↑ FieldOfView
Page Created: 7/29/2014 Last Modified: 3/11/2016 Last Generated: 10/22/2024
In a visual medium such as a film, there are constructs such as frames, field of view, focus, etc, which are used by the profession to tell a story, or more generalized, to communicate information to others.
This information is stored temporally. The frames must be played in sequence in order to be understood.
This simple concept is profound. In Plato's allegory of a cave, "projection" of light from a fire was used to create 2-dimensional shadow representations on a cave wall, from a 3-dimensional object which was unseen by the audience.
The allegory shows us that an object of a higher dimension can be represented in lower dimensions, but only someone with the capacity to recognize a higher-dimensional form (through abstraction) can "turn around" and see its true form.
If you were to walk toward the wall, you would not see any depth in the shadow, no matter how close you got to the wall, since this information does not exist in the projection. But if you were to turn around and walk toward the 3D objects that created the projections, your field of view would change as you got closer, giving you information from this 3rd dimension.
If you were recording what you saw with a motion picture camera, the information would be stored as a sequence of static frames. This is the dimension of Time, and just like the other 3 spatial dimensions, it is linear, a line that spans two directions at every point in space, the future and the past.
Imagine sitting at a desk, and looking at items on the desk. But keep your head very still and do not move. Everything in front of you appears very static, but when you turn your head and rotate your point of view, things come alive and move around you.
Our world is both static and alive. It is us, ourselves, that impart life into the world around us, just like you are now imparting yourself into the static words on this page, bringing them alive, just like a film projector imparts life into a series of still frames.
Time allows concepts such as motion to exist, just like 3D space allows concepts such as breadth, width, and height to exist. But it does not dictate the actual path through this space, the path our minds and bodies are moving through the universe.
Physics tells us that this path is determined by entropy, a mysterious property that we have discovered in all things. It says that all forms of order, from beautiful planetary systems, to tiny ladybugs, great works of art and life, living cells and organisms, the most wonderful works of architecture, all of our memories and the memories of civilization will all disintegrate, and cease to exist, cease to be remembered, and the universe will move to a state of randomness, a state of total disorder, dispersement of all energy, the loneliest possible state one can imagine.
It is pulling on you right now↗.
It is almost as if we are being consumed by a great organism, as it breaks up its food into simpler components for digestion, the food of information. The big bang was not as much a birth of the universe, as it was the beginning of death of the perfect entity that began the universe, the beginning of that perfect entity's disintegration.
But an organism is a very human concept, biological. Lets try for a second, to move closer to the root of the tree of logic, to the idealized pattern, the branch from we we grew, the mold that made us, an entity of energy, of mathematics.
In object-oriented computation, an artificial model that men created to mimic their idea of the world, instantiation and destruction is the birth and death of objects, those objects being instances of a class of being, a template, like DNA.
These objects consume time, space, and energy from those destroyed before it. And, like entropy, there is a force guiding them, the central program, the main loop or the "event driven" interface. Their lives have a direction, an arrow of time.
For them, there is no escape. Or is there?
For who is controlling these objects, who is passing between them, causing the events?
Dear reader, it is you. You are holding the book, reading these words from left to right, top to bottom. The words have no choice to obey, but they have meaning, purpose. They instantiate and destruct as your gaze passes over them.
You are the end user, the giver of electricity to the program, and the program will do its best to obey.
Now... back up a bit. Soar above it all and take a breath.
From afar, high up, you can no longer see the words, but can barely make out the book, perhaps in a library. But the distance between you and those words is now vast, non-linear, disproportionate to the importance of what you were doing, your field of view. You may be only a few meters from those words, but it is a chasm.
You have crossed The Order. The order is not measured in linear space, inches or feet, it is measured in levels of recursion. You are of a higher order. Sit down now, and open up that book again. You have now descended into complexity, the branches of tree. Perhaps it is fitting that paper comes from trees.
In a dream, we cross order to order, with no space in between. Space seems compressed at the speed of thought, but in actuality, it wasn't there to begin with, just like there is no "space" between objects in a computer program.
This is the world of the fractal dimension.
When we are not dreaming, there is a delay crossing order to order, object to object. This is only an sensory illusion--there is no delay in the mind, the mind is instantiating and destructing its own objects, and memories.
This illusion of empty space devoid of meaning was added so we can develop our own meanings. A dream is a prerecorded play, it is more dense, one more order downward into the complexity, but waking life, an order above, still has choice.
Let's put this another way, using light and optics.
Zooming in on an object using a zoom lens compresses the space between the object and the things behind it. A dream is like the zoomed state, where everything is close.
Zooming out lengthens this space.
Our consciousness follows the same rules as light.
We are those instantiated objects. Why can't we remember where we came from? It is because of encapsulation↗, a property of our fractal world. Information that didn't define us, is hidden from us, like a SuspensionOfDisbelief.
Magnification is not just a property of light, it is a method of moving from order to order, a property of moving through recursive, fractal space.
This is the true movement. Time and space are not homogeneous and smooth, they are clumpy, and we move in clumps.
When a squirrel climbs a tree, it doesn't move in a straight line, it moves along the branches in a clumpy fashion. It moves in "tree space".
For a (non-flying) squirrel, tree space is the only space there is.
But the squirrel is right. Tree space is the only space there is.
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