Registered: May 2004
Posts: 1

I will begin by stating that prior to about an hour ago I had not been exposed to NKS or anything related. But I find my curiousity aroused. I have spent all my life pondering the natural world which led to degrees in science and ecology.

For the sake of brevity, I will simply say that I am a novice philosopher who always finds his mind drifiting outside of the mainstream. And, just as a point of clarification, I am functionally illiterate in even the basics of math, having been fortunate enough to have been born and educated during the development of handheld programmable calculators which allowed me to pass exams.

Having said all that, here is a metaphysic that I have been dwelling on and derived independently although it mirrors the works of others.

As the subject line suggests, I am desiring feedback on these thoughts and implications.

Thesis: as a metaphor, a fractal is sufficiently robust in exhibiting both simplicity and complexity as a continuum across time and space to serve as the basic unit of thought in a metaphysic of sustainability.

The first fractal,

attraction or propensity for order

patterned everything that follows

The universe we are a part of, has been imbued with forces; with attraction or propensity for order; it is created as the result of the forces; randomness sought non-randomness. It is a self-defining property of the Universe.

It is from this fundamental building block of the Universe that we discern the DNA of the Universe without yet knowing, empirically, its source.

March 6th 2004-03-06
It is not a miracle that life occurred, it would have been a miracle if it had not.
Gilles Champagne

The next level fractal is our Universe.

It is within this set of patterns that we find the base laws that determine the nature of our Universe. These patterns are created out of the increasing order propagated by matter coalescing. Included in this fractal are the facets that create the properties that create stars and their entire life cycles, leading to solar systems, and galaxies as well as down the know chain of possible interactions to the subatomic levels where we find quarks and leptons as well as the forces carriers photons, bosons and gluons. For our immediate needs we have discerned certain facets that help us understand those fractal properties that give meaning to the systems around us, these facets include:
The Laws of Thermodynamics
Gravity
Quantum Mechanics
And all the other Physical Properties, Theories, Constants and so on.

The human fractal is this; humans are natural living organisms from the planet earth and are subject to those ecological fractals that govern those members of the biosphere that are called hominids from the family of mammals in the kingdom of animals.


We require a breathable atmosphere
We require water
We require food

These are the base facets for the third fractal, they cannot be simplified further in nature, and therefore are immutable.

At this point, I have stopped because of the incredible implications of this line of thinking.


Thanks for taking the time to read.

Gilles Champagne

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Registered: Aug 2003
Posts: 712

My suggestion is to educate yourself about the subject before offering uninformed opinions.

The word "fractal" has an actual, formal meaning. It does not mean "any pattern" or "fact".

NKS is about extending the formal systems we consider in science beyond mathematical functions and similar objects, to the broader class of formal systems represented by simple programs. New or old, program based or math based, science lives on formal sophistication and rigor and dies in its absence. If you want to do anything in science, or even just follow what others are doing in an informed way, you must learn formal methods.

If you skate by all that and lump all formalism into a "more general" category of metaphor, and try to track every formal relation with a few linguistic distinctions, you will not get anywhere. Don't have to like it, it is just true. You will remain an uninformed spectator.

Even informed consumption of science, let alone doing any of it, requires formal understanding. There is a price of admission. The level of analysis available to Aristotle does not count as science anymore. The bar rises over time. Those who don't pay the formal education price are perfectly welcome to watch and think about these things. But they are not seriously going to be participants in the process.

There are some philosophical issues touched on by science where conceptual analysis without formal methods is about all we have. Offerings in these areas by those uninformed about what formal methods actually can and can't do are rarely of any value to scientists.

It is still possible to do this sort of thing well. But by proceeding on a basis of extreme humility and caution about what is known. And leaving substantive decision between conceptual possibilities to the verdict of science, not of such conceptual analysis alone. On its own we know - empirically - that it is a wholly unreliable method.

Informed conceptual speculation can propose, in other words. Uninformed speculation essentially always is lucky to reinvent a wheel, and usually reinvents a broken half of an axle instead. Even the most informed and careful speculation will be wrong most of the time - because it is a scout. Let science decide which speculative possibility is of even formal interest, let alone which might be true.

You tell us you are mathematically illiterate, on a site devoted to improving mathematical science by incorporating computer programs as an additional kind of model. You tell us you hadn't heard of NKS a hour ago. These things are perfectly compatible with being interested and having questions about NKS and what it all means. But they are quite incompatible with expecting to teach all of us the meaning of life the universe and everything.

I think you need to be reading a lot more, and preferably studying formal methods in the sciences as well - OKS math, and NKS programs, both. As yet your statements sound naive and not interesting. I don't think you should iterate on them now trying to convince people otherwise, but should instead do a lot more homework first. That, or stick to asking simple questions instead of trying to offer complicated answers. You asked for feedback. Take it as intended.

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Registered: Feb 2004
Posts: 2

For more information about fractality see: http://www.fractal.org

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Jules Ruis
http://www.fractal.org

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