Worldview

What is the world actually made of? At first glance, the obvious answer is matter. But when we pause and look more carefully, we realize that we never encounter matter directly. What we experience are signals—light, sound, patterns—processed and interpreted by the brain. In this sense, the world appears to us not as raw substance, but as information. Modern physics hints at the same idea: in quantum theory, observation is not passive but descriptive. A thing “exists” only insofar as it is specified. Matter, then, is not fundamental; it is the consequence of information. The smallest unit of existence is not the atom, but the bit.

If the universe is informational at its core, then to know something is not merely to store facts. It is to build an internal model of the world. Each of us carries a private universe in our mind—a simulation that is necessarily incomplete and distorted, yet functional. When this internal model aligns well with reality and produces reliable predictions, we call it “ability.” But there is nothing mystical about it. What we call talent is largely the result of accumulated information and the resolution with which one has reconstructed the world. Ability is information density. Intelligence is the clarity of one’s internal map.

The difficulty is that no two maps are the same. Each person navigates reality using a model shaped by different data, experiences, and blind spots. When these models diverge, their predictions diverge as well. The resulting misalignments appear in the real world as misunderstanding, conflict, inefficiency, and distrust. Many social problems are therefore not best understood as moral failures or emotional flaws, but as informational mismatches—gaps, biases, and asymmetries in how reality is represented. If this is true, then such problems cannot be resolved by force or authority alone. They require the correction and integration of information.

Yet we often do the opposite. We hide what we know. To protect short-term advantage, we conceal intentions, criteria, and knowledge. This may work locally and temporarily, but in a connected world it disrupts informational flow and amplifies uncertainty. Secrecy introduces noise. What looks like cleverness at the individual level becomes stagnation at the collective level. Systems slow down not because people think too much, but because information stops moving.

From this perspective, “good” is not a sentimental ideal. It is a property of systems. Goodness refers to global optimization in an information space. To share one’s internal model is to allow models to overlap—to synchronize predictions about the future. Shared information compensates for individual blind spots and gives rise to a larger, more accurate common world, one that no single mind could construct alone. As transparency increases, collective intelligence rises, and unnecessary friction diminishes. Intelligence that remains closed eventually decays; intelligence that is shared compounds.

The force that sustains this process is the will to explore. Learning is the continuous refinement of the world’s description, and intelligence is the refusal to stop updating that description. High-resolution internal models are not private possessions; they are valuable resources for others. Curiosity is not a personal hobby—it is the engine that updates reality itself. At this point, intelligence and goodness converge. To understand more deeply and to share more openly become the same act.

We learn to expand our internal universe, and we share to unite it with others. Secrecy leads to closure; openness leads to evolution. To share intelligence, knowledge, and capability is to increase the resolution of the world as a whole. The commitment to maximize that resolution—to optimize the whole rather than the part—is not just a strategy. It is the most fundamental ethic available to us.

Human beings do not receive the physical world as raw stimulus. We inhabit a dimension in which sensations are interpreted through context and treated as meaning. While most organisms remain at the level of adaptation and learning, humans achieved large-scale cooperation by sharing non-physical values—nations, money, institutions, and stories. This dimension of meaning is no longer an optional or acquired skill; it is deeply embedded in the very foundations of our cognition.

What matters is that this capacity is not something we can choose to turn off. A life stripped of meaning is not merely empty; it manifests as a form of pain that threatens survival itself. Humans cannot abandon the question of why they live. We have crossed a threshold—from beings that merely persist, to beings that require meaning in order to exist at all. Humanity is the species that, having acquired the dimension of meaning, can no longer survive without it.

For a being that lives in this dimension, expression is not a luxury or a pastime, but a necessity of survival. It cannot be reduced to self-display or the pursuit of recognition. Expression is the process by which vague and unstable inner sensations are brought outward, given form, and stabilized as meaning within reality. Meaning does not complete itself inside the brain; it acquires substance only through connection with the external world. Expression is the mechanism by which meaning is anchored in the world.

Through this cycle, humans come to see themselves from an external perspective and to establish their relationship with the world. Meaning tends to reside precisely in the margins that escape efficiency and optimization. In this sense, the fact that art lacks direct utility is not a defect but a sign of its fidelity to the dimension of meaning. Expression is the fundamental impulse to inscribe a trace in the world, to render the fact “I am here” into something that endures as meaning.

What becomes decisive in a life governed by meaning is the location of one’s criteria of value. Those who possess an internal axis of evaluation can determine for themselves what is beautiful and what matters, without being subordinated to others’ reactions. When this axis is absent, meaning is transformed into something to be extracted from the outside. Recognition and numerical evaluation become ends in themselves, and expression loses its power to define the self.

This internal axis of value is not formed through willpower or effort alone. In many cases, it depends profoundly on early experiences of unconditional acceptance—of being received before being evaluated. Through such experiences, one learns not conceptually but bodily that meaning does not depend on external conditions. Only on this foundation does the world cease to be a place for harvesting approval and become instead a place for forming relationships.

Working, speaking, loving, even refusing—every human act is a form of expression through which one attempts to locate oneself within the world. Bound to the fate of living in the dimension of meaning, humans cannot avoid defining themselves through their relationships with others. Love, in this sense, is not merely an emotion or a goal. It is the environment that allows personal expression to circulate as autonomous meaning, without being absorbed into external evaluation. Only upon this quiet foundation can human beings bear the heavy destiny of seeking meaning, and take it up as their own life without collapse.