Booking Thru Life

Adventures of a Viking Reading Bystander

The curtain rises on the scene
With someone shouting to be free
The play unfolds before my eyes
There stands the actor who is me

Enryo (遠慮) is one of the most quintessential Japanese concepts.  “Restraining speech/actions towards people” (「人に対して言語・行動を控え目にすること」).

A Stranger in a Strangeland.

How could that be?

I was born on top of the world.  The middle class, white suburbs in Southern California, in 1950.  White, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant heritage: (that dreaded 21st century epithet WASP).

Then, Why a stranger in a strangeland?

There were hills that I couldn’t climb when I was young. I was sheltered by my dreams, now stellated mirrors in the sun.

Everybody: just like me?

Please Understand Me

Booking Through Life

Just like me?  Well, no.   Nobody was like me, in my Weltenschauung [worldview], except my father, kinda, but I learned that much later.  Nobody was of my circum-stance, of course, by definition.

Booking thru Life
and Paging thru History

Most people, especially my school peers, never seemed to be interested in these things we called books in my household.  Science?!  Engineering? Those were subjects to be taught later in school.  Nope, no one that I knew personally was interest in that: the kids and teachers surrounding me up to high school. Why is that so?

Architect Rationals often seem difficult to know. They are inclined to be shy except with close friends, and their reserve is difficult to penetrate. Able to concentrate better than any other type, they prefer to work quietly at their computers or drafting tables, and often alone. Architects also become obsessed with analysis, and this can seem to shut others out. Once caught up in a thought process, Architects close off and persevere until they comprehend the issue in all its complexity. Architects prize intelligence, and with their grand desire to grasp the structure of the universe.

I discovered I could learn by reading books. Learn, Unlearn, Learn.  LUL.  Non-Fiction.

Ants, New Math, Bubbles, Mushrooms, Crystals, Atoms, Radio kits, TV vacuum tubes, Computers, Programming, Cybernetics, Chemistry.

Der Welt.

There were Questions.

What is the structure and process of The World?

What does the definition “Information is negative entropy” — mean?

What are the Vital Questions?

What is the Natural Architecture of the Universe?

A Grain in the Stone? 

Learning about the natural world of crystals, mushrooms, chemistry, electrical engineering, and Information and Computer Science was a start.

The progress of science is the discovery at each step of a new order which gives unity to what had seemed unlike. — Jacob Bronowski

So what did conventional mathematics, physics, chemistry, and biology offer, in this regard?

Many things, but not enough.

It was a shock. It happened as I was reading  Life Itself, by Robert Rosen. I remember it very vividly. I still can recall it mentally: the time and place, Newton’s law was just a two term cutoff of the Taylor Series.  General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics essentially did the same. My neck hairs stood on end.  It was a sudden realization — an epiphany.  It was like the coming from “nowhere” from “everywhere”, the crystalization of order from the surrounding “invisible” chaos. I visualized it as an ideal empty Euclidean 3D sphere — there it was. My view of science, and the world, changed in that instant. The emptiness (or “thinness”) of recursive functions in regards to entailment. Positing reason as a given, an axiom, a faith — was necessary — a metamathematical religious tenant. So it is important to look at the what is the religion of mathematics and what is the mathematics of religion.

Robert Rosen had questioned the current approach of science in its use of the Newton-Turing paradigm, which includes the diverse domains such as modern string theory and molecular biology. In reacquainting myself with the domain of biology and the possible origins of life, important questions raised by Lynn Margulis and James Lovelock renewed my interest in the relations between life and non-life. So beyond this one might find it useful to ask the questions of what is the life of mathematics and what is the mathematics of life.

 What are the relations between the universe and symmetry?

I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.
Jorge Luis Borges

I intend to use my father’s methodology, Robert Rosen’s perspective, some judiciously chosen conventional science and mathematics, and use a systemic approach, combining both the quantitative results of science and the qualitative ad-hoc frame-works of science, mathematics, and information science into an integrated weltanschauungen of  Relational Complexity and Comparative Science.

“The question is not what should be, but what will be.”

Only the self-educated and educated person is free.

Other Architect Rationals include:  James Madison, Srinivasa Ramanujan, Emmy Noether, Paul Dirac, Robert Rosen, David Keirsey, Albert Einstein, Lonnie Athens, David Bohm