Judy Decker and I have been musing together via email, for the past year or so, about lots of things. Among our favorite topics for conversation are a host of age-old conundrums: the contest between chaos and harmony in the universe ... perception versus reality ... the form(s) that mature religion might take ... and so forth.

In a recent response to Judy's always-provocative comments, I speculated:

"Maybe the Most Important Stuff all revolves around interactions of people with people — and out of those interactions can come Things That Transcend."

I footnoted the above: "Please read 'people' to mean 'extraordinarily complex symbol-manipulating systems' — I don't want to rule out other lifeforms, conceivable or inconceivable."

Later in that same note, concerning free will and how it might coexist with physical causality, I quoted a ^zhurnal entry long ago (FreeWill, 11 Apr 1999):

"And perhaps, via strange loops between levels of meaning (as Douglas Hofstadter alludes to in his preface to the 1999 edition of Gödel, Escher, Bach) mental patterns can break 'free' of microscopic causality?"

Finally, in the context of poetry, writing, thinking, etc. I hypothesized in my letter to Judy:

"Maybe the magic is that the more important something is, the shorter it needs to be. Maybe the ultimate is Life, where there's only Now."

_{(see also My Religion, 6 Nov 2000, and associated pages)}

TopicLife - TopicPhilosophy - TopicFaith - 2002-05-16

(correlates: FreeWill, PerpetualMotion, SyntacticSugar, ...)