The Fractal Nature of Living Systems
Originally drawn in 1997
In the graph above, the circle is the full size of the universe. The spiral line is what we see when we look out into space, spiraling back into time to a smaller and smaller universe.
Space may be spinning in relationship to time, also notice the golden ratio. It looks as if space/time may have a fractal dimension of 1.618.
At the center of the graph is the beginning of time. If you study this model closely, you will notice that space expanded at a rate far greater than the speed of light.
In the beginning unity
The distinction between the one and the many, or inside and outside, could be visualized as a Möbius transformation of a sphere, Klein bottle, or maybe a double torus, expressing itself as one, then two, then three dimensions. There are many opinions, and many clues as to how this might be occurring, but nothing conclusive. The geometry and dimensions are some variation of emergent properties, repeated at all scales.
Let’s say we set up three boxes to isolate two measurable qualities of an electron. If there are two spin geometries, one being a spin about the center axis and the other fluctuating between the center point and the surface of the torus or sphere, so that if you isolate the geometry of the center spin in box A, and then isolate the other component spin which is fluctuating between the center and the surface in box B, you would still have half the remaining orientation being opposite at box A once again. This is similar to the measurement problem of quantum mechanics. Measurement coherence and entanglement are intimately related.
Truth is the highest energy state of a system
The universe is expanding. Into what? A higher dimension?
In a two dimensional model of the universe, the skin of a balloon, as the balloon expands, we do have a dimension at a right angle to the expanding skin. Is this time? Is the point at the center of the balloon the beginning?
Is the skin of the balloon a fractal or a hologram?
What is chaos, the opposite of truth?
The structure of the universe is a computational geometry that is fractal in nature.
If the universe is made of information, then we are moving from a state of profound truth to a state of meaningless gibberish. This is the second law of thermodynamics. We are in the gray region between truth and chaos. Our position in the computational geometry has something to do with scale. What is most important is meaning and relationships nested into context (story, actors, and stage).
It may be fluctuation of probabilities or fractal reiterations with varying degrees of freedom in an information field stored holographically. Is time the framework in which choices are made? Could it be the vehicle for our fractal journey? What we are talking about is a fractal probability distribution of space/time.
The difference between unity or singularity and infinity is the same as the difference between static truth and dynamic variation (potential as an infinite recursive iteration).
Any intellectual attempt to explain the idea of truth, will result in an explanation that requires an explanation. This continues to infinity as a logical balloon. Truth has a static quality and perfect symmetry, it looks the same from every angle, at every scale. In a dynamical system, truthfulness will fluctuate. Variation is dynamic, being neither perfectly symmetrical nor purely random.
In the hierarchy of information, truth has the most potential and chaos has the most variation. The connection that completes the circuit would look something like deception (self-referential randomness) if you are moving towards chaos, and love if you are moving towards truth. Our connection to this circuit is through appreciation of beauty, and desire, the polarity or direction depends on how you understand or trust the information. Love is the purest connection moving to the highest energy state, and deception (self-referential randomness) pulls you into the darkness, the dynamics of qualia. (In philosophy and certain models of psychology, qualia are defined as individual instances of subjective, conscious experience.)
Knowledge is the physical manifestation of consciousness
If information is stable, then knowledge is fairly stable and what is fluctuating is understanding, this division or variation of all things is in “understanding” and the unification of everything in what we call “love”. While this may seem strange, the information field appears to be conscious and, if this is the case, then we cannot rule out the idea of a higher purpose. This higher purpose would most likely have something to do with love. Matter and energy cannot be created or destroyed and the same is true for information. Matter has a material quality that emerges out of the information field. Information has a spiritual quality with variation emerging from the singularity. In the digital world nothing truly exists unless it exist in at least two places. Our connection to the information occurs at a deeper level of reality.
Profound absurdities link perception and imagination. If we take the intangible and encapsulate it within the vessel of reason, then we turn it this way and that looking for clues, we may discover something unexpected or we may have to discard it and move on. There is a lot to sift through and all too often, with no clear direction, we do this however because we “must”.
In this journey of life we have been set upon, every choice becomes a fork in the road. The destination of the branches in front of us are real, but all the other branches behind us (the choices we did not make) are imagined.
The history of a black hole is written or smeared upon its rippling surface, called the event horizon. The observable universe may be the rippling skin of the real universe. With each quantum tick of time, the skin, or membrane of our universe gets bigger. Can the past present and future appear together at a certain scale? Einstein tells us that the distinction between the past, present and future is a stubbornly persistent illusion. This would suggest that the universe is like a set of Russian dolls nested inside of one another. They all exist but we are stepping from one to the next with every tick of time.
At the micro scale, time is an emergent property, at the macro scale, time is a fundamental feature. Time, gravity, the stretching out of space and the second law of thermodynamics are linked in a manner which has yet to be described. If the expansion of the universe is speeding up, this could mean that the degrees of freedom in the outer fractal iterations is increasing (Fredkin’s paradox). If the nature of the universe is indeed digital, then what the speed of light defines for us may be the processor speed. The resolution of a system defines the limits of any value assigned to it. Infinity could be the changing value inside of a cycle, possibly fractal reiterations. At the finest scale what we end up with is unity.
Let’s assume for a moment that at the singularity of the big bang, the speed of light was infinite. We will ignore the prime mover for the moment and focus on what happens to light as space expands. If space unfolded like an infinite set of Planck scale tiles, the speed of light in the first tile would be infinite, at the next iteration, it would be less, and so on. The slowing of the speed of light would follow a power scaling law. Time is an emergent property, and so is space, and so is everything else. The unfolding of these tiles could be a fractal probability distribution and gravity cannot reverse the unfolding. It just slows it down in a relative manner. At the singularity of a black hole, entropy has not been reversed, it has been repositioned or redistributed. Gravity may be a two dimensional phenomena. It could also be a one dimensional fractal curve occupying three dimensions, which in musical terms has a tension and release as it repositions into the second and third dimension.
If we are talking about information, this unfolding would resemble the computational arrangement of a very simple instruction set that grows in complexity. Did the universe boot itself up? Are physical laws part of the universe, as opposed to standing outside it? Are the rules governing the universe emergent? Maybe each rule just is.
The most improbable possibility contains the most information. If we are talking about a four legged mammal that quacks, “quacks” contains the most information because there are many four legged creatures and there are many mammals but only one creature quacks. The most likely outcome contains the least amount of information. It is an outcome that is certain. It is like the singularity of a frozen crystal of water. The most information is the opposite of the highest state of energy being truth.
If the essence of our universe is information branching out from a singularity, Truth would necessarily be at the center, where trust also should reside. When they are together, you would have harmony of thought and purpose, and when they are not, you get varying degrees of discord branching out in a fractal pattern, but it is all still information.
The idea that trust is able to move outside of the center would suggest that consciousness becomes bifurcated by this process. A multiplication of souls would result. Each of these souls would be at varying degrees of proximity to the center, or truth, and so deception, distrust, or poor choices are branching out along with consciousness into the outer darkness.
The source of light is at the center, being truth, unity and love. The scattering of choices and conscious agents may have a purpose. May be to solve an equation, to eliminate a possibility, or to create a possibility.
There is what some call the “religion” of the 10,000 lies (self-referential randomness). It does not matter which of these lies you believe, it is all the same “religion”. One definition of truth says it is “a secure foundation”, and vice versa, the more secure the “foundation”, the closer to the truth you are. Any time an experiment is subject to interpretation, there is an opportunity to come to the wrong conclusion. Let us suppose for a moment that the universe contains infinity. Would it be a bounded infinity or a linear progression that goes on forever? What is the prime mover that started it all? How many steps back would we have to go before we were satisfied?
The Big Bang
Brane Theory
Multiverse
etc…
Do we just keep moving the original problem back one step at a time?
Does the interface between our world and the next, fluctuate?
It has something to do with attention, intention and expectation. There is a boundary and it is fractal. A cold stressed crystal will fracture in a fractal pattern. At the edges of this fractal, the scale is very, very fine, and so the influence is very, very small.
To penetrate deeply in to the spiritual world requires a large effort from a lot of people. This is why our culture has been conditioned to accept the idea of a material reality with no metaphysical properties.
Does consciousness have symmetry? How was the symmetry broken? Was this the cause of time?
Is information hierarchical? Is truth the highest form of information? Does it have perfect symmetry?
If reality contains both infinity and unity it is either a multifaceted jewel or the singularity dancing.
It is variation that creates reality. Without variation, there is nothing.
Our reality could be like a crystalline lattice structure with perfect symmetry at the center. The first breaking of the symmetry created time. The boundary of the fracture is fractal. This lattice is branching out into the outer darkness. It is information, or consciousness.
Imagine a tree growing inside of a space that is layered like an onion. Each layer contains somewhere between one and two times the volume of the previous layer. Wherever the tree occupies space is an event and everywhere that the tree does not occupy space is a probability that was not manifested. Each layer of the onion is the next fractal iteration, it is constantly growing and the onion or its layers are probably spinning (a probability wave) as well. Now think of this model as consciousness. What if dark matter and dark energy were un-manifested probabilities? In the dynamics of social interaction, meaningful information becomes enfolded into an intentional field of implicate order.
The tree is the universe we perceive, the onion is not space as we think of it. It is a probability space. It is the superposition of all possibilities. The onion has a dynamic, let’s call this dynamic spin. In a computer, there is no such thing as pure randomness. It is the same in the reality we experience. When you flip a coin into the air, it is in a superposition as long as it is spinning, however the chance of it landing heads or tails is not a pure 50/50 chance. The coin is influenced by the intentional field.
A material manifestation is a consensus agreement of probabilities in a quantum system. This has been seen in “The Global Consciousness Project, Meaningful Correlations in Random Data”. The Global Consciousness Project, created originally in the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research Lab at Princeton University, is directed by Roger Nelson from his home office in Princeton. The Institute of Noetic Sciences provides a logistical home for the GCP.
For 100 years, physicists have been trying to describe the pixels on the screen and their relationship to one another and only recently have they noticed the code running underneath of everything. It is not possible to determine the kernels code from the output to the display or the behavior of the program. The behavior is an emergent property and there is no path back to the place where it came from. It is as if we are in a hallway of 10,000 doors and every door leads to another hallway of 10,000 doors. This is a fractal maze.
The photon or light particle is a two dimensional object interfacing with our temporal, three dimensional perception. At the speed of light, the dimension in the direction of travel collapses to zero, therefore entanglement is a two dimensional phenomena. In other words it is holographic. We wonder what, if anything, might be emerging from one dimension.
The direction of time’s arrow is the breaking of the symmetry of the potential, of the boundary condition.
Cascading symmetry from a hierarchy (a thought experiment)
The singularity is the point in space/time where the math breaks down and the equation goes to infinity. The singularity occupies no space in our universe. It is the center of a black hole and the point in space/time just before the big bang. It is the unification of zero and infinity, or perhaps, unity and infinity. The hierarchy of dimensions must require spin. The symmetry at each level is only preserved by balance. This would require a stasis of the relationship of all things at each level.
If we are talking about information or consciousness, then this stasis would most likely resemble the idea of truth. The mechanism of balance would most likely resemble the idea of trust. The dynamics driving the whole system would look something like deception (self-referential randomness), which would necessarily pull on the balance from the next dimension. Even before the next dimension existed its probability was there.
The center is a point relative only to itself.
This is the singularity, the beginning, the highest possible symmetry.
We spin this point and we get angular momentum.
The point only has a one dimensional dynamic.
The point becomes a line.
Time is the difference between the point and the line.
We spin the line and we get a circle.
Angular momentum causes every bit of the line to migrate to the outside.
With perfect symmetry, the circle would remain a circle.
Any imperfection and you get another spin axis and so the circle becomes a sphere.
This sphere has spin and any imperfection would throw off a piece of itself so that you now have two spheres relative to each other.
These two spheres are dancing in tempo.
The process continues.
At some point in time we have a lattice of harmonic resonance.
A clustering of overtones begins to crescendo into a discordant echo.
These echos create their own overtones.
This continues and repeats dancing out of the center and into the outer darkness.
The attraction pulling at the center is in the outer darkness.
It is imperfection, it is probability.
If this is all information, what would it look like?
We don’t always have the words, sometimes we just have the impressions created by the words we have.
“If the universe is a seamlessly interactive system that evolves to higher levels of complexity and if the lawful regularities of this universe are emergent properties of this system, we can assume that the cosmos is a single significant whole that evinces progressive order in complementary relation to its parts. Given that this whole exists in some sense within all parts (quanta), one can then argue that it operates in self-reflective fashion and is the ground for all emergent complexity. Since human consciousness evinces self-reflective awareness in the human brain and since this brain (like all physical phenomena) can be viewed as an emergent property of the whole, it is not unreasonable to conclude, in philosophical terms at least, that the universe is conscious.
But since the actual character of this seamless whole cannot be represented or reduced to its parts, it lies, quite literally, beyond all human representations or descriptions. If one chooses to believe that the universe is a self-reflective and self-organizing whole, this lends no support whatsoever to conceptions of design, meaning, purpose… On the other hand, it is no longer possible to argue that a profound sense of unity with the whole, which has long been understood as the foundation of religious experience, can be dismissed, undermined, or invalidated with appeals to scientific knowledge.
….It now seems clear that this radical separation between mind and world was a macro-level illusion fostered by limited awareness of the actual character of physical reality and by mathematical idealizations that were extended beyond the realm of their applicability.” Nadeau and Kafatos (1999).
yogaesoteric
September 8, 2020