The Lightherder and the God Machine
thelightherder.com
thelightherder.com
So back to my bold hypothesis. The optical nerve connects the eyeballs from way up in the front of the skull to the occipital lobe way in the back of the skull. The conventional view is that the placement of this part of the brain and the long nerve connecting to it is a mistake of evolution which can't be refactored out in incremental steps. My hypothesis is that the lengthy optical nerve isn't a mistake and isn't just a wire but is in fact an integral part of how vision works. The optical nerve is a delay line, with different paths through the optical nerve being more or less circuitous. The available paths through the optical nerve can result in simple transformations such as rotation, translation, contraction, diffusion (gaussian blur) and time-averaging (temporal gaussian blur).
What I'm suggesting is perhaps the lengthy optical nerve wires in our skull literally serve the same function as the long tube with the screen/cameras in this machine. Maybe the output images of this machine look nice to our brains because they are exactly the same patterns our brain is already looking for and thus satisfactory comprehension is immediate. The two parallel cameras on two parallel long tubes in this machine bears an uncanny resemblance to the eyes are situated in the skull and connected to the brain.
I wrote something up around 2010 on my thoughts about all this stuff when I was first contemplating the HD feedback device. You might find it interesting - you can read it here: https://walkswithdave.tumblr.com/post/38950021331
"The core intellectual claim, then, is much the same as that of Gödel, Escher, Bach: namely, that a proper understanding of Gödel's proof helps us to see that life, mind and self are all constituted not by biochemistry but by the higher-level patterns that biochemistry makes possible. In particular, human selves are abstract self-referential (reflexively looping) patterns that arise spontaneously out of the meaningless base of neural activity.
These patterns are real, albeit abstract. And they have real causal power, even though they are epiphenomena generated by the brain. They affect other patterns within the mind-complex, and they loop back into the brain itself. Unlike the complex patterns generated when a video camera is focused on a television screen showing its own output (an analogy repeatedly used to demystify the notion of strange loops), the human-self patterns can determine changes within the system's hardware. But this mind-brain causation is nothing "spooky" or supernatural. It's an emergent consequence of the physical complexity of human brains."
Yay to Lehar’s work! Haven’t read his thesis, though. If you like Atasoy, check out Adam Safron’s Self-Organizing Harmonic Modes.
Tangentially, perhaps, but I wouldn't say that is the main argument.
I see the main argument as:
If the biology doesn't make sense within your current hypothesis, it is most likely the hypothesis which is wrong.
and the LSD argument is not about scientists taking drugs, but about scientists paying attention to evidence which comes from taking drugs. Which is very reasonable. Certainly as reasonable as other ablation studies, which are commonly accepted as good scientific practice (when kept within ethical bounds).
It's a nice effect though, so it's neat that someone actually built something around it.
It was finding the HD Panasonic field monitors a couple years ago with the hue / brightness /contrast / saturation knobs for only a couple hundred dollars used (they were initially a few thousand dollars) that made this project possible.
You could probably get a wider variety of image by adding more nonlinearity to the mix - As far as I can tell, this system is just iterating rotation and scaling, which are linear maps.
However the other thing is that as a system of analog tools it may be able to achieve all sorts of effects that might require a lot of processing power, development time, and sources of entropy for randomization to match. In short I think not just that what was built was easier for the person who built it, but might also be significantly cheaper comparatively.
on edit: of course they can't distribute their machine the same way you can code but that's the tradeoff
TehCorwiz knows what's up. A contraption is always more cool than software.
Probably the monitor to camera part is easier to do in software, but as other comment says the author probably is more familiar with monitor and cameras and understand better how to tweak the values to get nice images.
Fantastic piece of art. I love how it makes the process of iteratively drawing things => fractals into a physical, tangible thing.