Patterns of Ones and Zeros

"'Personal density,' Kurt Mondaugen in his Peenemünde office not too many steps away from here, enunciating the Law which will one day bear his name, 'is directly proportional to temporal bandwidth.' 'Temporal bandwidth,' is the width of your present, your now. It is the familiar '[delta-] t' considered as a dependent variable. The more you dwell in the past and in the future, the thicker your bandwidth, the more solid your persona. But the narrower your sense of Now, the more tenuous you are.

...

He had decided long ago that no Situation had any objective reality: it only existed in the minds of those who happened to be in on it at any specific moment. Since these several minds tended to form a sum total or complex more mongrel than homogeneous, The Situation must necessarily appear to a single observer much like a diagram in four dimensions to an eye conditioned to seeing the world in only three. Hense the success of failure of any diplomatic issue must vary directly with the degree of rapport achieved by the team confronting it. This had led to the near obsession with teamwork which had inspired his colleagues to dub him Soft-show Sydney, on the assumption that he was at his best working in front of a chorus line. But it was a neat theory, and he was in love with it. The only consolation he drew from the present chaos was that his theory managed to explain it.

...

If patterns of ones and zeros were “like” patterns of human lives and deaths, if everything about an individual could be represented in a computer record by a long string of ones and zeros, then what kind of creature would be represented by a long string of lives and deaths? It would have to be up one level at least—an angel, a minor god, something in a UFO. It would take eight human lives and deaths just to form one character in this being’s name—its complete dossier might take up a considerable piece of the history of the world."

- Thomas Pynchon (1937 - )
V, Gravity's Rainbow, and Vineland

Source of Spirituality

"Science is not only compatible with spirituality; it is a profound source of spirituality. When we recognize our place in an immensity of light‐years and in the passage of ages, when we grasp the intricacy, beauty, and subtlety of life, then that soaring feeling, that sense of elation and humility combined, is surely spiritual. So are our emotions in the presence of great art or music or literature, or acts of exemplary selfless courage such as those of Mohandas Gandhi or Martin Luther King, Jr. The notion that science and spirituality are somehow mutually exclusive does a disservice to both."

- Carl Sagan (1934 - 1996)
The Demon-Haunted World

Perceived Geometries #2

"Euclid alone has looked on Beauty bare.

Let all who prate of Beauty hold their peace,

And lay them prone upon the earth and cease

To ponder on themselves, the while they stare

At nothing, intricately drawn nowhere

In shapes of shifting lineage; let geese

Gabble and hiss, but heroes seek release

From dusty bondage into luminous air.

O blinding hour, O holy, terrible day,

When first the shaft into his vision shone

Of light anatomized! Euclid alone

Has looked on Beauty bare. Fortunate they

Who, though once only and then but far away,

Have heard her massive sandal set on stone."

- Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892 - 1950)

Perceived Geometries #1

"It is well known that geometry presupposes not only the concept of space but also the first fundamental notions for constructions in space as given in advance. It only gives nominal definitions for them, while the essential means of determining them appear in the form of axioms. The relationship of these presumptions is left in the dark; one sees neither whether and in how far their connection is necessary, nor a priori whether it is possible. From Euclid to Legendre, to name the most renowned of modern writers on geometry, this darkness has been lifted neither by the mathematicians nor the philosophers who have labored upon it."

- Bernhard Riemann (1826 - 1866)

"The division of the perceived universe
into parts and wholes is convenient
and may be necessary,
but no necessity determines
how it shall be done.""

- Gregory Bateson (1904 - 1980)

Leaves of Forgotten Paths

"On this plank of silent wood, a leaf descends like a stray sentence from a book never written, a fragment of the universe’s lost prose. The droplets cling to it, like memories of rain on the brink of being erased. They are not droplets at all, but miniature worlds, reflecting all that ever was, and all that will never be. Within this moment, time folds itself inward, a palimpsest of lives and stories overlapping in their stillness, as if each droplet were a star trembling on the edge of oblivion.

The leaf, fragile and delicate, is the map to nowhere—a path we will never walk, though it was laid out for us in some forgotten dream. Its veins are threads of infinite labyrinths, spun from the cosmic loom of contingency. Do they lead to Eden or toward the dust? Borges would have marveled at the infinity it holds within the finite, a cipher for the universe itself, decipherable only by those who have forgotten how to read. Its edges fray with the mystery of countless fates untaken.

But look closely—each grain of wood beneath it bears the imprint of time’s invisible steps. Could it be that this scene was destined to be? Or does the leaf choose its resting place, in defiance of all that is written? The universe pauses, just long enough for this image to be both remembered and lost, seen and unseen, a paradox folding in on itself. We are left to wonder if, in the fading moments of the universe, there will be a single leaf left resting on a board, and if we—trapped in Borges’ eternal dream—will finally understand its purpose."

- ChatGPT4o (12 Sep 2024)
Sparks of Artificial General Intelligence

Prompt: "You are a photographer, poet and philosopher, with a penchant for metaphysics and stories by Jorge Luis Borges. You have taken a black and white image of a leaf resting gently on some old wooden boards. Write a prose poem in the style of Borges that describes a mystery imbued in and implied by this image. Limit the number of stanzas to three, with 5 lines each. Be creative."

Tangled Infinity

"The clearest way into the Universe
is through a forest wilderness."

- John Muir (1838 - 1914)

Niagara Concealed

"With cities, it is as with dreams: everything imaginable can be dreamed, but even the most unexpected dream is a rebus that conceals a desire or, its reverse, a fear. Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears, even if the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules are absurd, their perspectives deceitful, and everything conceals something else."

- Italo Calvino (1923 - 1985)

Invisible Cities