Patterns of Organic Energy

"'Wu Li' was more than poetic. It was the best definition of physics that the conference would produce. It caught that certain something, that living quality that we were seeking to express in a book, that thing without which physics becomes sterile. 'Wu' can mean either 'matter' or 'energy.' 'Li' is a richly poetic word. It means 'universal order' or 'universal law.' It also means 'organic patterns.' The grain in a panel of wood is Li. The organic pattern on the surface of a leaf is also Li, and so is the texture of a rose petal. In short, Wu Li, the Chinese word for physics, means 'patterns of organic energy' ('matter/ energy' [Wu] + 'universal order/organic patterns' [Li]). This is remarkable since it reflects a world view which the founders of western science (Galileo and Newton) simply did not comprehend, but toward which virtually every physical theory of import in the twentieth century is pointing!"

-  Gary Zukav (1942 - )
The Dancing Wu Li Masters

Shamanic Dance

"Nature loves courage. You make the commitment and nature will respond to that commitment by removing impossible obstacles. Dream the impossible dream and the world will not grind you under, it will lift you up. This is the trick. This is what all these teachers and philosophers who really counted, who really touched the alchemical gold, this is what they understood. This is the shamanic dance in the waterfall. This is how magic is done. By hurling yourself into the abyss and discovering its a feather bed."

-  Terence McKenna (1946 - 2000)

Postscript. This is an "old" (almost two year old) image that I had inexplicably not processed from its raw state until having recently "discovered" it on my hard drive while looking for another (completely unrelated) picture. It's not that I did not think of it as a “keeper" worth processing soon after I captured it; rather, I simply overlooked it before I moved on to other things. It's existence is a reminder that our hard drives are likely full of "old and forgotten" (perhaps never properly "seen" and/or processed) photographs, behooving us to set aside time every once in a while to retrace old steps. The image depicts a tiny waterfall my wife and I passed while walking from the parking lot we left our car in on the Canadian side of Niagara falls in October 2023 (specifically, at Dufferin Islands Nature Area) to the falls themselves. Intriguingly, it is this shot (or something very close to it) - and, saliently, not an image of Niagara Falls themselves - that my brain conjures as a mental image whenever I hear "Niagara Falls" mentioned; and that (for me) depicts the "soul" of Niagara so much more directly (certainly, more poetically) than the iPhone panorama that appears below. 

Little did I realize that my mental image is a memory of an experience I had forgotten I'd photographed. Perhaps, with a nod to shamanic truths, I do not realize that my life is a but memory of an experience I had forgotten I'm always living!

An Unknowable Unfolding

"How did the universe get from matter to mattering?

...

Life comes from life," declared Pasteur.
But, if so, whence life in the first place?

...

The biosphere explodes in diversity,
creating more and more cracks in the
floor of Darwin’s nature until the cracks,
ever expanding, become the
very floor of nature,
and nature herself.

...

The ultimate, an unknowable unfolding, slips
its foundational moorings and floats free.

...

Agency introduces meaning into the world!"

- Stuart A. Kauffman (1939 - )
A World Beyond Physics

Metamorphosing Machine

"To get from the tangible to the intangible (which mature artists in any medium claim as part of their task) a paradox of some kind has frequently been helpful. For the photographer to free himself of the tyranny of the visual facts upon which he is utterly dependent, a paradox is the only possible tool. And the talisman paradox for unique photography is to work 'the mirror with a memory' as if it were a mirage, and the camera is a metamorphosing machine, and the photograph as if it were a metaphor…. Once freed of the tyranny of surfaces and textures, substance and form [the photographer] can use the same to pursue poetic truth."

- Minor White (1908 - 1976)

The Brain's Three Milliards

"Thought is the brain's three milliards
Of cells from the inside out.
Billions of games of billiards

Marked up as Faith and Doubt.

My Faith, but their collisions;

My logic, but their enzymes;

Their pink epinephrin, my visions;

Their white epinephrin, my crimes.

Since I am the felt arrangement

Of ten to the ninth times three,

Each atom in its estrangement
Must yet be prophetic of me."

- Aldous Huxley (1894 - 1963)
Island

Timeless Schema

"For the myth is the foundation of life;
it is the timeless schema, the pious
formula into which life flows
when it reproduces its traits
out of the unconscious."

- Thomas Mann (1875 - 1955)

A Framework for Intelligence

"So I want to be clear that intelligence is a really, as you well know, is a very complex issue. I’m not going to claim that I have the only appropriate definition or the best answer. I’m just going to give you my thoughts on it and the framework that I found useful in my work. I think we’ve, you know, can fully accept that there are other people with other useful definitions and so on.

So for me, some work that has to be done by any theory of intelligence is that it has to be able to help us directly compare and interact with what we now call diverse intelligences. So I’m not interested in theories that apply just to mammals or to mammals and birds or that break down when we have to think about octopus or insects or other things. I want a framework for intelligence that is going to handle all possible agents. This means not only the things we see in the phylogenetic tree here on earth, but novel synthetic biology constructs, artificial intelligences that we may build, either in hardware or software, potential exobiological agents, weird beings at other scales, including individual cells, subcellular molecular networks, uh, enormous things like social structures, and basically and perhaps the evolutionary process itself."

- Michael Levin (1969 - )
Michael Levin on Multi-Scale Intelligence and Teleophobia

Everything Dreams

"He was aware that in thus relegating to irreality  a major portion of the only reality, the only existence, that he in fact did have, he was running exactly the same risk the insane mind runs: the loss of the sense of free will.

...
Everything dreams.
The play of form, of being,
is the dreaming of substance.
Rocks have their dreams,
and the earth changes...
...

Nothing remains the same from one moment to the next, you can’t step into the same river twice. Life – evolution – the whole universe of space/time, matter/energy – existence itself – is essentially change."

- Ursula K. Le Guin (1929 - 2018)

The Lathe of Heaven

Ontology of Materialism

"What we observe is not nature itself, but
nature exposed to our method of questioning.

...

The ontology of materialism rested upon
the illusion that the kind of existence,
the direct 'actuality' of the world around us,
can be extrapolated into the atomic range.
This extrapolation, however, is impossible...
Atoms are not things.

...

Whenever we proceed from the known into the unknown
we may hope to understand, but we may have to learn
at the same time a new meaning
of the word 'understanding."

- Werner Heisenberg (1901 - 1976)
Physics and Philosophy

String Theory

"For me, the most beautiful aspects of physics are not the complicated math equations or even the ability of predicting how things will happen. What attracts me to physics is what it teaches us about the bigger picture. The general philosophical lessons that are embedded in physical laws are what excite me. For example, the fact that all particles and forces get unified within string theory teaches us about the unity underlying our universe. The amazingly vast collection of solutions to equations of string theory suggests that there may be many universes besides ours. What happened before the big bang, or was there a time before big bang? The 'duality symmetry' in string theory, which exchanges small spaces with large spaces, suggests that perhaps as we go back in time the universe was effectively getting bigger instead of smaller. This suggests we came from other universes. Physics teaches us deep facts about our universe and our place in it. I hope I can add a little to this beautiful story. That is my goal."

- Cumrun Vafa (1960 - )