Structured Imagination with Stable Attractors
From the public record
Proposed by: Benny Shanon
Visionary content is generated by cognition but not randomly. The imagination has stable attractors that different minds fall into.
Benny Shanon's systematic phenomenology of ayahuasca visions documented recurring cross-cultural themes without concluding anything supernatural: the mind's generative processes simply have preferred shapes. Applied to glyphs, convergence reflects the attractor landscape of human visual cognition under tryptamines. This sits between the cortical account and the archetypal one, and it predicts family resemblance rather than exact symbol matches.
Source: The Antipodes of the Mind (2002) (book)
Tags: phenomenology, cognition