Something from nothing

 

Just adding to last post… the problem for me with most intellectual pursuit (my own included) is the belief that the mind can “create” something. All human’s can do is move things around and expend energy changing the entropy of systems be that physical or mental. Under the influence of desires we drive things this way and that. But this (and I challenge Nietzsche amongst others here) is not the foundation of the world. Desire I am realising more than ever determines whether something in the human world happens or not. You may write the most excellent and correct book but if there is no desire to read it then it will probably never even be published. The point is not the importance of desire but its conditionality and fundamentality to existence and non-existence.

It seems that as with Dennett’s “Consciousness explained” there is the belief in GEB that we are going to see how something comes out of nothing… how that is something is created. Originally we accepted that God created and that was it. But since the Renaissance and especially the Enlightenment the goal has been to find a replacement for God… actually even more especially since the Enlightenment since the Death of God has been rather prematurely called.

The problem with “something from nothing” is that we must begin with nothing and we can’t do that. The only conclusion then (and my conclusion) is that we end with what we started with… and what is that? Well - after Buddhism - it is actually “Nothing” (for whatever we start with itself must have had a start and so on ad infinitum until what?). So we conclude that we must end up with Nothing also. This is what is hard for humans to digest but it is the apparent truth when it is looked at very closely … we start and we end up with Nothing because all the “things” we count as something are actually insubstantial.

So when Dennett “explains” consciousness or Hofstadter find patterns in what is just recursive symbol shifting there is the claim that something “new” has been found – something out of nothing. My suggestion is that these “patterns” aren’t new they were always there. That said some of the patterns are extraordinary and one does wonder what they came to arise from… With my new 1.8GHz 2-core machine I’ve got the power to do what I never did before which is to really go deep into fractals… some initial results whose complexity and apparent self-similarity boggle the mind…

The inside of the famous Mandelbrot set (rather than the outside which is usually rendered). Colours represent how many cycles until the system at each point repeats.

 

Zooming into the complex plane around a Logistic function with Z = k Z (1-Z) + C {k = –1}

Zooming into Mandelbrot Set Z = Z^9 + C

Newton Rafeson fractal. Plotting which root of the equation Z = Z^5-1 is arrived at

There is self-reference in that the sets are generated by repeatedly feeding data back into the equation. The starting data is the square complex plane. The wonder is how this gets transformed into these startling patterns that all exhibit self-similarity – which means that as you examine different sections you find similarity (but not equality) to the overall pattern.

Very broadly I can see the connection often made with ideas in Eastern philosophy that the Parts are similar to the Whole. That this place where I write is exactly as it is because of the state of the rest of the universe and vice-versa. To understand one is to understand the other – something I have always intuitively held. We need only understand a grain of sand to grasp the whole nature of the universe.

I also just asked an Indian friend of mine whether the Mandelbrot at the top resembled jewellery. He said particularly Indian jewellery. Well it could be Saxon or Celtic or Persian or any of the traditional Aryan jewelleries. My question for now and inspired by Hofstadter (a question that has been asked since the early days of fractals) is why do we humans of all the shapes chose jewellery that resembles fractals? What is it about fractals and self-similarity that appeals to the human mind.

I think Hofstadter probably has a very good point to make in GEB that recursion and self-similarity on a cosmic level might well be responsible for the forms that we see in the universe and which we ourselves embody.

But I maintain my reservation that this only explains why the world “looks” as it does. It doesn’t explain why it is like this. But Hofstadter more than anyone else I am aware of will himself be aware of this criticism and I wonder what he says!!