Man: The Fractal Algorhythm

A Collaborative Manifesto
by

Deric Morris & Swinton Roof
Dec 3, 1993

pg.2

"Humans are the interface through which Universe flows" - paraphrase of Buckminster Fuller

Tonight Deric and I (Swinton), had a most fruitfull discussion which we decided to present as recap to Metaphysics Anonymous. Our discussion started on the subject of the 'Dandelion Model' as a graphic template for all the various themes and topics as of late. At center would be chaos from which all the various and sundry theories and formulations would radiate as spokes of 'spoken' order. The whole thing would portray an interdisciplinary approach.

From there we went on to an idea I had of what I call call the information inversion map where one goes from deep structured entity assignments to superficial surface representations. The relative measures of redundancy and uniqueness are inverted in the process, but thats another subject. Next, we talked about the importance of boundary or surface measure relative to volumetric measure in the concept of 'scaling' as applied to any number of dimensions. Also as a topic was the deep connection between mathematics of holography and the Fourier Transform.

We spent a while thusly, exploring various topics trying to sort out just what it was that we were fishing for. Repartee was the norm. I said ,"one man chaos was another's order". Deric said ,"one man's entropy is another man's lunch". And thus it went. "The more you try to pin something down, the more it wriggles". Visual symbols and words dont usually overlap, but meanings do. But what about auditory representations? Aha! ? I came up with "Context is the light which transforms information from uncertainty into knowledge. Anticipation of meaning is the cue for the searchlight of focus. Uncertainty is a necessary precursor to knowledge". Deric simply upstaged me with "Presupposition equals percept"!

Well, things heated up after that. Deric said he could imagine Eldon steaming as we both went ballistic on the idea of involute-evolute heuristics of n-dimensional abstraction flattening. I began spouting analytical descriptions of how virtual motion trajectories interact synchronously to produce events in time as sequential extended order which synchronize with other events to produce extension in space as pattern. To my delight this triggered something deep in Deric and he just blurted out "Of course... EMERGENT ORDER ACCRETES TO ATTRACTORS BY SYNCHRONY ... Bootstrap Teleology if you will!"

Ha Ha. The Devil! you say.

pg.3

Well, after that bombshell shed its last bits of bounds breaking dipersal of order, we had another round of caparal cigarettes and coffeeeeeee. Casually, we both agreed that 'logistics' involves the transfer of information and that 'logistics' generates entropy in and of itself. For the uninformed ( how quaint ), 'logistics' as we are using the term refers to transactional accounting analysis of energy-event exchanges. Gradually we grew more serious and both of us began to see something of real importance beginning to emerge from our speculations.

I had brought up the topic of man's awareness as regards to the sensory interface. Each of us is an active thinking individual in a sea of chaos we call the world or Universe. Our senses are a boundary or interface with the unknown. What really goes on, on the other side of that wall, no one really knows (.?) Science describes the world as a multitude of quantum events which impinge upon and correlate with our detectors. Any number of energy-entropy exchanges etc. conspire to produce what we call sensory input. Its important to note, however, that once these transactions occur, everything and I mean EVERYTHING, becomes pure and simply, frequency modulated pulses of nerve signals... i.e. binary information. A pulse either is or it isn't. Strength or significance at the nerve level is determined purely by frequency of firing. The world as we perceive it is quite literally built from ground up. Now, I admit the number of pulses is downwright astronomical- "Mucho Avagadro" as Deric says, but still we humans are quite capable of perceiving with notice a single photon of light. The point is, all we know is constructed from this chaos of signals traveling at nerve speed towards our brain! How on earth do we make sense of all this.

This is where Deric's rap took off, and I began writing furiously, trying to keep up. The basic premis is that 'awareness' is an active process. The senses do not idly correlate information as if it comes in like a ticker tape. No indeed. The drama of sensory interface is a multi-furcative process which is at essence informational-logistics. At the lowest level, these sensory impulses cross-correlate with each other as multiple cascades of feedback loops. The impulses are superficially speaking, pure information, but implicate to their processing is a hard- wired deep logic of geodesic structure. Infra-structures of cell-mediated energy exchanges and synaptic message boosting, channelize and massage informational signals in ever more complex patterns. Multiple nested cascades of feedback loops provide the logistic scafolding whereby the distinctions between implicate and explicate information merge at some point. Systems of sufficient logistical complexity display what is called self-organizing criticality. The crucial trigger that enables emergent order from chaos is 'syncronicity'. Kind of obvious if you think about it.

pg.4

Multi-furcative feedback ensures that synchronicity gets a chance to operate... an anti-chance device so to speak. ( my thinks to Jeremy Campbell in his book "Grammatical Man" on this point ). "If at first you dont succeed try, try again" ... or "try this,and seek what happens. maybe something will click" ... or "Gee, I just caught the tail of that cat as he passed behind that tree, well hold that thought and maybe a head will appear out the other side" etc etc. Get the idea? Belay that rope till I come into syncrony! Shades of Wolf.

To continue on, Deric said that this fractal recursion leads to the emergence of 'solitons' which are examples of information-chunking. I added that solitons, when viewed as informational entities, demonstrate operational invariance. i.e. they maintain a mobile coherence that presents a consistent integrity regardless of point of view or context. Herein may lie the essence of 'memory' as well as recognition, dreams, archetypes etc. More to the point, however, is that the above occurs at the deepest level of logistics. What we have here folks is OBJECT ENTIFICATION. This is most certainly what Korzibsky was talking about when he specified the Objective-Level which underlies all semantic response.

Ok. Time for more cigarettes and coffee. Get up. Get down. Get up again. Deric made a few phone calls and I drifted into a reverie of multi-furcative tree roots, branches, leaves, flowers, seeds. Deric re-engaged and pronounced "Green ideas sleep furiously." Quite a syntactically correct pot of gibberish but it seemed to make sense in the light of our heady jam session. Not content to leave it at that, he went on to say that fractals are maximal interface and geodesics are maximum structural volume and these determine the logistics of system as involute- evolute torus. Now, maybe I'm masochistic but I just can't resist trying to make sense out of his wild intuitive info-blankets. Anyway I asked for it by mentioning the tree analogue. So, to paraphrase, 'interface' is a physical boundary surface for informational energy exchanges between some entity and its enviroment or between entities. This involves logistics as nature in general and life in particular tends to maximize informational exchanges while minimizing the overhead of energy and entropy. The most satisfaction for the least action. The Law of Parsimony. The Kiss Principle. The Principle of Least Action. Now, if you're going to control something, you need information to do it. And you use information to do it. This is where algorhythms or information about information comes into the picture. Imagine some cryptic code, which you know will answer all your questions about how to get the goodies you need. Ok. What you need to crack this nut is a key of some sort. Algorhythms are the key. Brute force works on some levels, but a sophisticated Universe will try to maximize profit and minimize toil. Work smarter, not harder so to speak. Anyway, you've got your face up there right behind your interface, so how do you maximize and minimize? Well, fractals are key to unlock the interfacial reality.

pg.5

Fractals require minimum information to structure maximal interface. This means more through-put for less output. This is what informational leveraging is all about. Another way of looking at it is to realize that most fractals are defined by iterative process. From the perspective of control logistics ( remember, awareness is an active process ) if something works and you have a simple way to repeat the process then just get the reps up. From a spatial viewpoint, if you need to cover the most area with the least structure, then fractals are the way to go. Or maybe you prefer Penrose Tilings. Escher is nice too. Gee! I'm still trying to get out from under Deric's info- blanket. Gee...ode..six. Oh. Yeh. Geodaisics. No. That's not quite right. Ok. Geodesics. The supporting infra-structure for all this interfacial stuff is Geodesics. You know... Bucky Fuller's Omni-Rational-istropic-least action-path-all-accounting-equi-distribution-of-loadbearing-strutmembering- logistic of nature. More simply, geodesics encompass maximum volume with the least surface area in a structurally sound way. The Principle of Scale as Area relates to Volume is all important here, but I'll save that topic for some other time. Suffice it to say, "if its in the bag, make sure the bag's big enough." To recap, fractals and geodesics synergistically relate as being the templates for the LEAST-ENTROPIC-ALGORHYTHM. And to recapitulate, emergent self-organizing criticality is the boundary domain of the Mandlebrot Set.

Interface is fractal, almost by definition, whether physical or metaphysical. The metaphysical aspect almost threw me, till I thought of computer programming languages. One last expansion and then I'm going to go seriously involute. Ok. Here it is. Consider a programming language. Implicitly it is a metaphysical system for encoding ideas and explicitly it is some proprietary 'off-the-shelf' interpreter or compiler. Such a language exists as an interface between metaphysical mind and the explicate world of visual bitmaps, sonic bleats and whatever multi-media have you. Agreed. So where's the fractal? Well, programming languages all have structure of some sort. There are data types, aggregates of datatypes, syntaxes, and proceedural structures. These form a geodesic core if you will. Logistics comes in when the compiler or interpreter evaluates these structures or expressions. This assignment of values equates to a method whereby the Law of Parsimony may operate...LOGISTICS. The various ways of doing this are initialization, assignment, arithmetic evaluatation, and conditional logic or truth testing. Algorhythms use all of the foregoing structural devices and leverage them with some simple tricks. These simple tricks are for-next or do-while loops and recursive funtions. This is the fractal. It is interface because every loop has an entry and exit as well as a scope ( scope has to do with local versus non-local variables ).

... and now for my exit fron this strange loop I've been in.

SAR 12/3/93