Death as merely the strangest of strange attractors

From Gnomon Chronicles
Revision as of 04:29, 1 November 2020 by Admin (talk | contribs)
Jump to navigation Jump to search

"Death as merely the strangest of strange attractors" is a phrase from an essay by Karl Jones from a comment on Facebook.

Essay

I regard myself as a rationalist-empiricist first and foremost.

But I am willing to stretch the subconscious somewhat beyond the rational; it's important to keep an open mind, in the Karl Popper sense of falsificationism, not to mention the Aristotelian sense of natural science.

The future already is — the past persists — the passage of Time is a function of consciousness. These are my hunches.

The underlying physics must have a directionality, an asymmetry, of which our sense of time passage is a reflection, much as our experience of Fibonacci mathematics reflects the geometry of sunflowers and much else besides.

But our Clock Era metaphor of "Past Gone, Future Coming" sits poorly with me.

The future is not *waiting* for us to arrive — it is *pulling us into events*, with Death as merely the strangest of strange attractors.

In the News

Fiction cross-reference

Nonfiction cross-reference

External links