How can it be both?

When i came back online i considered changing my handle from insomniac, ‘cuz it no longer seemed to fit. Since retirement, i’ve been sleeping straight through.

Well, here i am, three in the morning, pondering at the keyboard, just like old times.

How can it be? How can the Universe be both material and ethereal at the same time? This is a fundamental question being asked over and over in blogs, on message boards, street corners and cafes. It is the single argument with so many different manifestations. Particle or wave, fact or fantasy, mind or matter, determinism or free will all stem from the same question. How can it be both?

Easy; it is all in how you look at it. The Universe consists of matter, energy and information. If you look at the matter by itself, it seems solid enough. If you look at energy by itself, the Universe looks chaotic, random and very hot or cold. If you look at the information by itself, the Universe becomes a phantom history of the doings of solid things amid chaos. Our Universe consists of all three. Considered together our Universe becomes less solid, less chaotic and more rational.

Is it solid or is it imaginary? Both! The Universe is solid, but dynamic, made out of energy and therefore not so solid over time. The interaction of matter and energy over time produce information in the form of an active memory. The Universe isn’t imaginary, but it has an active imagination.

You and i work with our own personal version of that universal user interface. The System lets you perceive your interface any way you see fit. It is done to you as you believe.

cheers,
jim

Biological Operating System

All creatures alive today, plus the remains of all living things that have gone before, all the organic compounds, all fossils, all fossil fuels, all the biomass accumulated by this planet over billions of years, exists because, information coded into DNA was accessed, read and acted upon by a cell. Before any one of those cells could grow, before any living tissue could be manufactured, before any polypeptide chains could be assembled, before anything could happen in ANY cell, DNA information had to be processed. Information processing is the very first act of Life.

Why is this an important distinction? Because information processing involves a set of concepts that are independent of the processing method being used. For one, there must exist a consistent set of rules or protocols that govern information processing within the system. This is called an operating system, or OS.

All living organisms follow the same rules for accessing and reading DNA code. These universal rules infer the existence of a biological operating system. I call it LifeOS.

It all started…

Hi, my name is jim.

For me this all started when John Lilly introduced the concept of a bio-computer in, “Center of the Cyclone”, in the early ’70s. He talked about “meta programming our biocomputer”. In those days the concept of the computer was still vague at best and few of us had any notion of what the computer would become. Still it was easy to grasp the concept that our behavior could be “programmed” by outside events or our own conscious decisions.

In the last ten years i’ve had a hands on education in the inner workings of computers, programming and the code driven systems that make up the internet. It has become obvious to me that John Lilly was right! There are many noteworthy similarities between computer networks and our own nervous system. First of which is that they are both code driven systems.

A note of thanks to the many folks on the ‘net for following the geeky habit of comparing everything in the world to one computer function or another. It shouldn’t come as a surprise that people name virtual functions after their nearest conceptual counterpart, but besides stimulating the imagination, the practice has given us a model that can help us understand the real thing.

Speculation about the future of computers has surly given us some great sci-fi, from HAL in the Space Odessy thru the Matrix movies. These days we are quite comfortable with concepts that would have been impossible to imagine just a few years ago. Maybe you’ve read some of the articles around the web that compare the Universe to a giant computer or life to a simulation. Of course, there is Michael Talbot’s book, The Holographic Universe, wherein he outlines that concept. There is good reason for the proliferation of this kind of thinking; it’s a good fit.

LifeOS started as just a title for a collection of articles and notes that compared different parts of computer systems to our own nervous systems. It took a few years for it to evolve into its present form… a mock holographic operating system used as a model for reality.

DISCLAIMER: The LifeOS series is informational only and will not operate any computer or interfere with any computer operating system.

Cheers,

jim cranford

It’s in the Code

It is obvious that there are some similarities between computers and the function of our nervous system. After all, the computer was designed as an extension of our own capabilities and could be expected to follow some of the same patterns. Many of the concepts and much of the terminology that has developed in the computer industry have counterparts in our own functional intelligence. For example, we have a short term memory that we access instantly and a long term memory that takes at least a “Hmmm” or a head scratch before it finds the info. That’s like your computer’s RAM memory, storing the short term stuff and the hard drive which stores for the long term.

Not only have computers helped us do things, but they have educated us as well. They have given us a model for understanding how life works. It is in the code.