Well, yes, adding noise increases the fractal dimension of a signal.
"Shannon entropy" is noise.
"Lempel-Ziv complexity" is "how long is the zip file".
"Shannon entropy" is noise.
"Lempel-Ziv complexity" is "how long is the zip file".
Given your brain takes sensory signal input and coheres it, impairing that ability is going to create signals-based feedback that is described in information theory and signal processing, which if there is any periodic sampling going on on the coherance layer, you're going to get shape artifacts that are a function of that period. It's essentially 1/f noise and the experience of "more" information in a hallucinatory state is really just noisy information, like feedback on a TV. (It implies your brain has a clock cycle, and probably something like an NTP service.)
Imagine your TV had worked perfectly for your entire life and the first time you experienced its signal was bad, but you didn't realize there was a world in which that signal could not exist, so it would be totally mind blowing and you might experience it as a rift in reality. It would demand the question, if the people on TV aren't the substrate of our shared reality, and they are only representations transmitted by signals our minds are cohering, what else isn't necessarily real?
You'd tell other people that you had an experience where there is something else, a true substrate of reality where the televisions weren't coherent and real, which seems impossible, but if you've experienced it, you know. Suddenly, the televisions and they things they say are fallible, but there is still a you without them, and one that is not bound to the identity you see reflected in what they broadcast and tell you, because when the TV signal fed back on itself or echoed with delay, now you know there is something behind it all. It seems profound, but it's really just the first time your TV didn't work because something had impaired the signal. This is what I think hallucinogens are: noise on your sensory channels that reminds you the signals you use to cohere your experience exist in a substrate, which is just a mundane fact and necessarily physically true, and "you" are more than what your manage to cohere into a narrative from your sensory input. Some people believe a substrate or perception of something "else" is inconcievable because they have never experienced jitter in their coherence cycles, and once you do it seems like a really big deal, but really, it's not, and most of us just go back to chopping wood and carrying water.
To keep with the TV analogy, let's say you are watching a movie, enjoying the story, the setting, etc... Then, noised is added to the signal and you start seeing all sorts of glitches.
For example, let's imagine that the boot of a character flickers a bit. That boot has its importance, the director wanted to give the movie a certain aesthetic and that boot is part of it, but it is not important in the story and you are not supposed to notice it, in fact it is especially designed not to be out of place.
But because of the glitch, you now have all your attention focused on the boot, which is interesting, but you lost the big picture, too hard to understand now because of the noise. Maybe the next glitch will highlight the pavement or a lamp post.
The closest I can come to describing this is a higher resolution - like viewing the same photo, but you go from 640x480 to 4K, and from 256 to 32-bit color. Indeed, when consuming any sort of digital visual input, resolution differences (and compression artifacts etc) become much more noticeable, so perhaps this isn't merely an analogy. But the same also extends to sounds and even taste - it's not that things taste different, for example, but you can more readily identify and appreciate all the overtones that combine to create a particular taste, without subtracting from the experience of the whole.
This, by the way, is why watching fractal animations [1] can be so fascinating in that state - you still perceive the fractal as a whole, but you also simultaneously see the tiny details, and can observe that they faithfully correspond to the larger image, without having to individually focus on each.
[1] E.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8cgp2WNNKmQ (best viewed at 4K)
The opposite of tiny detail happens. I looked at a brick wall and all the bricks were identical. Like lazy copy paste game texture identical. I knew that the bricks weren't actually like that. You see patterns in things because the frequency resolution needed to encode the difference is cut off. The result is like a JPEG artifact but instead of localized square pixelation you get globalized crystal pixelization. Everything looks like it fits a crystal pattern. Especially random noise. Here is some noise that worked particularly well one time. https://ibb.co/D1rd6bN
You can't tell me you are seeing patters that are really there in literal randomness.
You know how trees sometimes look like they have faces, for example? They objectively do, according to our pattern recognition algorithm for faces, in a sense that people will find the same tree more or less anthropomorphic. But it doesn't mean that they actually have faces, of course! If you have a still photo of the forest, and stare at it long enough, you might notice more such than you would if you just glanced at it briefly. Same thing here.
TV static is pure randomness. Looking at any pixel has no correlation with looking at any other pixel. Any pattern you see in static must therefore be an artifact of the way your brain encodes patterns rather than something that is actually there.
For a more abstract example, if you generate a random black-and-white static image, it will have a bunch of (short) vertical and horizontal lines in it, simply because random pixel values will sometimes cluster into sequences that produce lines. Such a line is "actually there" - different people will see it, and you can even write code that finds all such lines. The fact that its pixels were formed randomly, without correlation between each other, doesn't change this - it just means that the line has no meaning; it's data, not information. But even so, your ability to detect such lines in a static image can vary.
In a similar vein, there's a well-known issue with RNG in games, where a straightforward approach can sometimes result in e.g. repeating the same value in a row many times, which the players immediately notice (and perceive as unfair). Which is why in many games, the RNG is specifically tweaked to keep track of recent outputs and actively avoid producing more output that would form an easily recognizable pattern.
Sensory exploration & new neural connections are both well documented.
The harder the trip the less real-world signal and more brains's interpolation. We all have highly unique brains so although the principles are the same (fractals in visual and in mind, strange colors, mixing senses etc.) we all have such a unique take on it.
And since the same brain is just guessing and smoothing input, and the one processing the guesses, its guesses are so 'self-compatible' that it can literally make its own feedback loops (I had it multiple times, when tripping with closed eyes I began wandering further and further away on a very consistent interconnected trip).
Its so strange. I can remember those trips so well, but the 'enhanced' version of it is simply too vast for my normal brain to grok. Just partial projections like 3d into 2d that don't give full picture or don't make much sense.
Problem is, you can get caught on certain intricacies of the raw input instead of just taking it all in at once. Taking it all in at once you can see how it's different than what you preconceived, and that your preconception is just one of infinite perceptions of the single moment.
I haven't had much in the way of trips, but it resonates a ton with my own emerging understanding of base-reality, if i can call it that
Now if I put my mystical hippie hat on I'm going to ask you what you think noise is? Personally I think it's some fundamental property of the universe.
it's more a property of a thinking agent than it is of the universe.
if you see it everywhere it's because we are the same type of observers, maybe other kinds of hypothetical agents can segments the universe in different ways.
Background radiation is also a noise property of the universe, as is the background microwave radiation from the start of the universe. Is this just noise because it's an artefact of the measurement aparatus?
I feel like the analogy holds, at least for simple computers like that where the machine still runs, but with weird alterations. You can look at the patterns that the chip is generating and ... see something [for me never particularly visual, more philosophical]. But it's really just throwing things... off. There's something to learn there, I guess, but I never thought it was terribly metaphysical.
More just evidence that our experience is always mediated, and a sensory change [internal senses as well], a change in texture of mood and thought, and not a very functional one.
and once you do it seems like a really big deal, but really, it's not
it was a little ambiguius to me what was being implied...
YES. I've been following some threads related to the Leiden Theory of Language, which basically proposes that human minds differ from other creatures' right now mostly because we're an advanced semiotic organism that has carved out and evolved an ecological niche inside of an specific area of a biological host organism: the human mind. Basically, the mundane world we live every day is not so dissimilar from the one we imagine as an otherworldly future where we might become cyborgs of tech and biology... but we're ALREADY an organic cyborg of language/semiotics and biology. As in, shit is already weird, we just can't recognize the weirdness so well. Perhaps our fellow travellers (other animals) see us best for what we are.
Anyhow, re: drawings/songs. Through this distorted lens, I've been trying to see the way that our stories and narratives are in some ways like our children. I'm trying to see humans as being more like songs or drawings than we care to admit. Or rather, I'm noticing that we find these other things more "disposable" and we feel less kinship with them when they're persisting in various non-human substrates. We don't mourn their loss as fiercely as the loss of a semiotic-biological cyborg that is wrapped inside another human. But that's just our own bias. Maybe some of these lost narratives and semiotic systems deserve to be mourned just as much. Maybe we should be just as sad for the loss of groups of meaning and narrative (other cultures), but we're just not hard-coded to sense it as well...
And really vibing with your use of the word "substrate" btw.
Many of these complexity or information content metrics work in similar ways. You can even turn EEG recordings from medical operations with anesthesia to a sound and listen to them. The frequencies are of course very low so you must speed it up. You can clearly say when the person fell asleep. A waterfall turns into a hum.
It makes sense, if you're making measurements of a complex system, of course white noise like results are more probable if there's actually something significant going on, than a simple sine wave. Or picture the modem calling sound. The low data rates are simple waves but the high data rate resembles white noise.
Now, lossy compression algorithms, such as JPEG, MP3, and almost all video compressors, are different. They have some model of what the content is "supposed to be like", and fit to that model. This works badly for content that does not fit the model, such as the mess JPEG makes of hard edges.
The original author referenced Shannon. The tests he's running use signals from which he cannot extract meaning, so he can only extract the statistics you can compute from a signal you do not understand. There are other tests for "is it signal or is it noise" - looking at the spectrum, autocorrelation to look for repetition (they did some of that), correlation with other signals, and such - but "fractal dimension" isn't one of them.
"Lempel-Ziv complexity is the number of different sub-strings (or sub-words) encountered as the binary sequence is viewed as a stream (from left to right)"[2] This leads to a compression algorithm.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lempel%E2%80%93Ziv%E2%80%93Wel...