Strange Loops Everywhere!
A strange loop arises when, by moving only upwards or downwards through a hierarchical system, one finds oneself back to where one started. It arises from the concept known as Tangled Hierarchies. Instead of linear progression, these hierarchies balance on each other.
These are ubiquitous; omnipresent, everywhere.
In GEB, Hofstadter gives some examples of these in Bach’s Canon per Tonos, M. C. Escher’s drawings Waterfall, Drawing Hands, Ascending and Descending, and the liar paradox as examples that illustrate the idea of strange loops, which is expressed fully in the proof of Gödel’s incompleteness theorem.
It can be seen in Möbius strip as well .
A Möbius strip made with a piece of paper and tape. If an ant were to crawl along the length of this strip, it would return to its starting point having traversed the entire length of the strip (on both sides of the original paper) without ever crossing an edge.
Strange loops are a very strange concept. You can see these strange loops in day-to-day life.
……
In Transcendental meditation they say, ‘smaller than smallest is larger than largest’.
When describing the smallest things
Quantum physics begins with the vacuum and QED (quantum electro-dynamics)
which is the basis of all chemistry
which is the basis of all biology
which leads to needing sociology
and geology for studies of the World
which leads to planets and astronomy
which leads to galaxies and spiral nebulae, space-time and gravity,
and of course the big-bang (where everything comes out of nothing)
which must be understood in terms of astrophysics
which loops us back to QED and the vacuum.
Vacuum is the beginning and the end . It is the level where things merge.
Dreams
In movie ‘The Matrix’, Morpheus says, ‘what if you never woke up from a dream, you will never be able to distinguish between a dream and reality’.
Very valid thought! And the answer is, we won’t be able to tell a difference.
I have many a times, in my dreams, wished that, that dream was a dream. It clearly implies that in dream I am unaware of the fact that it is a dream. Dreams are thus as real as our universe. Only when I wake up I realise that, that was a dream.
Our dreams are a parallel universe of its own.The characters in our dreams are self aware and can also refer each other.
What if, what we are living is also a dream, what if our universe is someone’s dream and we are just characters in that persons dream, who are self aware and are interacting with each other; unaware of the fact that we are in someone else’s dream and someday, this someone might wake up, and our universe will collapse to vacuum, as it had started.
What if …
Now like there is the possibility of we being in someone’s dream, there also is a possibility where we are creating a universe, in our dreams.
Imagine the possibility, what if at some level, the hierarchy of dreams is tangled ? What if, dream within a dream within a dream, is creating parallel universes; and that hierarchy is not linear but tangled. What if at some level the universe that we create becomes the reality we live in. What if universe we are in is some level in that tangled hierarchy.
For illustration sake, focus on the image.
Imagine each parallel line a parallel universe that we are creating. Every time we dream, a parallel universe is created. Now imagine character in the dream, is also dreaming. That creates another parallel line. Due to the possibility of tangled hierarchy, we, at some level of creating a parallel universe, could be creating the present universe.
Just like the staircases, we will keep going down the dream world, only to realise at some Nth level, that we are at the level that we started, i.e the present.
What that means is that, if the you in your dream, dreams a dream, and in that dream, you again dream. At some nth level, there is a possibility that, what you are dreaming is the reality that is being created.
We in that case could be creating our present universe.
P.S : These are some random thoughts. Would love to know your thoughts around this.
