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Fractal of the Day
by Jim Muth
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Fractal visionaries and enthusiasts: Today's image returns us once again to a fault line of the parent fractal that was the source of the two most recent FOTD's. We trace the fault line farther from its source in the southern branch of a prominent valley, and follow it to where it begins to disintegrate into chaos. There, very well hidden, lies the midget that forms the nucleus for today's image. Once again, the most satisfactory version of the scene is produced by evaporating it and rendering the ghostly 'inside' remnants with the inside=bof61 option. Fractal evaporation is what happens when fractals created with only negative exponents of Z are calculated with an extremely large escape radius, such as the googol of today's image, in which none of the points will ever escape to infinity. The result is an image composed totally of trapped 'inside' points. In today's image, the central midget is still too small to be seen, but the fault-line arcs that surround it are impressive. These closed arcs remind me of the blades of the exhaust fan on my old, worn-out but still faithful fractal-dedicated machine, which usually need to be nudged into motion by hand when the machine is turned on. I named the image "Fan Blades". The image pleases me about as much as did yesterday's. I therefore rated it at another 6. But it is a rather unusual appearing scene, worth the 9-plus minutes required to render it on my old machine, and the fewer minutes it will take to render on current units. But some current units choke on old 'DOS' programs such as Fractint. For the convenience of those with handicapped computers, the completed image has been posted ready for download on the FOTD web site at: At the end of the last installment of philosophy, I had concluded that the answers to the great unanswerable questions of life cannot be found by our conventional science because science under-estimates the significance, and sometimes even the existence of the totally alien nature of the hyperreal world that lies behind the familiar 'real' world of consistent but sensory-generated interior mental images. Before continuing, I must state that by debating the standard scientific answers to the great questions, I do not intend to imply that those who espouse the scientific method are mistaken in their thinking. I am telling the conclusions I have arrived at only after years of consideration. My answers to these great questions are undemonstrable and not scientific. The answers of science that I debate are typical of the responses of those with a materialistic and rational world view, who are convinced that the 'real' world of mental images is a faithful representation of the hyperreal world that is the source of the sensory input, and use the successes of science to support this view. These readers may ignore my words or read them and wonder how I could have strayed so far from the truth that to them is so obvious. The first great question I shall tackle is 'where did the universe come from'. When we ask science this question, it gives various answers. The 'steady state' theory, which is no longer taken so seriously, avoids the question by stating that the universe had no beginning, but has always existed in pretty much the same condition as we see it today. Of course, this denial of the question raises the new question of why there has always been something instead of nothing. One of the most persistent origin theories is that the universe came from a 'big bang' that happened about 12,000,000,000 years ago and might or might not have had a cause. More recent versions of this theory add frills such as a period of rapid expansion known as inflation. The big-bang theory is persuasive because of processes now taking place in the universe, which, when extrapolated backward in time, converge to a single point in the past. However, science cannot tell us what caused this hypothetical big bang. IMO, science is unable to explain the cause of the 'big bang' because it is looking in the image-world for the answer, which is the wrong place, and in the process it is stretching the image-universe beyond the point of breaking. Our world image fails when we try to apply it to things too far removed from the scale of everyday experience. Even when applied to something as near as the solar system, our intuition no longer gives an accurate picture, and the effects of relativity must be accounted for. On size scales as great as that of the entire universe or as small as the sub-atomic realm, our intuition is totally inadequate, and we are forced to rely on complex mathematical expressions and contrived mental models. When we add the dimension of time, the situation grows worse, and even the mental models fall short. In our mental image of a real external world, we see time as a linear objective thing, passing inexorably forward at a steady rate from past to future, regardless of whether any conscious entity exists to experience its passage. We mistakenly assume that this is also true in the hyperreal world, which is the source of our interior image-world. But the hypothetical 'big bang' is an event that could not have been observed by any human, and therefore has never had a 'real' existence as an image in the mind of a human observer. It remains an eternal possibility, an unrealized aspect of the hyperreal world. Our conception of the big bang as a real event is a mistake, a grossly inadequate attempt to reduce the hyperreal to the merely real. This mistake causes the unanswerable questions to arise about things such as the beginning of time or the end of space. The beginning of time is an idea as wrong as the end of space. Time as we know it is IMO a state of consciousness, a limitation of our minds in which we experience one of the dimensions of spacetime sequentially rather than simultaneously. To answer the question of the cause of the big bang, we must realize that when we ask the question, we are asking a wrong question based upon a mistaken presumption. We are mistakenly projecting the perceived attributes of our world-image onto the hyperreal world. As crazy as it may seem, the universe as it appears to us exists only as a consistent set of images in our minds, which manufacture its apparent attributes as they decode the sensory input. The big bang or any other origin we might dream up for the visible and supposedly objective universe exists only in our imagination. Since things such as a beginning or end of time and space exist only as imagined attributes of our mental world image, any attempt to apply them to the hyperreal is absolute folly. The hyperreal universe simply *IS*. It exists and nothing else. It is a single unbroken and eternal unity without attributes. We can apply space-time limits to our mental world-image of the universe however. But the universe that we observe in our daily lives is not a single external thing common to all observers, but rather a consistent series of internal mental images, unique to each observer, which each of us early in our lives learns to perceive as a single objective exterior world. When we apply a time limit to the image world however, we are faced with the fact that there are as many image universes as there are people on earth, and that the life span of each universe is different, and in fact, equal to the life of the individual person who is experiencing it in his mind. So what caused the universe to appear? The answer is simple. No invocation of God is needed to explain the start of the world we see around us, for the answer stares us in the face. We caused the big bang ourselves when we thought too deeply about a beginning of the image-universe and invented a big bang! Cosmologists themselves invented the big bang when they ignored the totally alien nature of the world beyond the senses and tried to apply impossible real-world attributes such as a beginning in time to a hyperreal existence which can have no attributes. In the next philosophical discussion I will tackle the next unanswerable question of where each of us comes from as a unique self-conscious individual. The Tuesday weather here at Fractal Central was absolutely perfect, with a spring-like high temperature of 59F 15C and lots of sun. The fractal cats spent most of the afternoon out of sight in the holly thicket at the bottom of the yard, watching the birds clear away the last of the berries. No tuna was needed to make their evening happy. This morning is again starting mild, but it is cloudy and rain is forecast for later today. The duo might have a satisfactory day if they go outdoors early enough. For me the work is average. This means an evening of adventure in Fractal Land. The best of what I find there will appear as tomorrow's FOTD. Until then, take care, and if we can see it, hear it, and touch it, it must be really real. Jim Muth jamth@mindspring.com jimmuth@aol.com |
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