Stray Appendix I: An Illustrated Guide to Spectral Multispace. (Second Edition).

There's mathematics, and then there's Mathematics. The former is something we made up to explain why things work and what they might do next time. It is an echo. It may only be an idea, but an idea which reflects, as ideas generally do, a truth.

(There's truth, and then there's Truth.)

There are sequences and patterns that appear on all levels of the world around us, and though the numbers we use to represent them are our own, and any meaning we ascribe to them is our own, still the patterns recur. Fibonacci, the Golden Ratio, Rectangle and Spiral, divine geometry. There's mathematics, and then there's the language of creation.

(Important Note: There are absolutely no religious overtones to this theory, despite some of language used. There's also no maths.)

I'll start this in the middle, play it back, then forwards again. (Just to keep it simple.)
There is the material world. It is created by the rules that govern it, and evolves to suite them. There is a rule that determines the way a proton and an electron come together to form hydrogen, and this rule creates hydrogen. The rules of thermodynamics make it burn. The rules of nuclear reactions make stars happen. Of course the rules we have are made up by us, but they are still reflections of the world.
So, there is physical space and it is determined by what came before it; the rules. And they are determined by what came before them; the numbers which are the language of creation.

There is life. Life was born of the physical world when matter reached a certain critical threshold of complexity, and is, in terms of that world, a complex system and not much else. There is not a lot, speaking in a purely materialistic sense, in a horse that isn't in a mountain. It's the aspects of life which can't be perceived sensorily that make it life. Such as ideas.
A life form walks in two worlds, physical and conceptual. Even a microbe has ideas, in fact it has two: desirable and undesirable. Swim towards and try to eat, or avoid. Quality and unQuality, these concepts are the basis of all others. An idea is is a basis for ideals, which are the bases of decisions. Our senses point outwards at physical space, our emotional reactions point inwards to conceptual space. Emotion is the direct experience of an idea.

Think about a dream you had last night that you can no longer quite remember. Or the house you lived in two years ago. It feels a certain way. Not Anticipation or Bereavement or Comfort or any other emotional reaction that can be named, just a pure undifferentiated feeling, almost like a flavour, or a colour. That is the idea of the thing, and you are experiencing it directly. We only ever react emotionally to ideas, not physical things.

We walk in two worlds. We are what happens in the space where they interact. Life is the application of concept to matter.

The application of concept to matter is purely one of division, classification, and labelling. Drawing arbitrary lines in the sand. Reality is just a big blob of perception, a mass of colour and tone. The question of 'Where does one thing begin and another end' has one of two answers: nowhere; or wherever you want.
I take a ball of clay, remove a small piece, put another back in. Repeat. When does that ball become a different ball? It doesn't / whenever I say it does.
There is actually a third option: the ball does not really exist. It's not a ball of clay at all, it just is what it is. Ball, Clay... of; are just labels we apply to make things more accessible and communicable. As soon as you name something you are no longer dealing with the thing itself. (The Tao that can be named is not the eternal Tao.)
What is reality? It simply is.

Despite a tendency after a while to no longer really see things as they are, just what they've become to us, there's nothing wrong with any of this; it's imperative. Meaning is not within things, but between them. In order to find meaning in reality we have to take the mass and semi-arbitrarily divide it into as many fragments, inflections and subtleties as we can handle. Existence is one, and it is many. It is the source, and it is the infinitely diverse and detailed extrapolations of that source. (From the One came Two, from the Two came Three, and from Three came the Ten Thousand things.) It is from this digestion of existence, the creation of a thing and the equating of the thing to the idea of the thing, that we come into being.
Life is the application of concept to matter.

This is why stories are so important; as a form of conceptual pre-digestion. Think of a storyteller as a mother bird, hacking up nutrition for her young.
If I say that I left the house, walked to the shops, then came home; it's not a story, it's an account. For it to be a story it must communicates meaning; something about the world and our lives. We tell stories so that we might better understand (and survive) reality. A story, like all art, is the communication of emotion, and emotion is the direct experience of an idea. It is the boiling down of a group of ideas, communicated in a non direct way and intuitively absorbed. Stories are inseparable from human consciousness.
Dreams are much the same: conceptual digestion. The building and maintaining of conceptual space.


The universe evolves.
Recently, when an astronomer was measuring light that had passed through a nebula four billion years ago he found that the numbers didn't obey the constant which determines the way light passes through nebulas. The only way he could get them to fit was by assuming that back then the 'constant' was different. Analysis of an ancient natural nuclear reactor in Africa has suggests that the speed of light has dropped slightly since two billion years ago.
Why shouldn't the nature of reality change? That, surely, is what it does.
The world had to evolve to a certain level of complexity before life could appear.

Life evolves. Clearly. It pours itself into the mould of its environment and takes on the form which that environment will find most agreeable. (In allowing to survive.) As I've said, ideas were always with us but in a largely latent proto-form. It wasn't until life reached its own critical threshold that the birth of concepts really took place. Let's, for the sake of anthro-centric arrogance, say this was the development of human consciousness. If you want to start on about dolphins and geraniums go ahead, I won't stop you. Anyway, the coming of consciousness was the real beginning of conceptual reality. Like a big-bang.

Concepts evolve, because of us. They grow, develop, breed. If we like them they carry on. If not, they die. Just as the material world is our evolutionary pressure, so we are to conceptual space. It is formed by our desires.

The thing about evolution is that it never actually makes anything completely new, just reconfigures the same handful of basic building blocks into new patterns. Just as all life is shaped by the four base amino receptors of DNA, which are just structures of a few elements such as carbon and hydrogen, which in turn are just made up of the three subatomic particles (and on, and down), we construct new ideas from more basic pre-existing ones.
When we're born we start developing simple, perception based concepts, such as Big, and Loud, and Warm, and Vomit. As we develop, these are joined together into more complex systems; like Mother, and Falling Over, and Don't, until they eventually leave the directly perceivable and become increasingly abstract.

Perceptions are all we have for sure. Right now I know for an absolute fact that I’m seeing something that I’d call a laptop. Whether that thing is actually there, or True, is a completely different issue, I know that I perceive it. Without that knowledge of perception I simply cease to exist.
If you broke down Laptop far enough you’d just end up with a very convoluted knot of Grey and Hard and Bright and Hum and so forth. Which is pretty much all a Kalahari bushman would perceive of it, not having trickier prefabricated idea structures like Machine and Electricity to build with.
Ideas have to be built from the ground up, like a pyramid. Try reading the last paragraph of this email now, without the intervening preamble, and see how much sense it makes. I'll wait.

All I’m doing right now, in writing this down, is generating noise. Making black squiggles on a white background. On its own it's completely meaningless. If you didn’t have pre-existing concept clusters like Reading and English, let alone the more abstract ideas, this would be nothing but pixels.
Information cannot exist without an observer. Everything has infinite information potential. Anything can tell you anything, like looking at scaffolding and it telling you things about chaos.

I’m generating noise, but it's a pattern that evokes a certain reaction in me and causes me to start putting ideas together in certain ways. And because you and I are both human, and probably have vaaaaaaguely similar conceptual bases, I can at least hope that on reading this it will provoke you to start putting something together which will sufficiently resemble what I'm trying to express. This is all that communication is.

An idea in our head has a certain feeling to it, or flavour, or colour. When we create a new idea we build it out of the concepts we already have, like a quilt or mosaic, drawing on our knowledge base to piece together a pattern that best matches what we’re trying to express.

For example; what I’m trying to tell you now, the content of this email, to me feels like this:

Which once I’ve built it up from other ideas, so I can consciously get a grasp on it, looks more like this:

Where each block is a basic idea I already have. Though I didn’t make this from a thousand individual basic concepts, but from several already complex ones. Like Life, and Evolution, and Conjecture, etc.
And once I’ve written it out and you’ve read it and hopefully (...) understood it’ll look to you something like this:

And will settle finally into your subconscious feeling a little like this:

This concept has now reproduced. Whereas before it was only in my head it is now, in a somewhat different form, in yours. If you don’t like it you probably won’t tell anyone else or keep thinking about it, and it will die.
Although not completely.
It is now part of you, and is affecting the ideas around it and the way you’ll put together every single idea you’ll ever have again. Some parts will resonate with you and be pulled out as building blocks for other concepts. This email, these ideas, this sentence, will echo through and minutely affect everything you are and do, for the rest of your life. And through you to those around you, and the world. Our actions are like throwing stones into water, the ripples keep going around and around, long after we can no longer see them.
An idea can never fully die, because it’s just a pattern. Everything is pattern. Reality is just patterns interacting.

Everything is an extrapolation of the source. Look far enough into anything and you will find everything. Understand any one thing completely and you will understand all reality. Everything we are is within everything we are. Perfectly know the way a person walks, or smiles, or says the word 'airport', you can know them entirely.

When I was in the Ayasofia cathedral in Istanbul I was looking at a huge scaffold being used to restore the frescoes on the ceiling. It looked like this:

Which made me realise that the only difference between order and chaos is your point of view.

Everything is a pattern. There's no such thing as random, some patterns are just really really complicated. Reality is a dialogue between observer and observed, an agreement reached over what will be perceived. However, if everything is a pattern then that would include us. But are we also the observer? Of ourselves? In what way does our perception of ourselves alter us, and through that the universe which we perceive, and by perceiving bring into being, and by being, observes us? And if the nature of reality is so fleeting and insubstantial, then as part of that reality, where does that leave us?
Who can say.

And: consciousness may have evolved, but it is our consciousness which has created, with everything else, evolution? It may not be an external force pushing us forward, but rather something we have retroactively cast backwards in order to create this present moment that we may be sufficiently evolved as to have created it, and thereby, ourselves.

It's all a bit of a head make-love, really.

So, from the top: not at the beginning, but nearer to it, were the Numbers. The Numbers evolved, and when they reached a certain level of complexity, gave birth to the Rules of Nature.
The Rules evolved, and created Physical Space.
Space evolved and created Life.
Life evolved and made Conceptual Space.
Concepts evolved.

It stands to reason that, given time, some new form of being would be created from within conceptual space.

We could express this all as a spectrum:

Where everything exists as a synthesis of what it lies between. Life is the application of concept to space, space is the application of life to the rules, etc.
Indigo doesn’t exist as a pure colour, Isaac Newton forced it in because as an alchemist seven was a more significant number to him than six. True story.

So you have:
Red Orange Yellow Green Blue Violet
Or really:
Infra-red Red Orange Yellow Green Blue Violet Ultraviolet

The note of G has an orchestra pitch of 392 Hz. One octave higher, eight notes, the next G is double the frequency; 784 Hz.
Infra-red has a frequency centred around 392 X 10*12th Hz.
Ultraviolet, the eighth colour (below represented as black), is around 784 X 10*12th Hz. Double.

Or more accurately:

And yes I know that colours don't have exact frequencies, and that the eight note octave is completely arbitrary, but still...

Spectrums and octaves are just maps of frequency, which is a measurement a pattern's density, which correlates to complexity. Spectrums are spirals. Double the frequency and you end up with the same note/colour, but another step up.
So if existence can be expressed as a spectrum then its nature is to spiral eternally back on itself in a recurring pattern of complexification.

We can’t directly experience the rules of nature, only observe them through the way they move space around. We also wouldn’t be able to see anything beyond conceptual space, only its effects on the ideas within it. We're between space and concept, we can't see further than that.
The rules, if they are aware, couldn’t detect life directly either, only its effects on space. To them life would just be a seemingly random disturbance amongst an already chaotic system. If we went looking for The Next Thing it would be the same, we could only at best see concepts being moved around by something other than themselves or us.
But whatever it is is already there, in the same way that concepts were always with life and life was always with matter. Life forms are just very complex systems, the basic principles of life were present in the first matter, in the same way that the most basic concepts were present in the first living things.
But there was a sudden leap in conceptual complexity with the arrival of consciousness, in the same way as the complexity of life had a sudden leap with the arrival of single celled organisms. When I say ‘the birth of the next thing’ I mean the sudden complexification when concepts have reached a sufficiently evolved level, and from within them comes a completely new form of being.
Whatever it is is already there, but there's no way of knowing when it will awaken, or what the consequences will be.

We are approaching the singularity. Human knowledge is increasing exponentially, currently doubling every five or so years. But that period is reducing, also exponentially.
The singularity is the moment when the time taken for all human knowledge to double becomes effectively zero.


There's a field of thought called Radionics. Say I have a device which emits a high frequency sound and repels mice. According to radionics, if I were to draw the circuit diagram of that device and put it in a cage full of mice, it would still repel them. Patterns resonate. If one thing resembles another, it absorbs a certain amount of its reality (which is to say, the way in which it interacts with other patterns).
But what the hell? Mice can't read circuit diagrams, (neither can most people), so if a pattern is defined by the observer, how does that observer's interpretation of it then affect a completely removed third party?
But it does. And if there's one thing we've learnt from quantum theory, it's that something this impossible pretty much has to be real. Of course, another thing we've learnt from quantum is that experimenters will tend to alter what they're observing, according to what they think would be cool if they got to observe it.
But my point is this: patterns resonate.

This ideas forms these words, are reshaped into binary code, a flow of electrons, leaves your screen as light. This idea enters your mind. One pattern preserved through vastly differing mediums by a perceived similarity in the form it causes those mediums to take. One entity stretched through many worlds.
Imagine a spider's web. One of those really good ones that are more a volume than a surface. At each intersection point is an idea, the ideas bleed into each other along the threads and form larger ideas by their association. This is conceptual space. It is limitless but does contain a limited amount of information, although that information can be put together in an infinite number of ways, so it depends how you look at it.
This web is arranged contextually, ideas are grouped according to various forms of inter-relevance, as determined by us. If physically we're in the kitchen, conceptually we're in the area which contains information, memories, ideals about cooking, eating, housing, family and out and out until we're not really in the kitchen any more, conceptually speaking. We arrange things like this so that it's easy for us to land in a certain situation and have all the ideas we're likely to need within easy grasp. If something then happens out of context (a dog walks through the kitchen, i.e.) there'll be a moment of readjustment while we take ourselves to a more appropriate area of our conceptual web.
And this web is constantly shifting, ideas are dislocated and joined into others, areas re-contextualised relative to each other according to changing circumstances in our lives, connections made and broken.

And that's all well and good and sounds ok, but something which struck me in thinking about this is: that is _exactly_ what our brains look like, physically. Neurons join to each other, certain kinds of information group together in certain areas, links are constantly made and shifted, and thereby new ideas made available.
Patterns resonate. Similarity is a form of bond. This is of course pure conjecture; but is it possible that our brains look the way they do because their pattern of matter reflects their structure in conceptual space? And that this resonance is the link between the one organism's two forms of being?
What if we are multi-spacial entities, spread through all forms of being from one end to the other, (there are no ends) and in each phase of the spectrum taking on a form bred from the substance of that phase, which echoes the pattern of the whole. And these echoes, these resonances, are the bonds that tie us together into one cohesive self?

And if something new does come out of conceptual space, it will be the birth of some new aspect of ourselves, a new form of being, that though not directly perceivable to us will ripple back through everything that we are.