The Waveworld project is a culmination of explorations into my own psychology, studying diverse texts in philosophy and spirituality and more. This is an ongoing project, and just like my previous projects, will be done in an exploratory without a clearly defined goal.
The larger corpus of study over the years has been compiled into a paper which is submitted as preprint in PsyArxiv (early draft): A wave model of interaction between the psyche and environment
The current version of Waveworld starts from a dream I had that the universe is a large scale neural net:
"A week back I had a gripping dream that the universe is a large neural network. What I further saw was that the network is way more complex than current learning algorithms, is feedback based (like RNN etc) and that these are nested networks one within the other (ad infinitum, like fractals or holography). Finally this was a cyclical network, which hs no beginning or ending (because it was circular?!). I made a sketch of what I saw in #P5JS with the help of #ChatGPT The smaller circles are essentially nodes of the layers of a simplistic RNN and the values changes showcase the learning, but in a cyclical form such that (and I specifically asked for this) that the input and output values pass through zero at a point. Graphs of the nodes below. (The code is more of an artistic representation than an accurate one) P.S: I know this could be a blunder but I had to be authentic with my process."
I then started experimenting with the possibility of how (according to the wave model in the paper above) each entity in the universe like a human being could be a closed loop control system. I decided to create a p5js sketch with ChatGPT on the same. Using each pixel as an entity, I decided to apply the mechanics.
I then went on with multiple iterations until I stumbled on a ripple-boundary structure, because I wanted to add cymatic patterns to it. Here is an explanation of the system generated by the LLM: "In this system, each pixel inside the circle engages in a continual, local process of borrowing and lending with its immediate neighbors....those directly above, below, to the left, and to the right (with seamless wrapping at the edges). Whenever a pixel holds more value than its neighbors, it “lends” some away by sending value outward; if it holds less, it “borrows,” drawing value in from those around it. These exchanges aren’t instantaneous....each pixel’s tendency to borrow or lend lingers briefly, introducing inertia and causing waves of value to ripple and reflect across the circular domain. Over time, these simple, local borrow-lend interactions build up into rich, cymatic-like standing patterns, with energy spreading, interfering, and eventually balancing out. All of this happens with strict conservation: value is never created or destroyed, but endlessly redistributed among the pixels, demonstrating how complex, harmonious structures can emerge from the most basic, neighborly exchanges."
I tried this with multiple boundaries: square, circular and finally hexagon. I chose hexagon specifically because it had a connection with the flower of life image.
I tried this with multiple boundaries: square, circular and finally hexagon. I chose hexagon specifically because it had a connection with the flower of life image.
The Hexagonal configuration gave the most interesting patterns. It showcased flower of life intersections, star of david, triangles, and patterns reminiscent of islamic architecture
I also tried tessellating the hexagonal structure using Adobe After Effects
Now, I knew that this configuration can't just be 2D. So I also tried various configurations on a spherical ripple inside a polyhedra; starting from a cube, then to an octahedron, then a dodecahedron (platonic solids). Here are renders of a dodecahedron and with the dual of the dodecahedron, an icosahedron:
After this I further researched specifically on the flower of life (or seed of life) pattern and tried a cuboctahedron boundary. Now since the reflections were from the faces of the cuboctahedron than the vertices, i decide to also try the dual of the cuboctahedron, the rhombic dodecahedron as a boundary. This was done using Matlab. Video of the rhombic dodecahedron below:
From the 2D animation of the hexagonal configuration; I also extracted the frames and made the mid-grays transparent. I extruded the same in the vertical axis and got a pillar shaped form, which was highly reminiscent of sound-pillars in ancient Indian temples.
The similarity could also be found with the patterns and islamic architecture:
This gave me an idea to regenerate the temple pillars and roof of mosques using the wave patterns as structure reference in a generative AI video model like Adobe Firefly or Stable Diffusion (by Stability.AI). Results below:
Simulating the 3D configuration above, I felt that the real visual of this would be discovered only if it is made into a grid (like the tessellation). Now because the rhombic dodecahedron is a space-filling polyhedron, the grid structure was tight. So I made 7 layers of the polyhedra grid (7 because of the importance of the number in nature), I then tweaked the cell sizing to get an overall hexagonal geometry. The final simulation made in Matlab, after some color correction in After Effects is what you see below:
This representation might not be accurate, but what I think is that this structure could represent the quantum probability distribution of the universe. Because interference of waves can cause holography, the probability distribution is also fractal. And solidity comes, perhaps, beyond a threshold of the probability which again could be a function of the system.
One further thought is that, although this is represented in time as an animation, the possibility that all of the probability interference waves exist at the same time can give the system a zero effect; ie. there is no cause-effect at a macro scale and at a micro scale, everything is tightly interconnected.
Getting feedback from people working with altered states of mind, I understood that in the waves, when the vesica-pisces portion emerges, there is a significance. In the previous videos, this portion did not occur much. So I designed a different configuration (which now makes complete sense): ripples from 7 points arranged in seed of life pattern reflecting within a larger circular boundary. Called this work "Primordial Waters"
And trying this as a tessellation gave beautiful patterns.
This also gave me an idea for a better 3D configuration: in a rhombic dodecahedron, the vertices produce ripples (flower of life). These ripples are reflected within an enclosing sphere. I rendered the same from multiple viewpoints using Matlab. It kinda gives an MRI scan animation effect.
Not sure what I was trying to do here, but inspired by ZachLieberman 's recent works, I used the ripple model on 7 different points on the human body. I initially added a boundary, but later let it free.
Original dance video by Polina Tankilevitch on Pexels
Out of sheer curiosity, I set 6 points marked by Leonardo Da Vinci in the Virtuvian Man, including the centre of the artwork, as sources of ripple and gave the bounding circle of the sketch as the boundary for the ripples. Also made videos with the square boundary (suggestion by Piter Pasma) and union of square and circle boundary.
2 interesting frames emerged (second one shared by Sree Unnikrishnan on similarities with the Vasth Purush)
I then tried the ripples in hexagon configuration such that a set of new ripples start everytime the previous wave touched the hexagon. I also made the proportions matching the seed of life. It gave patterns reminiscent of the patterns found on many mosque roofs and other religious structures. In example below is Ibn Batuta mall and mosque roofs sourced from Pinterest; Link1, Link2
I decided to break the symmetry a bit on the Primordial Waters video. Instead of all ripples starting at the same time, I decided to give each of it a time delay equal to the time the centre ripple takes to reach half the size of the boundary. And then each ripple starts one by one counterclockwise.
Exploring a little further, I tried to make the ripples not fixed to the 7-point config of the seed of life, but to be freely distributed in a fibonacci spiral
I ran a density graph of on the Primordial Waters animation (7 simultaneous ripples in circular boundary) for 100,000 cycles (one cycle is the time the centre ripple takes to touch the boundary and reach back the centre). I did this to see if the whole process is cyclical after a while such that it drops to 0 or close to 0 again. But even after 100,000 cycles, I didn't observe this.
Upoon request from the community for the Primordial waters tessellation to be coloured, I made a new iteration of it with colours.
It didn't make sense for me that the number 6 or 7 could come out of 0 or 1 that easily. Maybe I am wrong, but it seemed the hexagonal boundary or the 7 ripple config seemed intentional than emergent in a poetic sense. I was reading this book , which got me thinking of time and space, and bringing in the 6 degrees of freedom in space and the one direction of time, I decided to make the ripple inside a cube (6 faces for reflection) and animate it (1 direction of time). The usual frontal and side views didn't give me anything interesting, but contemplating on the Metatron's cube, I got an idea to try the isometric view. And voila! I think this is really beautiful and I am calling it AEONM:
I separated the frames of the video above into layers and stacked them in 3D. The image of the stack was then used in an image-to-3D AI model to generate the pillar below.
An Origin Story
The following text is a conceptual story of how creation could have happened, based on the above explorations into wave simulations.
In the beginning there was a "zero-state"; which was null, void and can't be imagined. Because of the paradox of existence, for the null state to exist, there was a non-null state, called presence. Now this presence, in the form of a pulse (like a breath), moves out of the null to form a crest and then back to the null and then out of the null to form a trough (imagine a circle or a sine wave). Now because a crest or trough could be infinite if unbounded, for creation to occur a boundary condition had to be there. And thus it all starts. This configuration of the pulse in a boundary leads to the emergence of creation.
At first the pulse was 0 dimensional as in a dot pulsing (top-left in the video) out of the null. It then expands itself from its centre into a line segment, which then becomes the boundary (top-right), while the pulse continues reflecting within the line segment. The reflection causes interferences (just like any wave interfering with itself).
Now the pulse again divides the boundary from the centre and spreads across (perpendicular to the line segment) to the next dimension which is a plane, in this case, a square. The pulse itself becomes a circular pulse and then continues its act of reflections within the square. We can see the interference patterns more evidently now (bottom-left).
The division process again continues when the presence pulse divides the boundary from the centre of the plane and moves perpendicular to either directions of the surface of the plane to form a cubical boundary. The pulse itself becomes a spherical pulse. Now it is a spherical wave inside a cube, reflecting and forming more complex interference patterns(bottom-right). This division can go on and on until multiple dimensions (hypercube etc). And hence creating interferences across dimensions.
(It is possible that after a certain dimension (6?) that it goes back to a 0 dimension. It is also possible that the formation of each dimension is not sequential, but simultaneous. But Im not going into that here)
Nevertheless here is how this could translate into creation:
1) If this "presence" (as opposed to the null) is the base of all of existence and can be thought of as a quantum field, solidity or physical reality gets formed when the wave function collapses when the field interferes with its reflections beyond a certain threshold. Now I cant prove that these interferences can lead to particles forming, but I think that beyond a certain threshold of a parameter of the wave, physicality could appear. Another way to look at it is that physicality is illusory because the person perceiving a physical object also is made up of these waves. And the perception or interaction between the person and the object also creates an interference in this field. This creates wave function collapses at points in the interference patterns, hence the "experience" of solidity. Even then at the underlying level it still is part of a larger ordered wave.
2) Because interferences (due to reflections) can lead to holography, we can see how at scales the universe repeats itself. It also parallels how things at scales are connected to each other. And how we all are connected to each other.
3) If this presence field can be called as consciousness, it parallels panpsychism. That everything is conscious. But it would be better to say, everything has presence. Because the waves form everything, and that too in a mathematical order, this also points that (at a grander scale) free will and the ego is an emergent factor. In a way, it is an illusion. So everything happens because of the interference of waves in a certain order.
4) In the previous video of the isometric view of the spherical wave in a cube which I shared, we can see that the metatrons cube, the flower of life arrangement and multiple other sacred geometric figures emerge without intentionally coding it. Thus the possibility of having platonic solids in the interference patterns at highly zoomed in scales is high.
5) Quantum entanglement is not so spooky in the sense that the interferences are all connected across spatial and other dimensions.
Thoughts worth exploring:
1) If this presence which emerges out of the null as a wave can be indeed considered cyclical, then we can see how everything moves from creation to destruction and back. That nothing is permanent and everything that has a beginning has an end.
2) On the contrary if it is not cyclical or perhaps it is cyclical at local levels (like the pulse moving in and out) and not universally, then the whole of universe is just moving towards increasing complexities of interfering with itself and resolving to an "almost" null state (the pulse passing through zero and back) and back. Metaphorically, the universe is trying to rediscover itself through ever-complex ways.
3) If all dimensions and all interferences and waveforms are simultaneously "there" rather than created step by step, we can imagine how moving through these interferences by "observation" or presence gives rise to time or the feeling of it. (In a way block universe). Im not sure how this movement could happen. But hypothetically if we could get this whole system simulated, we could possibly see what happens in the future; and know the past.
4) This can and can't support the multiple universe theory because the complexity of the interferences could be so high that it could create such parallel universes. But even then they would not be independent, and they would still be connected.
5) At a human psychology level, this means that we too operate as waves going through life, resolving out from a null state and back to the null state. I explain this more in the wave model described in the paper I shared previously.
Can we test this? Perhaps mathematically? Perhaps by creating a complex simulation such that we can literally zoom in to the interferences and study them? Im not sure. But will keep exploring.