while tripping sometime ago on a bike ride with a friend, I couldn't help but be drawn to the symmetry of the plants off the side of the trail. while on LSD, I've also noticed much more of an attraction to mathematics, a field of thought I'm normally quite uninterested and incompetent in as a rule. Plants seem to illustrate that there are in fact numerical and geometrical laws governing our existence. I'm not going to claim intelligent design due to the constanly questioning nature of my mind, but the geometry of flora on Earth seems to indicate a certain bent towards sentient construction. Any thoughts on this particular subject from any of the other pyschonauts out there?

You should read a book called "In search of divine reality" by Dr. Lothar Shafer.

I took a class by him at the UofArkansas called quantum reality. He's a physical chemist. He basically describes the world, empirical and nonempirical (ie waves), using quantum mechanics as a living web of mathematical values and constraints which through some intelligent transcendence, this world of numbers and values becomes, and governs our reality through the entanglement of our own existence.


That's the best short description I can give you.

thanks for the recommendation, ablengata. While I've never been an expert in any particular area of science, I can't help but resist to postulate on the nature of the universe around us in a figurative and loose narrative sense that doesn't really capture the lucidity and powerful plainness of science. I do enjoy reading scientific texts, although I can't pretend to understand all of it. These tomes do raise many questions for me, questions that I then attempt to answer thru much mental and spiritual exploration. I'm interested in psychedelics and the nature of existence the way Huxley was, from more of a romantic and aesthetically based writer's point of view, but I always try to use science as it is a formidable tool for psychedelic discovery.

One possibility I've always considered is that numbers themselves represent some sort of intelligence, and that "God" or "Allah" or whatever is in fact an equation, constantly being feed into some sort of data input that creates our constantly expanding universe. Or maybe this is kind of what your Dr. Shafer is getting at. I'll certainly try to find this book on Amazon now, my interest is piqued.

Our science and math is largely based on nature. I would only make sense to see patterns in nature that we stole.

also, it seems like the appearance of form constants (the geometric patterns often observed during psychedelic trips, particularly of the mescaline variety, or right before lucid dreaming) in the human mind would certainly lend credence to the theory of a mathematically based existence.

Plants seem to illustrate that there are in fact numerical and geometrical laws governing our existence.

You're not the first to think this up...

Ever heard of the golden ratio? Fibonacci numbers? Present in nature my friend.. oh wait, just saw that glitched go to there before I did. Also, op, use less words to get your point across. This isn't a college essay.

i remember some of my dreams almost every night and they always have a correlation to events that transpired days ago.

i seem to notice things like this much more than my friends.

for example, say me and some friends are sitting on the grass, i am ALWAY picking at it. 1 out of maybe 20 leaves of the grass, if you pick it, will contain a bundle of leaves. i always pick out the biggest leave, then the next one, the next one, etc.

and i save the middle leaves that cant be picked down any further. but shhh on that one, cause my friends think its fuckin weird that i pick them, nevermind save them...

Also, op, use less words to get your point across. This isn't a college essay.


Dick, I thought he painted the scene quite well. Good use of words, op.

However:

You and I view reality much like a speculator might watch a baseball game through a knothole in the fence - and all he sees is third base. He's got his eye up there and he watches the entire game through third base, and only third base.

If someone asks him to decribe baseball, he says, "Well, there's some guy that stands around kicking the dirt for quite a while, spitting on the ground, and that sort of thing. And all at once a bunch of guys come sliding in and kick the dirt all over and then swear at eachother and almost fight, and pretty soon they all leave and the first guy stands around, kicking the dirt once again. And that's about it. "

And this is America's number one sport!? This is about the way we view reality. We perceive just a little bit of it, and we are so naive to think that's all of it. But that isn't all of it. The truth is that virtually the whole ball game called reality is being played beyond our knothole view...

-Court Holdgrafer



Our senses combined actually perceive less than one millionth of true reality.

Any thoughts on this particular subject from any of the other pyschonauts out there?

You're not just tripping. Fractals, dude. Give me a plant and I can try to deduce you a constructor for it, too...

Yeah. Nature's like that. Awe in its wonder, learn its science, and keep moving forward too.

shut up :)

Fractals, dude. Give me a plant and I can try to deduce you a constructor for it, too...

Okay, I got bored... anyways, LC... as we all know, the key concept which defines fractals is... "recursion." That's it, the end-all and be-all, and allows one to store complex information in very little space.

http://img518.imageshack.us/img518/15/fractalleafhd9.jpg

A number of leaves, for instance, consist of diamonds with their outer points connected by circles. The one given is defined by a .75 iterative scalar on the offset of the points and a y definition of +/- 0.375 * y. It's as simple as that.

Others can be more complex. I'm pretty sure I've seen leaves with an iteration-scaled parabola, creating a weighted curve of interesting velocity. Nautilus shells are essentially the standard 2d rotation (cosXsinY/sinXcosY) with an increasing sphere size and radius per iteration. Yadda yadda.

shut up

Nah. Though it is odd that "whoa I wuz tripping and everything wuz fraktalz" belongs in Mad Scientists rather than BLTC. ;)

...but because mathematicians have tripped before us... yes, it does. ;) Fairly established science at that.