What's With The Name?

You're probably wondering why this blog is called 'Fractal Mindscape' and what on earth 'res cogitans est res extensa' means. Well, I'm sure you're at least faintly aware that the mystery of our conscious awareness has been hopelessly explained by organized religion and scientific investigations seems to yeild more questions than answers. Not only do we exist within an apparent mystery, but it gets more mysterious as it goes along.

It has been my experience that the best way to navigate this puzzle is by inventing one's own explanation, and this is what I am in the process of doing. It has also been my experience that entire classloads of students at one of the best medical schools in the world have no idea what a fractal is, so dont despair if you don't either. The fractal has been a useful tool which I have used to create my cosmology, for it is an infinitely recursive pattern that is different at every level, yet somehow also the same. Any segment will hint at the nature of the whole, and any piece will contain elements of or relationships with all of the other pieces. You can zoom into it forever and zoom out of it forevermore. Such is the universe. We have got as far as neutrinos on the in-zoom and hypergalaxies on the out-zoom and the main thing we have realized is that there seems to be more space here than anything else. Quantum physicists operating the most sophisticated and expensive scientific instruments ever built have fled to India to smoke hashish and grow dreadlocks because of what they saw when they were permitted a glimpse through the veil of what we assume to be real.

The core of our being is our consciousness, which does not stop at the boundaries of our bodies. We have all experienced information that has filtered through to us from a medium other than the senses we are familiar with. We are intermingling fields of consciousness, our bodies the epicentres of these fields, as much mind as they are physical.

Unfortunately, we have been led to believe otherwise by a man called Renee Descartes, whose insistence that mind (res cogitans) is separate from body (res extensa) has shaped the scientific paradigm for centuries. It has also removed us from nature, giving us dominion over it and the propensity to pick it to pieces to see how it works, as if it were a machine. Science is coming full circle with discoveries in most disciplines that are unravelling systems of thought that took centuries to construct, and systems theory is demolishing the walls we have built to compartmentalize what we think we know. Our increasing familiarity with the atom (still derived from our tendency to smash it to bits) and the universe is leading many on the forefront (no longer just the fringes) of science to conclude that what we once thought of as physical, may indeed be just thoughts in a mind and our minds in its thought, part of an infinitely recursive pattern that is different on every level, yet somehow the same.