[FRIAM] Jack Cowan / Visual Hallucinations and structure of Visual Cortex (was Re: dystopian vision(s))

Fri Aug 19 20:20:34 EDT 2022

Steve Smith writes:
>  There is surely research into how much/which psychoactives get involved
in modulating these processes.

Jack (not George) Cowan gave a great lecture at BiosGroup in 2000 on this
very topic:

" What geometric visual hallucinations tell us about the visual cortex"
https://www.math.uh.edu/~dynamics/reprints/papers/nc.pdf

Abstract: Geometric visual hallucinations are seen by many observers after
taking hallucinogens such as LSD, cannabis, mescaline or psilocybin, on
viewing bright
flickering lights, on waking up or falling asleep, in “near death”
experiences,
and in many other syndromes. Kl¨uver organized the images into four groups
called “form constants”: (1) tunnels and funnels, (2) spirals, (3)
lattices, including honeycombs and triangles, and (4) cobwebs. In general
the images do
not move with the eyes. We interpret this to mean that they are generated
in the brain. Here we present a theory of their origin in visual cortex
(area
V1), based on the assumption that the form of the retino–cortical map and
the
architecture of V1 determine their geometry. We model V1 as the continuum
limit of a lattice of interconnected hypercolumns, each of which itself
comprises
a number of interconnected iso-orientation columns. Based on anatomical
evidence we assume that the lateral connectivity between hypercolumns
exhibits
symmetries rendering it invariant under the action of the Euclidean group
E(2),
composed of reflections and translations in the plane, and a (novel)
shift–twist
action. Using this symmetry, we show that the various patterns of activity
that spontaneously emerge when V1’s spatially uniform resting state becomes
unstable, correspond to the form constants when transformed to the visual
field
using the retino–cortical map. The results are sensitive to the detailed
specification of the lateral connectivity and suggest that the cortical
mechanisms
which generate geometric visual hallucinations are closely related to those
used
to process edges, contours, textures and surfaces.

_______________________________________________________________________
Stephen.Guerin at Simtable.com <stephen.guerin at simtable.com>
CEO, https://www.simtable.com <http://www.simtable.com/>
1600 Lena St #D1, Santa Fe, NM 87505
office: (505)995-0206 mobile: (505)577-5828

On Fri, Aug 19, 2022 at 10:40 AM Steve Smith <sasmyth at swcp.com> wrote:

> And the retina is not a simple pixel-camera... even one with a
> non-uniform, non-rectangular distribution of photon-integrators...  there
> is plenty of processing going on between rods/cones and optic-nerve.   Do
> we suppose that *these* layers are significantly short-circuited by (some)
> psychadelics?
>
>
> Retinal Processing Layers
> <https://www.embl.org/news/science/vision-unveiled-new-roles-for-the-retina-in-visual-processing/#:~:text=Located%20at%20the%20back%20of,colour%2C%20contrast%2C%20and%20motion.>
>
> There is surely research into how much/which psychoactives get involved in
> modulating these processes.
>
> I tend to believe (with no specific references to offer) that the more
> interesting mediation/modulation DaveW gestures towards goes on further
> down the chain of processing.  Loosening up some of the (over?)
> model-fitting going on downstream from edge/contrast-enhanced perceptual
> info.   For example, I don't think that the military-industrial complex
> will have secret psychoactive drugs which replace night-vision goggles
> anytime soon. BUT I am more inclined to believe that cognition/perception -
> *sharpening*/*widening* pharmacology is already in use .   Cigarettes and
> Coffee were in WWII/Korea/Vietnam Rations as well as Bennies
> <https://allthatsinteresting.com/amphetamine-use-world-war-2>.  Good
> thing the Wermacht hadn't hit on PCP
> <https://drugabuse.com/drugs/hallucinogens/pcp/history-statistics/> by
> then...   already Jacked Ubermenchen on Hydrazine afterburners?
>
> Are all our geriatric politicians on B12/Aderall cocktails?  Oh to see the
> pharmacological records for our most colorful politicians today!
>
> <Cyberpunk Segue>
>
> As is my habit, I refer to a Science Fiction Novel of relevance:  Hard
> Wired <http://www.walterjonwilliams.net/excerpt-hardwired.html> - Walter
> Jon Williams.   On the one hand, this early cyberpunk novel is armatured
> around advanced tech facilitated by earth-orbit near-zero-gravity,
> near-perfect-vacuum, near-zero-regulation, and
> near-zero-distribution-challenges (de-orbited bundles) supporting a
> florescence of pharmaceutical  research/development/production/use.   On
> the other hand, the protaganist (as I remember him) was wonderfully
> oldSkool, using a 3 chamber insulin-pump style tool interfaced to his
> neural interface to drive his Red/White/Blue drug-drip system.  Red and
> White are advanced forms of the conventional mapping (downers/uppers) to
> support on-demand relaxation/rest and on-demand energy/focus.  Blue is an
> on-demand perception-sharpening/broadening drug.
>
> <Strip City Segue>
>
> Walter is one of a fascinating contingent of NM contemporary writers
> nominally from ABQ (Belen I think) and HW published in 1987 was an early
> throwdown in the Cyberpunk Genre, and is set in the near-future
> Flagstaff-Albuquerque "Strip City" (and low-earth orbit).   Considering the
> proliferation/existence of strip-cities that have emerged along
> transportation (road, river, etc) routes organically, the Saudi "Line" Glen
> recently brought up here seems like an obvious ideation for an Arabic
> architect jacked on too much "Spice" ("Dune "reference).
>
> Even 20 years ago, Colorado Front Range residents were referring to
> Ft-Pueblo to reference the (near) continuous development of the I25
> corridor from Ft. Collins to Pueblo.   I flew back from Europe into Denver
> and drove from my daughter's place in Parker (south-south-Denver) to Pueblo
> on the back "farm roads" further out in the plains and discovered that the
> Ft-Pueblo stripmall-strip had grown out a good 10-20 miles East of I25 at
> several points (Castle-Rock, ColoSpgs, Pueblo).
>
> </Segue>
>
> </Segue>
>
> On 8/18/22 11:00 PM, Marcus Daniels wrote:
>
> The retina isn't perfect by any means, and the visual cortex must fix its inputs to make vision seem better than the raw inputs.    This is from memory, but I can look up references.
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com> <friam-bounces at redfish.com> On Behalf Of Prof David West
> Sent: Thursday, August 18, 2022 8:56 PM
> To: friam at redfish.com
> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] dystopian vision(s)
>
> An analogy that might clarify what was being conveyed in the original post:
>
> A RAW image - no compression, no processing - is what the brain/mind can perceive.
>
> JPEG is the image after going through the "survival filter" - both compression and adjustments to saturation, contrast, and sharpness. There are all kinds of advantages to JPEG, but "accuracy/fidelity" is not one of them. Consider all the consternation amateur photographers had a few months back with their phones failing to capture the redness of the sky in San Francisco and other parts of CA.
>
> Drugs, so the advocates claim, are not an alternate transformation—not HEIF—but simply a removal of the compression/processing mechanism entirely.
>
> Of course, even RAW is lossy: a few million pixels  captured from the near infinity of discrete photons available.  I suspect the brain/mind is less lossy, but to what degree?
>
> And my own experiences, both chemical and meditative, suggest to me that some kind of patterned sense making is still going on because my 'mind/consciousness' still interprets things — I still see the Argus Goat (sometimess a ram instead of a goat, with multiple eyes, often conflated with Argus Panoptes) allbeit It and I might have a conversation.
>
> davew
>
>
>
>
> On Thu, Aug 18, 2022, at 2:15 PM, glen wrote:
>
> I'm glad you softened it. Codependence *is* "organic to the nature of
> one's existence". What I worry about are those that idealize
> themselves as only codependent on some singular thing, which is what
> you're calling out when you talk about identification with thrill
> seeking or whatever. It's the single-ness that's the problem, not the codependence.
>
> Marcus and Dave seem tightly analogous in their positive responses to
> technological entheogens and physio-chemical ehtheogens, respectively.
> And you, being a bit of an ehtheogen-teatotaler, if I've understood
> correctly, align with Marcus. In contrast, I'm agnostic about the
> origins and pathway of any entheogens I might become codependent upon.
> Drugs, even very old ones brewed up by one-eyed witches in the outback
> bush, *are* technology, nearly identical to the Mojo Lens or the
> Neuralink. What's that stanza from Alice in Chains?
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p9GAEFTeWko
> "
> What's my drug of choice?
> Well, what have you got?
> I don't go broke
> And I do it a lot
> "
>
>
> On 8/18/22 11:36, Steve Smith wrote:
>
> On 8/18/22 9:47 AM, glen wrote:
>
> Yeah. I'm not as concerned as you seem to be about the addictive nature of alternative perspectives. Obviously, because my whole schtick is about attempting to take alternative perspectives. The addict has to admit they have a problem before treatment will work, eh?
>
> My use of the term "addictive" was unfortunate.  I didn't mean it
> particularly perjoratively.   I mostly just meant the awareness that one can become "codependent" on substances/experiences which are not otherwise organic to the nature of one's existence in-context. Tarzan and his friends may have done something vaguely similar to bungee jumping and skydiving (vine swinging and cliff diving), but those who have made the high-tech equivalents of those experiences part of their very persona have "given over" in some way that may or may not be something to "worry about"...  it is just in a practical sense a "commitment".  I have known plenty of people who have made "commitments" to all kinds of things/substances (caffiene, nicotine, alcohol, thc, gucose, lipids, parkour, etc) which they are virtually symbiotic with (addicted to?).   I have my own practical commitments to all kinds of behaviours and consumptions which are effectively now *part of who I am*.  I might have been a somewhat different person today if I had never become "committed" to alcohol, caffiene, earning/spending $USD, driving planes, trains, automobiles, etc.
>
> But if we adopt the perspective of the "longtermists", "transhumansits", or similar, and believe that essentialist computation is the limit point, the thing just over the horizon toward which evolution works, then our *brain* is one of the first/best instantiations of such computers. (Maybe I need scare quotes, there, too ... "computers"?) Quantum comput[ers|ing] is a close second only because too many people are ignorant enough of current computing to think hard about its limitations.
>
> FWIW I was just re-introduced to Bostrom's Astronomical Waste <https://nickbostrom.com/astronomical/waste> <https://nickbostrom.com/astronomical/waste> arguement in the context of a New Yorker Article on Effective Altruism which I think you have referenced a few times here.   A more computationally/entropic framed version of the Dyson Sphere <https://nickbostrom.com/astronomical/waste> <https://nickbostrom.com/astronomical/waste> (or more originally the Stapledon Light Trap):
>
>     An excerpt from/Star Maker/which mentions Dyson spheres:
>
>         Not only was every solar system now surrounded by a gauze of light traps, which focused the escaping solar energy for intelligent use, so that the whole galaxy was dimmed, but many stars that were not suited to be suns were disintegrated, and rifled of their prodigious stores of subatomic energy.
>
>
> So another form of Dave's argument, still metaphysical, is this Smolin-esque (or even Schrödinger-esque ala negentropy?) concept that our objective(s) is tightly coupled pockets of deep computation. And *that*, given that our brains are fantastic computers, gives some weight to the idea that deep and broad introspection gets one closer to God, closer to the objective, closer to the real occult Purpose behind it all in much the same way as studying quantum mechanics and quantum computation.
>
> My argument *against* that is that even if tightly coupled (coherent) pockets of computation are a crucial element, so is the interstitial space *between* the tight pockets ... like black holes orbiting each other or somesuch. It's not merely the individual pocket/computer that's interesting, it's the formation, dissolution, and interaction of the pockets that's more interesting. Actually, then, the *void* is more interesting than the non-void.
>
> Tangentially:
>
> Panic! At the Disks: First Rest-frame Optical Observations of Galaxy
> Structure at z>3 with JWST in the SMACS 0723 Fieldhttps://arxiv.org/abs/2207.09428
>
> I appreciate having near-peers who are "peering" into the same general (vaguely familiar) areas of the fractal abyss that I am...
>
>
> On 8/18/22 08:03, Steve Smith wrote:
>
> The experience *I* have (or the way I have mostly interpreted it) with various ways of "playing around with my interface/membrane/boundary" is that alternatively addictive to the point of becoming "essential" and a "vertiginous stare into the abyss" at the same time.    I'm not talking particularly or specifically about ingesting entheogens or any other substance known to acutely adjust reality.  There are (obviously) many other ways to "play around with the boundary". For what it is worth, Pandora is playing Denver's iconic "Rocky Mountain High" in the background as I complete this paragraph.
>
> I currently attribute this to the alone/all-one duality and the flexibility (elastic and plastic) nature of self-other boundaries (membranes?) as a conscious ego.   (Sting - How Fragile we are on Pandora now, segueing into judy Collins' Both Sides Now).
>
> If I take "the Uni/Multi-verse" to be nothing more/less than a single complex adaptive system which can(not) be reduced to a system of systems (only reduceable by an imperfectly isolated system (self) which has a compressed "model" of the universe as a system of systems of which it"self" is a perfectly isolated subsystem(self)) then the experience of self-other and "gaining insight/parallax into (R)reality" isn't all that puzzling (to this self's model of itself within the universal).
>
> This of course still leaves (for this illusory "self") the "hard problem" of the fact (rather than the nature) of (subjective) experience itself...
>
> I have a feeling (in my subjective experience as a self) that the "breath of consciousness" might be the compression/decompression cycle itself?   Talking (linearly) about this stuff is a fractal/recursive minefield of rabbit-holes worthy of Alice tripping on Entheogens?
>
> - Steve
>
> On 8/18/22 8:34 AM, glen wrote:
>
> Parallax is an important technique for getting at things just *beyond* one's current representational power. So, were I to try to steelman your argument, I'd suggest that, yes, the process by which our bodies refine/focus/hone-down our attention to a smaller, compressed thing from a larger thing (whether the largess is "noise" or not is a tangent) is important. And the entheogens permute that honing down, that reduction, to create a different transformation.
>
> It's reasonable to speculate that the transformation we execute under the influence of an entheogen might be *less* reductive than that we execute when "sober". But to argue that the transformation under the influence is a more accurate match to reality is fraught. Less reductive? Sure. More accurate? Well, that would require us to go into that tangent. What do we mean by more accurate? Does randomness exist? Etc.
>
> So we might want to be careful with that crossing between relatively tame statements like "entheogens alter the cross-membrane transformation providing parallax toward the out there" versus more metaphysical statements like "entheogens provide a better transformation (or no tranformation) across the boundary to the out there".
>
> Thanks for clarifying. I think I have a better understanding of the argument. Those of us who play around with our interface probably *do* have a better understanding of reality than those of us imprisoned by their one, sole interface. But we don't need to go so far as to say a drugged mind is more capable of perceiving the real reality.
>
> On 8/16/22 17:16, Prof David West wrote:
>
> If you assume, or believe, that the mind (body-brain-embodied mind-Atman) naturally processes 100% of the inputs and assume/believe that a survival enhancing mechanism filters that stream to create the illusionary subset that we call Reality, then entheogens work to dismantle the filtering mechanism and expose the Real Reality.
>
> Missing in my first post was a hidden premise, that any augmentations (Neuralink, et. al.) are almost certainly based on whatever we think we understand of the filtering mechanism, not the Mind, and therefore would augment/enhance that mechanism and therefore lead to results opposite of what is desired.
>
> The missing premise is pretty much conjecture on my part but is grounded in an advanced, but not expert, understanding of AI and neural network technologies; so it should be taken with a tablespoon (thousands of grains) of salt.
>
> davew
>
>
> On Tue, Aug 16, 2022, at 11:22 AM, glen wrote:
>
> Opposite of what? I don't understand how augmentation is the
> opposite of the entheogens (drugs or meditation). Are you saying
> that, e.g. the Mojo Lens or Neuralink further restrict, whereas
> the entheogens lessen the restriction?
>
> If so, then my guess is you could do the same sort of
> restriction modulation with any augmentation device. E.g. if
> there are 1 billion possible data feeds you could receive,
> decreasing them is like an undrugged person self-censoring and
> such, then increasing them is like taking a entheogen ... that is, assuming Church-Turing.
>
> If we reject C-T, then it seems reasonable to argue that the
> body "computes" something that any computer-based augmentation
> would restrict, by definition, making it impossible to expand
> beyond what the augment provides. Computer-based augmentaiton
> would provide a hard limit ... an unavoidable abstraction/subset of reality.
>
> On 8/15/22 19:04, Prof David West wrote:
>
> The hallucino-philia (and Buddhist epistemologists) would argue that our brains (minds) already fully grasp / cognize / perceive our physical reality. But, for survival purposes, it self-censors and presents our consciousness/awareness/attention with a small abstract subset of that reality—an illusion.
>
> Drugs and meditation are 'subtractive' in that they dismantle the abstraction/reduction apparatus that generates the illusion hiding our 'full-grasping'.
>
> If such a belief were "true" then "augmenting our brains" would be the exact opposite, and exceedingly harmful, approach ...
>
>      ...   unless, the augmentation was a permanent [lsd | psylocibin | mescaline] drip.
>
>
> --
> ꙮ Mɥǝu ǝlǝdɥɐuʇs ɟᴉƃɥʇ' ʇɥǝ ƃɹɐss snɟɟǝɹs˙ ꙮ -. --- - / ...- .- .-..
> .. -.. / -- --- .-. ... . / -.-. --- -.. .
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