The Fractal Self Quotes

“Metaphorically, Daoism anticipates something like the butterfly effect.

Way-making (dao) gives rise to continuity,
Continuity gives rise to difference,
Difference to plurality,
And plurality gives rise to the manifold of everything that is happening (wanwu)

In Chinese thought, this transformation is called Dahua, the great transformation, a principle that seems to express glimpses of universal evolution.”
― David Jones, The Fractal Self: Science, Philosophy, and the Evolution of Human Cooperation

“Furthermore, we suggest a fractal self is capable of growth and a kind of metamorphosis. Daoists refer to a seasoned human cooperator and facilitator, working adroitly, with a natural ease in the smooth, orderly, adaptive spirit of wuwei, as a sage. Such an individual is typically embedded in a particular affinitive complex system. An affinitive system is virtually anything in nature or human endeavor that is avidly sought by an individual in pursuit of vocation or avocation-a business, social, educational, artistic, scientific, or governmental enterprise, and so forth. Such systems typically develop chaotic structures and behaviors; envisioned as geometrical forms, they often constitute complicated attractors; around the edges of their coherent existence they would tend to be fractally organized, transcending classic dimensionality (see introduction). The sage tends to develop into a leader or catalyst within his or her affinitive system as he or she progressively "evolves" over time into increasing levels of intimacy and coherence with the system.”
― David Jones, The Fractal Self: Science, Philosophy, and the Evolution of Human Cooperation

“Thus wuwei manifests itself in the adaptive integration of the interacting parts of units of a complex system. The tendency of wuwei is to lead a system toward a state of fractal congruence, a close fitting together, a coalescing, of its significant components. The cooperation of those components facilitates the functioning of the system on its new holistic level. At the highest levels of complexity, wuwei integrates human beings into the systems of the world. This process of integration represents a synergistic enhancement of Dao by empathic human participants in cooperation with nature and with the outgrowths of human nature that have emerged from our evolutionary history and constitute culture. Thus, a fractal self is such a human being who is a participant with others, open to various worlds within nature and culture, and this person becomes a potential facilitator of emergence.”
― David Jones, The Fractal Self: Science, Philosophy, and the Evolution of Human Cooperation

“The Daoist concept wuwei, which means literally nonaction, but carries connotations of spontaneous, natural, and nonassertive or nondirected action, emphasizes the orderly becoming of the world; it reflects the natural, unconscious, and nondirected action within an anti-teleological process model of the world to which Laozi, the mythical author of the Daodejing, or the Classic of the Power of the Way (also known as the Laozi), refers. The flow of the world (proceeding out of its seamless structure) is Dao in action, or "way-making." The shaping of Dao then is understood as wuwei: in its self-organizing fashion, Dao "really does things non-coercively, yet everything gets done," and "Were the nobles and kings able to respect this, All things (wanwu) would be able to develop along their own lines.”
― David Jones, The Fractal Self: Science, Philosophy, and the Evolution of Human Cooperation

“Mandelbrot's insights are reminiscent of the approach taken by the ancient formulators of the Yijing, the Chinese classic Book of Changes, who seem to be the first to arrive at an understanding of interlocking patterns of the human and natural worlds. Their insight was to imagine "a system of coordinates, a tabulation framework, a stratified matrix in which everything had its position, connected by the 'proper channels' with everything else." Chinese philosophers during the second and third centuries would also maintain that the seamless dimensionality in nature is the definitive characteristic of Dao-the way the world is formed and the way it behaves: "Way-making (dao) is the flowing together of all things (wanwu)," and "It is inherent in things that they are ties to each other, that one kind calls up another." Dao, or "way," is in many ways just life itself, the flowing of life, or even the changing world itself. "The flowing together of all things" in the quote above is wanwu, the totality of all that is happening in the world.”
― John L Culliney, The Fractal Self: Science, Philosophy, and the Evolution of Human Cooperation

“Earlier in this chapter we noted that a wide range of birds and mammals, including humans, express such behavior in varying ecological contexts. This core complex of intimate emotional connection then, in humans, may rise to the next level: cognitive empathy-an active seeking to understand the other's mental state-and ultimately to "attribution," which is the most complex state of assumption of another's mentality of the moment, modeling it within one's own consciousness. In this section and through the rest of this book we will see that the dawning of the fractal self in the human condition extends the Russian doll to a new outermost entity-namely, a prosocial awareness, pregnant with expansive conscious potential of human beings to empathize across scale through our affinitive worlds of culture and nature. However, the process is full of setbacks, in all societies and on many scales.”
― John L Culliney, The Fractal Self: Science, Philosophy, and the Evolution of Human Cooperation

“In Plato's thinking, our desire for immortality is what drives us to reproduce (hence to heterosexual expression). The great philosopher would not have clearly understood that any particular eukaryotic legacy declines exponentially toward the vanishing point in subsequent generations....”
― John L Culliney, The Fractal Self: Science, Philosophy, and the Evolution of Human Cooperation

“Sex thus represents a defending mechanism of long-term biodiversity, versus cloning that would trend strongly toward competition. Although competitive traits never go away, their intensity and distribution are moderated, and sexuality powerfully lowers the curve of increasing aggressive tendency within any species. Sex as a key principle of biotic intimacy is a safety valve in nature against an ultimate, self-destructive integrity of aggressive replicators that would diminish life's complexity and turn evolutionary expression toward a brutish simplicity. In the long run, sex may protect against the threat of bottlenecking gene pools with populations envisioned by Tennyson-"red in tooth and claw"-having impoverished endowment for survival in a world of change on many fronts.”
― John L Culliney, The Fractal Self: Science, Philosophy, and the Evolution of Human Cooperation

“If nothing else were to happen beyond independent assortment in gamete formation, when sperm and egg combine after sexual intercourse to form a new human embryo, then 2^23 X 2^23 parental chromosome combinations in the diploid complememt of forty-six are possible in any given offspring. Thus, minimally, each of us represents one of about seventy trillion possible genetic beings.”
― John L Culliney, The Fractal Self: Science, Philosophy, and the Evolution of Human Cooperation

“The word shaman comes to us from the Tungus language of Siberia and means "he or she who knows.”
― John L Culliney, The Fractal Self: Science, Philosophy, and the Evolution of Human Cooperation

“Shamans, as the classicist E.R. Dodds defines them, have "received a call to a religious life. As a result of this call [they undergo] a period of rigorous training, which commonly involves solitude and fasting, and may involve a psychological change of sex." Once the shaman emerges from this religious training, he possesses, according to Dodds,

the power, real or assumed, of passing at will into a state of mental dissociation. In that condition he is not thought...to be possessed by an alien spirit; but his own soul is thought to leave the body and travel to distant parts, most often to the spirit world. A shaman...has the power of bilocation. From these experiences, narrated by him in extempore song, he derives skill in divination, religious poetry, and magical medicine which makes him socially important. He becomes the repository of a supernormal wisdom.

Thus, shamans seek a balance between the mythical/magical and the real Earth; that is, they are students of the plants, animals, rivers, and the rest of nature. They instinctively feel and see magic in the state of nature and have an intensified intimacy with nature beyond any of their lay counterparts in society-their selves are fractally enmeshed with the patterns of the natural world. Not only do shamans move between the normal and supernormal, between the human and natural worlds, they also develop a heightened state of empathy with their fellow human beings.”
― John L Culliney, The Fractal Self: Science, Philosophy, and the Evolution of Human Cooperation

“Lighter elements are thus "burned" in stars and the "ashes" emerge as brand-new heavier elements. The energy released by this burning is the energy of suns.”
― John L Culliney, The Fractal Self: Science, Philosophy, and the Evolution of Human Cooperation

“The astonishing finale of this story to date is that out of the song that recorded itself across the cosmos in radiant immortality, there also emerged the universe's dominant physical structure. Over eons, the slightly elevated gravity of compressed (denser) regions pulled matter together into patches of stars, quasars, and galaxies, while the rarefied zones remained relatively empty voids. Scientists mapping space have now confirmed these patterns on scales up to more than several billion light-years.”
― John L Culliney, The Fractal Self: Science, Philosophy, and the Evolution of Human Cooperation

“Compression in a medium raises its temperature, and rarefaction induces cooling. Thus the distribution of temperature through the plasma patterned itself exactly in synchrony with the sound waves. Slightly warmer and cooler regions formed in space, marking extremes of high and low plasma density. As the universal song extended through time, these regions expanded, and they oscillated in temperature with the beat. Then the song of the plasma ended at the recombination phase of the universe, when matter abruptly thinned and stopped the music. However all of the sounds then playing left a ghostly imprint on the cosmos in the shape of final warm and cool patches in the radiation (photon) field of space. The patches were of varying sizes, depending on each particular acoustic wavelength in the pattern of overtones that existed when the song stopped playing. The largest patches of all were cool and represented the traces of the fundamental wave of the universal sounding board-stretching from earliest compression to final rarefaction at the time of recombination.

From this time, the immortal song was recorded in light-temperature (the energy of photons), and even galaxies would eventually dance to its rhythms. This is a milestone in modern cosmological understanding of the universe in its infancy, elucidated during three decades of brilliant research involving numerous scientists from many countries.”
― John L Culliney, The Fractal Self: Science, Philosophy, and the Evolution of Human Cooperation

“The sound of the universe began with kinetic energy playing through small variations in plasma density: compression and rarefaction. Owing to the almost instantaneous inflation after the Big Bang, those density variations (sound waves) of the same intensity appeared on all scales virtually at once. This started all the sound waves in phase with each other. The universe had tuned itself like a musical instrument, and it began to play with overtones or harmonics, like an organ in a cathedral.”
― John L Culliney, The Fractal Self: Science, Philosophy, and the Evolution of Human Cooperation

“The small surplus of matter over antimatter was only one of the asymmetries. Equally profound, engendering structure out of the matter that remained, was gravitational energy that broke out of the unified energy field at the beginning of the universe we inhabit. Following inflation, gravity amplified its effects throughout space in response to the stretched quantum fluctuations that first set the patterns into which structure would evolve. Matter began to concentrate in some regions, leaving other areas relatively less dense. The distribution of galaxies would later correlate with this initial pattern of lumpiness. In other ways, the early shaping of our universe may have progressed through discontinuities emerging out of symmetrical force fields that then took particular forms within the wrinkled "quantum fabric" of spacetime. One seminal example that led out of physics to chemistry and, ultimately, biology was a unified particle symmetry that concerned an electron-neutrino unity. These particles assume a smooth, uniform identity-virtually pure energy at an extremely high temperature-but, upon cooling to a certain threshold, suddenly break into unique entities, with the electron assuming much more of its energy as mass and the potential to build the emergent complexity of chemistry around elemental matter. Thus, the early breaking of symmetries led to various subsequent processes to shape the universe on all scales with an inexorable potential for the emergence of everything.”
― John L Culliney, The Fractal Self: Science, Philosophy, and the Evolution of Human Cooperation

“Close to the very beginning of everything, a roughness was imposed on the universe. Its properties-energy, mass, and the forces uniting mass-energy-began in a completely unified state, but they would not stay that way for long and would be profoundly affected by the stretching of quantum irregularities. Quickly, the smooth homogeneity of everything developed waves, lumps, and wrinkles, especially variations of the density of energy and mass that began to structure space and time. Also, superimposed on the enormously magnified quantum effects to further shape the cosmos was a process physicists have termed symmetry-breaking.”
― John L Culliney, The Fractal Self: Science, Philosophy, and the Evolution of Human Cooperation

“Between familiar constructs such as a two-dimensional surface and a three-dimensional volume was an infinity of intermediate form. Mandelbrot introduced the term "fractal" (the key to the fractional geometrical world). And it became a breakthrough that cracked the code of chaos. It is now clear that the infinitely iterative fractal governs the onset of turbulence on the borders of attractors throughout nature at all levels of organization.”
― John L Culliney, The Fractal Self: Science, Philosophy, and the Evolution of Human Cooperation

“We propose that universal evolution has been catalyzed at every step by a new principle, the cooperative constant, and we will speculate on where the trail may yet lead.”
― John L Culliney, The Fractal Self: Science, Philosophy, and the Evolution of Human Cooperation

“Borrowing freely from science, philosophy, and religion, we presume to hope that readers will encounter a newly consilient and satisfying worldview that places humanity, as fractal selves, essentially within the process of the becoming of the universe.”
― John L Culliney, The Fractal Self: Science, Philosophy, and the Evolution of Human Cooperation