K Void :
There’s this remarkable video by Dave Blair on YouTube, titled “Trapping Images in Feedback Loops & Creating Galaxies with The HD Video Feedback Fractal Device.” What you’re seeing in that video isn’t just a visual experiment; it’s a metaphor, a soft unveiling of what the mind goes through in high-dose psychedelic states or near-death experiences.
You begin with a signal, a pulse, a structure and then it feeds back into itself. The image spirals, curves, and dances until it births something wholly other. Just like under DMT or high dose pysilobin consciousness begins folding inward. You're no longer perceiving the world; you’re witnessing the blueprint of perception itself unraveling.
This reflects what cognitive models of altered states suggest. Attention charges the perceptual field with energy, increasing its curvature, speed, and intensity. Normally, that energy is balanced through what we call energy sinks such as symmetry or recognition. When something looks familiar, your mind anchors it. You recognize a face, a memory, a feeling, a trauma, a color; and in that moment, the unknown snaps into something known. This is your perceptual system relying on Bayesian priors internal probabilities built from experience that try to stabilize reality into what makes sense.
But on higher doses, those stabilizers collapse. Recognition fails. Meaning fragments. The semantic web rips apart, and what remains is raw pattern looping, shimmering, fractal feedback. You see kaleidoscopic feedbacks hyperbolic geometries, surreal hybrids of thought and form. Faces with extra eyes, recursive temples, vibrating mandalas,sacred geometries, mirrored archetypes, beings with impossible anatomy, mandalas that breathe. You don't interpret reality anymore; you feel it undulating as pure structure.
Blair’s feedback device captures this perfectly. When the usual anchors symmetry or semantic content can no longer absorb the overload, perception spills out into wild reflection. The machine, though electronic, becomes a visual allegory for the psychedelic mind. It creates galaxies and spirals not with software, but with the echo of its own signal feeding into itself just as consciousness, under entropic pressure, begins to mirror and magnify its own architecture.
That’s the loop. That’s the doorway. That’s the serpent eating its tail, the ouroboros of perception. When you cross that threshold, you don’t just witness strange visions you encounter the act of seeing itself, unfiltered by meaning, radiant in its own recursive imagination.
2025-06-19 23:51:04