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| Firstly an introduction MUSINGS OTHER PEOPLE'S ESSAYS |
23jan1999
Summary of Ideas
This summary is incomplete, and, as far as I can make it, chronological.
GREED
In Third year at Secondary school I realised that people's prime motivation was greed.
ABSTRACTION
Shortly before Sixth form it became evident that we could abstract and join together previously separate ideas.
FRACTALS & LEVELS
Around the time I wrote the Party story I realised that things were the same whatever level you looked at them on.
FEEDBACK
The brain is so important because it uses itself as a form of input.
NON-EXCLUSIVENESS
There is no one correct philosophy or science. What we have has been built up over thousands of years and it's what's makes us human. There may be others.
NO BOUNDARY
The people around you determine "you" as much as anything else. The observer is always part of the system. Other people pull you into where they think you should be.
COMPLEXITY
Science that I didn't understand made me realise that we shouldn't take for granted that we can see everything, or even the most important parts. We can't tell what's going to happen next.
GAIA
Everything is involved in everything else.
BINARY DECISIONS
Decisions may be binary only because we don't know how else to see it. Perhaps we can postulate an unknown third way, and deduce its properties.
LIMITS
Goedel's Theorem showed me that we can never know everything.
METAPHOR
At the beginning of my Second year I found that it wasn't the things themselves that were important, rather the gaps between them.
BLINKERS
We perceive the universe through metaphors. Different metaphor sets let us see different aspects of a multidimensional universe.
HUMANITY
Common metaphors are what make us human. Madness is just a different metaphor set. Words are merely metaphors for second-degree concepts; words shape our universe.
CELLULAR AUTOMATON
Simple rules work together to describe large systems. The same rules determine both the laws of the universe, and the workings of the brain.
INFORMATION
The fundamental particle of the universe is information. "Don't know" and "Can't know" become the important groups. Information flows.
CONSCIOUSNESS
Consciousness is the feeling of making infinite measurements due to brain-feedback and being the terminus of the von Neuman chain.
INTERCONNECTEDNESS
Heirarchic systems are limiting. The world is interconnected. We can refer to objects by mentioning only their second degrees.
NATURAL LANGUAGE
Language is an interconnected system with dynamic behaviour.
QUANTUM BRAIN
To infer laws from language, the brain performs dynamic behaviours on a network of all possible languages, all at once.