Just leaving this here for now and will come back to it shortly.

"Now this is meant to be zero

Will be back.

Be right back, but for now, yes,  "We are stardust," but we are not stars. Yes, we are "billion[s]-year-old carbon," but we are only partially described by what we are made of.  How we are made into lawful processes of carbon breaking and bonds that make us feel separate from the world leads to a unique dependence on measurements and observation that gives the give in the given. 

This physical dependence on the terms nature imposes to allow intervention upon the lawful evolution of nature (the give in the given) gives us everything: our tribulations, our joys, our sorrows.

The price of intervention imposes physical dependence that brings probabilities, the present, knowledge, and error into existence: the long way "back to the garden," where necessities did not require knowledge and food to intervene. Knowledge is the price. Knowledge is the prize. Memory is the price. Memory is the prize. (Life begins as the price, and becomes the prize when life is kicked out of the garden upon discovering food. Dependence on food IS dependence on knowledge, on measurement, on observation. Food is the give in the given. There is no evolution in the garden, for there is no dependence on overcoming separation. The garden is a symbol of the wholeness of nature that life must obey to exist as it does.

Nature partially described by Dr. Steven Weinberg

Excerpt to follow, and this account of nature is the one I rely upon to examine the give in the given.

We are as physically dependent on partial descriptions of Nature as we are on food. This dependence is imposed as a condition on accessing "the give," or the forgiveness in the just application of the law.

There are other accounts of Nature that forbid give in the given, or assert there is no given at all. They do not use food or life in their accounts. I believe life intervenes upon a determined evolution of a real world, and food and dependence on partial information are the conditions imposed by Nature on life.

Our partial descriptions are always approximations based on approximate specifications of initial conditions. We can never have access to complete knowledge of the universe, but, crucially to me, this does not mean a complete description does not exist. By the time the description is registered, it is already too late. It is already in our past, already dated, already fixed in the past and not the present. It is the present moment that observation-dependent creatures like us can never exactly measure, and where we always exist, even if our partial descriptions of the past and future, and of possible pasts and possible futures and the speed of light crowd out our *perception* of the physical present.

Our physical dependence on moving the positions in space of energy and matter from where they would otherwise be imposes a dependence on partial descriptions. It is this dependence on partial descriptions that gives us our living existence and everything wonderful and horrible about being alive. Being alive IS dependence on partial descriptions of nature.

In My Beginning is My End: A Partial Description of Nature

Compare to The Principle of Least Action, Home, Always Returning Toward Home, No Such Thing as perfection, no free energy, no separation, no distance, but only trying

Infinity and Equilibrium as states from which nature is displaced, and toward which nature strives: Toward Home, cycles, periodic, clocks, waves, returning

See Brian Green video on Principle of Least Action:

Excerpts from Four Quartets by T.S. Eliot

I

In my beginning is my end. In succession
Houses rise and fall, crumble, are extended,
Are removed, destroyed, restored, or in their place
Is an open field, or a factory, or a by-pass.
Old stone to new building, old timber to new fires.
Old fires to ashes, and ashes to earth
Which is already flesh, fur and faeces,
Bone of man and beast, corstalk and leaf.
Houses live and die: there is time for building
And a time for living and for generation
And a time for the wind to break the loosened pane
And to shake the wainscot where the field-mouse trots
And to shake the tattered arras woven with a silent motto.

In my beginning is my end. Now the light falls
Across the open field, leaving the deep lane
Shuttered with branches, dark in the afternoon

...

    In that open field
If you do not come too close, if you do not come to close,
On a summer midnight, you can hear the music
Of the weak pipe and the little drum
And see them dancing around the bonfire
The association of man and woman
In daunsinge, signifying matrimonie--

A dignified and commodiois sacrament.
Two and two, necessary conjunction,
Holding eche other by the hand or the arm
Whiche betokeneth concorde. Round and round the fire
Leaping through the flames, or joined in circles
Rusticaly solemn or in rustic laughter
Lifting heavy feet in clumsy shoes.

Earth feet, lifted in country mirth
Mirth of those long since under earth
Nourishing the corn. Keeping time,
Keeping the rhythm in their dancing
As in their living in the living seasons
The time of the seasons and the constellations
The time of milking and the time of harvest
The time of the coupling of man and woman
And that of beasts. Feet rising and falling.
Eating and drinking. Dung and death.

    Dawn point, and another day ...
... I am here
Or there, or elsewhere. In my beginning.

...

The only wisdom we can hope to acquire
Is the wisdom of humility: humility is endless

    The houses are all gone under the sea.

    The dancers are all gone under the hill.

III

O dark dark dark. They all go into the dark,
The vacant interstellar spaces, the vacant into the vacant,
The captains, merchant bankers, eminent men of letters,
The generous patrons of art, the statesmen and the rulers,
Distinguished civil servants, chairmen of many committees,
Industrial lords and petty contractors, all go into the dark,
And dark the Sun and Moon, and the Almanach de Gotha
And the Stock Exchange Gazette, the Directory of Directors,
And cold the sense and lost the motive of action.
And we all go with them, into the silent funeral,
Nobody's funeral, for there is no one to bury.
I said to my soul, be still, and let the dark come upon you
Which shall be the darkness of God. As, in a theatre,
The lights are extinguished, for the scene to be changed ....

And the conversation rises and slowly fades into silence
And you see behind every face the mental emptiness deepen
Leaving only the growing terror of nothing to think about;
Or when, under ether, the mind is conscious but conscious of nothing --
I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing: wait without love,
For love would be love of the wrong thing: there is yet faith
But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.
Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought:
So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.
Whisper of running streams, and winter lightning,
The wild thyme unseen and the wild strawberry,
The laughter in the garden, echoed ecstasy
Not lost, but requiring, pointing to the agony
Of death and birth

    You say I am repeating
Something I have said before. I shall say it again.
Shall I say it again? In order to arrive there,
To arrive where you are, to get from where you are not,
    You must go by a way wherein there is no ecstasy.
In order to arrive at what you do not know
    You must go by a way which is the way of ignorance.
In order to possess what you do not possess
    You must go by the way of dispossession.
In order to arrive at what you are not
    You must go through the way in which you are not.
And what you do not know is the only thing you know
And what you own is what you do not own
And where you are in where you are not.

IV

....

    Our only health is the disease
If we obey the dying nurse
Whose constant care is not to please
But to remind of our, and Adam's curse,
And that, to be restored, our sickness must grow worse.

    The whole earth is our hospital
Endowed by the ruined millionaire,
Wherein, if we do well, we shall
Die of the absolute paternal care
That will not leave us, but prevents us everywhere.

....

... there is no completion--
There is only the fight to recover what has been lost
And found and lost again: and now, under conditions
That seem unpropitious. But perhaps neither gain nor loss.
For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.

Home is where one starts from. 

....

Love is most nearly itself
When here and now cease to matter
Old men ought to be explorers
Here or there does not matter
We must be still and still moving
Into another intensity
For a further union, a deeper communion
Through the dark cold and the empty desolation,
The wave cry, the wind cry, the vast waters
Of the petrel and the porpoise. In the end is my beginning.

If "the particle" truly does not exist, then how is our partial description not a complete description of the world? Quantum mechanics seems to get to the unavoidable subjectivity and lag of personal measurement of the world with an instrument like the brain that "assembles" or "constructs" or "adds together" signals to create its own present from scraps from the world. What is really the subjective, personal thing? The creation of the unique personal sensation of a present moment, which we can never really know. What we can never really know is NOW. What we can never really agree on is SIMULTANEITY because of the delays in processing information from the world. How do we get around these delays? Is the meaning of quantum mechanics that living systems intervene upon the future by moving the position of energy from *where* it would otherwise be, without intervention? What is the nature of the intervention? Resetting initial conditions. Principle of Least Action: my beginning is my end and my end is my beginning. There must be zero difference between varied path and true path. How can this be? BEGIN WITH THE END POSITION. The "initial condtion" is the target, the end, the return: "home." It is supposed to match "initial conditions" at THE BEGINNING POSITION. TOTAL ENERGY IS CONSERVED: kinetic energy is converted to potential and waste? The waste cannot NOT be counted. The system is global, the whole: conservative. See Jennifer Coopersmith: there is no way to carve up the world into systems once and for all to avoid "double dipping" of different levels acting independently. This is the dilemma solved by The Principle of Least Action. That all is connected is not a woo platitude, but the truth of nature. It seems connected by some conserved rate of change which admits intervention so long as the intervention obeys the true path, given by initial conditions. See the Brian Greene Daily Equation. Consider if the Weinberg essay's description of nature is a complete description of nature between allowed interventions upon The Given. Allowed interventions must obey that which must be globally conserved.

Descriptions of Nature depend on defining The System, and defining what is "conserved" in terms of what remains INSIDE The System following some reaction or experiment or event, and what is "not conserved" because it passes OUTSIDE The System, into The Surroundings ("the rest of the universe" that is not The System). 

Living Systems must maintain their separation from their surroundings, but in order to do this, they depend on the surroundings from which they are separated. Aerobic creatures are immersed in oxygen with evolved systems that automatically process it without necessary thought or competition or cooperation. We literally move through it like fish in water, we swim in an oxygenated environment that our bodies know what to do with. 

Food and water are different. Dependence on food and water impose a different kind of dependence on the surroundings that tells us something about how Nature is, and how we are.  

My working understanding is that all life must overcome a separation between what it wants, needs, knows, predicts, expects and its actual experience to remain uniquely separated from its surroundings as part of a continuous intervention on the evolution of nature. I believe physical dependence on transcending this separation is what life is.