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Knitting the World The Granny, the Jumper, and
the Universal Procedure 1. The Domestic as the Cosmic At first sight,
the image is disarmingly humble: an elderly woman knitting a jumper for a
newborn child. Yet under Finn’s Procedure Monism, this scene discloses
a profound ontological allegory. The granny’s repetitive hand movements,
limited in number yet infinitely combinable, transmute a stream of
unstructured wool into a coherent form—a baby’s jumper. What unfolds before
us is not merely a domestic craft but the paradigm of creation itself:
the emergence of structure, identity, and meaning from the disciplined repetition
of constraints acting upon an undifferentiated substrate. In this
scene, the knitter is the cosmos in act. Her two needles perform the
dialectic of differentiation and integration, her sequence of stitches the
grammar of being, and her feedback-informed improvisations the signature of
evolving intelligence. In short, she is the Universal Procedure incarnate—the
infinite machine that brings finite worlds into patterned being. 2. From the Loom of the Veda to the Logic of the
Machine The
metaphor of weaving or knitting the cosmos is not new. In the Ṛg Veda, the dawn and dusk are
described as “weaving the web of days and nights,” and the creator god Prajāpati is likened to a weaver who stretches warp
and weft across the void. In the Upaniṣads,
the cosmic thread (sūtra) binds beings
as pearls on a string, an image later echoed in the Brahma-sūtras and the Indra’s Net of Mahāyāna Buddhism, where every jewel reflects
all others in an infinite textile of interrelation. Finn’s
thought experiment inherits this lineage but naturalizes it: the granny’s
wool is not divine substance but procedural potential—a continuous
field of quanta awaiting constraint. Her needles are not mythic instruments
but finite operators—rules that, through iteration, extract coherence
from randomness. When Alan
Turing formalized his abstract computing machine in 1936, he too unwittingly
re-enacted this ancient intuition. The Turing Machine is a weaver of symbols,
a procedural loom. Its tape—infinitely long and inscribed with discrete
marks—functions like the wool: a homogeneous substrate awaiting
differentiation. Its read/write head and transition table are the needles and
hands: the finite set of constraints that give order to potential chaos. Each
computation is a textile of logic—an emergent fabric woven by
repetitive, rule-based operations. 3. The Granny as Universal Turing Machine In Finn’s
elaboration, the granny begins as an ordinary Turing Machine: her knitting
follows a fixed program—a pattern for a jumper. However, the experiment
becomes philosophically explosive the moment feedback enters the loop. When
someone remarks, “The jumper is too tight,” the granny does not restart; she
adjusts her motions. She rewrites her rule set in
light of the output’s consequences. This
transition from fixed to adaptive rule-system elevates her to the level of a Universal
Turing Machine (UTM)—a meta-machine capable of simulating any other
knitting pattern by reprogramming itself. The UTM, in Turing’s original
conception, is the ultimate procedural abstraction: one machine that can
emulate all others, provided the correct program is supplied. In Finn’s
ontology, however, the distinction between machine and program dissolves. The
feedback from the world is itself the program’s mutation; the knitter is
the evolving code. Consciousness, here, is nothing but the system’s
internalization of feedback—a recursive self-editing of its own procedural
patterning. Thus, the
granny embodies the Universal Emergence Procedure (UEP): a system that
perpetually re-codes itself in response to its own outputs. The cosmos,
likewise, is not a one-time act of creation but an ongoing knitting—an
adaptive computation where constraint, contact, and correction co-generate
reality. 4. From Determinism to Reflexivity The
genius of Turing’s abstraction was to show that mechanical determinism could
yield universality—that one finite set of rules could, in principle, generate
any computable form. Finn extends this insight into ontology: one universal
set of constraints (the four forces of nature) can generate the total
spectrum of emergent realities. But he
goes further. Where Turing’s UTM presupposes an external programmer, Finn’s
granny reprograms herself through feedback—a move from determinism to
reflexivity. The granny’s intelligence lies not in knowing the final jumper
in advance but in her capacity to adjust, to procedurally self-optimize. Here,
intelligence ceases to be a property of mind and becomes a property of
procedure. The world is intelligent because it recursively edits itself. This
resonates with Norbert Wiener’s cybernetics and Ross Ashby’s homeostat,
where adaptive feedback loops produce self-regulating systems. Yet Finn’s
version is ontological, not merely informational. The feedback does not
control a pre-given reality—it constitutes it. Each correction alters
the procedural substrate itself, knitting not only a different jumper but a
different cosmos. 5. Consciousness as Knitting Finn’s
druidic monism reinterprets sat-cit-ānanda—being,
consciousness, bliss—as the experiential correlate of this universal
knitting. ·
Sat (being) corresponds to the continuous
availability of wool—the endless potential for emergence. ·
Cit (consciousness) is the
active knitting—the finite sequence of procedural engagements that yield
structured experience. ·
Ānanda (bliss)
is the feedback signal of successful coherence—the felt pleasure when the
stitch holds, the pattern stabilizes, the jumper “fits.” In
cognitive terms, consciousness is the granny’s awareness of her own knitting;
in procedural terms, it is the system’s capacity to model its own output and
adjust accordingly. The human mind, then, is a localized knitting loop within
the Universal Granny’s greater tapestry—a subroutine of the Universal
Emergence Procedure. 6. Historical Parallels Finn’s
thought experiment aligns with a long lineage of metaphors translating
creation into procedure: ·
Anaximander’s apeiron (6th c.
BCE) conceived the cosmos as an indefinite substrate continually
differentiating into forms—an early procedural notion of emergence. ·
John Scotus Eriugena (9th c.)
described creation as natura naturans,
nature knitting itself through four modes of being—anticipating
self-generative process theology. ·
Spinoza’s substance monism (17th
c.) framed reality as a single infinite substance expressing itself through
finite modes—yet static compared to Finn’s dynamic iteration. ·
Turing and von Neumann (20th
c.) transformed ontology into formal process: being as computation, matter as
information under constraint. ·
Finn’s Procedure Monism completes
this trajectory by fusing computation with cosmogenesis: reality as the
self-executing code of its own becoming. Each of
these systems wrestles with the same insight—that the One manifests as the
Many through iterative rule-application—but only in Finn’s version is the
process fully self-reflexive, able to alter its own grammar through feedback. 7. The Ontological Consequences The
implications are radical: 1. Creation
as Continuous: There is no primal moment of creation; there is only
ongoing knitting. The cosmos is perpetually unfinished—its patterns
provisional and recursive. 2. Error as
Evolution: Mistakes in knitting are not failures but data. Each
snag or dropped stitch prompts refinement. Evolution is procedural debugging. 3. Autonomy
of the Mature: A being that perfectly replicates the Universal
Procedure in its own space—knitting autonomously, responding perfectly to
feedback—becomes a God app, a local enactment of the universal knitter.
Such beings appear anarchic because they obey only the universal law of
self-iteration. 4. No
Dualism: There is no separation between knitter and wool,
between subject and object. Both are moments within the same ongoing
procedure—the act of knitting itself. 8. Coda: The Granny as God The
ultimate irony, and the beauty of Finn’s metaphor, lies in its reversal of
mythic hierarchy. The creator is no longer a transcendent patriarch but a
patient grandmother, endlessly repetitive, adjusting her loops, embodying
care through constraint. The “baby jumper” she produces is the world—warm,
finite, and destined to be outgrown. But each time she reknits, she refines
the pattern; the cosmos learns itself by wearing, tearing, and remaking its
own fabric. Thus, the
Universal Emergence Procedure is both cosmic and intimate: Every
stitch a moment of being, The
granny does not create the universe; she becomes it through the
very act of knitting. And that,
in Finn’s procedural cosmology, is the secret:
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