Wed, Jan 9, 2008 Permanent linkThe universe is not subject to our will. Essentially, it follows its own autopoietic operations. What humans perceive as harmonious, mathematically precise, and quantifiably ordered is our own interpretation and an exception to the normal state.
~ Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra
Thu, Jan 24, 2008 Permanent linkWhere did you find that beautiful hyperdimensional object? Is it a hypercube?
Thu, Jan 24, 2008 Permanent link
it is called a Tesseract, and i don't remember exactly where i got this one. There are many at the link above, but I will try and find the link for this one for you. Here is another one which can be found in the gallery
Thu, Jan 24, 2008 Permanent linkCheck out this interactive one (click & drag)
http://www.fano.co.uk/hypermodel/tesseract.html
Thu, Jan 24, 2008 Permanent linkre: Spaceweaver's comment.
"The universe self organizes bottom up. This is what evolution is all about. Pure principles are bottom up projections. "
I would tend to disagree with this. Principals don't necessarily manifest or emerge 'bottom up'. (Darwinian view). Or 'top down' for that matter. (Judeo-Christian) As Bucky said, 'principals are eternal'. They are infinite... and they are deep within us. They are contained within the informational soul of our being. One must only remember. It's all about remembrance.
Thu, Jan 24, 2008 Permanent linkMaybe I'm just staring at it too long, or maybe I've never seen one with that many lines, but the tesseract at top looks qualitatively different to me than the hypercubes I'm familiar with. Like it's made with more faces? Or perhaps it defines a cube in a dimension higher than the fourth?
As for the bottom-up, top-down question: I think we're caught in the time-based syntax laced in the word "organizes." This term suggests that top or bottom happen one before the other. As Counterform reminds us, the implicate order is outside of time and intrinsic everywhere at once.
Fri, Jan 25, 2008 Permanent linkThere are a handful of alternative animations on this wikipedia entry. This old post on my blog takes the hyper-dimensional and makes it mundane again.
Reminiscent of Leibniz's Monadology. Though it is aesthetically, appealing I find it hard to accept. The universe self organizes bottom up. This is what evolution is all about. Pure principles are bottom up projections. We come to know them while we invent them or realize (literally speaking) them. That includes god. We like to think about those things beyond comprehension, but mostly because they challenge our limits of perception, and we LOVE to break those limits :-)