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Fractal of the Day
by Jim Muth
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Fractal visionaries and enthusiasts: Today's fractal image is so different, so striking, that little can be said about it. The image speaks for itself. I am not going to speculate about where the voice comes from, but when the image is viewed, the fractal voice will be heard. To find the image, I made a slight change in the parent fractal that I have been using for about a week. I increased the portion of Z^(-1.26) from 5 to 9, a change that causes the whole fractal to shrink while keeping most of its overall features intact. I then searched along the southeast shoreline of the large circular bay. This bay is unusual in that it has no obvious buds along its shoreline, but as today's image shows, it does have midgets. When I found today's scene, I tried the usual tricks on it. I tried all the 'outside' options and found the 'tdis' option works best. Then I evaporated the image and found that none of the 'inside' options makes as good an image as the unevaporated outside=tdis version, though the 'bof60' option works best. Finally, I set the escape radius to 500,000,000, which results in a half-evaporated image. I kept the outside parts set to 'tdis', the inside parts set to 'bof60', and the result was the skeletal framework of today's image. The final step was finding a color palette that brings out the best in an image that is only half there. Though Fractint has only 256-color capability, it gives maximum versatility to those limited colors, and after a half hour or so I had worked up the palette that makes today's image one of the few FOTD's that can honestly be said to rate a 9. When it came time to name the image, I studied it a few minutes, then saw a collection of colorful broken shells scattered on a fractal beach. I named the image "Shattered Shells", the name it will carry for all time. The render time of 7-1/2 minutes is quite reasonable for one of the best FOTD fractal images. But rendering may be avoided entirely by downloading the finished image from the FOTD web site at: The next great and apparently unanswerable question comes in two parts -- first: what is consciousness?, and second: why am I myself and not someone else?. Consciousness is strange indeed. We can not pull it out of a person's body and lay it on a table to examine it. It cannot be observed in others, yet if it is not observed in oneself, it does not exist. Something about it remains unchanged, even when it vanishes every night and returns every morning, every day throughout our lives. And this mysterious something remains unchanged even while the contents of our minds and the material of our brains are constantly changing. Perhaps the greatest unsolved puzzle of modern science is the origin of this ephemeral yet unchanging thing called consciousness. Despite cognitive scientists' claims of progress, the hypothetical neural correlate of consciousness remains as elusive as ever, presumably hidden somewhere in the as-yet-undeciphered neural network of the brain. The hope of solving this puzzle is so slim that some scientists fear it and do not dare discuss it openly. The omission of consciousness in the so-called 'theories of everything' which physicists are constantly putting forward is blatantly obvious. The 'scientifically correct' approach is to assume that the living biological brain generates consciousness in an on-going process, in much the same manner as a radio transmitter continuously generates electromagnetic radiation, but we assume this only because we know that self-awareness does in fact exist and we know of no other possible source of it. At the same time, we assume that the matter of the brain is totally unconscious in itself, which means that some very respectful scientists are telling us to believe in the very un-scientific, high-magical trick of producing something from nothing. Religion does little better. The teaching of conventional western religion is that self-awareness is a property of something called a soul, a spirit-like thing created by God, which coincides with our physical bodies while we are alive, but separates and goes up to heaven or down to hell when we die. (The Catholic religion has taught of an in-between place called purgatory, where our souls go for cleansing if we are not good enough to go directly to heaven.) To me, the claim that the soul is the source of consciousness does not answer the problem, but merely shifts it from the physical brain to a more ethereal substance known as the soul. The question is no longer 'how can the brain generate self-awareness?'. It has become 'how can the soul, whatever it might be, generate self-awareness?' In addition, there is almost a total lack of scientific evidence that the soul actually exists. And an equally puzzling problem exists, which may be stated as the question: "why am I myself and not someone else?" If the universe is infinite, then the number of conscious entities that could possibly exist is also infinite. And all of them must necessarily be different. This makes the chance of each particular conscious individual ever coming into existence equal to zero. We could not possibly exist, yet we do exist. This is surely the most fortunate accident of all time! And how extra fortunate it is that the world just now happens to be passing through the tiny and only bit of time in which each of us will have our conscious existence. Science shrugs off these questions, implying that we simply exist because the impossible chance of our coming into existence after an eternity of not existing did somehow manage to happen. Then it continues futilely scanning the brain in search of the NCC. Of course, it is not surprising that the world happens to just now be passing through the tiny bit of time in which we will exist. Like the universe being critically fine-tuned for the emergence of life, it could not be otherwise. The conventional religious answer to individual existence is that we exist because God, showing his love for us, created our souls as unique individual awarenesses. But a bit of thought will reveal that this is no answer at all, for the number of different self-aware entities that God might create is also infinite, and the chance of any particular individual ever coming into existence through the creative power of God is therefore once again equal to zero. It begins to appear that something is wrong. These questions, which constantly haunt so many of us, not only have no means of being answered, they barely make sense. In my opinion, this is the give-away that we are making some very wrong assumptions when we ask such questions. In the next installment of philosophy, which will appear right here in a few days, I will discuss what these wrong assumptions might be, and what I consider the true situation to be. For now, it's time to get back to earth. The weather on Sunday was partly cloudy with a high temperature of 46F 8C. The fractal cats, who most certainly eat food other than tuna, spent about 2 hours lurking in the holly thicket, looking for excitement that never happened. When they came inside, a small treat of tuna eased their disappointment. (The tuna is only a special treat. The dynamic duo's main diet is the variety of food that all well-fed cats eat.) But today is starting cold and rainy. I see a bad day coming up for the duo. For me, the commercial work is average, but there is that next installment of philosophy to start work on. The next FOTD will appear in 24 hours; the next philosophy will take several days longer. Until tomorrow, same time same place, take care, and be ready for anything. Jim Muth jamth@mindspring.com jimmuth@aol.com |
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frm:MandelbrotMix4 {; Jim Muth
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