A friend of mine just recently turned me on to this series of 6 videos by Arther C. Clark that explain Mandelbrot Fractal patterns and how they relate to nature. Some of you may have seen them already, they look a little old but it a good basic explanation.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qB8m85p7GsU

This is number 1 of 6, nine minute videos, I highly suggest watching all six!! They can all be found in the menu to the right.

Although...., about 6 minutes into this first one, is a tunnel-like pattern that is almost identical to the tunnel I floated through while "talking" with this "knowledge", during my smoked spice & MAOI experience with the S.H.E. last SAT.
The colors where not as bright & it was a bit more "geometric" but everything was just as detailed and seemed alive!!!

I see these Fractal-like patters a lot, that constantly grow out of themselves & have life to them, sometimes even talking to me, through my mind.
After watching this seres of videos, and understanding how these patterns fit into nature and brain structure, it makes me even more curious as to what the hell it is we are "meeting" while in hyperspace!?!?

Check it out!

WS

Ah. the beautiful random pattens of nature.Everything from the patterns of clouds,patterns that rocks have that have been erodid over time by rain and water,the patterns that leafs leave on the ground and their is a mathimatical equation that was some how created to explain these random acts of nature which i believe is what a fractal is.Its been a long time since i read the book but it's really interesting.Another realm we have been blind to untill recently.

more like julia sets

????

WS

More like the both. For more info http://aleph0.clarku.edu/~djoyce/julia/julia.html Regarless, its a very interesting subject.Another interesting subject is string theory. ps. i cant get the whole link to show,so you might need to copy/paste

Thanx man I will watch all of them, sounds fascinating!

Yep, the Mandelbrot set is mysterious in many ways!
Just keep in mind, that the mathematician only can make “visual” this set, because he works with something that is called the imaginary plan (the Mandelbrot set is a visualised iteration, computation of many „pixels“ of this plan) , and the complex numbers are an extension of the real numbers obtained by adjoining an imaginary unit.
An IMAGINARY UNIT!!!
Something that is somehow not “real”, but to work with this imaginary unit helps them to understand real things better, helps them, to create fractals, for example. By the way, this imaginary units are needed in mathematic and physic to do other computations (in control theory, signal analyses, quantum mechanics….)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complex_number

If everything is essentially made from the same building blocks, then it's not so strange to see the same principles occur everywhere in nature. Including in our own counsciousness. It is even my belief, or rather suspicion, that this is the main explanation for religious experiences and that we make the 'mistake' to make up antropomorphic god's that look like us, simply because we look like everything else in nature. Several states of mind would be just variations on basic principles, would 'fit in' the things we see all around us, and therefore, from our perpective seem transcendent. In another thread i refered to the "angry volcano god's" or "angry lightning god's" aplying this principle to anger and the similarity of it's 'shape'with those of volcanic eruptions and lightning.
I even belief that many of these basic shapes, translated in patterns of electric activity, encode for certain behaviour or states of mind, explaning the tendency to sort of 'fall back' into behavioural patterns we all have, in the end any thought would trace itself back to it's source.

Nice tip, I've been fascinated by fractals since the article in Scientific American in the eighties! Even programmed a mandelbrot generator at the time on a Commodore64, incredibly slow...
And yes, I often see them at launch, especially the spiral/tunnel. What does it have to do with consciousness... maybe the universal consciousness is like a huge fractal, and we are sub-sets, still connected to the whole - the separateness is an illusion, like the mini-mandelbrot shapes that are all connected to each other and the big one. Just random speculation...

Here's an interesting collection of mathematical visualisations, there's an episode about the Mandelbrot set but the hyperdimensional stuff is worthwhile too: http://www.dimensions-math.org/

Funky,

Just the other week I experimented a little with multithreading in C# and made a small program that distributes the calculations of a mandelbrot over many cores. The scaling by adding more cores is almost linear.

I'll have a look into those Arthur C. Clark video's.

-I agree whole heartedly w/ this statement and it's only in psychedelic journeys ,meditations or whatever mystical pratcice of choice that raises ,atleast my consiousness to where i become accutely aware of this reality and its being in tune with the universal oness.I cant but help to think of watson and crick's discovery of the double helix structure of the DNA strand,while under the influence of lsd (i believe it was crick that was under the influence).That is a major scientific discovery that can be attributed to the aid of a psychadelic experience.Has anyone here,along w/ seeing fractal imagery,seen what looks like DNA strands? Swim has and i know that a buch of Dr. Strassmans volunteers did.If you wnat to check out an article on watson and crick : http://www.hallucinogens...m/lsd/francis-crick.html .String theory states that there are 12 dimensions (i might be wrong on that number) but how many dimensions,as humans in a normal state of consciousness are we aware of, 4 ? Quantum physic's and metaphysics are pointing in the direction of what we're talking about and there are some very strong parallels.There is an element of entertaiment ,atleast for swim when seeing some beautiful colors and imagery but for the most part he views ethneogens and psychedelics as a tool or conduit to this realm.At the of the day what the hell do we know?The more i live and experience, the more i realize i dont know shit.I just feel like an explorer trying to pick up the clues to a bigger truth and has fun doing so -peace

Well Put!!
I had this exact thought as I was listening Mr. C. Clark's explanations!!

Look at how the universe is just repeated over & over. I've seen a set of pictures, I think they've been called "power of ten" shots or something, where you start light years out into the universe and step by step, you slowly step down to our galaxy, then into our solar system. You end up zooming into the DNA of a leaf on a tree, then down into its atoms and the atom's quarks!! (which are amazingly hyperspace-like!!)
It amazes me every time I watch it. I guess, because of how "Mandelbrot-like" we are, when looked at that way. Its all clearly repeated, but how far out does it go?!?!?
Is our universe mearly making up some atoms in another, much larger reality, that is way beyond our comprehension? How far does it zoom out?
Nature seems to do this to a certain level when we zoom in from our reality (or size) and our technology only goes so far in, for now.

This kind of thing fascinates me to no end!! (how's that for irony?!?)
If you chaps would like to see that "power of ten" video I mentioned, let me know and I'll find & post a link.

WS

Check this out , http://www.raygirvan.co.uk/apoth/udo.htm

link please power of 10

You got it!!

http://www.micro.magnet....ienceopticsu/powersof10/

Short explanations of what you are seeing at each step, are above the picture in bold print.

Amazes me every time!!

Does anyone have more of these?
I'd love to see more of these "power of ten" videos!!

Even more, I like to learn more about the Mandelbrot Set and fractals in general!!
That original video I posted this thread about, is unfortunately rather old.
I'm interested in learning some new, more up to date info about this stuff!!


WS

Hate to say this but that was an hoax:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Udo_of_Aachen

Nice book about self referential structures: Gödel,Escher,Bach. by Douglas Höftsadter.
One thing that intruiges me about these fractal things, is that they contain a representation of infinity within a medium that is not infinite itself. Magical.

No shit!

It is interresting to see that many people have this feeling of 'familiarity' with this fractal. would this be because of the m-fractal itself, or because of the major characteristic of self-reflection?

Mathematician Henk Barendrecht has written some essays about the fractal-like aspects of the mind, DNA, computation and other fenomenona. For me, just looking at these things brings me almost in a sort of trance.
If infinity really does exist is on the other hand depending on what kind of thing that's supposed to be infinate.
Number theory seems to aply that there's an infinite amount of numbers. Given on the other hand that the amount of particles in the universe is not infinite, this cannot be exactly true though. If you would build a computer, using all the particles in the universe and you would organize them in the most efficient way possible, at a cerrtain moment there will be numbers, still too large to be processed by this machine, wich is the most powerfull computer theoreticly possible. Number theory itself though, doesn't know that it is restricted, since the restriction comes from the basis of it's possabillity in the physical world, outside the theory itself. For fractals this seems to be even more so, it has the shape of infinity although it can never be as infinate as it seems to implie it is. The fractal is like a hologram, it seems to contain more than is possible.