There are orderings to the cosmos far beyond those of simple material substances, and include this very discussion. To study the structure of what is going on here includes what we might lump into categories such as the psychological and metaphysical, not considered science by some, but necessary knowledge nonetheless. Outside of that context, science is an empty distortion of reality.
The “device” of which you speak has been in existence for many millenia - the human mind.
It needs to be “calibrated”, which involves not only education but a considerable degree of self-reflection. There also has to be a certain amount of reasoning capacity in order to detect these “signals”.
The “device” organizes perceptions of what is other to our selves into a recognizable form that reveals its superficial material structure. It proceeds beyond immediate manifestations of that connection, to formulate a picture of what the thing is in space and time; e.g. the rising and setting of the sun and where on the horizon those events happen at different times of the year. We bring together shared data to arrive at a deeper understanding of the relationship between the earth and the sun. Doing all this we push past the superficial perception into a greater appreciation of the larger structure of complex events. Through this process we come to identify and understand the nature and behaviour of various elements to their atomic level. Knowing what they do, we can manipulate matter to do what we want. Knowing how matter behaves and something of the earth sciences, we can figure out how landforms came to be.
Back to Mount Rushmore, we know it to have the form of human faces. Such phenomena can be projections onto objects such as a knot of wood or swirls in marble. Usually these are distorted images that we typically understand to be illusions, the result of haphazard occurences that do not contain an intrinsic meaning, but having one read into them. Analyzing the mountain before and after it was sculpted, we may say that there is no difference in terms of the complexity of the orientation of molecules that comprise its physical form. The complexity lies its overall form - same trees, but a different forest, which some may not be able to see because of the trees.
We know through historical documents that Mount Rushmore was constructed, as we know, through what has been passed on from our beginnings, that this world was created by God. We know by the image imbedded in the rock that it must have been designed. Having some understanding of how the universe came to be, although much of our current understandings may not endure the passage of time, we can more or less trace back the simple-complexity that is the body-spirit unity of ourselves as persons-in-the-world, temporally and ontologically, to see how the whole system of necessary and interdependent components that make up all of creation, comes together. As we look at Mount Rushmore and know that it has been designed, our mind informs us that so too was all this wonder in which we participate.
