Fractals and the process of "awareness"?

[Ishmhora]

I am looking to see if anyone is doing research into how the mental process of "awareness" might relate to fractals.  I wonder if the way in which we see a pattern is determined by a process that can be described through a fractal (i.e. I am "aware" of time passing)  I know that there is research being done into how the eye itself is aware of objects.  Is similar research being done into the the way in which the mind processes information?  And if there is research being done what results is it yielding if any?

[cKleinhuis]

you have a slight "awarenes" of the depth inside the fractal, by counting the spirals on its arms ...

[fractalrebel]

I am looking to see if anyone is doing research into how the mental process of "awareness" might relate to fractals.  I wonder if the way in which we see a pattern is determined by a process that can be described through a fractal (i.e. I am "aware" of time passing)  I know that there is research being done into how the eye itself is aware of objects.  Is similar research being done into the the way in which the mind processes information?  And if there is research being done what results is it yielding if any?

I don't remember where I saw the article - a Google search would probably turn it up, but there seemed to be a positive correlation between the calculated fractal dimension of neural imaging of the cerebrum and both genius and insanity.

[oftakofta]

I am looking to see if anyone is doing research into how the mental process of "awareness" might relate to fractals.  I wonder if the way in which we see a pattern is determined by a process that can be described through a fractal (i.e. I am "aware" of time passing)  I know that there is research being done into how the eye itself is aware of objects.  Is similar research being done into the the way in which the mind processes information?  And if there is research being done what results is it yielding if any?

Some of the work by W. Tecumseh Fitch might interest you.

My all to short summary and analyss of his and related work: The brain is very parallel in its information handling, with lots of things going on at once but in different distinct areas. The function of the brain is to somehow internalise a model of its surroundings (our physical world) so it can navigate them. This is because the body that the brain belongs to is basically a big bag of chemicals that needs to be kept in a certain order, at a certain temperature and transported across distances too large for diffusion (or other passive means) in order to continue to be self-replicating (thanks Darwin). Because there is a real physical reality with real physical laws which these chemicals have to obey the brain can only have ONE model of reality that it implements, even though it may have calculated several possibilities. "awareness" is distinctly serial, you can only be "aware" of one interpretation of your surroundings at one time (very overgeneralised). The example would be optical illusions like


where the two different interpretations (old lady or fancy lady) never can be held in "awareness" at the same time, even though you can switch between the interpretations "at will"

The processes that create these models in the brain are a form of deterministic chaos (or complex non-linear processes of you prefer that term) that is fed sensory data that might intermingle with stored sensory data (how the system was at an earlier time point) and that spits out a model in the end. This model is then used for "top down" control of the organisms behaviour that in turn generate new sensory data ad infinum. If you plot chaotic systems in phase space or state space (looking at the entire system over time) these systems show strange attractors that are fractal. In other words fractals are the "scars" that chaotic systems leave behind them over time. A lot of research is now done with single neuron electrodes that use fractal analysis of the patters of signalling over time (remember the "Clinton" neuron?). The problem is that a system can have a lot of different strange attractors, making them hard to find. In order to try and circumvent these problems multifractal analysis is being applied. "Awareness" could also just be some type of synchronisation mechanism between different chaotic systems. We are actually not all that good at complex chaotic systems in both space and time, we have the beginnings of tools for analysing chaos in space (geometric fractals and space filling fractals that have fractal dimensions, see wikipedia on:"List of fractals by Hausdorff dimension") or in time (fractal waveform analysis) but not both at once.

http://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/~wtsf/downloads/NanointentionalityFinal.pdf (and references therein gives thorough biological elaboration on these, and other important concepts like "intentionality" if you like philosophy of mind)

Also I want to recommend Erwin Schrödingers 1944 essay "What is life?" if you want a more thorough elaboration on the physical constraints put on life by the universe as we know it. It is also a delightful exposé of the value of human reasoning and the empirical method as a concept. Remember that it was written almost a decade before the discovery of the double helix when you read it.
http://whatislife.stanford.edu/Homepage/LoCo_files/What-is-Life.pdf

Sometimes is hard to know what is philosophy and what is science when looking at these things, so i guess I'll just mention the strange self-referential properties of the "I" concept and not elaborate on it. I would be glad of someone would point me towards more literature in case they find things lacking or wrong in my type of reasoning and analysis.

[jehovajah]

I am glad of your post. I feel that iteration is so fundamental that it seems nonsensical not to revise all our thinking accordingly. I once realised that there is no safe ground to proceed in this area, but rather one has to strike out and explore it. All i can say is that it is more secure than the so called security of traditional exposition. Our language grammars often invert the priority pronouns. "We" should be the pronoun "we" use most about our "self". While we may like to characterise our journey through life as a struggle for independence it is more nearly one of dependence to independence to inter-dependence to intra-dependence as far as as awareness is concerned.