Is Consciousness Fractal?
Our subconscious love for fractals may tell an evolutionary story
By Jordana Cepelewicz
Originally published at Nautilus on May 4, 2017.
In one way, Jackson Pollock’s mathematics was ahead of its time.
When the reclusive artist poured paint from cans onto vast canvases laid out across the floor of his barn in the late 1940s and early 1950s, he created splatters of paint that seemed completely random. Some interpretations saw them as a statement about the futility of World War II, others as a commentary on art as experience rather than representation. As Pollock refined his technique over the years, critics became increasingly receptive to his work, launching him into the public eye. “We have a deliberate disorder of hypothetical hidden orders,” one critic wrote, “or ‘multiple labyrinths.’ ”
In 1999, Richard Taylor, a physicist at the University of Oregon, expressed the “hidden orders” of Pollock’s work in a very different way. Taylor found that Pollock’s patterns were not random after all. They were fractal — and the complexity of those fractals steadily increased as Pollock’s technique matured.
Now, Pollock would not have known what a fractal was, nor would anyone else have at the time. It wasn’t until 1975 that the eminent…
