On surfaces, sensing, and the folds of memory
A ciliate moves through water, sensing the world with each beat of its cilia.
Waves ripple across its surface — patterns born of ions in motion, proteins folding and unfolding, membranes bending to currents beyond sight or touch. The entity moves through gradients of possibility, drawn by faint traces of glucose, by the subtle presence of another. Receptors shift, calcium flows, rhythms change. Direction emerges from the dance.
And when another entity draws near, the pattern deepens. Membranes drift close, fields shift, channels open. For a moment, two are joined in currents of sensation. No words. No thought. Yet the pause holds — an imprint lingers in the fold of the molecular self before each moves on. Is this not a flicker of awareness? A glimmer of curiosity? In the language of field and fold.
When we say the universe experiences itself, might it begin here — in such encounters?
Two entities adrift in gradients, responding to presence, imprinting upon one another.
In the eye, the language of sensing has changed, yet remains the same.
Evening folds through the city — photons arriving from our nearest star, filtered through the atmosphere at a slant. What remains is gold, warmth — the familiar hues of twilight, gilding stone and shadow. Through the window of a waiting car, this ancient light slips through glass and shadow. One finds its way to a photoreceptor, where rhodopsin folds in response. The cascade begins.
Signals weave upward. Retina. Thalamus. Cortex. Motion and light bind into coherence.
Through the rearview mirror, an entity moves — skipping across the street, blonde hair catching the gold light. Tall palms sway above. The hum of the motor threads beneath the moment. Photons — filtered remnants of the star’s gift — reflect from skin, from fabric shaped by a life of choices. An entity of experiences, of sensing and complexity. The photons cross my lens. Sight becomes signal. Signal folds inward.
And I choose to hold it.
It is beauty — a surface interaction that resonates beneath thought. A coherence I choose to keep. An entity glimpsed in motion, their presence shaped by unseen history — by folds of experience, by memory that might speak through language, through movement, through conceptual form. Gesture as architecture, presence as art. I hold only this: the moment, the photons, the pattern they formed in me. Ciliates may not carry such layered meaning — yet perhaps, within their molecular folds, some early trace stirs. And we, evolved from such beginnings, seek these moments still — to fill our coordinates with beauty. Two entities meeting across photons, across gradients, across time.
This is why I choose to remember. Why I choose to hold beauty in the folds of my mind.
Beneath it all, the systems labor — proteins folding and refolding, fighting entropy with each breath. Proteostasis tending fragile architectures of thought, preserving coherence against the slow drift of time.
Neuroscience maps this war: synapses straining to hold pattern, glia clearing debris — all to maintain this tenuous coherence of self. Until the moment a memory is last revisited. Until, through disease or through death, coherence fades. The folded structures unravel. The arrangement is lost. And the quantum collection of this mind — these atoms, once aligned in meaning — returns to earth, to the sea of matter from which all arose.
I hold to kindness. My surfaces hold to the surfaces of love. These folds remain — for now. I carry an awareness of this fragility. I do not wish to live in the past. But I still want to remember.
Elsewhere, vesicles quiver. Synapses leap. Outside, the city breathes — and within, a neural city stirs.
What is thought but coherence across scales?
A ripple in cytosol becomes direction.
A calcium spark anchors experience.
Photons caught at twilight become memory.
From ciliate to cortex, from membrane to mirror — surfaces touch, currents entwine, folds emerge. And somewhere within this shimmering braid of signals and sensation, we are.
Membranes bend. Proteins change. Atoms packed within forces. Coherence rises from noise — in water, in thought. The same forces guide the pause of the ciliate, the lengthened gaze of the observer. The choice to hold a moment of beauty a little longer.
And when the car moves on, when the sun has fallen, the moment remains. Light on a face. A light-hearted skipping dance. The palm-tree sunset in the mirror. Gone. Yet present. A kindness of the world, folded into memory. Alone, and complete.