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Fractal of the Day
by Jim Muth
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Fractal visionaries and enthusiasts: Today's image is a scene in the East Valley of the large midget on the main stem of the Z^2.00001+C Mandeloid. Because I put so little work into it, the image has been given no name and no rating. The render time of 4-1/2 minutes is well within reason. If this brief time is still unreasonable, the already-rendered GIF image is available on the FOTD web site at: I have made it abundantly clear in my recent ponderings that I feel mankind needs spiritual hope. But hope for what? Eternal life? Is eternal life really a good thing? Unending existence might eventually prove to be worse than the hell we are taught to fear. How will we feel after we have satisfied every earthly desire? How will we feel after we have fulfilled and grown bored with every dream we might invent in an eternal afterlife? Could there possibly be enough variety in whatever kind of world comes next to forestall boredom forever? After a while, variety itself becomes boring, which is demonstrated when people grow bored with the near infinite variety of fractals. After a long hard day, do we not welcome the oblivion of sleep? After a long hard life, why should the oblivion of death not be equally welcome? The answer of course is the need for meaning and justification. Life at the physical level is grossly unfair. Some are born into wealth to live lives of ease and luxury, while others are born into poverty to suffer lives of want and misery. And at the physical level there is no means of justifying this inequality. The circumstances of a person's birth are the result of a random spin of the wheel, with nothing spinning the wheel and no wheel to spin. The good suffer, while the wicked flourish, and even with no image of an insane god running things, we have a nagging feeling that something is wrong. Then there are those questions I have yet to tackle, (but soon will), which defy explanation at the physical level, questions such as: what are we?, what stays the same through our lives, while the material of our bodies and the content of our minds constantly changes?, and perhaps the greatest question of all -- how can unconscious matter produce conscious thought? We have no rational physical answers for such basic questions. Something is indeed wrong. But what? It is apparent that the spiritual crutches on which we have long leaned are not real. Heaven is not real. Hell is not real. Saints and angels are not real. The all-good and powerful God watching over us is not real. The glorious afterlife where we will be reunited with our lost loved ones is not real. But why stop here? The visions seen by saints are not real. Dreams, even lucid dreams, are not real. Out-of-body experiences are merely extraordinary lucid dreams, and therefore are not real either. Hallucinations are not real. The vivid phantasms seen and heard by the insane are not real. We can go on: Imaginary numbers are not real. Even real numbers are but abstractions. Mathematics itself, the instrument by which science studies the physical world, is an invention of the human mind -- an idea. There certainly is a lot of unreal stuff floating around. But what then is the real stuff? We are taught to believe that the material and energies of the physical universe are real. But why should the physical universe be different? All we can know of it is a series of electromagnetic impacts on our retinas and a series of air-pressure impacts on our eardrums, which together with some tactile impressions produce in our minds the image of an outer real world surrounding us, in which we exist and move about. The mental images that represent the physical world are more stable than those of dreams, and they are certainly based on something unseeable, but the things we take to be objects out there in the physical universe are no more than images in our minds, just as real or unreal as any other mental images. Denying the reality of the physical universe is a huge step to take. Many who have substituted physical reality for God and the discoveries of science for the doctrines of religion will be unwilling to take it. But if we are to work ourselves out of the quagmire, we must be willing to leave the security of the physical universe and the science that investigates it, and branch off in a new direction where reason takes strange turns. Science can answer the questions of how, but it was never intended to answer the questions we are concerned with, the questions of why. Much more philosophy is to come. Stay tuned for further interesting developments in the coming days. Absolutely perfect weather here at Fractal Central on Thursday made the fractal cats very happy. Finishing the work at a reasonable hour made me very happy also. Happiness produces good fractals, so we'll see how tomorrow's fractal turns out. Until then, take care, and ask for answers. Jim Muth jamth@mindspring.com jimmuth@aol.com |
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