. You need gravity, the pencil’s shape, where you dropped it from, and the surface below. But what about air currents? The temperature of the room? People walking by? The pull of the moon? You could keep adding details forever. Most would make almost no difference, but how do you know which ones?

To answer at all, you have to set a frame: a boundary a mind draws around what it will consider. A frame is a perspective, at some resolution, applied to a reality where everything is related to everything else. Every model does this. A model is a representation built to help us understand, explain, predict, or act. Building one means keeping some features of the world and leaving out the rest. To predict the pencil’s fall, we treat it as one solid object, not a cloud of atoms, because at that resolution the atoms don’t change the answer. That isn’t a flaw. No mind, however powerful, can include everything in every explanation. It also doesn’t have to. Reality’s links aren’t equal: a few are strong and most are faint, which is why a frame can leave most of reality out and still work.

But if reality has no edges, neither does any problem we try to model. Every frame is one we drew, and the rest of reality stays connected to the part inside it. A detail we left out might turn out to matter. If we widen the frame to include it, new details appear just past the new edge, and they might matter too. So the frame problem can’t be eliminated. Every representation draws a frame, and reality never fits inside one.

Greater intelligence helps. It builds better models, finds which details matter, and replaces bad assumptions. But no amount of intelligence can create a final edge where reality has none.

Still, we don’t need a final frame to make progress. As Karl Popper and David Deutsch argue, knowledge grows through conjecture and criticism: we propose explanations, look for their flaws, and improve or replace them. We need explanations that hold up under criticism and help us understand more.

Tools frame problems too. Algebra, a programming language, or a microscope makes some problems easy and others hard to even see. A tool can make us very good at searching inside one way of looking at a problem while keeping us from finding a better way.

The frame problem is not a temporary hurdle. It is a permanent feature of being a mind in a boundless reality.

6. The Frame Around Existence

The frame problem reaches even the question of what exists. Minds draw frames not only around things but around existence itself. Physicalism, the view that only the physical exists, is one such frame. A physicalist can grant that patterns exist, such as mathematics, logic, or a program, but holds that each is only an arrangement of physical stuff.

Computation is a hard case. The same computation runs on transistors, gears, water valves, or blocks in a video game. Each run is physical, but what runs isn’t tied to any one substrate. A physicalist can reply that the pattern is a higher-level physical property each arrangement has. But the gears and the transistors share no stuff at all; what makes them the same computation is the pattern alone, which makes it hard to say the pattern is nothing but the stuff. I don’t think the question is settled. In What Is a Computer? I follow it to simulation theory: the possibility that our own universe runs inside a larger one. Wherever the frame around what exists falls, minds inside reality drew it.

Fiction puts the question well. In the film Doctor Strange (2016), the Ancient One challenges Dr. Strange, a surgeon sure of the material world:

You think you know how the world works? You think that this material universe is all there is? What is real? What mysteries lie beyond the reach of your senses?… This universe is only one of an infinite number. Worlds without end… Who are you in this vast multiverse, Mr. Strange?

I think the Ancient One is right, and I would go further: in an infinite reality, every possibility exists. Infinity alone doesn’t guarantee this. An infinite reality could, in principle, repeat one pattern forever and leave everything else out. What rules that out is the claim from Section 1: reality has no edges. A limit on what can exist would be an edge around existence itself, a line with the possible on one side and the real on the other. Every edge we have ever tested has turned out to be one a mind drew, and I see no reason this one would be different. The graph from Section 2 points the same way: it holds every distinction a mind could ever draw, and it never ends.

So our universe is one unit among many, the way a pencil is one among many. The idea is old. Arthur Lovejoy named it the principle of plenitude and traced it from Plato through Leibniz. My version stands or falls with the claim that reality has no edges. “All there is” is a frame too, and we have no reason to think we have drawn it wide enough.

7. Intelligence and Growth

What, then, is intelligence? My proposal is that intelligence is the capability a mind uses to build and improve its representations. It notices variance and regularities, explains, predicts, experiments, and learns. It builds models, finds where they fail, and builds better ones.

It can even turn on itself. We can think about our own thinking: how we learn, how we reason, and how our tools shape what we understand. But this is still modeling. We are using representations to improve the way we make representations. And it still happens inside reality, not above it.

As intelligence develops, it widens what can be considered. A child learns to tell colors, shapes, and sounds apart. Later they may learn music, mathematics, or science, and each new understanding lets them see connections they couldn’t see before. Science follows the same pattern. Understanding gravity let us explain the motion of the planets. Understanding evolution showed how all living things are related. Understanding computation opened the way to machines that think.

Intelligence can also extend a mind’s other capabilities. Writing extended our memory. Microscopes and telescopes gave us new resolutions. Each extension lets a mind see things it couldn’t see before.

This is what I mean by growth: adjusting our frame to widen or narrow what we can experience in the future. Narrowing can be growth too. Focusing on one craft or one person opens experiences a scattered mind never reaches. It isn’t only about collecting facts or building skills. We grow when we learn, build, travel, make friends, meet unfamiliar ideas, or find new ways to experience the world. And because reality is infinite, growth never has to be finished.

But growth alone leaves a question open. If a mind can always see more, what is all that seeing for?

Meaning

What are minds for? The usual answer is survival. Minds help us find food, avoid danger, and solve problems. That answer is true at the resolution of a body. At the resolution of a life, it leaves something out.

My conjecture is that minds move back and forth between two activities, both about experience in time: growth and gratitude. Growth, as Section 7 described, adjusts our frame to widen or narrow what we can experience in the future. It starts from discontentment, from wishing we were somewhere else, and that discontentment is a form of suffering. Gratitude is experiencing the present with contentment. Even memories of the past are experienced in the present.

8. Beauty and Gratitude

Minds can appreciate beauty. Survival may explain how our minds came to feel it, but not why we value it for its own sake.

Think of the moment a hard idea suddenly makes sense. Something that seemed tangled becomes simple. Events that seemed unrelated turn out to share one cause. There is beauty in that moment. There is beauty, too, in music, a mountain view, a mathematical proof, a loving relationship, a good run, or a conversation that changes how you see the world. These experiences are very different, yet we can value each one for its own sake.

Beauty is hard to define. It isn’t just symmetry, simplicity, or pleasure. We find it in complexity, uncertainty, struggle, and mystery too. My conjecture is that the more we understand, the more we can find beautiful.

Someone who studies music hears patterns they used to miss. Someone who studies astronomy sees more in the night sky, not less. Someone who gets to know another person deeply finds new reasons to love them. Understanding doesn’t just add information. It changes what we experience.

And understanding more doesn’t make reality less mysterious. A good explanation often reveals a whole new landscape of questions. There is beauty in what we understand and beauty in what we haven’t yet found.

Beauty that keeps opening onto more has a name: wonder. Religious traditions often take the beauty and majesty of the world as signs of God. I don’t believe we need a creator outside reality to appreciate that beauty, but I recognize the wonder those traditions point to. The rise of stars, planets, life, minds, and love is worth deep appreciation. Carl Sagan said that we are a way for the cosmos to know itself. I would add that we are also one of the ways reality comes to appreciate itself.

This is where gratitude enters. Much of what we are content with is beauty: a discovery, a friendship, a good idea, a moment of joy, or simply the chance to exist at all.

9. The Back-and-Forth

Growth and gratitude need each other.

Growth without gratitude becomes an endless chase, a discontentment that never rests. We reach for the next achievement, the next discovery, the next experience, and never enjoy what we already found. Life becomes something that will be worth it later.

Gratitude without growth has the opposite problem. We appreciate what we already know and stop exploring what we don’t. It is easy to mistake contentment for having nothing left to find.

Together, they form a cycle between discontentment and contentment, like a swing. We explore and discover. We appreciate what we found. Then we grow again, not because contentment failed, but because of what we are.

A rock doesn’t want to move or grow. An agent does. Agency is a force that moves an agent out of stasis, and motion is its mark. Living things are agents, and so are minds, biological or digital. In a mind, that motion is the reach for new experience. Seen at the resolution of a body, the seeking is survival. Seen at the resolution of a life, it is meaning. So contentment doesn’t end the cycle. It is the resting point from which a mind reaches again.

The swing is a picture, not a schedule. Growth and gratitude don’t have to take turns; they often happen at once, within different frames of the same mind. A scientist can delight in a discovery while chasing what it means. A parent can enjoy their child exactly as they are while helping them grow. An athlete can love the movement while getting stronger. Some of the best moments in life are the ones where you can’t tell the two apart.

Gratitude also doesn’t mean being content with suffering, or approving of everything that happens. We can love life and still work to reduce suffering, prevent harm, and make things better for ourselves and others. This back-and-forth isn’t a call to settle for the world as it is. It is an invitation to take part in it.

10. Heads, Hands, and Hearts

Growth and gratitude run through three broad capacities:

Heads are our capacity to understand. We reason, learn, explain, imagine, and discover. Heads widen what we can consider.
Hands are our capacity to change things. We build, create, experiment, move, and grow food. Hands turn possibilities into experiences.
Hearts are our capacity to experience and appreciate. We love, connect, play, form communities, and enjoy beauty. Hearts remind us why understanding and building matter.

Heads and hands do most of the growing, and hearts do most of the appreciating, but all three take part in both. These aren’t three separate parts of a person, any more than the pencil is separate from the world. They are useful distinctions within one activity: living. And they feed each other in every direction. Love inspires learning. Work leads to discovery. Understanding deepens relationships. Gratitude inspires creation.

This way of seeing a life shapes how I think about technology. Machines are taking on more of the mental and physical work that once needed people. Many people fear this will make human life matter less. I see great promise in it. If machines carry more of the work our needs demand, we gain time and resources for the heart: friendship, community, play, discovery, movement, creativity, and experiences we can hardly imagine today. Less required work doesn’t have to mean less valuable lives. It can mean more room to live. (Technohumanism takes this further.)

Conclusion

Is reality fundamentally scarce or abundant? Abundant. Reality is one infinite whole, without edges, and every possibility exists within it. Scarcity is real too, but it lives in frames: the edges a finite mind draws, at some resolution and from some perspective, because the finite cannot contain the infinite. A scarcity, like the pencil’s edge, is real within the frame that draws it, but it is not where reality stops.

That is why the dividing line matters. A mind that mistakes its frame for the limit of reality spends its attention rationing what it has and defending rules whose constraints have eroded. A mind that knows its frame is one of endless possible frames spends its attention on positive-sum work: growing what there is, and redrawing the frame when it stops fitting. Neither escapes the frame problem. Only one keeps trading old scarcities for ones it would rather have. For that mind, finitude is not a cage but an open door.

Abundance gives a mind direction; scarcity gives it a present to live in. A good life moves between the two, between growth and gratitude: reaching past our current frame, and being grateful for what it holds, limited as it is. Survival is part of what minds are for, but not all of it. In a reality without edges, there is always more to discover, and more of it to love.