GR as fractal world

[Gillies, Lindsay]

re Bonnie & jp's fractal chat:

[retaining jp's quote:]
"Soon toasters and toaster ovens, wood fires, RV kitchen microwaves,
gong-size skillets over propane flames, all working on bacon, links,
eggs,flapjacks waffles, hash browns, French toast, and hush puupies, were
sending out branching invisible fractals of smell, reaching all over the
place, fat smoke, charring spices, toasted bread, just made coffee." p.323,
Vineland, Little, Brown, 1990.

Almost a paraphrase of the penetrating odor of banana breakfast and its 
complex molecules nevertheless immediately obtainable to the senses..."never 
has death been so clearly told to fuck off"...perhaps the thing with 
fractals and other "genetic" programming (i.e., initially encoded mechanisms 
that elaborate themselves) is that it looks more and more like the real 
thing, perhaps becoming as real as necessary.

Consider a fractalization of a straight line, guided to overall conformance 
to the outline of Britain.  You can zoom in on any part of the coastline, 
generate additional fractallity, and it looks "accurate".  Potentially you 
can fractalize until the unit of line splitting becomes smaller than the 
unit of observation---then you've got a genetically generated "reality".  Of 
course, from any altitude, you need to guide the curve's tendency so that it 
conforms with the way the world "actually" is---e.g., the shape of Britain. 
 Perhaps thats a model for paranoia.

It seems significant to me that these issues are often deployed by TP in the 
realm of immediate sensation---thus the difference between "smoke" and the 
actual citation "smell" is important.  Smell is immediate.

He's been mentioned at least once, but in this context of Big Science as a 
tool in literature, Stanislav Lem is huge.  Apparently the most widely 
published "science fiction" author in the world, he's been available in 
english for a while now (though not as far as I know his "non" fiction work 
re science and metaphysics).  There are a number of points of contact with 
TP.