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Buben
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Life is like fractals analogy. Gigantic post, a thought I got.
#13153395 - 09/05/10 11:31 PM (13 years, 5 months ago) |
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We, people, why do we live? If we ask ourselves that question what answer will we give? I have asked that question myself, I have also seen how other people motivate their existence and the common denominator is wanting something. That is people always have something they want to do, know, feel, experience before they die and that keeps them going. When people see nothing for them in this world or when it seems that the only thing they really want will never happen they start talking about pointlessness of life and begin to slide down into depression.
Hence it seems reasonable to assume that what keeps us alive often in a very direct sense is the willingness to know more about life itself, whichever way you do it depending on which life you live, it might be through science, experience, religion, wealth e.t.c. This is not an unusual concept in eastern religions where life is describes as a play or as a dream and there would be absolutely no point in going on if you knew everything in advance, hence for it to go on we must find out more and more gradually as it progresses.
At this point I would recommend you to watch a documentary by that aired on BBC "Horizon-How long is a piece of string" if you can't think of a way to do that I will explain the main concept below.
If you watched "How long is a piece of string" skip this. The concept that is important here is rather simple and goes like this: depending on how accurate you want to measure something/know something, for example how long is a piece of string you will have to take a closer look and the closer look you take the more difficult it becomes to give an answer. For example any pice of string is infinitely long, and that was demonstrated on a map in the documentary. If you measure a country on a map with a ruler you will get very rough measurement of it's borders, If you take a long string and lay it on the border all the way around and then measure the length of the string the length will be longer, and if you use special tool you will be able to follow all the curves of the border even better and the length will be even longer. And you can keep doing it, measuring more and more accurately, zooming in more and more to accurately measure every bump on the border, and as you zoom in to infinity, the length will also grow to infinity. Or simply put, google fractals, a mathematical concept where you can zoom in in infinity and it just keeps on going revealing more and more.
Now how does life look for a child? It is pretty simple, children have very few problems, world is very simple and very much centered around you and your friends. Border so to speak is measured with a very rough ruler.
As children grows up he or she experience more of life, learns new things, life becomes more complicated, that is the measurement process gets refined and one is able to see more bumps of life and really measure them, that is feel real love for the first time, hate, and all other things that goes with life. More one grows up the more life is coming at you, not only that but you also set up goals for what you want to "measure on the map", goals you want to achieve, thing you want to know. And the journey begins:
And as long as there is something ahead of you that you want to know, experience e.t.c. as mentioned in the beginning you will just keep "zooming in" towards that, or just keep on living, keep on measuring, experiencing, exploring life, demonstrated with video of fractals above.
It is easy to see in the world of science, where we measure our world around us trying to make sense of it. We want to measure it as accurate as possible invented better and better microscopes and then we discovered atom, and eventually we even split that, and we wanted to see what it consists of, and now we are talking about string theory and quantum physics. Hence we are back to how long is a string, but on another level.
I think at this point the analogy between life and zooming in on a fractal is described to such extent that it should be possible to grasp it intuitively.
And we keep at it, exploring life as we live it zooming in more and more in hope to reach the final point at which we will understand it all. But of course the more we keep at it the more keeps coming, which results in new inventions new religions and general evolution of the human race but understanding it all is left for the unknown future, either to religion, you will understand it all after death, or to science that hopes to understand it all someday.
Now, some cleaver lad figured all this out few thousands of years ago and said; all this desire is what moves the circle of life, fractals were not invented back then so analogy with zooming in on them could not be made, and if I just sit for a while and do nothing, not even think then I will stop this zooming in and will see it all in its wholeness. So he did, sat in meditation, for a long time, and then he got enlightened, talked about all being one e.t.c. This is not about this guy, because I really don't know much about it so I really can't say.
But people today keep on doing same thing, and many claim to have reached enlightenment, seen the whole picture, realized the unity of it e.t.c.

And they are happy for a while, finally they have seen it, and they tell everyone about how wonderful experience it is. Fact is it is so wonderful that they try to experience it again, so they pick up meditation again and keep at it, and of course what they have done is to start zooming in again in hope to find new experience if they just try a little harder, which is to say they keep zooming in again towards infinity and more they try the more is coming.
And no two enlightenments are the same for this reason because of course no two lives are the same and everyone sees the deferent part of the fractal they happen to stand on at the time they experience enlightenment. And the reason one knows that people that have had experience of enlightenment did't see it all as it is but only a local part is because they try to have same experience again, to see more.
Now looking at this analogy, where by living as you do you zoom in right or left in this fractal life, what is the method to see, understand it all as a whole? Zooming out obviously, but how does one do that? And who knows if there is an end point in the other direction?
-------------------- My blog with thoughts I get. _________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Drugs are paradoxical, you think you can solve all the worlds problems with philosophy, but if you drop a coin you will never fucking find it.
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TheSkyInYourEye
Stillness Bathing


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Re: Life is like fractals analogy. Gigantic post, a thought I got. [Re: Buben]
#13160176 - 09/07/10 03:05 PM (13 years, 5 months ago) |
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Subtlety is the language of experience.
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ivander
Paragon of Animal



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Re: Life is like fractals analogy. Gigantic post, a thought I got. [Re: TheSkyInYourEye]
#13163591 - 09/08/10 03:31 AM (13 years, 5 months ago) |
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Fine analogy of life you created here with the fractals. But life IMO, is more complicated then this. And this complexity is the product of the free will. Sure you can zoom in and out, but if yo are willing you can create another way of 'looking'. You can switch the fractals of life, make another one, or use some other abstract way of living. Some people want to know what they live for, others dont. Not even realizing they have this gift of life. Some may have reached the enlightenment, others dont. But enlightenment is not universal experience which is the same for all. For some, even the most simple and uninteresting part of the fractal can give rise to enlightenment. So you want to know how to see it all? Zooming in or out wont help. Remember you are talking about the fractal. And as much as you zoom in or out, it will be the same, and it will look the same. So why bother zooming in/out in the first place. Its infinite and wherever you turn you will look into infinity. So if you want to know why do you live. Then, just look around your self, and see the part of the fractal you are that defines you. Cuz you choose what you make of it, and what part of this big fractal you will zoom in. The only purpose life has is the one you give it. So if you dont want to give it any then you wont be looking at the 'fractal'. If you choose to look, then admire its beauty, and enjoy it. Cuz what else we can do?
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Those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music. - Nietzsche I've never faked a sarcasm in my life. True story.
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Buben
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Re: Life is like fractals analogy. Gigantic post, a thought I got. [Re: ivander]
#13163891 - 09/08/10 07:26 AM (13 years, 5 months ago) |
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Thanks for reading the gigantic post and for the pleasant replies.
ivander:
I agree with everything you said, but about it being more complicated with free will well it does not mess up the analogy in any way. For example when you woke up you had infinite amount of choices ranging from usual routine ones like make coffee or not, take a shower, smoke a cigaret to more unusual ones like jump on one leg, ring neighbors door and run away, call you ex, throw things through your window e.t.c. you are so to speak on the infinitely wide line which stretches in both directions with choices.
You make one of those choices probably same you made yesterday for example make coffee, hence you can no longer be in the same state lets call it "first thing in the morning" because you already made a choice, you picked a point in this infinite line and then changed state from that point, that is you zoomed in one step and are now presented with a new infinite line of choices.
And this is what I meant, as long as we keep expressing free will and live our lives, we keep zooming in on the fractal in the manner mentioned above.
Hence people experience enlightenment while meditating because that's the only time in life when one does not make any choices but just observes.
I have no point with this analogy I wanted to make except for the analogy itself. But I got new respect for fractals when I see them, where before I thought of them as just mathematical toys.
-------------------- My blog with thoughts I get. _________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Drugs are paradoxical, you think you can solve all the worlds problems with philosophy, but if you drop a coin you will never fucking find it.
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ivander
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Re: Life is like fractals analogy. Gigantic post, a thought I got. [Re: Buben]
#13168855 - 09/09/10 03:08 AM (13 years, 5 months ago) |
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Oh, I see. But still even as one meditate, he is still a part of this fractal. It does not have to be zoomed in or out to be it. And when i mentioned free will, I got the idea that, enlightenment could be achieved by moving around. I never did some serious meditation. But I consider my self to be enlightened with what I got. Sure, different people consider enlightenment to be different in a ways. Its not that I want to mess with the analogy, just to expand upon it. Beside, when I found out about the fractals few years ago, my world changed, quite literally. Reality got a new definition, so, my respect too..
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Those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music. - Nietzsche I've never faked a sarcasm in my life. True story.
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jivJaN
yes


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Re: Life is like fractals analogy. Gigantic post, a thought I got. [Re: Buben]
#13173249 - 09/09/10 11:44 PM (13 years, 5 months ago) |
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I took ur suggestion and watched the documentary. It was nice to see in how many ways.. it is impossible to measure a piece of string although i predicted a few of them before hand.
But something occurred to me just know ,so i thought id post it here and possibly get ur feedback ,since uve been stormin the same ideas.
Have you thought about how time related to this "measuring problem" ? If we cant measure how long a piece of string is.. can we measure how long a second is ?
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--------------------- All my posts in this forum are strictly fictional. They are derived from an acute mental illness , from which i am forced to lie compulsively. I have never induced any kind of mind altering substance in my life and i have no intentions whatsoever of doing anything illegal. If I have ever suggested such a thing it would have most likely been , due to my personality disorder and i probably do not remember it at all..
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the bizzle
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Re: Life is like fractals analogy. Gigantic post, a thought I got. [Re: jivJaN]
#13173647 - 09/10/10 02:22 AM (13 years, 5 months ago) |
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by the time I got to my original self it was already infinite
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Buben
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Re: Life is like fractals analogy. Gigantic post, a thought I got. [Re: jivJaN]
#13174139 - 09/10/10 07:57 AM (13 years, 5 months ago) |
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I think it's different with time. String is something you hold in your hand and try to measure it. A second doesn't really exists, it's just an abstract concept which is called a second. Your watch tells you every time it ticks when such second passed.
Hence to ty to measure a second one must first define it, but then there is not need to measure. That is it is equivalent to measure 1 cm that is not something 1 cm long but the concept of cm itself. That is second is just an invented measurement unit for time, as cm is unit for space, and not the time itself, as cm is not the thing you try to measure.
Hence the question really is if measuring time between two events more and more accurately will it result in infinity as it does with string. But with string the problem is that more closely we try to measure it the more things to measure are revealed so to speak. But with time we can't really do that, there is no "more time" revealed as we try to measure time. There is only problem with measuring endpoints of events, when does an event starts and when does it ends.
Hence I would say that same think does not hold for time. Though I must admit that I have very poor understanding of general relativity and other theories concerning this, I was never interested in physics, and therefore don't even have any foundation to reason from about time.
Though it has been proven(?) that time dilation exists for example near high gravity or at high speeds, Einstein's theories...
Hence I can imagine how it would be true with time as with space, that is time is not linear but speeds up and slows down many time. For example looking one event let say that last one second the event did not happen linearly in time but for example if one would imagine it, like a sinus curve, slowing down and speeding up in time, but overall looked linear over one second at high level. Then trying to measure it better that is to take a subset of this "sinus curve" would reveal more of the same, e.t.c. e.t.c.
But I am just guessing here. 
Sorry for my long rambling posts.
-------------------- My blog with thoughts I get. _________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Drugs are paradoxical, you think you can solve all the worlds problems with philosophy, but if you drop a coin you will never fucking find it.
Edited by Buben (09/10/10 07:58 AM)
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jivJaN
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Re: Life is like fractals analogy. Gigantic post, a thought I got. [Re: Buben]
#13175513 - 09/10/10 02:20 PM (13 years, 5 months ago) |
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in the documentary.. the physicists mention a particle being in two places at the same "time".
what if its not the same time ? what if we just see it like that ? what if the same thing does apply for time.
i've always had thoughts about the atom. i guess the way school explains it just wasn't satisfying. a proton.. and then an electron.. just circling around it.. never slowing down.. never getting closer. where does all the energy come from ? something is keeping this electron in motion.
basically everything in physical reality is made out of atoms and each of these atoms .. just.. keeps going in a sense and we dont know how.
neway.. a theory that i've been throwing around in my mind lately , is that it might be that we see the electron everywhere we look for it , simply because it is moving so fast ,that it operates on an entirely different time scale. simply imagine a laser being pointed at the wall. you see a dot. if you start moving it around in a circle.. you start seeing a circle as it goes faster.. then you start moving it randomly through points within the circle.. and it keeps getting faster and faster.. and when you look for the laser... that one point that its currently projecting.. it will be everywhere , seemingly at the same time.
shit gets really interesting when you start looking into holograms and how they're done.
im 2 high  sry if i ramble
but now just connect all that gibberish up there.. with the idea that the smaller we go - the faster it is compared to our experience. thus.. measuring one second here.. might actually be years.. down there.

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--------------------- All my posts in this forum are strictly fictional. They are derived from an acute mental illness , from which i am forced to lie compulsively. I have never induced any kind of mind altering substance in my life and i have no intentions whatsoever of doing anything illegal. If I have ever suggested such a thing it would have most likely been , due to my personality disorder and i probably do not remember it at all..
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Buben
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Re: Life is like fractals analogy. Gigantic post, a thought I got. [Re: jivJaN]
#13189015 - 09/13/10 11:51 AM (13 years, 5 months ago) |
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Yea who knows. But I got another thought yesterday.
Imagine yourself sitting in front of a computer with Matlab or something plotting this : (1,y) where y is any number N. The 2D plane is your "world" and what you plot will be an infinite line along y axis going through x=1. That is the "dot" that would be at some determined point if we knew value of y is now at all y's at the same time.
Hence shit acting wired at that small level could be explained that there exists features of the object that are not determined at that point. Which is to my knowledge is basically what scientists figured, and also that observing shit at that small level determine it to one of these options.
What I am driving at this time is this universe as an "n dimensional coordinate system" onto which "m dimensional objects" are "plotted". That is an object consists of "m features" which determines how that object is represented in "this coordinate system" we call reality.
And the reason things at so small level seem to be at many places at the same time and have others fundamentally wired behaviors is because that its "features" are not determined. That is basically "basic building block" that does not constitute an "object" by itself, but only by observing those we determine it's features to be of certain value at that point in time, otherwise it can be anything, whatever works. In some cases a gold atom, in other cases a light photon e.t.c.
The thought being if you try to plot a vector/object with 2 values/features you will get a dot in 2D coordinate system, with 3 features it can be represented as dot in 3D space. If we have 4 features we can add color to the dot in 3D space to represent 4th feature, we can represent 5th feature as the shape of the dot, e.t.c.
Hence to represent high dimensional objects (objects with many features) one needs as high dimensional coordinate system as possible, that still makes sense and also the object that are represented in this system will be as complex as the number of features. Well basically the idea is that this universe is such a "coordinate system".
Well then who determines how many features and what their value is? Well any explanations fits, evolution, higher dimensional being, "God" running an experiment, e.t.c. e.t.c.
Hence time is just a dimension like any other in the "coordinate system" universe that is needed in order to represent certain features of the n dimensional data that is plotted onto this coordinate system, just like x,y,z are necessary dimensions in order to plot a dot in space.
Sorry for rambling, it's really hard to explain an idea with words, and there is really no point in this one.
-------------------- My blog with thoughts I get. _________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Drugs are paradoxical, you think you can solve all the worlds problems with philosophy, but if you drop a coin you will never fucking find it.
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imachavel
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Re: Life is like fractals analogy. Gigantic post, a thought I got. [Re: Buben]
#13197096 - 09/14/10 10:43 PM (13 years, 5 months ago) |
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the meaning of life may not be limited or come from fractals, but it sure branches out in fractal form.
psychedelics teach us beautiful things. but you don't need psychedelics to see that science works in the ways of patterns and fractals, patterns are necessary for creation and stability. things wouldn't exist without them. which is why it's awesome to understand this high or not.
agree?
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I did not say to edit my signature soulidarity! Now forever I will never remember what I said about understanding the secrets of the universe by paying attention to subtleties!
I'm never giving you the password again. Jerk
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Buben
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Re: Life is like fractals analogy. Gigantic post, a thought I got. [Re: imachavel]
#13203525 - 09/16/10 10:14 AM (13 years, 5 months ago) |
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I don't get quite get what you mean, so I can't say if I agree or not. Have to elaborate a bit.
Though obviously patterns and pattern recognition is quite an important part for humans and it is possible to imagine how it could be related to science, creation and stability.
-------------------- My blog with thoughts I get. _________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Drugs are paradoxical, you think you can solve all the worlds problems with philosophy, but if you drop a coin you will never fucking find it.
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