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Fractal of the Day
by Jim Muth
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Fractal visionaries and enthusiasts: Yes, I realize that it's a 4-1/2 hour image, but the devil made me do it. I wrote in yesterday's discussion that the as-yet invisible midget at the center was probably nothing more than circles ruined by moire patterns. Today I had to check to see if I was right. As the rating of 4 shows, my suspicions were correct. Everything close to the midget is indeed an un-resolved mess. A log color palette would have cleared up a lot of the mess near the midget, which could use another thousand or so iterations. But when I tried the log palette, the area close to the midget became totally flat and featureless. Enjoying chaos a bit more than featurelessness, I decided to use the linear color palette. The name "Land of Sunflowers" is more of a play on words than an accurate description, though the resemblance to an actual sunflower is reasonably apparent. The circular character of the features surrounding the midget is one of the greatest flaws with very deep midgets -- by the time the midgets actually become visible, they all look the same. The parameter file is attached for reference purposes. It can be run, but only the foolhardy would attempt to do so. The only practical way of viewing the image is to give Paul and Scott a few hours to render and post it, and then pick it up from either of their web sites. The URL's of the FOTD web sites are: After the big electrical storm last evening, the weather turned cooler and much less humid today. The partly cloudy skies and temperature of 84F 29C were appreciated by the fractal cats, who finally came out from behind the sofa. I am currently reading, or more correctly trying to find the time to read, the October 2001 issue of 'Analog', a science-fiction, science-fact magazine. In this issue, I found the editorial to be particularly interesting. The topic of the editorial is a topic about which many stories have been written -- the possibility of achieving immortality by copying our awareness into new physical units. The conclusion of the editor is one with which I agree -- that immortality will always be impossible to achieve in this manner. Ignoring the question of whether eternal life would be an unending good thing or would ultimately turn into an inescapable hell-like existence of ultimate boredom, the article raises many other questions. The article compares our individual existence to a self-aware super floppy disk. We can make an identical bit-by-bit copy of a floppy disk, but the copy, though its identity and functions are indistinguishable from the original by human observers, will never have the exact same identity as the original. The original self-aware identity would be somehow attached to the particular atoms of the original disk, and therefore be impossible to copy. This comparison seems to make sense until one remembers that a human body is not a dead sheet of magnetized plastic, which is always composed of the same atoms. (In fact, when quantum phenomena are taken into account, the idea of individual and unique atomic particles becomes rather fuzzy.) A human body is a living organism, which constantly changes the material of which it is composed. The real problem is to determine what it is that stays the same day after day. What is the sameness that returns to existence every morning, even though the material of the body, and especially the brain changes even as we sleep? We cannot claim that it is a particular set of thoughts and memories that stays the same, for thoughts and memories are more ephemeral than even the material of the body. It is the mind itself, the generator of the thoughts and memories, that stays the same, and IMO, despite the claims of materialists, and all the brain-activity imaging techniques we may devise, the mind has not been and cannot be shown to be identical to or produced by the activity of the brain. Before the era of scientific enlightenment, this puzzle did not exist. At that time, it was assumed that in addition to the ever-changing physical body, every conscious individual possesses an unchanging but invisible soul or spirit, and it is this unchanging spirit that is self-aware. But when the scientific method was developed, we soon discovered the connection between mental activity and the material of the brain. As a result, we now have nothing, not even an invisible spirit, to help us solve the problem. This problem is one of the most if not the most puzzling of our modern world. Without calling on a hypothetical and undemonstrable spirit, I have no hint of how it might be solved. It is already apparent that the research now being done, such as studying the brain mechanism of vision, will produce an ever-increasing amount of data, but ultimately lead to a dead end. The problem always will humble the methods of science, while providing ever more food for philosophical pondering. It's now time to humble myself by doing nothing but finding an occasional fractal and watching the cats for the rest of the day. Until next time, take care, and don't have a copy made of yourself. Jim Muth jamth@mindspring.com |
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