Scale OR Detail in Complex Systems

When working with large-scale simulations or datasets, we face a fundamental trade-off: you cannot simultaneously observe or represent both fine detail AND large scale in a single view. Simulating traffic behavior at city or larger scale, for instance, forces us to choose a coarser resolution.

Yet the universe itself seems to face no such constraint. When we zoom in to examine a flower's cells, we lose sight of the garden - but this is our limitation as observers, not reality's. The flower's cells and the garden both exist fully, simultaneously. Reality doesn't choose between resolutions; it simply manifests at all scales at once, within infinite compute budget.

This reveals something deeper about representation itself. Our simulations, our languages, our mental models - they're all constrained by finite compute, finite attention, finite representation. They're incredibly useful, but they're reductions.

As Korzybski noted, "the map is not the territory" - not because maps are useless, but because they are reductions. We must trade scale for detail, while reality needs no such compromise.

The universe simply is, and that is humbling.