Tuesday, July 12, 2011

Self-Similarity

Throughout the course of my work, I've implicitly made reference to a type of similarity which also different, giving numerous interpretive schema along the way that was capable of at least tacitly accounting for this repetition. The foundation for this has been a thorough investigation into fractal geometry in which each part of a whole is more or less an exact copy of the whole. That is to say, if you take a look at a fractal, and then proceed to zoom in at various scales of magnification, the fractal will keep its overall shape, or you will be able to see little copies of the whole as you zoom in. This is known as self-similarity.

The sort of logic that can be drawn out of such a shape is one of scale invariance. To use a social sciences example, the same laws that apply to individuals, would apply en masse to societies, cultures, groups and so on.

During the course of my work, I have tried to point out the fractal nature of self-referential utterances such as $This Sentence is False$ which relies on a specific kind of recursion. That is to say, the last output becomes the next input into the function. This sort of recursion is implicit to fractality and is also a prevalent motif in Hofstadter's great work _Godel, Escher, and Bach_.

The eternal golden braid is the helicoid acid and holomorphic structure of none other than the bodies that constitute life. They too have an image of the whole present at each indivisible unit known as the cell.

The implications of this self-similarity resound within a new geometry in which each of the parts reflect each of the other parts within a reflexive and undifferentiable matrix of re-entry.

This (to a certain extent) can resolve the paradox of Western Ontology which was discussed in the Lossy Compression post.

It will be interesting to see how far self-similarity and fractal geometry can be taken as literary devices.

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