dinsdag, februari 06, 2018

The perfect frame

After a weekend of experiential abundance I am back at my desk trying to coherently fit all of it in my current paradigm. And I am failing at it. Some stories do not fit in and I am forced to review my core beliefs/hypotheses. Thanks to Dave Grays great depictions of Belief Systems in his book Liminal Thinking and the impactful practices of Liminal Coaching by Mike Parker, I have become comfortable with the fragility of my mental constructions. I have come more open to adapting them to reality as it hits me.
So pondering about the meaning of 'everything' I find myself zooming out to find a fitting frame of reference that wil accommodate all my recent experiences.

Jeremy England (MIT) has the compelling idea that life is 'just' a causal effect of the laws that form this universe. And if I understand it correctly (not sure) we humans are just a more effective way to arrive at the entropy end state. Dissipating energy at an unbelievable speed. Our behavior seems to prove him right. There is no other life form that burns energy as fast as we do. The fact that this 'success' will cost us our lives is of no meaning in the bigger picture. As said, that depends the frame of reference.

Earlier I already bought into the ideas of Stephen Wolfram that all complexity can be seen as results from endless repetitions of extremely simple interactions. I have believed mathematics to be the most truthful and precise (pattern) language. It helps me understand my existence and meaning within my world. But that frame of reference seems to become too small, too narrow. And this belief is undermined by the most unsuspected source possible: the celebrated mathematician Sir Roger Penrose himself.
He states that understanding is beyond computation. Here is a recent slide of his hand:


Now that is a fascinating thought in the middle of the exploding possibilities of the current Artificial Intellegence developments.
I wonder what Ray Kurzweil would think about that.

For now I am stuck in the irreversibility of the causality that defines our universe. Which drives me to ponder beyond. That limitation never has meant anything to my imagination. That is more akin to the stuff that dreams are made of. But up until this weekend I could kind of separate my inner world with the outside world. The latter I named 'reality' and I saw no real connection with the first, known to me as 'my fantasy'. Reality to me is the factual space defined by the same laws of nature I mentioned when I referred to the hypothesis Jeremy England puts forward. So I prefer my thinking to align with what can be scientifically validated. (Meaning; double blind experimentation excluding personal biases.) I like a straight causal line linking back to to founding principles of our universe. (Exhausting and valuable work)

My intuition and associations however are free with no apparent boundaries. They lead me to very different spaces. Spaces that I assumed to be produced by my imagination. But these days I start to suspect something else in happening.  It could be the other way around!

Instead of producing the thoughts, I might be receiving them. Like a radio of sorts. That idea is with me for decades but only as a form of thought experiment. But now it is beyond me.
That of course is a total ego crasher. It hits me exactly in my dearest personal property: my private imaginations with all those cherished dream castles and goodies.

Now that the confession is out in the world and on the virtual table of by blog, I will pause to hear what you think. In a later piece I might elaborate what exactly drove me to this disruptive assumption.