Tuesday, December 12, 2006

Ouroboros


....From my post on Sailfreespirit ......


My vision precedes my steps, and I exist mostly in the time to come. My body yearns to be reconciled with my sight in the tasks ahead; my hands ache to grasp the tools with which I will chip away at the domain of fortuna, plowing chance asunder where the stones allow the planting of favorable crops.

These anxious thoughts bring me to ponder their roots. It is the domain of life to be an organizing force in a world of essential entropy. It is from the chaos that our power is drawn, yet this power is focused by all life forms to create and maintain order. Without entropy, there can be no life, no energy, yet entropy itself is the nemesis of all life, forever bound in a circle of order and chaos, the Ouroboros.

With the knowledge that all things exist in all places and in all times to varying degrees (the essential lesson of quantum physics), it is left to the other laws of physics to constrain the potentialities to a perceivable subset. Without constraint there would only be the infinite energy of chaos itself; no organizing (observing) force could exist. The universe is forged from this sea of random motion by limiting probability so that “impossible configurations” do not occur to an observable extent. Self organizing constructs and life forms further manipulate probability within their ability to create and maintain themselves, and to interact with their environments. The purposeful manipulation and management of probability is the essential force of life itself. It is the cornerstone of existence, expressed at the subatomic and every scale above. One ignores this basic fact at their peril. Those that manage the manipulation of probability prosper accordingly, and those that fail suffer; often greatly. To actually master probability would be to transcend the plight of the mortal through to deity.

OK… here’s where I go way out in left field. If the potentiality to -approach mastery- of probability exists within us, it likely lies not within our hands, but within our minds. Perhaps the act of perception is more powerful than any other force which we recognize. Suppose the existence of the observer is the ultimate criterion for the limits on chaos set by what we call the “laws of physics”. They are what they are so as to accommodate our existence. Certainly we could not observe in any set of conditions in which we cannot materially exist. Perhaps, in this way, changing the act of observation, or the nature of the observer would bear fruit in the form of a changed consensual reality. Thoughts are things? Perhaps. Do not all actions begin with intention?

Food for thought….