Life is like fractals analogy.

We, people, why do we live? If we ask ourselves that question what answer will we give? I have asked that question myself, I have also seen how other people motivate their existence and the common denominator is wanting something. That is people always have something they want to do, know, feel, experience before they die and that keeps them going. When people see nothing for them in this world or when it seems that the only thing they really want will never happen they start talking about pointlessness of life and begin to slide down into depression.

Hence it seems reasonable to assume that what keeps us alive often in a very direct sense is the willingness to know more about life itself, whichever way you do it depending on which life you live, it might be through science, experience, religion, wealth e.t.c. This is not an unusual concept in eastern religions where life is describes as a play or as a dream and there would be absolutely no point in going on if you knew everything in advance, hence for it to go on we must find out more and more gradually as it progresses.

At this point I would recommend you to watch a documentary by that aired on BBC "Horizon-How long is a piece of string" if you can't think of a way to do that I will explain the main concept below.

If you watched "How long is a piece of string" skip this. The concept that is important here is rather simple and goes like this: depending on how accurate you want to measure something/know something, for example how long is a piece of string you will have to take a closer look and the closer look you take the more difficult it becomes to give an answer. For example any pice of string is infinitely long, and that was demonstrated on a map in the documentary. If you measure a country on a map with a ruler you will get very rough measurement of it's borders, If you take a long string and lay it on the border all the way around and then measure the length of the string the length will be longer, and if you use special tool you will be able to follow all the curves of the border even better and the length will be even longer. And you can keep doing it, measuring more and more accurately, zooming in more and more to accurately measure every bump on the border, and as you zoom in to infinity, the length will also grow to infinity. Or simply put, google fractals, a mathematical concept where you can zoom in in infinity and it just keeps on going revealing more and more.

Now how does life look for a child? It is pretty simple, children have very few problems, world is very simple and very much centered around you and your friends. Border so to speak is measured with a very rough ruler.

As children grows up he or she experience more of life, learns new things, life becomes more complicated, that is the measurement process gets refined and one is able to see more bumps of life and really measure them, that is feel real love for the first time, hate, and all other things that goes with life. More one grows up the more life is coming at you, not only that but you also set up goals for what you want to "measure on the map", goals you want to achieve, thing you want to know. And the journey begins:

And as long as there is something ahead of you that you want to know, experience e.t.c. as mentioned in the beginning you will just keep "zooming in" towards that, or just keep on living, keep on measuring, experiencing, exploring life, demonstrated with video of fractals above.

It is easy to see in the world of science, where we measure our world around us trying to make sense of it. We want to measure it as accurate as possible invented better and better microscopes and then we discovered atom, and eventually we even split that, and we wanted to see what it consists of, and now we are talking about string theory and quantum physics. Hence we are back to how long is a string, but on another level.

I think at this point the analogy between life and zooming in on a fractal is described to such extent that it should be possible to grasp it intuitively.

And we keep at it, exploring life as we live it zooming in more and more in hope to reach the final point at which we will understand it all. But of course the more we keep at it the more keeps coming, which results in new inventions new religions and general evolution of the human race but understanding it all is left for the unknown future, either to religion, you will understand it all after death, or to science that hopes to understand it all someday.

Now, some cleaver lad figured all this out few thousands of years ago and said; all this desire is what moves the circle of life, fractals were not invented back then so analogy with zooming in on them could not be made, and if I just sit for a while and do nothing, not even think then I will stop this zooming in and will see it all in its wholeness. So he did, sat in meditation, for a long time, and then he got enlightened, talked about all being one e.t.c. This is not about this guy, because I really don't know much about it so I really can't say.

But people today keep on doing same thing, and many claim to have reached enlightenment, seen the whole picture, realized the unity of it e.t.c.

And they are happy for a while, finally they have seen it, and they tell everyone about how wonderful experience it is. Fact is it is so wonderful that they try to experience it again, so they pick up meditation again and keep at it, and of course what they have done is to start zooming in again in hope to find new experience if they just try a little harder, which is to say they keep zooming in again towards infinity and more they try the more is coming.

And no two enlightenments are the same for this reason because of course no two lives are the same and everyone sees the deferent part of the fractal they happen to stand on at the time they experience enlightenment. And the reason one knows that people that have had experience of enlightenment did't see it all as it is but only a local part is because they try to have same experience again, to see more.

Now looking at this analogy, where by living as you do you zoom in right or left in this fractal life, what is the method to see, understand it all as a whole? Zooming out obviously, but how does one do that? And who knows if there is an end point in the other direction?

Reccomendation

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Душа!

Душа, интересная вещ. Ты не знаеш что она у тебя есть, пока в неё кто то не насрёт!

Set of rules is righteousness which leads to lawlessness which leads to robotness.

I apologize in advance, it is late, I am tiered, but I wanted to write this down.

I wrote October'09 about how society without social rules falls apart, that post focused on showing examples and reasoning around it to make the point that it leads people to doubt themselves and everything around them, and don't even know if they are being treated badly, or if they do realize it don't know if speaking up is the right thing to do or just to be silent and eventually communication and understanding breaks down, since there is no protocol (rules) left to enforce this communication.

Reason I came back to this was that I just observed another example, one person just giving orders to his friend "go make tea, chop chop", and it was not like he wanted a conflict or was an ass, he just wanted tea and thought it would be funny to "ask" in this way like giving orders to a slave, which already shows that there is a big problem in the understanding of how to treat your friends.

And I just saw how his friends face changed this disgust of being treated like that, he hesitated, and thought what to do, but he was lost with no clue of what to do, so after few seconds hesitation he went up and made tea where the appropriate reaction wold of course have been "who the f*** do you think you are to talk like that, lift your fat ass and do it yourself".

Why? To help him, what are friends for if not helping. Yes you might say, but you might tell him in a normal way and not as above, you could try, but if you would have seen his friends face that is what would have come out.

Well enough with examples, there are more details in last post about that, the problem is identified and the consequences are grim, but how did it come to that? I see several possible reasons:

First one is the most obvious, there existed bad social rules, for example how women were treated in the society, minorities, e.t.c. those bad rules had to go, but one threw out baby with the water so to speak, by fighting for women's rights which is good, you now have a high probability to have a fight on your hands even if you do such harmless things as opening the door or taking/giving the coat not even talking about paying for her at the date. Hence some rules disappeared this way.

Second is the religion, a society with hight percentage of believers does follow certain rules from their religion, hence religious rules/laws becomes social rules and since everyone believes they follow those rules and even those that don't believe do the same because everyone else does. And as long as enough people believe those rules will be followed, but as long as enough people looses the faith the ones that still do believe will start being ridiculed for their believe and strange rules they follow, speeding up the process, until there are so few believers left that their rules do no impact on society. "I God does not exist, everything is permitted" becomes true, not because non-believers don't know what is wrong and what is right but there is no authority to enforce it, and the problem becomes not that people do evil things, but that people don't do good things. And only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing.

Third is obvious, if not enough parents teach their children about what is wrong and what is right the few that do will get overwhelmed by the majority that does whatever they want that they will not be brave enough to act the right way against the popular way.

I live in such a country, where everything above is true, there are no males and females but something in between with different reproductive organs, we are among least believing countries in the world and I haven't seen anyone that teaches their children things like give seat to elders on the buss, don't yell or talk loudly in public, don't walk between two people, don't stand in the way and talk, treat others like you want to be treated, don't promise what you can't keep, e.t.c. basic rules.

It sounds like you should expect total chaos, ruleless society, everything is permitted, and basically it is you can act however you want and the risk of someone actually telling you that you are doing something wrong is basically nonexistent, but there is no chaos, quite the opposite.

I explain, I have lived in a society with very strong social rules, those social rules determined what was the right way and the wrong way to act towards each other, law on the other hand was government telling you within which space you are allowed to be free, that is there could be situations where the right thing to do by social rules was not always legal. This of course has consequences when people make up their own rules, and it becomes difficult to uphold the law.

But here on the other hand where there are no social rules the only limitation to what you could do is the law and the upholder of the law is the police. There is a clear authority and it must be obeyed, why? Because otherwise anything is permitted. The law became new God. As opposed the the example above where people think "well law is all good and such, but I know what is right thing to do".

It sounds good doesn't it law abiding society, why should we have social rules at all then? But the law does not say stand and let the elders sit on the full buss, law does not say a lot of things, and it should't hence everything what is not law will degrade to "what is easier/profitable for me" and I hope that with previous examples I have shown that this is the case here.

But:

Rules are not written in stone, (some have tried) but it fails, rule is a rule as long as it is considered to be right by the majority.

Law on the other hand is a set of instructions written by few for some reason or another, and even if majority disagrees with those there are still a group of armed people with power to make sure you follow it, the authority. Or remove you if you don't(imprison you) so that no one else gets the same idea.

And the scary thing is with ruleless, law worshipping society is that people as I wrote so many times before don't know what is right and what is wrong, they don't even want to know or why they should, there is a law to follow, that's it. For example there is an extreme example I have seen, standing at a traffic light, there are no cars as far as the eye can see, but it is red for pedestrians, normal person will think, "what am I waiting for?" look to both sides, no cars, and walk, but this person stood there until it turned green and then walked over.

He did it because (he thought) law said don't walk on red, so he did't even though common sense said to walk because there are no cars on the road.

Hence people are acting like robots following the law and where the law does not apply, they are lost not knowing how to act and often acting wrongly because they lack the knowledge of what is right thing to do and often doing wrong thing motivated by "it is easier" or "better for me".

What is the other extreme? A society where it is impossible to uphold the law.

Two opposite world views, which one is better? The answer probably going to depend on where you live and what you prefer, personal freedom and search for truth, or law, order and prosperity.

But whit kind of law will people write that do not apply the common sense in everyday situations in order to do the right thing?

And does it matter how many laws are written if everyone only use common sense?

PS

I have used the term don't know what is right several times, and I want to explain what I mean by a quick example.

A friend borrowed "money" (gold) from me in a game. He said he will buy X, pay me back within one week then when he has enough, buy Y.

I had X but I did't have Y either, so I thought poor him, surely I'll do it for him.

What he did was, bought X, collected enough gold to pay me back, instead borrowed more from another friend, bought Y and fed me lies for several days that he has't collected enough to pay me back yet.

Well obviously everyone still (hopefully) knows that it is wrong to lie like that to a friend.

But what is not so obvious is the fact that he consciously decided not to keep his word and pay back at promised deadline, that is very common here, why did't he do it?

Because he did't think keeping his word is necessary, he figured no harm will come from this, I will patiently wait for him to pay back and he will eventually hence he did nothing wrong.

When I told my other friend that I caught him with the hand in the jar his reaction was also basically, well few days sooner few day later, he is going to pay back eventually, but agreed that he should't have lied to cover it up.

Hence lying is still considered wrong.

While not keeping your word is not considered wrong.

But the difference between those two is very small and yet there is nothing wrong with not doing what you promised, and I tried to explain that it is wrong to promise things and not follow them through, and they did't understand why when I told them that it is simply wrong, a friend said, you could have borrowed from me to buy Y until he paid back, I have enough, but that is beside the point.

If something wrong turns out ok in the end, it doesn't make it right. And if you keep doing wrong things like that and everyone around will keep ignoring it it will become normal, because it's easy.

And this incident opened my eyes to see that people don't try to do the right thing, they don't even want to know what the right thing is, when they are faced with a problem they don't think what is the right thing to do because there is no moral authority left in society to fall back on, but only the law left, and if it is legal then the next question what will I benefit/suffer.

If you have read this far I take my hat of for you, because I am very tiered and I realize that this text is very poorly structured and much longer then necessary.

Do the right thing, but authority of the right thing to do and obey the law.

Well, since it is like that.

Slow, nothing to write about, e.t.c. so I figured instead of trying to "invent" something to write about and end up like crappy artists having single good song per album (in best case), I don't do it, I just wait for some good topic to come along.

Well then there is also a matter of "good artists copy, great artists steal" or something in that direction, well I got one better for you, since I don't have time to do it, very great artists just copy/paste the embedded videos of what other have done, there you have it!:

Having that done I should point out that I don't consider myself to be an artist in any shape or form. Though I might continue the trend of posting videos that express things better then I could ever have.

About past, into slow season.

It has been a year since I started this blog. This year was surpassingly active. To be honest when I started this blog a year ago I had ideas for about two posts and couple of topics from the past, but as time went I got new ideas that i wrote down, at time I had a list of topics to write about, and I tried to find time to write them.

Overall I am happy with what happened during this time, the only thing that would make me happier would be more feedback, because as you have noticed this blog contains ideas in rather raw format, written rather fast to convey the idea, nothing is final and perhaps might even be wrong, and if you think it is, comment, why you think so.

Unfortunately I sense slow season ahead, there are some things going on in real life that I will have to attend to, but also I have no ideas lying around waiting to be written down but instead I will write as it comes, and who knows how long time it will take now when I have more to do then ever.

Hence I welcome all into 2010 and wish you all new thoughts and see you again when I get one.