You and Grandpierre are evidently quaffing the same hooch. I defer to you, Madam! You do him much better than I.
Speaking of which, Betty, thanks for getting me drunk last night!
For anyone interested in more on the subject:
Seems to me that some may be valuing Grandpierre’s insights as though he were an intelligent design theorist or a Christian creationist. He is neither, but it should make no difference if he were.
From a temporal perspective (boundaryless-ness) – Grandpierre’s musings on the chain are akin to fractals - which we often associate with Mandelbrot sets and have recently discussed wrt cell intelligence.
Please check out the following webpage which explains the infinite detail in a Mandelbrot set from an artist’s point of view. Essentially, the observable finite is merely a “morsel” of the potential infinity in the fractal.
The void, on the other hand, is none of this. Conceptually, one might think of it as the background in which the Mandelbrot set materializes or becomes observable. But that too is an impoverished view in that the void itself is not merely empty space or a vacuum – indeed, the void has no space, no time, no energy, no matter, no geometry, no information, no mathematics, no thing and especially no physical causality. It is the context of everything which is possible.
Grandpierre put it this way:
I may not understand Grandpierre’s insights about the void, the infinite, or the foggy-foggy-dew, but I'm not a complete fool. I can read between the lines.
All existing things are finite, because they are in time. But existing things also participate in timelessness. To view how that may be so, one would need to step out of “normal” 4D experience, and imagine the "all that there is" (i.e., the universe) from the standpoint of an observer who stands outside of linear time. The observer would see all that there is as occurring in one present moment. There is no past, present, or future in infinity. Time is not a line, but a plane. But even from the 4D perspective, we may be able to recognize that the timelessness of infinity contains all possibilities that can come into existence in time. Not all possibilities are extant all at once within the 4D “band.” And tellingly, it is a creative agent who drives the selection of possibilities that can be realized – that is, an intelligent agent capable of making a decision.
Grandpierre is not speaking of God here (he is not a theist!!!): Rather, I think he sees that nature (existence) is shot through with creative agents – living beings possessing some form of awareness or sentience, at the “low end,” e.g., molecules, cells, molecular machines; at the “high end,” human self-consciousness.
IOW, “observers” are information processors and catalysts reifying decisions (successful communications leading to a reduction of uncertainty in the receiver, in Shannon’s model) made available by an extraordinarily rich and dynamic information flow mediated to inorganic and organic existents via particle exchanges with universal fields. The universality of fields speaks to timelessness, and unboundedness.
Plato has a pithy way of stating this case: “Time is the moving image of Eternity.” Finite existents similarly are moving images of the Cosmos (to the Greeks) or of God (to Christians). Alamo-Girl’s reference to fractals and Mandlebrot sets is very instructive here.
You didn’t think much of this, I gather: “The realm of the Finite cannot exist without the realm of Infinity, since the Finite can change only by its connection with Infinity, and it can maintain itself only by continuously changing.”
I just love this line! To me it speaks to the fundamental dynamic undergirding all existence, which one conjectures is a dynamic tension between that which does not change in nature (a conservation principle), and that which is susceptible to change (that which we call “random,” but perhaps this would be misleading).
The Infinite in this observation is that which does not change; it is the complete set of all possible existents that can come into being. Reified existents are finite; that is, changeable, changing, contingent, limited in/by space and time.
By way of illustration, the human body moves about in universal fields, exchanging particles/charges with the “external world” such that the body is never exactly the same each time it is “measured.” Cells come and go; but we do not cease to be recognizably “ourselves.” It is said that the human body replaces all its cells periodically, that is every 7 years. And yet we are “conserved” as who we are, for at least as long as we exist – i.e., have life. When we no longer have life, the 2nd law of thermodynamics takes over; and our cellular materials are eventually returned to “nature” -- for “recycling,” so to speak.
But what becomes of our life – the seeming form of our material being – when we die? It seems life is somehow opposed to the operation of the second law, at least during our existence. But what happens to life when we “die?” We know that the second law inexorably claims material bodies; but it seems to me that if a “life principle” dominates the second law in material existence, it appears doubtful to me that “life” and “matter” can be equated; or more particularly, that the former cannot be entirely reduced to the latter.
Well, that’s enough for now, I guess. We are in the domain of cosmological speculation here, and perhaps this sort of thing is not to your taste anyway. So thanks for hearing me out, and thanks so much for writing, VadeRetro!