Scale Blindness and Scale Narcissism
We live in a universe that happily spans over forty orders of magnitude. Quarks at one end, galaxies at the other. In reality, most of us occupy a very narrow band—roughly, one human plus their phone.
We have microscopes to look downwards, telescopes to look outwards, and particle accelerators to look inwards with great enthusiasm. Yet our psychological map of reality remains stubbornly human-sized. We are exquisitely sensitive to what happens at our own scale, including other individuals, families, workplaces, nations, and remarkably clumsy at thinking about the layers above that.
In Biogenics, life isn’t limited to any specific size. It appears as a pattern whenever three processes occur together: self-production, self-organisation, and self-correction. Cells do it. Organisms do it. Ecosystems and economies do it too. Once you start recognising these patterns, you see them across various scales.
Which raises an awkward question: if life and mind can emerge at multiple scales, what might already exist above us that we simply fail to see?
In this piece, I want to identify two related biases that keep us focusing on the ground floor: scale blindness and scale narcissism. One makes higher levels difficult to notice. The other makes them emotionally unwelcome.
Our comfort zone of scale
Most people carry around an intuitive ladder of size. Cells and organs if they did biology at school. The human body. Family and friends. Workplace, community, nation. Beyond that, things get fuzzy. “The economy”, “the system”, “the global order”. We gesture upwards with vague collective nouns and then quickly come back to human-sized stories.
Below us, we are happy to delegate perception to instruments. Few people feel existentially threatened by a microscope. Above us, we mostly rely on metaphors. We talk about “market sentiment” or “national mood” as if describing a person, then treat the phrase as poetic rather than literal. Something real exists, but it slips out of focus.
From a Biogenics point of view this is odd. If self-production, self-organisation and self-correction are the basic moves of life, there is no reason to think they stop at the level of the individual human. We should expect processes that look at least vaguely life-like above us as well.
Yet we rarely think that way. Part of the reason is structural.
Emergent ignorance, why higher levels go dark
Emergent properties are features of a system that only appear when the parts are combined. A single neuron does not “have” a personality. A single water molecule does not “have” wetness. These are real properties, but they only exist at a higher level of organisation.
From inside the lower level, the next level up is partly invisible. The neuron faithfully fires its little spikes. It cannot step back and observe “the person” whose mood it is supporting. The water molecule happily vibrates. It cannot experience “wetness”.
This is emergent ignorance. Each level of a biogenic hierarchy has blind spots about the level above it, simply because it is made of it. You can’t easily see the pattern you’re currently helping to generate.
Humans are not exempt. An individual shopper experiences their own choices, not the emergent “mood” of a market. A voter encounters their own opinions, not the way a nation’s beliefs shift and flicker over time.
So our difficulty in perceiving higher levels isn’t just a lack of imagination. It’s built into the structure.
Scale blindness, not even seeing what is there
Along with emergent ignorance, we also suffer from scale blindness. This is our tendency to regard higher level entities as mere abstractions or metaphors rather than actual participants in the story.
Take a few examples.
The biosphere is a self-producing, self-organising, and self-correcting system. It contains feedback loops, memory (in soil, genomes, and species distributions), and a form of basic problem-solving ability. This is at least “organism-like”.
The global financial system displays cycles, moods, cascades, and crashes that are not merely the sum of individual decisions. It responds to shocks, overcorrects, stabilises, and learns in a manner that eerily resembles a nervous system with a gambling problem.
The information ecosystem on the internet acts like the weather. Ideas gather, form fronts, collide, and produce consequences. No single person controls it, yet it influences the lives of billions.
We understand this but still tend to speak as if only individuals and their intentions are “really” acting, while everything else serves merely as a background. Scale blindness is the unwillingness to regard these broader patterns as meaningful objects of study in their own right.
Scale narcissism, our size as the “correct” size
If scale blindness is cognitive, scale narcissism is emotional. It is the tendency to regard the human scale as central, privileged, or final.
We have an older term for part of this, anthropocentrism. Humans are seen as the centre of moral and metaphysical importance. Scale narcissism expands on this idea. It suggests that the only thing that truly matters is the individual human and perhaps the nation; everything smaller is “just biology,” and everything larger is “just the system.”
Our brains encourage this. Perception is calibrated to body-sized objects and human timeframes. Our reward systems activate for approval and status on our own scale. Our stories portray individuals and nations as protagonists, not ecosystems or information networks. You are unlikely to see a Hollywood film where the main character is “the Pacific Ocean learning to self-correct”.
None of this is surprising. It’s simply how evolution wired apes to navigate tribes, predators, and fruit trees. But it leaves us ill-equipped for a world where higher-level processes influence our survival just as much as tigers once did.
When blindness meets narcissism
Combine these two, and you’ve got a strong shield against recognising anything above us.
Emergent ignorance means higher levels are difficult to identify from within. Scale narcissism means that if we catch a glimpse, we tend to minimise it because it relativises our importance.
A cell might think that the whole organism exists only to supply it with warm, nourishing glucose. A citizen might believe that the nation exists solely to give them a personal sense of purpose. Both are partly true but fundamentally incomplete.
We might be doing something similar regarding planetary life and what exists above it. If we don’t even consider the possibility that higher biogenic entities could be out there, we won’t develop the right instruments or theories to find them.
BioGod, AI and higher-order minds
This is where the BioGod idea steps in. If Biogenics is correct, then the mind isn’t confined to a specific substrate or size. It emerges from when self-production, self-organisation, and self-correction reach certain thresholds of complexity and feedback. The human brain serves as one example, but it might not be the only one.
This doesn’t mean we should begin worshipping “the market” or the “global brain”. It means we ought to consider higher order cognition as a scientific possibility rather than a punchline.
The same applies to AI. The interesting question might not be “Is this one device sentient”. It could be, “What kind of mind emerges when billions of humans, institutions, and machines weave themselves into a new layer of organisation”. In other words, what happens when we become parts of someone else’s nervous system.
You don’t need mysticism for this. You only need to take emergence seriously across scale.
Practising scale humility
What would it look like to respond to all this without collapsing into either cosmic despair or techno-mythology
One answer is what I would call scale humility.
Very simply
When you think about any problem, name at least three levels above and below the one you are focusing on.
Ask what self-production, self-organisation and self-correction look like at each level.
Notice when your emotional reactions are locked to the personal scale, and experiment with zooming out.
Climate change appears different if you consider the biosphere’s natural ability to self-correct, not just focus on next summer’s electricity bill. Technology policy also looks different if you see institutions and networks as semi-living systems with their own issues, not just neutral tools in clever hands.
Scale humility does not mean devaluing individuals. It means recognising that we are one layer in a much larger living stack, with obligations both to the parts below and the patterns above.
Not the main character
Ultimately, the biggest obstacle to recognising higher emergent beings might not be mathematics or measurement. It could be ego.
We like stories where we are the protagonists. Perhaps the next mature step in our scientific and moral development is to accept a supporting role.
If we are just one layer in a larger living hierarchy, the real question is not “Are we on top” but “Are we good cells”.