Bootstrap your networked reality with logic, identity and dimensionality

Sometimes an idea hits that is so disruptive it threatens to rip apart the very fabric of our psyche. This happened to me in March and for a time its effect pushed me beyond the event horizon. Being a bit different, I have some prior experience here, and thanks to the love and support from family, friends and employer I'm back in the saddle.

Three months later I'm rested, relaxed, cycling ??, and, though not wanting to blog at my former breakneck pace, decided to put some of these ideas into the public domain as if nothing else it shows the creative mind in motion. There is no personal ownership or originality claimed; like all creative processes this is channeling; resonance, receptivity; noticing what is already there and finding a language to describe it. So take a bed, Harry, for a journey on the Knight Bus.

Conductor, tapping the glass: "Take her away, Ern."

Shrunken Rasta head: "Yeah, take it away, Ernie, it's going to be a bumpy ride!"

-- Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban.

Origin story

Like anything mystical or profound we need an origin story. Cf. The Book of Genesis, the cracking of the Taoist cosmic egg, the Rig Veda's Nāsadīya Sūkta. As Joseph Campbell states in The Hero with a Thousand Faces, they all have the same root (universal patterns linked to the human condition). This is mine:

A little thought was alone in the void.

"Am I alone?" asked the thought and a loop was formed ∞ and a notion of self.

This scared the thought and it started to cry ?? and water was born.

After a while the tears subsided.

"I can't be alone," thought the thought, "because I am scared and cry and think. I have my tears and thoughts to keep me company. How can this be?

Did someone make me?

and where am I?"

...

A meta thought is born from our little thought, and a memory was made.

<Commentary at this point by Daedelus Kite: "No one made you. There is no you. You are nowhere. And nothing exists.">

Commentary and analysis

So that's all I have as story fragments. What is going on here?

1. I'm imagining I am the little thought in the void. And considering the origins of the universe as a computer starting off with a simple structure and growing in complexity in the form of iterations using minimum viable product (MVP), adding loops and memory and the like along the way as a form of self-development. I was reading Taoist cosmology at the time and also got my birth chart done by an Astrologer. I was also thinking about S?ren Kierkegaard and the stages of searching for meaning in life which eventually can end up with the developmental and big questions like "is this me/not me", "who am I?", "am I alone?", "does God exist?" etc., essentially considering the universe/Godhead as having these developmental/existential challenges also. Clearly there is a link here to Gnosticism
2. I also continue to develop my theory that God/universe/self/nature as one networked mind and we are some type of subnetwork/bubble tumbling about. I even wrote a short story about it called The Autistic Ambassador. I guess this is an obvious extension to James Lovelock's Gaia Hypothethis and the concept of the Noosphere: “The sphere of human consciousness and mental activity especially in regard to its influence on the biosphere and in relation to evolution.” 
3. My big Aha! moment (J.Brian Hennessy) was combining three previous thoughts together: A) the universe is an evolving network B) everything is true simultaneously but some truths are more canonical than others C) this network must be some sort of infinitely bootstrapping quantum computer with more primitive origins that we and everything else exists in (and it exists in us)

The classical elements

So where did this get me? That dimensionality bootstraps also. In other words:

1. Universe has no dimension at a lower order of reality (canonical order) than it has one
2. has one dimension at a lower canonical order than it has two
3. has two dimensions at a lower canonical order than it has three, etc.
4. ...and is considered to be in all these states simultaneously. I call this characteristic Taodimensionality ??

This logic has something of Occam's Razor about it:

 Non sunt multiplicanda entia sine necessitate

"No multiplicity without necessity"

William of Ockham

About this time I created this image which derived from the Occam picture above treated as a square and then filling it with circles and repeating jamming with the ideas of colours as a digital realisation of wavelength and frequency. In my mind I considered colours and circles as emerging from the digital void and indeed this creating an equal and opposite shadow world duality. I also considered that perhaps these alternative layers of squares and circles expanding infinitely were somehow keeping each other in check and that field effects occurred between the elements, much like the right-hand rule, causing transverse motion:

And when I played around with composites of this image (raising transparency levels and overlaying) I got some really cool filter effects like the following:

Tryptych, 2020

I don't recall why, but I imagined the network would bootstrap dimensions based on simple geometric constructs according to the Fibonacci sequence--assuming that this was something fundamental in the mathematics of the evolution of cybernetic network systems/bootstrapping quantum computers (other options include dimensionality growing as primes or linearly). I visualised expansion of the universe from the standpoint of a cadence or heartbeat of repetition of these simple thoughts for an infinity of infinities (∞ to the power ∞) until some other characteristic caused a new level of dimensionality to be born. Not sure why, its just what I was jamming with. It occurred to me that lots of infinity would start doing strange things eventually --perhaps the cosmic computer would suffer a buffer overflow-lol. I was playing with Apple Keynote at the time and came up with images like this (and notice the tubby ouroboros, an ancient symbol I take as representing a cybernetic feedback loop or recursion):

While imagining I was this dimensionally expanding quantum computer I also considered Godhead-like cellular automata travelling around corners and edges and laying down films of reality (and meddling) at more derivative levels of existence. Indeed I created around 1000 pieces of digital art in a week using this technique using Apple Keynote like the following:

And notice the use of picture-in picture feedback with heavy use of screenshots and transparency settings. It was like terraforming and interesting new worlds were formed. Interestingly enough my new technique became more coherent over time and after fruitless attempts to break the internet by introducing visual feedback (my obsession) I turned into a digital artist for a week, producing works like this:

After Botticelli

On further reflection I was very committed to the following imagery that came to me like a vision:

• Some form of clap or bang causing waves to emanate in opposite directions, and these waves going on forever. Then, after an infinity of infinities has passed, they start to bend, eventually meeting up and colliding, creating a second clap/bang and so on. Indeed there is plenty of imagery showing this sort of thing e.g.:

• This acting somewhat like a corner of a square with the waves hitting again when they meet at the opposite corner ... (also reminds me of a transverse raindrop hitting a groove in my deck outback and shooting off in both directions with equal vigour)
• The idea of an extra level of dimensionality acting like a flame or heat applied to paper that had been sliced in a cross, the corners turning up in the middle as they are heated revealing movement in a dimension in transverse arrangement to the paper itself

There was more but I cannot recall it to mind.

Implications

A boot-strapping of dimensionality would explain a number of things that previously confused me like (and please consider I am a hobbyist, not a trained philosopher, mathematician or physicist so there are going to be errors):

1. Esoterica like zen, monism, duality the rule of three, rule of five, Freemasonry symbolism of squares and compasses etc. since the universe is of a lower dimensionality lower down the O/S or protocol stack (cf. OSI model)-- e.g. Fibonacci I am interpreting the <1, 1> as the <0 and 1> existence and non-existence duality - perhaps that is the hardware, 2-dimensionality is perhaps the bios, 3-dimensionality the operating system kernel and 5-dimensionality the operating system user mode etc.
2. Why these esoterica and their link to metaphysics are also strongly associated to concepts like power and influence--since in a taodimensional universe they operate at a lower (and hence more significant) canonical order
3. Why the Boston matrix and its derivatives are so darn useful and why numerology and astrology seem to reveal truths for some people. And why Philip of Macedon's divide and rule works so well - he is essentially doing a 2D cluster analysis of a multidimensional problem, much like a modern-day data scientist, selecting the dimensions that allow influence and suggestion to operate most effectively in his favour. To be candid, I do this as well in our guilds, making observations about people's capabilities, alignment and receptivity to new ideas feeding into further guilds or group chats
4. Why a 2D black hole sucks - it is like a bug/tear in the 3D universe where its 2D canonical superior pokes through--a bit like an inter-dimensional router (Q: does this mean that time is actually flowing backwards as Tantrism? holds e.g. the black hole existed before the star). Indeed, do the black holes have high betweenness centrality amongst the nodes of the networked universe?
5. Why Fibonacci and the golden ratio turns up all over the place, especially in nature and particularly growth since it is a fundamental characteristic of bootstrapping network complexity and hence dimensionality. I.e. might life be the bootstrapping of complexity and network dimensionality at the level of the organism as a microcosm of the universe?
6. Why Edwin A. Abbot's "Flatland: a romance in multiple dimensions" from 1884 is so great--guess he was drinking from the same waterhole ...
7. ... and talking of waterholes, could provide some explanation for the natural inclusion theory of Alan Rayner and why there is so much reference to nested tori. Perhaps the receptivity of the void is related to interdimensionality in a similar manner to the black hole point
8. The origins of the classical elements of earth, air, water, fire (and variants) in characteristics of the bootstrapping quantum computer (e.g. earth is solid and non-ephemeral, water flows and finds the lowest point, fire consumes-like a delete or garbage collection, air spreads out like a broadcast message). The story fragment I wrote above mentioned the origin of water as the little thought feeling sadness. Of course this is metaphorical water, something that flows downwards (mostly) to the lowest point, having an abysmal nature. cf. Edward De Bono's Water Logic
9. The origins of the male and female archetypes (not male and female sex, more like the opposite forces, female yin and male yang of Tai Chi)

Male and female archetypes

Summary and conclusion

When interpreting periods of extreme creative endeavour after the fact it can be instructive to use Socrates' three tests:

1. Is it true?
2. Is it good?
3. Is it useful?

True

As far as truth is concerned, there must be something here since it powered an extreme burst of creative energy that lasted a couple of weeks. But as to the details it would need some maths and modelling to prove conclusively. Bootstrapping complexity as a type of meta-lifeform in a biosphere or noosphere is also nothing new. Indeed it underpins the work of many eminent thinkers including James Grier Miller, James Lovelock and indeed David Ronfeldt. We can say that at a minimum there is strong circumstantial evidence for the general principle:

Whose Story Wins: rise of the Noosphere, Noopolitik, and Information-Age Statecraft by David Ronfeldt, John Arquilla

In addition, bootstrapping complexity is the basis of computer operating systems, the OSI stack, Taoist cosmology and the I Ching, Lego; the list goes on and on...

It is also the basis of reinforcement learning as illustrated in a couple of references at the end, showing what amazing things can happen after a few million iterations of things in a seemingly dumb primordial soup. And needless to say this is the effect of natural selection, and indeed if natural inclusion is more your thing please consider the maths of this just works as demonstrated by genetic algorithms and the work of John H. Holland in 1975. Indeed I even saw the code for these things in action when I worked for AI entrepreneur (and climate skeptic) Dr. Andy at Prophecy Systems back in the day.

Note: this doesn't mean that natural selection is all that is going on or that I consider it a complete theory - this is a maths/algorithm/precedence of thought argument. Monkeys and typewriters do write Shakespeare eventually after all, that is, as long as there is some measure of fitness--perhaps competing monkeys and an external arbiter-perhaps an AI avatar of the upstart crow himself:

We can also say that it is true a priori that anything that is three dimensional can also be analysed in two dimensions as the Boston Matrix and Philip of Macedon examples illustrate.

Good

Taodimensionality is speculative technology aligned to natural laws of the cosmos. It is amoral. But perhaps it is good if it helps people understand this complex universe a little better.

Useful

In terms of usefulness we can certainly say the idea of Taodimensionality allowed other ideas to be generated and lateral movement between ideas. The test was passed with flying colours.

So there you have it, a big idea that turned my world upside down and one I am still exploring and likely will be for years to come.

Appendix 0: Fibonacci, real numbers and observability

Consider the following ideas:

1. Might network dimensionality be linked to observability? Perhaps some math can be found that a network of dimension 8 is required to model adequately a network of dimension 5 (5+3=8). And what is the dimensionality of a network anyway?
2. Might Fibonacci sequence allow a network to maintain a relationship to previous states like laying down elements in a blockchain. I had a conversation with someone just last week on this topic: that the Fibonacci number, Phi (could not find emoji or shortcut) indeed π are essentially "time". Perhaps Fibonacci is the great pole flopping as a cosmic spiral in a two dimensional expanding spreadsheet universe. I don't see why not.

Note: Apple and emoji designers, hang your heads in shame. On my mac, Pi has a shortcut key, option p: π, but phi does not. Neither seem to have an emoji even though there are ones for dentistry symbol "light up and horizontal with circle", ?, and the flag of Wallis & Futuna, ????.

Wallis & Futuna on the globe

Note: I managed to cut and paste a phi and it looks like this: Φ

Appendix 1: little thought story gives birth to semiotics

Here I am reflecting on the growth of patterns or languages or code that would bootstrap based on the origin story in the way corollaries follow a logical statement. Added my commentary three months later in square brackets:

1. nothing [proposition/theorem: the universe does not exist]
2. nothing = nothing [which means there is a concept of universe and there is the concept of its non-existence, and the concept of identity]
3. nothing = !nothing [which means in order for this to be true there exists the concept of existence for non-existence to be its opposite]
4. nothing = (nothing, !, !nothing) [taking stock of all the concepts that follow on from the first proposition and it looks like I missed the =]
5. nothing = (nothing, !nothing, (nothing, !, !nothing) [and the concept of sequencing also exists and the simultaneous and deeper truths stacking up in a canonical ordering ... Taoist cosmology anyone? More on this later]
6. nothing ... etc

This reminds me of some more esoteric coding blogs I have skimmed on monads.

I also started listing our elemental semiotics that would develop as part of this cosmic bootstrap:

.man

.woman

.corner

.triangle

.cup

.sofha:<soften>,>harden<

.loop

.spectrum

.wavelength

.puzzle

.objective

.colour

.black

.white

.binary

.fear

.water

.air

.fire

.earth

.aha

.ahano:<aha>,>ohno<

! (emphasis, acceleration, game over, termination, death)

.positive+, negative-

I started building a sort of programming language for the cosmic computer using emojis ...

??binary tree makes net and web: ??>(???)

??nets and webs (n&w)

can flex ... dimensionally .. they are interdimensional

(n&w) were here before us ...

will be here after us...

run through and between us..

E.g. rule of three = simplest feedback circuit?

Appendix 2: betweenness centrality

Not a concept I fully knew at the time but seems to be relevant:

Betweenness centrality in a graph - Q: could this be the origin of the Chakra?

Appendix 3: universal clothes line as memory

By this time I had entered a flow state and was making up new ideas and theories and artworks with extreme fluency. Here I am talking about my method as a form of pseudocode and speculating how an origin quantum networked reality would require and bootstrap a concept of memory. I went on to speculate that we are constantly tuning our (digital) models of reality to match an infinite resolution that constantly exceeds our capacities and that perhaps we are stuck in a lower order reality that lacks the resolution of higher order realities e.g. at a lower sampling frequency/bitrate ...

My work has been in apple keynote worked as follows:

master directory contains single keynote file:

set <name> (latest_memory)>static export of current thinking 

set <name> (memory_pointer)>somewhere to put things

set <has child>->exists(folder)

1. open keynote
2. play round until <aha> // work explodes then subsides
3. export as images so i can cut and paste to share, remix: if !<has child> create <name> //and child folder generated under master directory, if <name> recurse to end, <save to>(<name>)
4. post to the guild etc, play guitar, contemplate nature, interact
5. goto 0

I came up with an image that considered the birth of memory or networked evolution of the universal mind as bootstrapping dimensionality and semiotics as a fractal hanging successive attempts on a cosmic washing line. This is similar to the Taoist cosmological notion of Taiji, the Great Pole, and notice the repeat of nothing=nothing forming galaxies of semiotics and dimensions with each new teeshirt on the line (I consider the line in this image to be the Taiji and notice it grows orthogonally, like a fractal, at the equals sign):

My view is that as well as logic and programming constructs, and elements, and archetypes of male/female, other elemental concepts like "wind" etc derive from this principle. E.g. at an archetypal level wind is the shifting or swirling of 2d pixel pattern on a page.

And of course each new dimensional universe creates its own Taiji (or perhaps more accurately lays down its own offshoot), so wind perhaps is influence of higher abstraction, lower canonical/dimensional network.

The birth of wind?

This is a key concept so let me unpack it. It links to Hegel's dialectic:

1. Any cognition or computation lives in a computational system
2. This is a bounded context that cannot escape from itself
3. But operates within the context of a larger bounded context/computational system which exerts an influence cf. Climate change and ideas of infinite material growth (Gaia is a bounding system of extractive economics, unless we start mining asteroids)
4. This is also the basis of command signalling: irresistible force from canonically more primitive and therefore more powerful network

Here is a cool diagrams from the Hegel article that illustrates the point:

These notions of bootstrapping are of course found in the I Ching, where we have:

1. Yin and yang as broken and solid lines, from which we build
2. Trigrams, from which we build
3. Hexagrams, that
4. Index into a 64-element divination system of meaning derived from yarrow stalks

There is no surprise that the I Ching was the inspiration for Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz's work on binary.

Note: we can also see that the broken line, yin, is formed from two smaller solid lines and/or a solid line split into two. This also relates to the Eve being formed from the rib of Adam archetype creation pattern from Genesis.

Appendix 4: riffing on Occam's razor

This section is unfinished, I will return to it from time to time.

WARNING: Riffing on Occam's Razor or any musical activity taking place in the vicinity of bladed objects is not recommended except for trained professionals and those of a lunar disposition ??

Always wear safety equipment commensurate to the risk. Reinforced trousers, gloves and footwear with armoured toe insert are recommended.

Cf. the film short Blind Alleys from portmanteau horror Tales from the Crypt with Joan Collins

?

Question: obeying Occam's razor, what would cause the universe to require more dimensions?

To unravel this Gordian Knot I will start playing around with the question, George Polya style (and also Playful Monk style:

One of the following statements will be true:

?? Egg--there was nothing before the universe

?? Chicken--there was something before the universe (e.g. universe was created by a meta-universe operating at a lower canonical order)

Assume ??

Genesis KJV strikes me as the great start to a chicken story:

In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. And God said, Let there be light: and there was light. And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness. And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day.

What would cause the universe to require more dimensions? This might be related to ?? forces acting on ?? e.g. our cloud computing platform or ISP going down. That would certainly do it.

Q: does ?? have more or less dimensions than ???

Assume ??d<??d (chicken universe has less dimensions than egg universe it runs on)

... since it is a less sophisticated derivative e.g. Monad->Demiurge->Universe.

This helps, since the universe requiring more dimensions can be seen as it gaining more insight into the higher dimensionality (and lower cardinality) of the meta-universe that created it. i.e. this is like an OSI stack or O/S -- program runs in user mode sits on kernel mode sits on bios sits on hardware (sits on physics etc).

This notion is similar to this quote from Sufi mystic, Rumi:

“You are not a drop in the ocean. You are the entire ocean in a drop.”

To summarise:

1. ?? universe where ?? runs on/is an emanation from ??and ??d<??d
2. ?? subset of (where is subset emoji???) ??and ??=?? (since it all gets converted to ?? byte code
3. The ?? universe requires more dimensions as it grows its understanding of/alignment with the ?? meta universe it emanates from indicating that higher dimensionality can be modelled in lower dimensionality domains. Occam's razor satisfied QED

Assume ??d>??d (chicken universe has more dimensions than egg universe it runs on)

Hmmm. This seems a little odd, if ??->?? (egg emanated/created chicken) then why would chicken have more dimensions/be more sophisticated? And thinking about it further, seen another way, ??=??. Then again I can build more sophisticated tools out of simpler (meta) tools -- think using a boulder to chip an ax-head--so perhaps this is fine.

This is about the time I start considering the following, "what is a dimension anyway?" and start considering Hilbert space.

... actually I am going to abandon this line of questioning and switch to ?? mode.

Assume ??

So now we are in absolute origins of the universe territory, perhaps Big Bang, perhaps pre-big bang depending on whether you view our universe as a ?? or an ??.

?? land is rather special as this article has hinted at. It derives from the primary paradox of existence: the codependency of void and non-void and Taoist cosmology does an excellent job of articulating ... and before that the Monad, a unity, a singularity of these two concepts.

Monad - another term and another gnostic website with some cool diagrams on this topic--and note my reply to one of the comments on topic of object-orientation and the computational efficiency origins of reincarnation:

This picture seems to illustrate very well the point I was trying to make.

Suffice to say, in ?? land where void and non-void are brought together in harmony do you think concepts like dimensionality, space, time are even relevant? So why do they exist?

From our perspective as mere mortals, we are colours trying to look back through the prism to the light source that made us. And back to Occam's razor: why would the Monad require dimensionality, space, time and any of us pieces of unformed clay? Perhaps it got bored ... or lonely.

Appendix 5: Spacetime and emanation

Monad->Demiurge->Clay

Copies of a message where some of the meaning is lost in transmission:

"Send reinforcements, we're going to advance" becomes

"Send there-and-fourpence, we're going to a dance"

So the transmission is about making copies and distributing these in spacetime and things get lost/garbled along the way. It's also a bit like old Voldermort and his Horcrux.

And getting the message ungarbled is to do with inner as well as outer work. The essence of personal development and spirituality.

Appendix 6: what came first, the circle or the square?

Or indeed are they opposites in a dualistic analogue/digital universe.

<<work in progress>>

Appendix 7: links

A small selection of cool links I was browsing at the time or that seem related.

Creation myths.org--of course there is:

Reinforcement learning over millions of rounds among agents playing hide and seek who eventually learn to exploit the physics engine (?? exploits ??):

Open AI beats professional at DOTA 2 player after two weeks of reinforcement learning:

.

.

Different visualisations of networks in 2D:

.

.