TO KNOW OR NOT TO KNOW, ONE WAY OR ANOTHER

Since my early days, Science promised a universal method to explain everything, but university science with its inner contradictions left me bored. Ortega showed that science can fossilise and become superstition. The African tropical rainforest around 1963 and audacious new thinking together with young French scientists paved the way to my later analysis of living system hierarchies. The rainforest is a great debunker of arrogant scientists. Its plants and animals are countless, its inner subdivisions are not sharp, timing of events there is imprecise. In highly complex ecosystems no situation is recurrent. Hierarchical systems analysis, chaos theory and fuzzy logic, all of the 1960-ies, show the same way. Time is no factor, but an invisible dimension, a measuring stick, and visible space is 3D. Knowledge from foreign lands and from the past often sees reality as “more or less” defined, “elastic” (“jam karet”, rubber time, in Indonesian). Our neat science predicts correctly how stars move, but not epidemics or jobless periods, or tree growth. The dilemma of structure (3D) versus becoming (4D) always was central to human thought. It is met by two axioms defining an elastic universe with fractal dimensions. First, structure is a very slow process and process is a very short-lived structure. Second, due to a short life-span, humans can only perceive infinity if broken down, folded, refolded etc., a fractal image. These axioms and some rules derived yield a logically coherent image of the universe, inclusive of but broader than science as taught in schools today.