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Comment by hnfong | Hacker News Reader

The Mandelbrot set is quite well known.

Yet something I learned recently blew my mind. It's about the uncanny resemblance between the images generated by the Mandelbrot set, and among all things, the popular image of Buddha.

For example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buddhabrot

Even when looking at the 2D Mandelbrot set renderings, I can't help but wonder whether the similarity of the "bulbs" to the rather unique Buddha "hairstyle" (of allegedly funny lumps of hair) was just a coincidence.

Also, the tower-like makuṭa headdress in some Buddhist traditions look exactly like the thin threads that connect the bulbs at around (-2, 0).

I'm not saying they mean anything, but just something uncanny, and once I learned about the resemblance, it's hard to unsee it...

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> I can't help but wonder whether the similarity of the "bulbs" to the rather unique Buddha "hairstyle" (of allegedly funny lumps of hair) was just a coincidence.

Honest question: what else do you think it could be, if not a coincidence?

Honest answer: some early Buddhist followers taking some form of acid/mushrooms and saw geometric visions of the Mandelbrot set and thought it was a divine manifestation of Buddha?

I mean, I don't think this is likely, but that's the best I got.

I hear the brain likes to go into geometry mode when hallucinogens are ingested, and I suppose the brain is theoretically powerful enough to compute the Mandelbrot sets...

I have had similar thoughts.

The prominent modes and paths of this 2D probability distribution also show some resemblance to the kabbalistic tree of life, which is its own, but fairly related topic of study. DMT use within a connected strand of this "inner science" has been suspected.

Drawing more of these far-fetching connections: The complex plane is related to several areas of physics, which might somehow find expression in electromagnetic brain dynamics.

In any case, the buddhabrot distribution seems quite understudied both from a scientific / mathematical PoV, and from the perspectives of the occluded study of the "inner realms".

I've done a wide variety of hallucinogens. While I've seen things that could be described as fractal (in that they are nested and self similar), I've never seen a literal time escape fractal. In my experience, hallucinations look more like turbulent flow, like smoke. Deepdream isn't a terrible first approximation, but may give you the impression that the hallucinations are more dramatic or total than is typical.

I can't rule this hypothesis out entirely, but I'm very skeptical. Pareidolia seems more likely to me.

There are a few others well-known fractals apart from the Buddhabrot that resemble real-world objects. My favourite is the burning ship fractal: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burning_Ship_fractal

I found these sorts of things really helpful in getting my kids interested in fractals. They love the idea that there are "things" they can find that are only viewable through math.

The burning ship is still my favourite object in mathematics despite about twenty years of study since I first came across it. In an echo of the famous story about Tamm and the Taylor series error, I once had to explain the burning ship to border control in an impromptu test of my credentials (though I'm not sure if I'd have been shot if I got it wrong).

Also see the Mandelbrot monk (before you get too excited, it was a hoax)

https://abcnews.go.com/Technology/WhosCounting/story?id=9861...

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