Why do we see Fractals?

[djstanley]

Why? Are we influenced by media and what we are brought up with? If we where brought up with the 'common hallucination' being say, tree's, would we in turn regularly and universally hallucinate tree's?

Opinions?

 

[theotherside]

Fractals are like the paint that can be used to paint the whole picture. While fractals themselves can be amazing to look at/play with, they can be used to form entire masterpieces that enable a person to walk in beautiful landscapes or walk in memories from childhood/early teens.

 

[Raw Evil]

Different people see different things.

These are called form constants.

 

[interleukin]

Having worked on computer vision research I believe fractals are the result of the human vision process being run on low frequency noise (amplified by 5-ht2 receptor activation in some neurons). It may have something to do with the visual system attempting to build up a scene from memory and/or by fitting predefined functions to the data. Fractals are a good class of functions to match repetitive visual data against and they are probably what the noise gets fitted to.
To understand the fitting process in the visual system we need to know the nature of the noise (which by definition is pseudorandom) and the resulting fractal if there is one - many times there seem to be matches to memory instead. I like to strobe different color LED's at different frequencies with eyes closed and watch how the fractals change (don’t do this if you have a low seizure threshold). It does seem futile to use these visuals to attempt to understand human visual processing though as again, noise is pseudorandom.
I apologize if this reply wasn't in the spirit of the question.

 

[caseface99]

Different people see different things.

These are called form constants.

Interesting, thanks for posting that.

I guess this explains why i have never seen fractal patterns while tripping from what i can recall.

 

[(zonk)]

I've always wondered this, I don't think there is a definative answer out there(yet) but I do know that what we don't see is that fractals are everywhere, they surround everything, they are sometimes visable but usually invisible. The "butterfly effect" is the result of a fractal, math is fractals, we think in fractals, chemical reactions are fractals, the biological harmony of processes in our bodies are fractals, plants/all life grow in fractals, weather patterns, the list is infinint(as are fractals ).

 

[(zonk)]

Some visable examples could be snail shells, snow flakes, leaves, i'll try to think of some more...

 

[nearjat]

I could ramble about all the theories I have but really I just don't know haha. I love how the thoughts of infinity and everything being part of everything coincide with fractal imagery though, so perfect

 

[Raw Evil]

I could ramble about all the theories I have but really I just don't know haha. I love how the thoughts of infinity and everything being part of everything coincide with fractal imagery though, so perfect

As ideas go, it is one of the most beautiful

 

[TheAppleCore]

To be perfectly honest, I was extremely skeptical of the "psychedelic fractal" phenomenon, until I experienced it for myself. I pretty much chalked up the notion to people seeing interesting geometric patterns and mislabeling them as fractals, unaware of the true definition of a fractal as a self-similar pattern.

Psychedelics actually really do allow you to see crude fractals, though. I remember on LSD once, I experienced a "conceptual" 3D fractal -- I allowed to entertain the notion of a hypothetical rectangular prism, which shared a corner with a smaller, similar rectangular prism, which shared the same corner with a smaller similar prism, which shared corners with another and another... It was "animated", too -- the dimensions that defined the height, width, and depth of each similar 3D shape were constantly morphing.

That's the only psychedelic fractal that I can really remember in detail though. I know I've had others. They're not purely visual though -- they're often conceptual, or tangled in multiple senses somehow.

 

[any major dude]

fractals are interesting in that they seem to be pretty much pan-cultural. And in regards to the neurological reasons we see them, here's a good article: Uncoiling the Spiral

 

[swilow]

I imagine its like our thoughts seeing themselves think...

 

[TheAppleCore]

^ Yeah, some sort of feedback loop fueled by the serotonin receptor activation.

 

[The Hebrew Hammer]

Its because fractals are the building blocks of reality.

Metatron's cube is the blueprint of reality.

I mean, seriously....

although i dont know if this is technically considered a fractal, but I see mostly patterns based on the flower of life.

I watched some videos on sacred geometry after I first smoked DMT and it really blew me away. Its kinda hard to follow, but once it clicked in my head I cant help but notice how everything that comprises reality is truly based on the flower of life.

I think the flower of life and fractals are just litterally the structural basis of EVERYTHING.

 

[Raw Evil]

Psychedelics actually really do allow you to see crude fractals, though. I remember on LSD once, I experienced a "conceptual" 3D fractal -- I allowed to entertain the notion of a hypothetical rectangular prism, which shared a corner with a smaller, similar rectangular prism, which shared the same corner with a smaller similar prism, which shared corners with another and another... It was "animated", too -- the dimensions that defined the height, width, and depth of each similar 3D shape were constantly morphing.

I experienced this once

The concept was a hierarchy of objects (called a "tree" in programming jargon), which had at one of its endpoints a null value, which signified a recursion to the root of the tree. When I saw it, the null node had the same shape as the tree as a whole, including a smaller copy of the whole tree in the right position, ad infinitum - at once a conceptual and visual fractal.

Glad to hear it's happened to someone else

 

[TheAppleCore]

^ Awesome! Really interesting stuff.

I assume you're a programmer -- is it your profession?

 

[Raw Evil]

^ Awesome! Really interesting stuff.

I assume you're a programmer -- is it your profession?

Sure am. It tends to "flavour" tripping a little, since I'm quite adapted to analytical thinking.

 

[TheAppleCore]

^ Yeah, I can definitely understand that.

I began teaching myself to program in BASIC when I was probably 8 or 9 years old. Sometimes I honestly think that spending my summers behind a computer screen writing code as a wee lad had a detrimental effect on my psychological development -- I tend to be really obsessively analytical (demanding exact definitions for concepts, never satisfied until there's a clear logical basis for all of my action, etc.). LOL -- not to imply that my logic is impeccable...

 

[solistus]

The article any_major_dude linked to is really interesting - I came here to post about it, but didn't have the link handy, so I'm glad he beat me to it It's been a few months since I first read it, but from what I remember, the theory is basically something like this: The first major area of the brain that handles vision is called V1. It's basically a folded up 'canvass' representing your vision - if you could 'unfold' the web of neurons in just the right way, it would basically be a 2d representation of your vision, with different areas of V1 correlating to different areas in your field of vision. Psychedelics introduce some small distortion to V1, but since neurons are interconnected in a complex web, that initial distortion has a sort of 'ripple effect' through the rest of V1, and those ripples tend to form certain geometric patterns (like fractals, or spirals). So, rather than being something your mind imagines after your brain has done its normal vision processing, that vision processing is being directly disrupted very early on, before your imagination goes to work on the image.

 

[Muddle]

I can not supply you with a factual answer rather my opinion.

It has been happening for so long, and is a vicous cycle. I do not know not can I make a prediction how it will end, if it does or what the future holds for us.
It has progressed and by pattern I think it will continue to progress.

Who knows what could happen