The Big Picture

This page sets out my interest in big picture thinking: the attempt to form an integrated view of reality, value, and action.

A Comprehensive Worldview

I have always been drawn to the task of forming a comprehensive worldview. I want a connected picture of how the world works, how life and consciousness emerged, how human beings think and live together, and what has value. I want to bring these questions together, rather than treat them as separate compartments.

The task is partly philosophical, but not only philosophical. It should also draw on philosophy, science, history, psychology, economics, and other disciplines, using whatever methods work best. Some issues need conceptual analysis. Others need evidence, models, historical perspective, or synthesis across fields.

Seven Areas of Understanding

My own way of organising the big picture is to divide knowledge into seven broad areas. This is not a rigid taxonomy, but a map for thinking about a comprehensive worldview.

First, there is the physical world: the universe, matter, energy, time, space, and the structures studied by physics, cosmology, chemistry, earth science, engineering, and technology.

Second, there is life: living organisms, including biochemistry, biology, evolution, ecology, medicine, agriculture, reproduction, ageing, cooperation, competition, and the diversity of species.

Third, there is humanity: human beings and human societies, including anthropology, history, economics, sociology, politics, culture, institutions, commerce, government, and law.

Fourth, there is consciousness: the subjective point of view, including the nature of experience, the range of possible human experience, the good or bad quality of conscious states, and our limited understanding of the experience of non-human animals.

Fifth, there is practical reason: the study of what to do, including ethics, decision theory, choice of goals, individual and collective decision-making, and the use of reason to guide action.

Sixth, there is thought: thinking and the tools for understanding, including epistemology, cognitive psychology, language, communication, education, information science, mathematics, and the improvement of inquiry.

Seventh, there is the local: knowledge of particular personal and local circumstances, including oneself, family, friends, place, work, relationships, responsibilities, and the issues faced by particular communities and organisations.

These categories mark different perspectives. The physical, life, and humanity are mainly about what is objectively there. Consciousness concerns the subjective point of view. Practical reason concerns what to do. Thought concerns the processes by which we understand anything. The local is where general understanding is applied.

Foundational Ideas

There are some foundational ideas that matter across these fields. For me, four are particularly important.

One is reason. We instinctively see the world in ways shaped for survival, not for truth. Our natural outlook is local, practical, social, and often misleading. On earth, for example, we experience gravity as a simple downward pull; reason shows us gravity as a universal relation between masses, operating across the cosmos. Reason allows us to get beyond instinctive and parochial views, test appearances against evidence, and see the world more truly.

Another is naturalism. We have evolved with tendencies often to see agency, purpose, and supernatural meaning where they do not exist. Those tendencies may have made sense for survival, but they are a poor guide to reality. Reason points us towards the conclusion that there is no supernatural realm. Human beings, minds, and values are all part of nature and should be understood in these terms.

A third is the relation between objective and subjective viewpoints. Objectively, we are organisms in a physical world, products of evolution, biology, and culture. Subjectively, each conscious being has a point of view and a world as it appears from within. A serious worldview must hold both perspectives together.

A fourth is levels of explanation and emergence. Reality can be described at many levels: particles, chemistry, cells, organisms, minds, persons, societies, and cultures. Higher-level patterns depend on lower-level processes, but they are not always best understood by being reduced to them. Life, consciousness, language, institutions, and value emerge within the natural world, but each needs its own concepts and explanations.

Ideas from the Disciplines

Thinking about the big picture has introduced me to a number of ideas that are both fascinating and widely significant.

One example is entropy, a statistical principle that helps us understand order, disorder, energy, time, and the directionality of physical processes. Evolution is also transformative: explaining how complex life can arise without design, how organisms become adapted to their environments, and how human nature is rooted in biological history.

Information is another cross-cutting idea. Genes store biological information, brains process sensory and social information, language transmits information between minds, and culture preserves information across generations. It links physics, biology, cognition, technology, and society.

Cooperation is also central. It helps explain the move from individual organisms to human societies, and appears in biology, game theory, economics, politics, morality, and institutions. It is one of the main ways in which individual interests are connected to collective outcomes.

Scale is equally important. Our minds evolved for intermediate sizes: the world of bodies, landscapes, social groups, and practical action. Reason reveals both the very large and the very small: cosmic time, evolutionary history, global population, future generations, atoms, cells, genes, and the power of large numbers. It helps correct the local perspective for which our minds evolved.

There are many others, including the structure of matter, genetic inheritance, subjective experience, cognitive bias, markets, institutions, culture, language, incentives, and moral concern. Each is a local discovery or framework, but each also changes the wider picture.

The bigger point is not to collect interesting facts. It is to see how the most important ideas fit together.

Philosophy and the Big Picture

Philosophy began as an attempt to understand the big picture as a whole. Over time, many parts of that project became separate sciences and social sciences, each with its own methods. Philosophy was left mainly with questions that cannot be answered empirically, and are instead dealt with using philosophical methods.

This makes philosophy only one part of the wider project. Many of the most important contributions to our worldview now come from science, history, psychology, economics, anthropology, and other fields. Yet philosophy remains distinctive because it brings conceptual clarity, argument, integration, critical reflection, and a concern with what matters.

This is why I imagine something broader than philosophy alone: Big Picture Studies. This would be a field that examines the variety of worldviews, how they have changed over time, and how they are shaped by different cultures, disciplines, and assumptions. It would use philosophy, but not be confined to philosophy. It would develop interdisciplinary skills: connecting ideas across fields, judging which methods are appropriate, and cultivating a sense of what is significant. Its subject would be the connected understanding of the world and our place within it.

Why the Big Picture Matters

Because big picture understanding matters to me, I am grateful to science and reason for the worldview they have made possible. In recent centuries, that worldview has advanced enormously. We now understand the scale of the universe, the history of life, the natural origins of human beings, the workings of the mind, and the social and economic forces that shape our lives. This is a remarkable achievement of human thought.

I also feel some bemused frustration that the formation of a worldview is not more widely seen as a central life aim. We all live by some picture of reality, whether explicit or implicit. It matters whether that picture is true, coherent, and humane. This is one reason I find religious worldviews so difficult: they seem to me to get the structure of reality fundamentally wrong, and then build meaning, value, and action on that mistake.

Much of my own thinking has been driven by places where established worldviews did not seem to make sense. Practical reason, utilitarianism, consciousness, and naturalism are all examples. In each case, I was dissatisfied with the standard ways of thinking and wanted better answers: more naturalistic, more coherent, and more connected with the wider picture.

The big picture matters because it helps us see what is significant. It places our lives within human history, human history within natural history, natural history within the universe, and our choices within a wider space of value and consequence.

A good worldview should help us understand reality, correct our illusions, and orient us towards what matters.