The integral is older than morality. It was running in nervous systems for hundreds of millions of years before anything resembling a moral order appeared — with complete indifference to the content of what it was building. The process does not select for kindness. It selects for existence. It simply runs.

Morality is a late arrival — a set of habits that civilisation developed to solve the problem of large-scale cooperation among creatures whose biology alone could not sustain it. It works. It has expanded the circle of moral concern further than any purely biological account would have predicted. But it is a layer, not the foundation. The foundation is older, and the foundation is ruthless.

Good, in this account, is not resonance as such — resonance is morally blank, and a person can be good at the work of an assassin as readily as at the work of a healer. One interpretation is that good is a condition of the coupling: the condition in which individual integrals thrive independently and couple productively, in which competition and collaboration between parameter sets generate compounds that none could have reached alone. The Athenian agora. The House of Wisdom in Baghdad. The jazz band improvising without a score. What these share is not harmony — there is often fierce disagreement at the surface — but the maintenance of the coupling conditions under which productive resonance is possible. Good is what happens when the process runs well — when competition and collaboration are held in productive tension, each preventing the other from becoming terminal.

The conclusion returns to Rodriguez, to Byrne, to Anaxagoras on the banks of a river watching the sun, the moon, and the sky. The examined life is not constant self-analysis. It is the habit of occasionally surfacing to ask the question — and then returning, fully, to the sunset. The wondering continues. Meaning is accumulated. Good things resonate.