Hacker News Reader

Our brains are general purpose pattern-matching machines, self-programmed by their environment.

Intense interest in anything, will eventually train models within the mind that not only recognise higher order patterns, but predict them too.

Those “predictions” come from the intuitive parts of our mind - they bubble up - seemingly from nowhere. There is a lot of wonder about this, and it is fun to explore (say making music, or playing with patterns). The predictions are not part of our rational (imperative?) step-by-step mind.

We also create irrational narratives to explain where our intuitions came from - the successful startup founder explaining their route - the mystic explaining their source.

  It grew out of tasks in which he asked a split-brain person to explain in words, which uses the left hemisphere, an action that had been directed to and carried out only by the right one. “The left hemisphere made up a post hoc answer that fit the situation.” In one of Gazzaniga's favourite examples, he flashed the word 'smile' to a patient's right hemisphere and the word 'face' to the left hemisphere, and asked the patient to draw what he'd seen. “His right hand drew a smiling face,” Gazzaniga recalled. “'Why did you do that?' I asked. He said, 'What do you want, a sad face? Who wants a sad face around?'.” The left-brain interpreter, Gazzaniga says, is what everyone uses to seek explanations for events, triage the barrage of incoming information and construct narratives that help to make sense of the world.

A split-brain guy creating an narrative, rationalising: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Of01gO_fC1M

The irrational narrative part is the difficult one to tackle, in order to truly try to understand something like that. I can of course tell myself why I am seeing these things after and while working on these patterns, but to truly try to understand this is another subject all together.

But the part about starting to predict these patterns in our minds, and the connection to the underlying structures of geometric nature in our cells and for example the visual cortex, makes the process really interesting, it somehow can to my experiences help us in best cases connect to those structures in a deep way, and also the structures that are all around us in nature.

Thanks for sharing, this prediction aspect gave me some thoughts to think about more.

I would classify what you experience as an instance of the Tetris effect.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetris_effect

I've experienced with this with racquetball strangely enough, and my brother tells me that he regularly experiences this with playing the piano.

(This makes me terrified of the degree to which programming has affected my way of thinking, considering I've spent 100x as much time doing that as playing racquetball.)

One part Tetris effect, one part Klüver form constants.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Form_constant

Thanks for sharing that Klüver form constant, did not know about that term. The Tetris Effect I had heard about.

The ability of our minds and brains to create these forms by themselves and also there being a logical, game like mechanic when you use our software might explain parts of why it feels so good to continue doing, and why these acts permeate into the mind even not when doing it.

Also the fact that you can easily spend hours working on these patterns, when you have a tool that enables that easily enough, it supports the thinking that our minds start to replicate and predict these patterns, as mentioned by one poster above this.

I experienced this with chess, to the point where it affected my sleep and I had to stop. I'm a remarkably bad chess player too.

I believe this is a common Phenomenon with a lot of different manifestations. I think it's scientifically boils down to hyperactive pattern matching by the brain. Is common with psychedelics and often manifests as a fractal growth but also manifest in normal life. A common sober example is seeing floaters in your vision. Most people have floaters but not all see them and not all the time. The brain gets a lot of information and passes it through a filter, and then tries to pattern fit it. Prolonged exposure to a certain stimulus or a fixation on it attenuates the filters down and the pattern fitting up.

With sufficient attenuation, the brain will simply fit any noise it sees into the pattern.

The idea is related to the Nobel prize winning vision cognition studies of David Hubel and Torsten Wiesel, where animals can be conditioned to not perceive vertical or horizontal lines.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.psychologytoday.com/intl/bl...

This isn’t any sort of crank theory, I think this is basically what string theory amounts to: we experience a 4-dimensional projection of an N-dimensional space.

Also, in math, lots of things are projections of higher order objects into lower order spaces!

You might enjoy "The Hyperbolic Geometry of DMT Experiences (@Harvard Science of Psychedelics Club)", https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=loCBvaj4eSg

Your software seems similar to iterated function systems (IFS, e.g. Apophysis) in principle, but it's deterministic.

On the philosopical side, these shapes are particular kind of thought-forms, something that mind naturally creates when it's not distracted by sensory input. The forms hardly have any profound meaning - they are just art created by bored mind - but sometimes they represent sonething profound.

For anybody whom might be interested in "what a 4D cube might look like..."

https://youtu.be/1wAaI_6b9JE?t=2360

The entire video in mesmerizing -- one of the coolest party tricks I've learned is the double-twisted morbius strip dissection.

You need to get out more