Visualize the color
red in your head. Maybe a
red dress.
That thing, that vision you have just created in your head:
◘ You can't see it. (With your eyes. Nor can anyone else.)
◘ You can't hear it.
◘ You can't taste, touch, or smell it.
◘ It exists in your brain only as a flash of neurons in a rapid and extremely complex sequence.
Notice that you fully comprehend this "thought," this burst of neuron activity in your brain (the red dress), but it is only a
shadow of
you. Only a trivial piece of information and nothing we could rework the whole from (ie your whole personality can't be determined by it).
This is an important concept in terms of some ultimate source of consciousness that branches out like a fractal.
Your neurons, for example, have a shape very similar to that of our universe as we know it:
Here is a presentation of a Mandelbrot fractal, starting with a magnification of 1x and then zooming in time after time until a particularly stunning
reiteration of the original shape is found:
A fractal like this is an
infinite,
self-reiterating pattern that will go down as small and intricately detailed as you would like to
view it. It's an archetype that would literally allow an infinitely rich physical manifestation, should the physical universe ultimately take this
form, as other individuals, including physicists, have suggested.
Who's to say the neurons in your brain aren't just another peg in this divine and frightfully monstrous fractal, and our universe is a neuron in
something else's brain, that operates on a time and size scale we may never be able to reach (thus divided/embedded into "separate" universes)? Or
that the resorting to probabilities in quantum physics is not due to interferences from infinitesimal life rapidly oscillating with electrons that
would at least be as planets or galaxies to them, over billions of "years"?
But enough daydreaming, and back to the
red dress. When you see the red dress, what is holding it, and where?
The same "substance-less substance" (ever-changing, super-complex patterns of neurons firing) has some other remarkable characteristics:
◘ It "
sees" your sight
◘ It "
hears" your hearing
◘ It touches, tastes, smells your senses of touch, taste, smell
This "substance" in your head comprehends all the input from your physical body, electrical signals, subtle senses of mood, hunger, and all the
rest. It allows and at least somewhat defines your personality, your values and beliefs, your
entire way of looking at the world.
But
your experience does not consist to you as electrons, neurons, or even particular sets of neurons, in their layers of brain fat. You are
unaware of that level of things completely.
You know what you experience in your head every day. I definitely should not have to tell you.
But nonetheless, this experience arises from constantly-changing and extremely complex patterns. Nothing static. Your thoughts are like fire: they
flash and flick here and there, but never the same place twice, and never in any pattern that you can predict immediately beforehand.
So here is the idea I'm throwing out of how this self-organization spreads out:
Each world embedded within a world of a vastly greater scale of space and time, and everything else following suit in terms of scale. The rich
diversities of manifestations that are created share "sparks" of the "light" that is the transcendental creative energy flowing from the source
out into infinity like a tree branching out from its roots:
Ultimately, you would be a miniature god and universe unto yourself. Just like the last Mandelbrot fractal in the image, surrounded by what you might
consider celestial adornments of sorts. God would get bored just playing hide and seek alone, after all.
So what about it? Make sense to anyone? Piss anyone off? Too much reading?
[edit on 8-5-2008 by bsbray11]