The Overview Effect

I’ve been thinking about the overview effect lately, the radical perspective shift from seeing the whole as a phenomenon that shows up across many modes of exploration: flow states, meditation, psychedelics, and mystical experience. Those shifts reveal recurring patterns of awareness and often images that form the visionary experience.

What if we could treat those patterns like a language and model them with LLM-style systems? Doing so might let us map the structures of consciousness across humans, plants, and ecosystems, and reveal how information and meaning form at the boundary between the physical and non-physical, such as energy and matter.

In my own artwork, I explore these multidimensional patterns visually, through crystalline structures and light-based forms that act as portals into these expanded states of awareness. Each piece becomes a way of sensing the larger systems we’re part of, and how consciousness itself might be patterned.

Mapping a Multidimensional Model of Consciousness
I wonder, what kinds of data would we need to begin modelling “awareness-patterns” across different life forms? And could foundational AI research benefit from biological or ecological priors — or vice versa, could exploring consciousness through these models help us see more clearly the interconnection of all life?

I’d love to curate dialogues with researchers, artists, and explorers across cognitive science, plant neurobiology, and AI around these questions. If this resonates, I’d be honoured to hear your perspective.