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A Sourcebook for the Worldwide Discovery of a Creative Organic Universe
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II. Pedia Sapiens: A Planetary Progeny Comes to Her/His Own Actual Factual Knowledge

3. The Book of Naturome: A New Translation

Brandt, Christina. Genetic Code, Text, and Scripture: Metaphors and Narration in German Molecular Biology. Science in Context. 18/4, 2005. In this international journal from the Cohn Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Ideas, Tel Aviv University, a Max Planck Institute for the History of Science scholar provides an insightful review of decades of cross-fertilization between bioinformational and linguistic realms, with an emphasis on the work of philosopher Hans Blumenberg and biochemist Gerhard Schramm.

In addition, the metaphor of a “genetic code” and the comparison of the genome to text and alphabet remain within a long occidental tradition according to which nature and the world are seen as entities accessible through writing or encrypted as cipher. Thus, the metaphor of a “genetic text,” which offers in the first instance a description of cellular mechanism as processes of reading and writing, holds strong connotations to the notion of “Scripture” which is central to the western religious canon. The metaphor of the “Book of Nature,” which as a part of Western tradition has gone through many changes, is also present in the code concept of modern life sciences. (631)

Butner, Jonathan, et al. When the Facts Just Don’t Add Up: The Fractal Nature of Conversational Stories. Social Cognition. 26/6, 2008. By applying dynamic systems theory, University of Utah psychologists are able to parse conversational reports so as to quantify an inherent thematic repetition, as per the extended quote. We note in this section for it lately seems, via worldwide mindkind, that universe to human natural creation likewise nests and repeats the same story over and over, as it reflects the intrinsic genomic code everywhere. Here, in such an organic gestation at its earthly nativity, could be a once and future great illumination for us.

Fractals are a mathematical description of a pattern – that a pattern repeats across resolutions of time. (672) On the theoretical side stories that are fractal in time involve a patterned and meaningful distribution of facts and interpretations that is neither random nor linear. (672) A story structured fractally in time would also contain a repeating pattern that is overlaid across many resolutions, in this case, resolutions of time. If we think about temporal resolutions of a story as words, phrases, sentences, and paragraphs, then examining any one resolution (e.g., sentences) would result in a coherent pattern that seems to repeat, but also branch in a seemingly irregular manner. (674) If one were to change the resolution to another temporal unit, say phrases, again won would witness a coherent repeating pattern similar to the previous one. Change the resolution again, for example, to words, and one would still see a similarity – this is a self-similarity function in resolution. (674)

Changizi, Mark, et al. The Structures of Letters and Symbols throughout Human History are Selected to Match Those Found in Objects in Natural Scenes. American Naturalist. 167/5, 2006. Caltech neurobiologists find universal geometries across a wide range of alphabets, logograms, and symbols, which can then be traced to the shapes of natural objects that primate brains have evolved in a response to.

Curtius, Ernst. European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973. This erudite classic by the German romance literary scholar contains a chapter on The Book as Symbol for a numinous creation intended for our edification, within which the section “The Book of Nature” is a standard reference for this perennial trope and metaphor. From Hugh of St. Victor in the 12th century to Galileo into the 17th, a sense and discernment of a second natural scripture was at the heart of theological insight.

Danielson, Dennis. Paradise Lost and the Cosmological Revolution. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. The University of British Columbia professor of English proceeds to contrast John Milton’s epic 1670s poem Paradise Lost with the reach of modern astrophysics since both are drawn to posit a multitude of cosmoses from which our ominous earthly sojourn arises. From the first pages it is also shown that Milton believed his stanzas were entries, as did Galileo and Newton, to the natural book of God’s works, which was the reigning motif of this age.

This volume brings John Milton's Paradise Lost into dialogue with the challenges of cosmology and the world of Galileo, whom Milton met and admired: a universe encompassing space travel, an earth that participates vibrantly in the cosmic dance, and stars that are "world[s] / Of destined habitation." Milton's bold depiction of our universe as merely a small part of a larger multiverse allows the removal of hell from the center of the earth to a location in the primordial abyss. In this wide-ranging work, Dennis Danielson lucidly unfolds early modern cosmological debates, engaging not only Galileo but also Copernicus, Tycho, Kepler, and the English Copernicans, thus placing Milton at a rich crossroads of epic poetry and the history of science.

Debus, Allen and Michael Walton, eds. Reading the Book of Nature. Kirksville, MO: Thomas Jefferson University Press, 1998. An anthology both from original, medieval sources and current scholarship that conveys the analogical, interpretative milieu wherein every natural entity, object and event was an epitome of each other in a vertical scale reaching to their Creator.

Dehaene, Stanislas. Reading in the Brain. New York: Viking, 2009. The College de France cognitive neuroscientist sets as his task to move beyond the “standard model” that our diverse cultures occur without any connection to a cerebral substrate. Rather we are a “mysterious reading ape” whom due to an associative “theory of mind” and collaborative “global workspace,” both for each conscious brain and our social groups, are hard-wired by evolution to form alphabetic writing systems. Instead of a cultural relativism or blank slate, a novel hypothesis of “neuronal recycling” is proposed whereby such hominid propensities provide this extraordinary capacity to express a written literacy by which to describe and enhance our world. By these lights, invariant principles can be distilled from the myriad languages and scripts, along with constant mythic forms in the sense of Claude Levi-Strauss. Please now compare with Changizi, et al, 2006, who reach just these conclusions.

Reading rests upon primitive neuronal mechanisms of primate vision that have been preserved over the course of evolution. Animal studies show that the monkey’s brain houses a hierarchy of neurons that respond to fragments of visual scenes. Collectively, these neurons contain a stock of elementary shapes whose combinations can encode any visual object. Some macaque monkey neurons even respond to line junctions resembling our letter shapes (e.g., T, Y, and L). Those shapes constitute useful invariants for recognizing objects. According to the “neuronal recycling” hypothesis, when we learn to read, part of this neuronal hierarchy converts to the new task of recognizing letters and words. (121)

In summary, a well-developed network of dense long-distance connections is present in the human brain. They form a global workspace that allows for the confrontation, synthesis, and distribution of information arising from other brain processors. This system is further endowed with a fringe of spontaneous fluctuation that allows for the testing of new ideas. I believe that the recent expansion of this global workspace network is closely related to both the emergence of reflexive consciousness and to the human competence for cultural invention. (321)

Dowek, Gilles. The Physical Church Thesis as an Explanation of the Galileo Thesis. Natural Computing. 11/2, 2012. The paper begins with Galileo’s iconic paragraph that Divine nature is ultimately mathematical in its formative essence. But it is said he did not go on to specify what this actually entails. Some four centuries later, the Deputy Scientific Director of the French National Institute for Research in Computer Science and Control (INRIA its French acronym), with responsibility for “algorithms, programming, software, and architectures,” offers an answer. This “Physical Church Thesis,” due to Alonzo Church (1903-1995) an American logician, in collaboration with Alan Turing, aka Turing-Church thesis, is seen to represent a reality that in some way is computational in kind. By this 21st century paradigm, the natural realm may be seen as characterized, pervaded, and moved by such an informational, programmatic source.

Thus, if the physical Church thesis holds, then all physically realized relations are computable, hence they can be expressed by a proposition of the language of mathematics, i.e., the Galileo thesis holds. (248) A side effect of this explanation of the Galileo thesis is that the laws of nature can be described not only in the language of mathematics, but also in a language designed to express algorithms: a programming language. (249) Yet, this algorithmic description of the laws of nature may have a broader scope than the description of the laws of nature with differential equations. For instance, the transformation of a messenger RNA string to a protein is easily expressed by an algorithm, while it cannot be expressed by a differential equation. (249)

Drucker, Johanna. The Alphabetic Labyrinth. London: Thames and Hudson, 1995. In part on the mid 17th century belief in a natural testament. The incentive at the time was to recover a primal Adamic language used to name the creatures and artifacts of this world by which to discern the Godhead, of whom each person is a hieroglyph.

Eco, Umberto. The Search for the Perfect Language. Oxford: Blackwell, 1995. Per his resource website, www.umbertoeco.com, “Umberto Eco is a world renowned novelist, medievalist, philosopher, semiotician and literary critic.” In this work Eco draws upon his immense scholarship to present a European history from bible and kabbalah to the 20th century of persistent, malleable efforts to both discern a natural script and to better inscribe one. Prime areas are medieval metaphysics and encyclopedic projects as they sought to touch, trace and articulate an extant reality that is in some way deeply textual in kind.

Friedman, Matti. The Aleppo Codex: A True Story of Obsession, Faith, and the Pursuit of an Ancient Bible. Chapel Hill, NC: Algonquin Books, 2012. As the publisher cites below, an investigative journalist based in Jerusalem deftly reconstructs a narrative better than fiction of how culturally important it is for peoples of the book to preserve such a premier, venerable biblical edition. As a personal note, in March 2013 my wife and I had brunch with husband and wife nutritionists who were posted circa 1970 at American University in Beirut, then known as the Paris of the Mideast. They travelled then to Aleppo in Syria, indeed an historic treasure. Today both cities are under siege, Aleppo in ruins, due much to rampant weaponry and tribal warlords. It would seem, beg the issue, that a 21st century worldwide Cosmic Codex ought to be open, legible, a salutary genetic scripture, for all children, women and men.

A thousand years ago, the most perfect copy of the Hebrew Bible was written. It was kept safe through one upheaval after another in the Middle East, and by the 1940s it was housed in a dark grotto in Aleppo, Syria, and had become known around the world as the Aleppo Codex. Journalist Matti Friedman’s true-life detective story traces how this precious manuscript was smuggled from its hiding place in Syria into the newly founded state of Israel and how and why many of its most sacred and valuable pages went missing. It’s a tale that involves grizzled secret agents, pious clergymen, shrewd antiquities collectors, and highly placed national figures who, as it turns out, would do anything to get their hands on an ancient, decaying book. What it reveals are uncomfortable truths about greed, state cover-ups, and the fascinating role of historical treasures in creating a national identity. (Publisher)

Glacken, Clarence. Traces on the Rhodian Shore. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967. A masterful history of the human encounter with nature from Grecian times to the 18th century. Glacken finds the simile of a divinely inscribed creation to persist throughout.

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