More Expansive Speculations

Trying to see how architectivity might arise out of connectivity, I often arrive at the picture of a standing wave. But a wave can't stand without having an architective anchor point, and what makes this really interesting is that it needs either TWO anchors or enclosure in an architecture of at least TWO dimensions.

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Do connective systems enclosed in containing architectures display holisms of their own? Certainly any one participating object in a connective cannot be completely described without considering an effective influence of the connective in its entirety, but the influence of the container must be included. So yes, enclosed connectives display a holism but the total influence here is more than that of the connective and its holism.

It could well be that each of us sports an individual cerebral holism, a personal holism of our brains, purely connective, not interacting with, controlling nor organizing us, but apprehending our minds and bodies in the way I have described in Physical Spirituality for holisms. The idea of a personal 'soul' comes to mind, but in this case it is purely connective, is encased within one's skull, and does not persist after death.

Interestingly, enclosed connectives are susceptible to resonance when waves pass through them, which open connectives are not, meaning that waves passing through our brains, enclosed as they are by our skulls, could make them resonate.

Could it be that persisting resonances due to their enclosure by the architective skull provide the architective basis for our architective mode of sentience?

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I'm beginning to think there are connective and architective senses of humour.

I see the architective sense of humour when a higher level takes advantage of the inadequacy of those at a lower level. I remember my two year old's peals of laughter when he snuck up on the cat and pulled its tail. Or chasing chickens around the yard.

So what would a connective sense of humour look like? It certainly wouldn't require a misfortune at another's expense. Perhaps an unexpected movement, harmony or a falling flat?

Jokes about tits, bums, farts and other taboos are architective. Puns are architective.

However, a "sense of humour" also implies a sense of frivolity, of not being serious. The line between architective humour and outright aggression is a thin one.

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Within the architective window, architectivity will constrain, or attempt to constrain, any form of connective play. Within the architective window, the intergeneration of connectivity and architectivity (that is, more connectivity provides more opportunities for constraint, while more constraint provides more objects to relate connectively) escalates in spirals of fecundity, and will do so for as long as the emerging fields of connective play stay within architective reach.

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Every object is not only vibrating in whichever ways it is free to do so, but its constituent objects are also vibrating (at amplitudes sublimate to their constraints) and their constituent objects too etc.. Interestingly, all of these vibrations are likely to be at different frequencies.

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What if scale is itself a dimension independent of space? That is, what if scale was an absolute and separate physical dimension of reality much as space and time are?

Look at it like this: If scale was in some way absolute and independent of space, then at the time of the Big Bang, and for a brief time thereafter, the universe would have been so small that it would have fitted within the scale of the architective window. In that case the universe could have begun as a single architective whole. And with no other objects around, the cosmos of the time would have been devoid of connectivity.

As the universe expanded, it would have got to a size where as a single object it became too large to fit into the architective window of scale, and so split into two or more objects that would fit (and connectivity was born). Subsequently these objects would also have expanded until they too became too large to fit in the architective window, and they split again, and so on. This process of spatial expansion followed by sporadic splits would have continued to this day, delivering the distribution of objects and object sizes we see in the universe today. By this scenario, in the distant future, today's largest objects (which I think are the rocky planets) would also eventually need to split as space keeps on expanding. Talk of the universe eventually reaching a thermodynamic equilibrium would need to be accompanied by talk of shattering objects in a world of ever-increasing connectivity.

Starting at the first split, the levels of splitting might be evident in the large scale intergalactic structures we see today. Perhaps each galaxy is the remnant of an ancient but single splitting event.

From this point of view, the 'bangs' in the unfolding of our universe would have taken place as a sequence of smaller, gradually more scattered bangs, rather than, or in addition to, a single big one at the beginning.

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Are there scales other than the spatial scale within which we are confined to a window?

Yes. Being water based organisms we are confined to a thermal scale between the freezing and boiling temperatures of water (which may vary slightly with pressure).

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I earlier described how mass can be lost or gained by an architective binding of objects, such as when atoms bind to become molecules, or when atomic nuclei fuse, illustrating how an architective binding of objects creates a whole, new, different and single object.

In the case of pair production, a positron and electron are created from a meeting of photons. Here we have two objects being created, in this case not from an architective binding of objects but a connective interaction of bosons. Quarks too arise from a meeting of gluons, where again, objects are created from an interaction of bosons.

In one scenario an architective interaction between objects creates a single different object, and the objects that went into the creation can be considered constituents of the created object; while in the other, a connective interaction between bosons creates non-single objects, and where the bosons that went into the creation cannot be considered constituents of the created objects. (In pair producion an electron/positron pair is created while quarks are only ever produced as mesons (a pair of quarks) or hadrons (a triplet of quarks) or even tetraquarks or pentaquarks - but never single quarks.)

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Could this creation of architective objects from an interaction of connective bosons (and the converse of pair annihilation) indicate that architectivity and connectivity are mutually reducible? Here we have massive, charged objects being created from connective bosons which are both massless and chargeless, that is, from pure energy. (And in the case of quark production, isn't it interesting that charge can be produced from a nuclear rather than an electromagnetic interaction?)

In Physical Spirituality I argued that they are irreducible, that "The existence of objects can't be explained in terms of waves or vibration alone - boundaries are needed to anchor vibrations into objects, otherwise they would just be passing consonances." Both lepton and quark production rely on the nearby presence of a comparatively massive atomic nucleus (in order to conserve momentum), which I see as providing the necessary architective anchor. So even in this case, architectivity cannot be created from connectivity alone. Conversely, in the case of pair annihilation, a companion atomic nucleus is not always necessary so connective bosons may be created from architective objects alone, but then architectivity is after all connectivity constrained; the annihilation merely having removed the constraint. Nonetheless, in terms of serial meaning, the two modes are completely irreducible.

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Variations of energy in a system can carry significant meaning. In particular, energy can dance. Psychedelic experiences tell us that this dance is hugely significant, while the song of the Cosmic Deity (as proposed in Physical Spirituality) is supremely relevant.

Architectively bound objects cannot dance freely. They can only dance internally and to tunes that are subliminal. Unbound and uncontained objects can dance freely while bosons too can dance freely in interference. When unbound, leptons such as electrons can dance freely but quarks never appear in an unbound state due to strong force confinement, so quarks can't dance.