Full of Fire

"When primitive man gained control over fire, it was a great step. However, the Universe is full of fire; consider the stars. Because we can think, and nothing else on our planet seems to be able to do so, it is natural for us to hold our intellectual prowess in great esteem. However, it may be that information processing, instead of being the sole province of us humans and our machines, may be a part of almost everything else in physics. Life itself, is clearly mediated by digital information; the genetic code. Digital Mechanics assumes that physics is also a process based on informational processes. We may need to rid ourselves of the prejudice that purposeful, thought related action is exclusively the domain of humans or perhaps aliens similar to humans. There are kinds of thinking that are qualitatively unimaginable to us though we can think about it quantitatively. We should not be afraid to consider intellectual activity as the driving force behind the creation of the Universe. By a close and quantitative examination of the possible parameters of Digital Mechanics, we can arrive at reasonable guesses as to what might be the purpose behind the creation of a universe like ours. That, in turn, can lead us towards intelligent speculations about Other, the space that contains the engine of our world."

- Edward Fredkin (1934 - 2023)
A New Cosmogony

Be Still With Yourself

"When you approach something to photograph it,
first be still with yourself until the object
of your attention affirms your presence.
Then don't leave until you have
captured its essence."

- Minor White (1908 - 1976)

Lily Math

"Philosophy is written in this all-encompassing book that is constantly open to our eyes, that is the universe; but it cannot be understood unless one first learns to understand the language and knows the characters in which it is written. It is written in mathematical language, and its characters are triangles, circles, and other geometrical figures; without these it is humanly impossible to understand a word of it, and one wanders in a dark labyrinth."

- Galileo Galilei (1564 - 1642)
Il Saggiatore

Orderly Action Within the Whole

"One must then go on to
a consideration of time as a
projection of multidimensional
reality into a sequence of moments.

...

Thought divides itself from feeling and from the body. Thought is said to be the mind; we have the notion that it is something abstract or spiritual or immaterial. Then there is the body, which is very physical. And we have emotions, which are perhaps somewhere in between. The idea is that they are all different. That is, we think of them as different. And we experience them as different because we think of them as different.

...

Man’s general way of thinking of the totality, i.e. his general world view, is crucial for overall order of the human mind itself. If he thinks of the totality as constituted of independent fragments, then that is how his mind will tend to operate, but if he can include everything coherently and harmoniously in an overall whole that is undivided, unbroken, and without a border (for every border is a division or break) then his mind will tend to move in a similar way, and from this will flow an orderly action within the whole."

 - David Bohm (1917 - 1992)

Illimitable Spirit

"My religion consists of a humble
admiration of the illimitable superior
spirit who reveals himself in the
slight details we are able to perceive
with our frail and feeble mind."

- Albert Einstein (1879 - 1955)

"Blessed be you, mighty matter,

irresistible march of evolution,

reality ever newborn; you who,
by constantly shattering our
mental categories, force us to go
ever further and further
in our pursuit of the truth."

- Teilhard De Chardin (1881- 1955)

"What matters most:
What he had yearned to embrace
was not the flesh but a downy spirit, a spark,
the impalpable angel that inhabits the flesh.
Wind, Sand and Stars."

- Richard Bach (1936 - )

Walls of the Worlds

"At least nine-tenths of all the original reality ever created lies outside the multiverse, and since the multiverse by definition includes absolutely everything that is anything, this puts a bit of a strain on things. Outside the boundaries of the universe lie the raw realities, the could-have-beens, the might-bes, the never-weres, the wild ideas, all being created and uncreated chaotically like elements in fermenting supernovas. Just occasionally where the walls of the worlds have worn a bit thin, they can leak in."

- Terry Pratchett (1948 - 2015)

Moving Pictures

Disorder to Order

"And here the fundamental dilemma appeared. The grim picture of cosmic evolution painted by the physicists—an engine that is slowly running down and grinding to a halt—was in sharp contrast to the evolutionary thinking of the biologists, who observed that the living universe evolves from disorder to order, toward states of ever increasing complexity. At the end of the 19th century, then, Newtonian mechanics, the science of eternal, reversible trajectories, had been supplemented by two diametrically opposed views of evolutionary change—that of a living world unfolding toward increasing order and complexity, and that of an engine running down, a world of ever increasing disorder. Who was right, the physicists or the biologists?"

- Fritjof Capra (1939 - )
Patterns of Connection