Comment by IIAOPSW | Hacker News Reader

Comment by IIAOPSW | Hacker News Reader

I'd like to put forth a bold hypothesis. You have one of these in your skull and its an integral part of your visual system. Anyone who has experimented with psychedelic drugs has seen the intricate geometrical and fractal patterns. The explanation for these visions is that the brain works on feedback loops and the brain waves, not the individual neurons, are the currency of representation and thought. This idea has been rediscovered and elaborated independently several times by rational psychonauts since the discovery of LSD, most notably in Steven Lehar's PhD Thesis (1994) and James Kent's book Psychedelic Information Theory (2010). This feedback wave theory of brain function has basically been experimentally confirmed with fMRI data in the papers "Harmonic brain modes: a unifying framework for linking space and time in brain dynamics" and "Connectome-harmonic decomposition of human brain activity reveals dynamical repertoire re-organization under LSD" (both from Selene Atasoy 2017).

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 totally agree there is something important going on with feedback loops and the brain (and vision, and the mind) - especially loops made of loops (made of loops).

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

It’s really beautiful. Have you ever considered adding analog synths?

Such a good idea to try. Parameters could be varied in real-time by aspects of the images being created... and vice versa. More feedback loops.

I recommend Douglas Hofstadter's books Gödel, Escher, Bach (where I first read about video feedback) and I Am A Strange Loop.

"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."

https://www.americanscientist.org/article/self-assembly

Hebb claimed short term memory was a “reverberation,” based on Lashley’s notion of interference patterns and standing waves in the brain. Karl Pribram details a fair amount in his last book.

Yay to Lehar’s work! Haven’t read his thesis, though. If you like Atasoy, check out Adam Safron’s Self-Organizing Harmonic Modes.

Great theory. I think you are also suggesting that if scientists took LSD they might be better able to understand how brain works?

> I think you are also suggesting

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).

If some scientific discoveries were already made with of LSD, would you know? Its not like the scientists would admit to how they made the discovery in the methods section.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com