Bootstrapping

Plan to start holiday at Stonehenge last night ditched. Still fitting a bike rack, waiting for new bank cards after blitzing my identity last week, and some apathy. Still up at 4am this morning and watched the sun rise (just broke from clouds at 5am) from Knole Park. Nothing amazing, just peaceful. Am beginning to find peace and not strive so hard for what famously (as retold by Coello) is with us anyway. The greatest day is the day we can just sit with ourself. Maybe it is old age dawning slowly within me but I'm beginning to see this.

Just setting up dual booting on the replacement computer I discover that the term derives from the saying "pulling oneself up by the boot straps". That book "The Self-Writing Universe" by Phil Scanlan becomes relevant again - this is what he was talking about. A boot-strap it turns out works by running the smallest program possible which loads a second program and a cascade begins which eventually loads the OS, and the GUI these days, and then an application, managed by the OS, and you have the machine that we, the user, want to use (be that Word or Excel etc). Now the question arises for a universe what started that? And whatever that is what started that? This is the question Phil is persuing and something that has intrigued me also.

But this conundrum only works if you are outside the system looking in. One can only say "what started that?" from a stand-point apart from that. But how could anyone be outside the universe? We are thus necessarily "inside" and inseparable from to the very thing which we are enquiring about. This is the Anthropogenic Principle. It is also I see the Horatio Principle (see blog) and maybe the essence of the SRH. Thus inside the Universe there is no meaning to "start". Until we find a place to stand "outside" the universe then "starting" is not a meaningful term.

This is what arose in the meditation on Metamorphosis in Humans I was having when my computer was stolen... relevant? Death (loss) can strike at any time. It is thus parallel to the unfolding of immanent time which we notice in things like metamorphosis. Death comes like an interrupt on a chip process. I believe that interupts are a set of pre-wired instructions that force a chip to store its state and begin executing a different set of code. The process that is being executed will never know that it has been interrupted because like someone in a coma when it starts executing again it is just the next instruction with no reference to the time "in between". The relationship between steps in the code, like the relationship between points in the circle examples (previous blog), are not coded within the code - if they were then the relationship between those parts wouldn't be coded ad infinitum. So the argument went Death is not a part of the metamorphosis on a human. Now if stopping isn't then symettrically then starting isn't either. I don't remember my conception anymore than Physicists can find any evidence for the actual cause of the universe. "My Life", that things which unfolds from day to day, occurs in a different stream of meaning to my conception and my death. Death isn't at the end of the road, and my birth wasn't at the start. Science will try and extend life further and further, maybe we will be able to live forever. Death is thus being pushed away from this stream. Yet a car accident, cancer or heart attack will interrupt the stream and start executing a completely different stream. We all know that experience of being interrupted by something serious and what was so important yesterday suddenly is no longer relevant. The stream changes.

Now birth is the opposite of being interrupted. I can't think of a concept that conforms to this. Will make some tea now and have a think. Failing that I will make a word up... or did I already? What was that latin word for "in the beginning"... can't find it... it is related to the concept of ex nihilo however the sense as creation starts that it came from nothing. Like diving into the sea, the fish who know nothing about the land and the air must think that humans come ex nihilo, out of nothing. Where the analogy fails Buddhism picks up because in reality no pre-existing human (or soul) dives into birth, rather the diver only has the perspective of the fish. Just like birth then death is also in to nothing. This is the NULL I was speaking about in previous blogs. It seems that it is a "category" issue to borrow from Gilbert Ryle, but one that is written into the fabric of the universe... so maybe there is life in Russel and Whiteheads "theory of types" in that categories seem to exclude one another in reality. When one tries to access something that has jumped categories you get a NULL. I think about "my muse" who has died and it gives me a NULL. I trace my life back to before it started and I get a NULL. Now if I jump categories and speak of things materially then I have answers to both, but if we are honest knowing that I came from fusion of a cell in my mothers body with a cell from by fathers body really doesn't help me much beyond getting marks in exams. These facts are stratospheric compared with the ordinary things of my daily world. It is like thinking about the 60s and Englanding winning the world cup in 1966. I know it happened but when did it happen? The day before yesterday, and the day before that, and the year before that, and the decade before that... these all make sense, but continue back too far and it doesn't make sense any more - not to the stream of my life. It only makes sense talking to my mother or factually in a pub quiz. There are worlds outside myself that I access to make sense of time before I can remember, but what I can't do it link them all together in the single time line of the world I am brought up to believe in. Basically from my own perspective I did come ex nihilo.

So Buddha seems to have been right that there is no start and no end to the universe - that we exist in a boundless and timeless here and now. We may step outside ourself and look in to see boundaries and starts and stops but within the system there are no limits. Origins and Terminations then are relative and cannot be constructed absolutely within the entity that is created or destroyed... intuitively but why? That is the annoying SRH that still won't reveal itself. Anyway seem to have knocked down one of the major questions I had about the universe and transformed it into an SRH question... why are origins and terminations relative? Which is basically trying to look under the bonnet of the Anthropogenic Principle (which I always found unsatisfying like evolution). Come on SRH everything is waiting on you!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!