**Links to**: [[Schema]], [[Rhythm]], [[Noise]], [[Schematism]], [[Pattern recognition]], [[Pattern-theoretic mathematics]], [[Patternicity]], [[Rifference and Depetition]], [[Difference]], [[Repetition]], [[Deleuze]]. ### [[Postulate]]: Whenever we speak of anything, we speak of patterns. _Pattern_ is this entire project’s foundational, most basic concept. Without it, we have nothing. The problem is that we don’t know what a pattern exactly is. In this project, we consider _minimal difference_, as reduced as can be, to be the source of all patterns. The fact that there is **something**, anything, means we can have _patterns_. Imagine, for perceptual simplicity: a dot. If there is a dot, beside it is non-dot. That’s the starting point of all possible patterns. Continuing with our information-theoretic; Euclidian take, a pattern can be as simple as a line: the fact that we need a little bit more than a dot already hints at the repetition we consider inherent to _patterning_. In [[All things mirrored]] we investigate whether _symmetry_ can be considered the most “simple” of patterns, and speculate about whether our perception reveals symmetry everywhere because of fundamental aspects of reality (such as energy gradients) which have symmetric tendencies. Our perception minimizes energy expenditure by resolving complex aspects of reality into predictable patterns. How much is there, and how much we put in, is the question. %% What is a pattern? Let's think about the [[Tritone paradox]]. _______ Similar to the encoding of interest: the child sees the possible interest of the mother, the mother fails to see the interest of the child, (which is the projected one of the mother, ad infinitum): "I am thinking of a little child who had very carefully and at great length arranged a variety of objects of differing sizes upon his mother’s table, making sure that their array be decorative and pleasing, in order to give her a “great delight.” The mother arrives. Relaxed, distracted, she grabs one of the objects, something she needs, moves another back to its usual place, undoes it all. And when the child’s barely stifled sobs give way to desperate explanations, revealing to her the extent of her error, she cries out, full of regret, “Oh! My poor little angel, I hadn’t seen that there was something there!” — Étienne Souriau, Avoir une âme I hadn’t seen. . . . But what is it that she doesn’t see? What is the “something” that the mother fails to see? We might say that it is the careful arrangement of the objects, testament to the child’s particular point of view. Or we might say that it is the child’s “soul,” transferred entirely over into the arrangement. Either way, we would be right: she certainly sees the objects, since she tidies them up—what she doesn’t see is the mode of existence that belongs to them from the child’s point of view, the architectonic that they sketch out in the child’s eyes. _What she doesn’t see is the child’s point of view_; she doesn’t see that there is a point of view, a point of view that exists in a manner all its own. It is a virtuality that she fails to perceive, just as a distracted hiker fails to see the sketch of a virtual bridge in the rows of stones lined up across from one another on opposite banks of a stream. They are like spectators standing before an anamorphosis, who, failing to find the angle that would allow them to decipher it, can’t see what it represents. There are openings in the cosmos of things, innumerable openings marked out by virtuals. Rare are those who perceive these openings and attribute any importance to them; rarer still are those who delve into them with creative experimentation." pp. 25-26 [[The Lesser Existences, Étienne Souriau, an Aesthetics for the Virtual]] An interested learning of patterns, thus, and sociodynamic active inference. _______ [[Fantasy]] "Crucial to the generative model solution to the problem of object perception is the “productive function” of the biological (or artificial) brain—its ability to endogenously generate sensory patterns. An artificial neural network based on generative models develops its own pattern-recognition abilities, not merely by habits of weighting and associating external stimuli, but by “dreaming”, using a “wake-sleep algorithm”, in which the system learns how to generate the patterns, for itself, by “imagining” different sorts of possible patterns “in fantasy”3. The knowledge of how to generate patterns is then used in order to recognize incoming patterns. “Here, instead of attempting to directly train a (synthetic) neural network to classify images, the network first learns to generate such images for itself” (Clark, 2015b, p. 27). Such a system then attempts to analyze and classify incoming stimuli, not by simply checking them against a database of previously-encountered images, but rather by identifying the endogenous rules or “imagination procedures” that it would use to generate the incoming stimuli for itself." [[The Predictive Processing Paradigm Has Roots in Kant]] --> maybe that last sentence connects nicely with [[06 Principle of Sufficient Interest]]. After that sentence, also relatable to PSI: "This strategy provides a basis for achieving generalized perceptual concepts that are _less confined to particular token instances_, which has recently been demonstrated to match human performance on character recognition tasks (Lake et al., [2015](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5056171/#B60)). Hence Hinton’s ([2007a](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5056171/#B42)) title “To Recognize Shapes, First Learn to Generate Images.”" ________________________________ "pattern (n.) a Modern English variant of patron, retaining its other old sense of "outline, plan, model, an original proposed for imitation," from Old French patron "patron, protector; model, pattern." The difference in form and sense between English patron and pattern wasn't firm before 1700s. The meaning "a design or figure corresponding in outline to an object that is to be fabricated and serving as a guide for its shape and dimensions" is by late 14c. Extended sense of "repeated decorative design" is from 1580s. From 1640s as "a part showing the figure or quality of the whole." Meaning "model or design in dressmaking" (especially one of paper) is recorded by 1792 (Jane Austen). Pattern-book is from 1774; pattern-maker is by 1851; pattern baldness is by 1916." - Patterns as limits, as enabling constraints: "Specifically, **_enabling constraints_** open new dimensions and create new potential by generating, shaping, and radically transforming the very possibility space and topology in which the interactions are enmeshed. Constraints bind things and processes to the environmental conditions in which they are embedded. Such bound interdependencies are the marks they leave behind. Once the new possibility space is generated, the resulting coherent dynamics (the products of enabling conditions and interactions) become **_governing constraints_** on their participants. They stack the deck of _which_ processes and events _will_ _most likely_ occur, when they will occur, and which _cannot_ occur at all." "In Humphreys’s felicitous phrase, context-sensitive constraints “import the statistics of their world” into a system’s coordination dynamics. Feedback loops of constrained interactions with the environment import meaningful, historical, and contextual information into those novel and coherent dynamics they forge." "Overall, thermodynamics favors hierarchy formation because it facilitates energy flow. Contextually constrained and extended energy flow patterns, embodied as interactional Types as described above, each with its own emergent properties and characteristic behaviors and powers, also naturally sort themselves into _hierarchical_ patterns. Arguably launched in the decade of the 1960s by American Nobel laureate in Economics Herbert Simon and American ecologist Howard Odum, **_Hierarchy Theory_** offers insights that can help conceptualize the emergence and operation of complex dynamics generally, and of differentiated coherence in particular As expanded by American developmental biologist Stanley Salthe, botanist Timothy Allen, and evolutionary biologist Nils Eldredge, among others, the idea that constrained interactions result in coherent wholes that are organized hierarchically is congruent with the view presented here." "Order and organization are critical for accessing new energy gradients. Cosmic, biological, and social evolutionary transitions innovate by accessing and harnessing new energy sources. A tendency to order formation is central to this continuous process of increasing complexity. It was only in the middle of the 20th century with the advent of computer simulation (Abraham and Shaw, Conway) that science began to understand how **_collective_** and **_coordination dynamics_** tap energy sources unavailable to entities as isolated individuals (Conrad, Nicolis and Prigogine). Collective coordination dynamics cut across traditional categories; they include tornadoes, lasers, slime molds, coral colonies, and the social organization of bees and human beings. These dynamics harness gradients by capturing energy and converting it into structure and order (Turvey, Kelso). Far from violating the second law, complex pattern formation is nature’s way of facilitating energy flow (Bejan). Exploiting _gradients_ through the operation of a variety of constraints is the first step towards coherence-making. In contrast to the idea of cause, gradients are relatively unproblematic. Since the early days of mechanical engineering, where the concept was first employed, inclined planes are the textbook example of constraint. The steeper their slope, the greater the potential energy. Gradients are nature’s primordial constraint through which the Second Law is satisfied. Some natural gradients like cosmic expansion dissipate energy. Gravity, in contrast, is a centripetal gradient; it concentrates mass and energy. Cosmic expansion alone would quickly dissipate into thermal equilibrium. Gravity alone would quickly implode in a massive black hole. Neither gradient alone produces coherence and coordination." [[Ben Goertzel]] [[A Patternist Philosophy of Mind]] -[[C. S. Peirce]] modeled everything as habits, another word for pattern -[[Nietzsche]] "the world as will to power and morphology" -[[Gregory Bateson]]'s Metapattern, the pattern which connects -[[Benjamin Lee Whorf]] linguistic patterns, interpretation of language so general that "ultimately was proposing a universal pattern-theory" #metaphorpaper -[[Philip K. Dick]] "semi-reality": the world may not be there as we naively conceive it to be, but it is there nonetheless. -[[Benjamin Franklin]] "moderation in all things, including moderation" [[Recursivity]] [[fractals]] - -"...any significantly intelligent mind is going to have an explicit or implicit notion of similarity, and hence one may define event-categories as "similarity clusters" in any interesting subjective reality." P 13 #reason #intelligence -"Given the notion of pattern, we can then develop the full aperitives of patternist philosophy, as will be enlarged upon in subsequent chapters. We can make definitions like: -Complexity: the amount of pattern in an entity, -Intelligence: the ability to achieve complex goals in complex environments, -Mind: the set of patterns associated with an intelligent system (i.e. an intelligent set of processes), -Emergence: the existence of patterns in a set of processes that are not patterns in any of the individual processes in the set, -Relative complexity: the complexity of an entity, where the patterns in the entity are defined relative to the knowledge in the system, -Simplicity and relative simplicity: the inverses of complexity and relative complexity." Sonia comment on above: we can see this breaking down because knowledge is not defined, plus simplicity being a measure of low patternicity does not match up with e.g. the equations that describe fractals. However, this is his answer to that argument: "physical law patterns are "highly intense", they provide massive simplification". (Sentence is paraphrase from longer paragraph on p 15). So now we have degrees of simplicity, which complicates things even more. -look up: [[Quantum gravity computation]] and [[Pattern-theoretic mathematics]] - Zf.: general ideas on the basis of reading book above: what have often been termed dualities (and often dismissingly so, except by [[Rosi Braidotti]] who forgives dualities "because they are so useful") I would like to reframe as hierarchies. Some might think the concept of [[Hierarchy]] is inherent in that of [[duality]] (as do I), some might think it's almost the opposite (it is for this group that I stress the concept of hierarchy as nested within duality). Why must the question of [[Cognition]] come down to "matter" versus "mind", and why does it matter (no pun intended) that either one of these has more or less explanatory power for the nature of cognition? In terms of [[explanation]]: why do we lean towards the simplest minima with the highest explanatory maxima? Why must large patterns encompass the variety hidden within smaller patterns? Other ideas that touch upon this are _things_ versus _stuff_ (in programming ontologies and in everyday language), or entity versus process (with _event_ in the middle as a processual entity) time versus space, etc. #categories #no Zf.: a pattern has [[Directionality]], it aims towards the construction-identification of [[Similarity]]. Another thought about Directionality and [[Drive]]: the psychoanalytic focus on drive also reflects something about the male perspective from which it originates. Women are driven by various hormonal systems through the menstrual phase, for example. Their drives change, oscillating between various modes of preferential sociality and sexual inclinations. Non-menstruating mammals, i.e. males, experience a sense of drive that is much less oscillatory than that of females. It is interesting to think about the fact that what also may be true is that non-gender-specific individuals may display traits that fit both categories, or may be physiologically more attuned to one, but behaviorally more attuned to the other, and vice versa. [[Endocrine control]] [[Daniel Dennett]] and real patterns #lookinto [[Physics]] and a universal pattern, #lookinto : https://www.quantamagazine.org/universal-pattern-explains-why-materials-conduct-20190506/