No one knows. It was here before we were, and nobody saw it being put together. But the situation is worse than that. We don't even know what kind of answer to this question would be valid. Perhaps no answer can tell us what the World is. Yet we know that it exists because we are part of it.

It is sometimes said that when one person dies a whole universe is lost. Over your lifetime you'll try to understand the World. But it will be your own world that you'll understand. Just as your death will not harm anyone else, your understanding of the world may not automatically be valid for anybody else. (Let's ignore this problem for the moment.)

Assuming that we all live in the same World, a good place to start understanding it is to listen to other people. If you're a child, listen to the adults. If you're an adult, listen to the smarter adults. And then read what people have said throughout history. You'll probably find, as I did, that although you never find a simple, satisfying answer to this question, it is still a question worth asking and a subject worth studying for your entire life.

Socrates called the love of wisdom "philosophy". Unfortunately, if you want to become a philosopher and you study philosophy in an academic environment, all you'll get is the history of philosophy — an endless examination of who said what about which. This is because philosophy professors don't know as many answers to the big questions as they want you to believe, and have to rely on a pretty naked "bait and switch" gimmick, a time-honored technique in the universities because it appears to add legitimacy to any course of study. Imagine that you want to become an physicist and sign up to get a PhD in Physics. If they quietly substitute Physics History they can cover lots of interesting historical vignettes that might be interesting if you're studying the history of science but won't give you a clue about how to actually be a physicist. This is why I try not to use the word "philosophy". It's a dirty word — just not as dirty as words like .

Our failure to understand the World in the way that we understand, say, basket-weaving or a romantic comedy is so painful to admit that even smart people are in denial about it. This denial — and the fancy talk that camouflages it — is also sometimes called "philosophy". So just asking other clever people what they think might not get you very far at first, especially if your bullshit detector is not yet calibrated well enough to gong at the right times. But nobody's stopping you from thinking for yourself, as long as you're patient and are willing to take one step at a time.

So how should you think about the World? First, pick useful names for the kinds of things in the World. Here are some of the ones I tend to use:

Things that are just given to us, like time and space, and causality. You can't prove that they exist or even argue about it, but nothing else makes sense unless you assume that they do and operate roughly the same way for all of us. I would even include in this category stuff that we can doubt but where doubting leads nowhere, like whether the color "red" is experienced the same way by everybody, or whether your understanding of the world is automatically valid for anybody else, or whether tomorrow you'll wake up and realize that you only dreamed you were a Earth-bound primate, but that you're really an Venetian octopus.

We've only become resigned to this limitation during the last several centuries. John Locke believed that when we are born our minds are blank slates ready to be written on by our observations and that we would see and understand everything there is. But Immanuel Kant pointed out that some things must be prior to experience, or assumed before we can even have experience. (In other words, before you write your observations on your mental blackboard, you have to have a blackboard. And chalk. And eyes to read what you just wrote.) Strictly speaking we never experience time or space, for example, only events in time and space. David Hume claimed thats we never experience causality directly either, but that we seem to need to infer it from event sequences before the World seems reasonable to us. So this has cast doubt on to what degree do our senses in fact bring us the World as it truly exists and just what we mean by "the World".

An action or series of actions that can be located in time and space. This includes objects usually denoted by nouns, if they are located in time and space. Even babies know about events. In fact, babies are events.

When event patterns persist long enough to appear in our memory we call them objects. We tend to think the World as populated by these "persistent processes" but they're only an abstraction of individual events and already one step away from what we actually experience.

When predictable regularities are observed in the sequences of events we experience, we reduce and abstract them, and call them "natural laws". A natural law might take the form of "Every action has an equal and opposite reaction." As with many coinages, "natural law" started out as a metaphor for something commonplace and fallible, but soon meant something quite central in our understanding of how the World works. Compare this to what the word "computer", which originally meant "numerical calculating machine", connotes in the 21st century. Since the Latin word "science" is used to name the set of laws that we have observed to operate in a particular realm of phenomena, and since we observe human phenomena all our lives, David Hume said that a "science of human nature" should not only be possible but, eventually, essential to a properly running civilization.

Originally people experienced more or less the same World as their neighbor. But ever since the Enlightenment we have observed the World at various levels of scale. Our microscopes let us see a hidden World that is too small to be seen with the naked eye, and led to the theory of quantum mechanics. Our telescopes let us see how enormous the universe really is, and have made possible the theory of general relativity. Interestingly enough, these Worlds seem to be quite different. They require different terminologies to discuss adequately and seem subject to different rules.

We call physics those rules that govern the simplest objects in World that we can experience, albeit only indirectly through our instruments. The next higher level is chemistry, then biology, then psychology and sociology. At least that's the traditional way of organizing the knowledge that science has given us. There may be better ones.

Scientists would like to believe that each of these sets of rules can explain phenomena at higher levels. The physicist Heinz Pagels once told me that chemistry is a dying science because everything chemical can be "reduced" to physics. Modern lab science is all about "reductionism", as when they reduce psychological depression to a kind of chemical imbalance in the brain. But the validity of reductionism is in many cases an untested assumption and must not be taken on faith. In fact, we know now that there would not be enough time or electricity in the universe for a supercomputer that knew everything about what we've learned about physics to predict the probability or even possibility of the large particle agglomerations we call kittens. Therefore, at least for beings as limited as we are, the only way to talk about kittens is to talk about paws and fur, meowing and purring — and completely ignore relativity theory and quantum mechanics.

Maybe some higher intelligence in an alternate universe could reduce chemistry to physics, and psychology to biology, but there is a real possibility that humanity will never even find out if this is even possible — and it's certain that you and I won't. As of the 21st century we seem to be stuck inside a bunch of levels all of which have their own rules and need their own terminology. Oh, well, it isn't the first time we learned that the World was more complicated than we thought. Imagine how people felt when they learned that the Earth was not the center of the Universe.

And if the lab coats find this limitation totally unacceptable, we should remind them of what Niels Bohr said when Albert Einstein rejected quantum mechanics on the basis that "God doesn't play dice with the universe": Albert, stop telling God what to do.

Or John B. S. Haldane, when he said: the universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose.

Or Thomas Henry Huxley: Mind and matter in our little speck of the universe are only two out of infinite varieties of existence which we are not competent to conceive — in the midst of which we might be set down, with no more notion of what was about us, than the worm in a flower-pot, on a London balcony has of the life of the great city

Sometimes a little humility goes a long way.

We have labored hard for thousands of years to develop a civilization illuminated by truth and steered by right, but our daily World consists of a patchwork quilt of everything people say and everything people do. Any individual statement can be hearsay, supposition, hypothesis, or false, just as any act can be clumsy, wrong, amoral or immoral. So the first thing we do after taking in the "face value" of these phenomena is to compare and contrast them with our memory of personal experiences and what we've learned from them. Given enough time and sincerity, we develop a sense of "smell" about what dishonest information and cowardly behavior look like. You might say that at the human scale our World begins with the people we know personally and slowly expands to the people we come to trust even if we only read their books.

Truth and right are sometimes lost in a bewildering blizzard of information and behavior, but even the value of information and the meaning of behavior may not be obvious. Especially with the coming of the internet people have become far more sophisticated communicators and often use irony to imply the opposite of what they appear to be saying. Sports, to give another example, take the form of combat, but are in fact controlled by higher rules intended to prevent the harming of participants. It turns out that the number of layers of rules possible is limited only by our cultural sophistication and willingness to play these engagement games.

Second, start respecting the taxonomy you've now created. This will help you think more carefully, and more logically. And soon you'll realize some seemingly amazing things. For example, positing fairies and sprites, or gods and goddesses, that work in mysterious ways doesn't really explain anything. But that's okay because it never did. We've been getting along without gods all along only we didn't know it. Daydreaming about unicorns can be fun, though, as long as you know what you're doing.

Another example is that since your mind observes events, it cannot in itself be an event. In fact you'll soon see that your mind is not actually located in time and space at all. It's like a radio tuner that tends to bring in signals from a point in time and space that seems to keep moving all by itself. Your viewpoint is determined by where your eyes are, just as what you hear depends on where your ears are, but that tells you nothing about where your mind is. And that's okay too. But you also have a bit of control over what station your mind is tuning in to. You could, if you wanted, think about memory as being a kind of weak, short-term time travel into the past, and expectation as travel into the future. Since the past seems to be frozen while the future seems to be up for grabs, a working hypothesis like this will get you thinking about things like causality. And why does time have a direction anyway?

Understanding that your mind does not exist in time and space makes modern neurologists look as silly as the near-sighted 19th century lab coats who studied human beings with their parade of silly gadgets. Cognitive scientists keep saying that the mind is produced by the brain, but they never say how this is even remotely possible. This dogma is about as sophisticated as saying that the heart is the most emotional organ in the human body, as Archie Bunker used to. It might be true, but they offer no reasons to think it is. The evidence of our senses, carefully considered, says merely that brain and mind seem to be parallel processes whose connection is utterly opaque and may remain so forever. This puzzling separation of mind and brain troubled Descartes centuries ago. Although there have been many ingenious approaches to this problem, nobody has solved it to the satisfaction of all parties. Clinical neurologists, of course, merely ignore the problem.

A third common misconception is that number in general and measurement in particular can help us understand one another. How much in love you are may be a legitimate question, but it can only be answered qualitatively, not quantitatively. It can't be answered in the same way we would answer a question about the temperature outside. Letting instrument readings substitute for sense data like sight and hearing is often a good enough approximation when it comes to sharing observations of my world with you, but it can never substitute for a qualitative analysis of the human realities we most need to understand. Realities like love and power, or truth and right. This is why the myopic lab experiments of nineteenth-century psychologists brought us no real insights into who and what we are.

Once you begin to see how little we really understand about human existence, you'll be prepared to start out on a great journey of discovery, more fantastic than the discovery of the New World. You'll be launched on a journey that no one else can make for you — a journey to discover The World.

A journey to become Conscious.