From Photons to Pharaohs: A Golden-Hour Test of Imagination

Every evening, around the same window of light, my wall becomes a small theater. Sunlight bends through glass and throws bright arcs across the paint. I started pairing each raw light form with a quick sketch of what I imagined. Angel. Pharaoh. Tomorrow, who knows.

The protocol is embarrassingly simple: Same wall, same time, no moving the lamp or glass. Shoot the light. Then draw the thing my mind insists is "there." Repeat.

What started as idle observation has become something more deliberate—a daily negotiation between photons and priors, between what arrives and what I project. The wall has become my local laboratory for a global question: How much of what we "see" is actually there?

The Crowd as Rorschach

This isn't my first dance with projected meaning. A few years back, I posted an abstract mosaic form on Instagram—a shape that would eventually become my personal logo.This accidentally became my personal brand logo—sometimes the best designs emerge from experiments rather than intention. The prompt was simple: "What do you see?"

The responses mapped the beautiful chaos of collective cognition:

• AirPod (the zeitgeist speaking)
• Oculus controller (Silicon Valley's finest)
• Turtle's head (nature finds a way)
• Drumstick (hungry crowd)
• Tomahawk steak (definitely hungry crowd)
• Fancy "9" (the typography nerds)
• Italian hand gesture (🤌 cultural memory)
• Elephant head (trunk and all)
• Ladle (kitchen brain)
• Shower head (bathroom brain)
• Golf club (weekend brain)

Same pixels, eleven interpretations. Each person's neural network denoising the ambiguous signal through their own training data—their memories, contexts, current states. The mosaic wasn't revealing hidden truths; it was revealing the viewers.

When Light Becomes Language

What's happening on my wall has a name in physics: caustics.Caustics are patterns formed when light is focused by reflection or refraction through curved surfaces—think of the bright patterns at the bottom of a swimming pool or the curves of light through a wine glass. Those bright curves and cusps form when light focuses through reflection or refraction off curved surfaces. Pour milk into coffee and watch the light dance—caustics. Fill a pool on a sunny day—caustics everywhere. The mathematics are deterministic, predictable, pure physics.

But the moment those photons hit my retina, something else takes over. My brain doesn't passively receive this light show—it actively explains it away. This is predictive coding in action, the Bayesian brain doing what it does best: minimizing surprise by projecting learned patterns onto ambiguous input.

The technical term for seeing faces in clouds or angels in light patterns? Pareidolia. Evolution handed us hair-trigger face detectors because missing a predator was worse than seeing one that wasn't there. Now we see faces in electrical outlets, divine figures in toast, and apparently, pharaohs in evening light.

According to the free-energy principle, our brains are constantly trying to minimize prediction error. When caustic patterns create ambiguous visual input, our predictive models fill in the gaps with the nearest matching pattern from our priors. The angel isn't in the light—it's in the accumulated weight of every angel I've ever seen, heard about, or imagined.

The Double Edge of Imagination

Let me sit with both sides of this phenomenon.

On one hand: What a capability. Our predictive machinery transforms raw sensory data into meaning faster than conscious thought. We don't just see light; we see possibilities. Every human innovation started with someone seeing what wasn't yet there. The same neural circuits that put angels on my wall put rockets on the moon. Imagination isn't a bug; it's the feature that made us world-builders.

On the other: The same machinery that creates also deceives. Our priors don't just fill gaps—they can override evidence. We see patterns in randomness, intent in coincidence, conspiracies in complexity. The Rorschach test's questionable validity reminds us that projection isn't always insight.Translation for our purposes: projection is real; measurement is tricky. The Rorschach reveals something true about how we project meaning, even if psychologists debate exactly what or how reliably. Sometimes a caustic is just scattered light, not a message from the universe.

The trouble is, we can't turn it off. Predictive processing isn't optional—it's how perception works. We're all walking around in partially hallucinated realities, our brains constantly autocompleting the world based on what we expect to see.

Building the Ritual: A Light Practice

If we can't escape our predictive machinery, we might as well study it. So I've formalized my evening observations into something between meditation and methodology:

The 10-Minute Light Practice

When: Golden hour (that window between 'Asr and Maghrib,'Asr is the afternoon prayer in Islam, and Maghrib is the sunset prayer. This liminal time between them is when the light performs its best magic. when the light goes honeyed)

Where: Pick one wall. Don't move your optics once you start. Consistency reveals variation.

Protocol:

1. Position yourself where natural or artificial light creates patterns
2. Photograph the raw light (no filters, no adjustments)
3. Sketch what you "see" in the pattern (3-minute limit)
4. Title it with the first noun that comes to mind
5. Date stamp everything
6. Weekly review: Notice patterns in your patterns

What emerges: A diary of your priors. Watch how your projections shift with mood, season, news cycle. Stressed week? More threats in the light. Creative flow? Abstract forms bloom into stories.

The constraint is the catalyst. Same wall, same window, different visitors each day. The light stays physics; everything else is you.

Open Lab: The Experiment Scales

[Placeholder: This practice wants to become something larger. Imagining a public platform where people upload their light/interpretation pairs. A living dataset of human projection. Geographic and cultural heat maps of what we collectively "see." TAC voice notes explaining the stories.TAC stands for Talk & Comment—my experimental voice-note protocol for async conversations. Think of it as leaving voice messages on a shared wall. Maybe caustics become the new coffee grounds—a modern medium for reading not the future, but the present state of human consciousness.]

The AI Mirror

Watching Midjourney or DALL-E denoise random patterns into images, I can't help but laugh. We've built machines that do explicitly what we do implicitly. Diffusion models literally start with noise and iteratively denoise toward learned patterns—which is essentially what my brain does every evening with those caustic curves.

The difference? We can inspect AI's priors, encoded in weights and training data. Our own priors hide in the shadows of consciousness, revealing themselves only through practices like this. Training ourselves to notice and name what we project makes us better sense-makers, better builders, better at distinguishing signal from self.

Understanding our own predictive processing becomes critical as we share reality with AI systems that have their own priors, their own ways of filling gaps. The question isn't whether machines will hallucinate—they already do, just like us. The question is whether we'll recognize the mutual hallucination and build something beautiful anyway.

The Wall as World

Six weeks into this practice, patterns emerge beyond the patterns. The angel appears on anxious days. The pharaoh when I've been reading history. Abstract geometries after coding sessions. My wall has become a low-fi biofeedback device, a mirror made of light.

But zoom out and the lesson scales. Every civilization started with someone seeing something that wasn't there yet—and then convincing others to see it too. Cities are collective hallucinations that became concrete. Currencies are shared fictions that move mountains. Even consciousness itself might be¹ the story we tell about the patterns we project.

The wall is local; the lesson is global. Reality supplies fragments; our priors supply the wings. Culture is what happens when enough people agree to see the same angels.

Your Turn

Tonight, when the light shifts toward golden, find a wall. Or a window. Or a puddle. Let the caustics form. Watch what your mind insists on seeing. Draw it, name it, date it.

Then ask: What priors am I carrying? What patterns am I projecting? What worlds am I building from light?

Send me your diptychs. Let's map the collective imagination, one golden hour at a time.

Because civilization—all of it—is just imagination carved into light, and then agreed upon.

References & Rabbit Holes

• Face pareidolia and the brain - Why we can't help seeing faces
• Predictive coding in the cortex - The brain as prediction machine
• The free-energy principle - Friston's unified brain theory
• Bayesian brain hypothesis - Perception as inference
• Caustics - When light focuses into bright curves
• Rorschach test validity - The limits of projection as diagnosis