In the previous essay — Terminology 4: How Beings Become Mirrors — a step was taken toward the goal of reading scientific and spiritual perspectives through a shared language, and the deep relation between matter and meaning was opened up. Through the 'mirror' metaphor, matter was presented as a carrier of meaning and a reflection of metaphysical realities.

In this essay we will descend into concepts such as macro and micro states, emergence, and phase transition, and ask how they may help us read the link between matter and meaning.

To understand the cosmos in light of matter and meaning, one must grasp interactions at both micro and macro scales.

— Microstate: the detailed configuration of a system's elementary parts (the individual state of each).
— Macrostate: the observable property emerging from their collective behaviour (such as temperature, pressure, social motion).

Macrostates fall into two groups.

The wholesale change of an emergent macrostate, born from non-linear interactions among parts, is called a phase transition.

— Water turning from liquid to ice is a phase transition; the rearrangement of inter-molecular bonds wholly changes the macroscopic properties of water.
— A community undergoing a social uprising likewise occurs as the individual behaviours at the micro level cross a collective threshold of change.

Phase transitions name the critical thresholds at which the interactions among parts intensify and bring forth a holistic transformation.

Felsufi accompanies the essay with a figure (Figure 1): the dynamic relation between micro and macro states is visualized. The blue regions at the lower level stand for the microstates; the orange and brown layers above stand for emergent macrostates. The microstates pass through a phase-change boundary marked by red lines to become macrostates. This boundary is the critical threshold at which the system gains new properties as a meaningful whole.

At this point the system begins to express more than the sum of its parts, and turns into a 'mirror' reflecting meaning from the realm of significance.

A single macrostate may contain many distinct microstates. For example, different sentence-structures or languages that express the same meaning represent different microstates; the meaning itself is a macrostate.

In this sense, a macro-level reality — such as the destiny of a community — does not wholly determine the micro-level states of individuals; it offers them an influencing frame.

Concepts like macro/micro states, emergence, and phase transition can serve as powerful cognitive tools for understanding tesviye (proportioning, designing) and taqdīr (decreeing one's measure / limits).

Further in the series:
— Markov Blanket — inner–outer topology, the self, and consciousness
— Questions like 'are we the cosmos' only conscious beings? Can artificial intelligence gain consciousness?'
— Stochastic motion and positive/negative feedback mechanisms — the relations between will, consciousness, and knowledge