Fractal Torus, Fractal Flowers

 It's been awhile since I shared with you a fractal flower. I am always struck by the toroidal nature of these flowers when I see them on my dog walks. I snapped this picture on my iPhone; sorry about the poor resolution.

In the group of flowers above, you can see both toruses and fractals at various stages of manifestation. Let's look closer.

 

When the flower begins to emerge, it unfurls from a torus shape.

As the bud begins to open, you can see the torus walls and center. You can also see that its walls are composed of the fractals that will make up the bud cluster.

The more the bud opens, the less it looks like a torus as it begins to flatten out.

At last the torus is replaced by the fractal flowers. You can see that this one toroidal bud has produced a fractal pattern of smaller buds that look like the mother bud. And inside of those smaller buds are another iteration of the flower bud pattern. If we look even closer, we would discover that the smallest flower heads are themselves also made of smaller flower heads.

So what we have here, in this simple plant, is a fractal pattern of at least four iterations.  It reminds me of this fractal formula:

A Simple Explanation of Consciousness and Time: Our Cherry-Jello Universe

 It's been a very long time since I developed any new concepts to add to A Simple Explanation, spending the past couple of years concentrating instead on the Gnostic Gospel. So my longtime readers may be very happy to see this new posting featuring the torus, consciousness, and Jello? 

Yesterday my brother and I were musing over the nature of time--what is it exactly? It isn't a thing, it is nowhere to be located. Is it therefore a force? This was my response. I have long thought of the universe in this fashion, but I've never written it down or even shared it with my brother until yesterday. He flipped out over it. Let's see what you think...

A Giant Bowl of Jello

Here is how I picture time, space, and consciousness —

• We live in a Jello universe--a gigantic, torus-shaped, bowl of gelatin, studded with an infinite number of cherries.

• The Jello is the matrix that holds everything that ever was or will be.

• The cherries are every thing that ever were or will be--all potential events, all potential objects. An infinite array of cherries already laid out as potential.

• Consciousness is each spark of life making its way through this vast ocean of Jello.

• Time can only be apprehended through consciousness; time is nowhere to be found if there is no observer.

• The cherries are the full panoply of choices we could make along the way.

• Our free will chooses to swim this way and that as it moves toward the next cherry of choice. This free will is swimming from the middle of the torus in the direction of the outside boundary of the giant torus. All of these cherries are being held within the shape of the torus—the doughy part of the donut.

• Every lifetime is the trace of the worm-like path our consciousness chooses as it travels through the universe of cherries.

• In a real sense, the entirety of all of our lives is already conceived in potential. It is our self-awareness and free will that plod along at the speed of matter as we live our lives out as a linearity of passing time.

My brother, the professor of Philosophy, notes that this way of looking at time and consciousness may have just solved one of the longstanding conundrums of philosophy.  That is, how can we reconcile the concept of an all-knowing God if we subjects have free will? The answer presented by this model is that the all-knowing God has pre-placed all possible choices before us, but it is our individual free will that plots the course through these choices. This combination of potential versus choice reflects our free will.

That's it.

I'm posting a second version of this article over at my Gnostic blog, which further describes this Jello universe in Gnostic terms. If you are curious, you can head over there now.

Of course, the Jello salad pictured above is not to scale. The gelatin donut would be infinitely large, and the cherries relatively small.