api parent
I immediately started thinking that if there are such patterns maybe they capture something about the deeper structure of the universe.
On a hike this weekend my daughter and I talked about the similarities of the branching and bifurcating patterns in the melting ice on a pond, the branches of trees, still photos of lightning, the circulatory system, and the filaments in fractals.
Find some images of the entire huge scale structure of the universe. It looks a bit like… a brain.
What does this mean? Probably not nothing, but probably not “the cosmos is the mind of god.” It probably means that we live in a universe that tends to produce repeating nested patterns at different scales.
But maybe that’s part of what makes it possible to evolve or engineer brains that can understand it. If it had no regularity there’d be no common structural motifs.
Similar feeling here re: "mind of God". I interpret these patterns as a very simple property of mathematics producing complex-looking patterns and evolution exploiting that complexity. Evolution is the ultimate procedural content generation machine.
I thought that was Houdini.