On Choosing a Religion to Study: Research Notes
A chicken or a duck is a mistake, when you do Swan Lake.
Funny Girl, Bob Merrill
Must I? Truly I would rather not choose a religion, and I seem to be in a rapidly growing global majority. Yet, this aversion to choosing any one religion, or any religion at all, for study, abuse, neglect, or to define as the One Right Way derives from a Pandora’s Box of motivations. Some of us worry that by stuffing any one religion in any one Schrodinger’s Box, divorced from our calculating receptors, we cannot realistically expect the swan to remain alive long enough for us to get back to her. There are so many boxes and each one is beautiful in its own way, mesmerizing, distracting, perhaps causing our research questions to dwindle off into the infinite. Meanwhile, the arbitrarily and artificially segregated Religious Culture surely will not fare well in isolation and neglect. Cultures need air to leaven our souls. Meanwhile, the swan waits for our mutual enlightenment.
“Legein,” from the Greeks, means to choose, gather, recount, tell again, speak. Legein is to logos as communication is to language. “Religious,” then, may be linguistically rooted in : to re-tie, to re-bind, to bring together again, to synergize, to reason and speak together again. The heart of religion is telling our shared story, again, ritualized, symbolized, iconized, glyphed, languaged, narrated. So how is this different than the study of re-telling our shared story?
I was reminded of this question while reading the DVD cover of a movie entitled The Way, Directed by Emilio Estevez. At the top of the cover is the phrase “you don’t choose a life, you live one.” This is similar to “Life is what happens while we are planning other things,” which I have heard attributed to John Lennon as the originator. To synchronize and paraphrase, perhaps I do not veer too far into my solipsistic eisegesis to propose, “you don’t study a culturally-embedded synergistic System, you live one.” But, can we do both at the same time without distorting one or the other? Could we engage the egg and the live chicken simultaneously toward mutual optimization? Can the chicken remember being an egg without having a Twilight Box (a Zone shared by Pandora and Schrodinger) identity crisis? Can studying the egg satisfactorily predict and explain the life trajectory of any one chicken, or duck, or swan, or story?
It is an interesting moment to choose to study any culturally-embedded, symbol-hatched, spiritual gestalt—a Re-Legein. I have been hearing murmurs on the internet about Cosmological Physicist Max Tegmark’s Nature of Reality thesis, soon to be published (January 2014, Knopf Doubleday Publishing) under the intriguing title, Our Mathematical Universe: My Quest for the Ultimate Nature of Reality. His Universal Theory is that the universe is mathematic structure. As metaphysicians might say, the Universe is Form over Function. This thesis goes back at least as far as Taoism, where Yang gets to play the role of Form, including organic system presentation as testosterone, and Yin plays her silent implicated role of Function. She is the Earth Mother who knows how to get stuff done, quietly, while Mathematicians are doing their calculating.
On pre-orders alone, Our Mathematical Universe is already on the New York Times Best-Seller List. Based primarily on a brief article in the December 2013 issue of Discover magazine by Professor Tegmark, I eagerly anticipate the arrival of my copy. This looks important for the study of any metaphysical system, including those falling under the culturally broad category of “Religion.” I hope to read a significant step in the right direction toward straightening out this muddle we have gotten ourselves into about a metaphysics of everything. We have a wealth of wisdom under the rubric of Metaphysics, although most of it that evolved out of religious perspectives has gone by the wayside. Anything like a Metaphysics of Mathematics gasps its last clawing breath in the dusty tombs of theology, Scripture, or has evaporated in ancient oral legends that did not survive long enough to achieve any Orthodox imprimatur.
From a historical and anthropological perspective we are overdue, as an evolving Species, for a new “Metaphysics of Mathematics” paradigm. Especially one with revolutionary potential, such as Max Tegmark’s Reality is Math; Math is Reality thesis. However, is this a swan-song for cultural narrative, ritual, and symbol as the foundation for religious experience, awareness, and development?
Professor Tegmark has a fairly new Ph.D. in cosmological theoretical physics from Berkeley, of course, and is now a Physics Teacher at MIT. While he is being paid through MIT’s Physics Department, he may feel a bit like a swan in the chicken coop. One of Tegmark’s considerable strengths as a writer is his instinct to let us share his journey. This, in turn, leads to Tegmark coming out of his Metaphysician Closet to his Physics colleagues. These Physics Profs are aflutter about his “odd duck” publications, and Tegmark wants us to hear about these controversies from his perspective. There is integrity in that. I like this about him, and I am certainly not alone in this respect for a revolutionary paradigm-egg calmly laid with candor. “If you can lay your egg while those around you are losing theirs and blaming it on you….”
I do have a minor quibble with the order in which Professor Tegmark presents his two primary hypotheses. I would reverse them, and I think most mathematicians, historians, and other students of metaphysical systems would do the same. Reversed, Tegmark’s primary heuristic assumption, slightly paraphrased, is:
The Mathematical Universe Hypothesis: Explicated physical structures are mathematical structures.
In other words, what we perceive with our sensory receptors are geometric structures. This is familiar. It does not seem “revolutionary.”
Buckminster Fuller, on “Energy and Information,” Synergetics 2” (1979, p. 446),
“An energy event is always special case….Metaphysical includes all the experiences that are excluded by the definition of physical. Metaphysical is always generalized principle.
Physical is always special case. Energy is physical [explicated structure] and always special case. Information is always special case. Energy is information: information is energy. Special case is always realized by its energetic information. Dimension is unique frequency information. Time incrementation is special case information.”
Finally, Fuller gets around to the point where perhaps he would have more effectively started, “Concept is general: information is quantitative (special case).”
Switching Fuller into Tegmark’s Universal Hypothesis: Information structures are mathematical structures, special case. The implied corollary: Non-mathematically cognized structures are irrational, chaotic, dissonant Dis-Formation. The Ugly Ducklings that really don’t fit into our Exegetically Orthodox Nest of Re-Legein.
Like Tegmark, Fuller builds his explanations of definitions backward in time, and logical order. Fuller’s 1,400 pages of Synergetics 1 and 2 might be easier if read in reverse order, but that is just a theory—I am not altogether sure I fully understand Fuller either frontward or backward, and make no pretense of having followed his journey from beginning to end in either direction. Backward or forward, Fuller is challenging. This, despite his accomplished pictures, diagrams and charts. Even with these visual aids, Fuller’s geometric Information System missed his cultural mark because of his numerical problem: way TOO MUCH redundancy. One thousand four hundred pages is a big number to say what boils down to:
What Is: Special Case potentiated and explanatory Information Metric System, (0) Core-Vectored in Metaphysical (Conceptual) Values.
What Is Not (Non-Polynomial Reality): Metaphysical/Conceptual Values, implicated only (Non-Explicated Reality)
Fuller’s 1970’s “Spaceship Earth,” as he geometrically and synergetically defines it, appears analogous to Tegmark’s Physical structured events are Special Case Geometric structured events, if I may slightly paraphrase.
Maybe the Physicist Tegmark shows his colors by actually presenting his Special Case Hypothesis before his General Field Hypothesis. Tegmark calls his Special Case heuristic assumption The External Reality Hypothesis:
There exists an external physical reality completely independent of us.
Here the cosmologist theoretician reveals that he is a duck in swan’s clothing. He leads with physically-bound color in a grayscaled land of theoretical metaphysics, which we used to call, back in the day, theology, and/or the study of religion (re-legein).
However, the Mathematician objects: Go back to Fuller’s less ambitious Special Case definition because you do not need to take on the whole weight of subjective v. objective, of form over function or function over form, of phenomenology v. factology. Those battles all gave Metaphysics a nasty pair of black eyes, trying to keep one eye on the egg and the other on the resulting chicken, without ever moving to the more systemic Information perspective of their rhythmic and mutually-defining Prime Relationship. We want Tegmarks Swan Song to sing this larger harmony which is more opaque, easier to follow, if he would reverse his assumed direction and begin at the primordial (0) Core Vector beginning.
Within the beginning was the Word; but the beginning itself is our Information Creation.
Fuller’s and Tegmark’s Special Case heuristic assumption show vast potential for resolving long-standing math, physics, chemistry, biology, theology, neurology, psychology, anthropological, cultural, and perhaps even religious study chaos.
Information is Special Case Values quantification, implicate -Right-hemisphere Code (see Julian Jaynes, 1976, Bicameral Mind evolution theory, plus William Thurston and Gregori Perelman on the soul conjecture proof, David Bohm, Theoretical Physicist on implicate v. explicate order frequencies).
Exformation is Negative Special Case Values quantification (See Buckminster Fuller Synergetics, 1975, 1979 on negative and reverse polarity in 3-dimensional space, for definition of Polynomial= Non-Polynomial, and their mutually defining geometric/biometric balance. Special Note RE: Fuller: He perceives the paradigm biometric as a Universal Field +/- Information System SPECIAL INFORMATION CASE: Capacity to process +/- Balanced Bipolarity as 50%/50% Normative.) , explicate- Left-hemisphere Conceptual
(again, see the soul conjecture proof, Thurston, Richard Hamilton, Perelman, general resolution of the Poincare Conjecture: to paraphrase, If and when we are not all in this together, then we run into a whole lot of dissonance, confusion, and loss of energy. On the other hand, when confluence optimizes so do all Prime Powered Values, octave-frequenced in 4-dimension space, (0) Core Vector Assumption) More simply, Biometrics are the Binary Info Special Case exception to the Geometric Rule, or Code, depending on the paradigm from which you approach Mathematics.
In other words, Tegmark’s Information Universal Metric Values System Theory updates Fuller, because it is easier to understand. However, if Tegmark recognizes that the implacated Geometric Manifold described in his 2nd Assumption as a “mathematical structure” was defined by mathematicians Thurston, Hamilton, Perelman, Fuller, et. al. , as what is now labeled the soul conjecture, this is not apparent in his Discover article, December 2013 issue. Nor do I see any comparative references to Buckminster Fuller in any of the several esteemed, and well-informed, reviewer comments available through www.amazon.com.
Like most others, I am among the larger flock waiting in the dark for Knopf to release Our Mathematical Universe, meanwhile squawking and quibbling that “There’s nobody in here but us chickens, I hope!” Even so, call it Dillenbeck’s Hypothesis, if you will, that Cosmologist Max Tegmark not only did not read Bucky, but he also probably missed Psychology’s Julian Jaynes.
If you follow Julian Jaynes back to the anthropological proto-history of an evolving Left-hemisphere symbol-dominant Information Processor, you can find the origins of a Metaphysics of Information Values Theory in the Golden Ratio defined as “As without, so within; as within, so without.” This also just happens to fit allegorically with the Eastern Metaphysic of Tao where Polynomial Yang is Prime (0) Vector blanketed by Non-Polynomial [inclusive of Exformation Valued frequency polarities] Yin in luxuriously permacultured, abundant, Universal Equipoise. The tricky little surprise is that Exformation Valued polarity Bicameral Information is inclusive of Information Valued polarity, as Yang OVER Yin. Implicate Information is not merely half of Explicate Information; it is the first half, lower fractal frequencies, in any (0) Core Vectored smooth-structured Universe. Again, visit Perelman’s soul conjecture proof regarding the homologous relationship Information structures between Prime Vector-within and Manifold-without. As within, so without; and, as without, so within. Hence, all those weird, coincidental Fibonaccian dense, intricate, latticed, fractive, mysterious Golden Ratio/Golden Rule Information Prime Relationship System Codes. The Left-hemisphere, in its crippled mono-cameral STEM-educated way, has trouble due to its adamantly stubborn refusal to recognize that the same potentiated Information that is in the Egg resides in explicated form in the Chicken. And, if one wants to accurately predict what Information Prime Relationships will be in that Chicken’s Eggs, one need only short-circuit the whole biometric feedback loop by cloning the original Egg. Which comes first, whether one is a scientist or a mystic, is both, bicamerally.
Fuller calls Fractal Information function equivalent to Euler’s e-function for both time and space dimensions. Now we’re talking some serious and Sirius-influenced math structure. Fuller says (1979, p. 64) We are quite possibly the most complex of the problem-solving challenges of the inventor that is eternally regenerative Scenario Universe. In this way each of us might be a department of the mind of what we might call god.
This is Fuller’s version o what later became geometrically defined as the soul conjecture, where Polynomial = Non-Polynomial in a Universal =/_ balanced (0) Core Vector Zeta-function. Again, as within, so without, etc.
What Is Not, is an “unstructured system.” The Left-hemispheric calculator rejects this Conceptual Information as an Ex-Formational (disformed and, frankly, queer) oxymoron. Where you end up is significantly predicted by where you start, with what is not (which would be lack of Information about that Prime Relationship between the Swan and her (0) Core Vector Egg) or with what, in fact, is Prime Relationship in any Information System.
Historians, Economists, and Geometry Teachers all agree that the term structured system is What Is, although the term seems conceptually redundant. However, this newer generation of Information, Mathematics, and other Wisdom Theorists might suggest that the Information Value in “structured” is calculated in hierarchically folded Temporal Power frequencies, while “system” is analogous to Q-Bit Fractal Value frequencies, but that is another Story Problem for another day.
If Professor Tegmark would be kind enough to reverse the sequential order of his two Hypotheses, it would be easier for all of us to see that the Second Law of Thermodynamics is not needed, just as his second hypothesis is not needed. Both are implicately predicted by the Mathematical Binary Information Universe Hypothesis: our external physical reality is a mathematical structure, in any (0) Core Vectored Language where Polynomial = Non-Polynomial.
We would not be able to even think about the 2nd Hypothesis if the 1st Hypothesis were not True and Real. What Is is Information. What Is Not is Ex-Formation, and alarmingly disformative, even dysfunctional; but nevertheless no more than half the Re-Legein Story, both Truly and Really Told.
At last this Informative Metaphysic of Re-Legein Swan Song is done. Atheist and Theist each remain both True and Real so long as they re-member their Information perspectives in both balanced bicameral minds. The Lion may rest with the Lamb, the Universe of Reality is Transposed upside down Octaves of Harmony, and that Wisdom Swan can stop waiting for her two Taoist Eggs to hatch, first without, then within.
Hypothesis A: We seem to die alone,
Hypothesis B: But live to fly together.
Hypothesis C: We seem to die,
Hypothesis D: But live to fly forever.
Who could ask for anything more?
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