Fragments from a Notebook

A coastline is infinitely long. Its practical length depends upon the length of your ruler. With a one millimeter ruler you could spend your entire life measuing the coastline of California, taking in each rock and pebble and notch of algae. With a 10-foot ruler one could measure it much quicker, but you would miss an enormous amount of detail, and so on with larger and larger rulers. As the scale of measurement gets smaller, the measured length of a coastline (object, emotion, idea) rises without limit. This is why the deeper we proble into something, the more questions about it arise.

The more we dissect the minutea of human behavior, the more complex and unfathomable it seems.

The closer we inspect a psychological process, through stricter and stricter experimental methods, the more baffling and complex the process is seen to become. Like the layers of an onion, we peel off discovery after discovery, only to hold the very center, which then falls apart, and we find ourselves tasked with putting the onion back together in order to uncover the 'final' truth, but alas, there is none.

There are multitudes of practical truths which are true for their scale. This is how we can "apply" truth to solve problems, but only those problems existing on that scale. We cannot correct a flaw in the smoothness of a piece of steel with a wrench, but we can successfully bolt that piece of steel into place on the machine where it belongs.

"Universal truths" are true only in as far as we can see the universe. The universe we percieve is a finite one, yet it affects us deeply. The universe we can imagine is infinite, yet it affects us less dramatically. Perhaps there is a way to perceive more of the infinite, thereby viscerally experiencing more of what is truly "universal." Maybe this is through the realization and exploraion of fractionally perceptive dimension. If we knew that there is a real process by which "more reality" (not an "alternate" or spiritual reality) can be glimpsed, we can then investigate it without great, illogical leaps of faith. What if the "spiritual" is just "more reality" waiting to be unearthed? What if genius leaps of insight are just accidental mental excursions into "more reality"? What if paranormal mental events are just fingers blindly poking into "more reality"? "More reality" may just be another scale of coastline.

And another scale of coastline leads to...another coastline! The same coastline can exist as many coastlines at the same time, because after a certain depth of excursion, the former coastline fades completely from perception.

Regards entropy:

When irregularities become more frequent, on a human time scale, that is when entropy is most obvious.(this irregularity may be a momentary blip on another time scale; say, that of the history of the planet, or an eternity on the time scale of the life of an earthworm.)

The disintegration of psychological functioning in a person is an interplay of the concepts of fractional perception (fractal reality) and non-equilibrium thermodynamics (2nd Law, Entropy). For a person perceiving the world, as the chaotic periods between the self-similarity of events - other peoples' behaviours, motivations, social interactions, and mental reasoning - increase in time length (in other words, if the anticipated patterns within each of these events take too long to re-emerge for the person), entropy exacts its toll with greater and greater force, and disintegration of the psyche proceeds with more rapidity than can be normally compensated for via engaging in regular, even, orderly, non-chaotic behavior.

Re-integration of the entropy-ladden psyche occurs when the individual himself, or with the help of a therapist, is able to re-establish perceptions of pattern, evenness, regularity and orderliness in his worldview. i.e., a re-establishment of a periodic self-similarity appropriate to his (our) scale of mental existence.

Periods of randomness and chaos are just as necessary to a system as those of evenness and regularity, but an overbalancing on either side creates problems. When the system (person) moves too far away from equilibrium (death), it becomes too chaotic and disorderly (hyperactivity, schizophrenia, psychosis). When the system moves too close to equilibrium it becomes too inactive and powerless (apathy, depression, suicidal depression). For both human psychological systems and physical systems, a state somewhere near the mean is appropriate for normal mental functioning. This is analogous to the concept of the Standard Deviation. It is but another way of looking at it.

So it looks as though mental functioning follows the same rules as physical systems in non-equilibrium thermodynamics. Useful experiments would be those that do not isolate single perceptual behaviors (as a conventional physicist would study a system only at equilibrium, i.e. dead, and therefore not applicable to living systems), but instead isolate specific dynamical flows of mental functioning (which would correspond to living systems).

Remember, life is a non-equilibrium condition, so studying systems at equilibrium is, for all practical purposes, useless. It tells us nothing of the actual, dynamic world in which we live.

What would an isolated, dynamical flow of mental functioning look like? How would we construct it to be cyclic, like an infinite coil, rather than a straight, two-ended linear experience? Linearity can look dynamical, that is the problem.


copyright Bill Nathan, 1994