Patterns, order, and proportion
Getting to the root of what patterns are is difficult, but I think it's fun as well. From what I can see, patterns are subjective. That is, they are based on beauty and since beauty is subjective patterns must also be subjective as well. There is similarities between what are called patterns, but this is a relational aspect of them. This says nothing about a pattern in itself, as I see it. I was wondering if anyone had any arguments that patterns are objective
Comments (87)
[quote=“The Codex Quaerentis: On Ontology, Being, and the Objects of Reality”]... The particular occasions of experience are thus the most fundamentally concrete parts of the world, and everything else that we postulate the existence of, including things as elementary as matter, is some abstraction that's only real inasmuch as postulating its existence helps explain the particular occasions of experience that we have.
Some of these abstract things are so fundamental that we could scarcely conceive of any intelligent beings comprehending reality without the use of them. Immanuel Kant called these kinds of things, things we cannot exactly observe but which we cannot help but use to structure the things that we do observe, "categories". The ones that I will describe here are not exactly the ones that he describes, though there is significant overlap. The first thing we need to do to structure our experiences is to identify patterns in them. To do that, we need a pair of concepts that I call "quality" and "quantity", which allow us to think of there being several things that are nevertheless the same, without them being just one thing: they can be qualitatively the same, while being quantitatively different. Any two electrons, for instance, are identical inasmuch as they are indistinguishable from each other, because every electron is alike, but they are nevertheless two separate electrons, not one electron. In contrast, the fictional character Clark Kent is, in his fictional universe, identical to the character of Superman in a quantitative way, not just a qualitative way: though they seem vastly different to casual observers, they are in fact the same single person. If two people are said to drive "the same car", there are two things that that might mean: it could mean that they drive qualitatively identical cars (or as close to it as realistically possible, e.g. the same year, make, and model), or it could mean that they drive the same, single, quantitatively identical car, one car shared between both of them. With these concepts of quality and quantity, we can describe patterns in our experience as quantitatively different instances or tokens of qualitatively the same tropes or types. Out of this arise the notion of several different things being members of the same set of things ("qualities" as I mean them here mapping roughly to the mathematical concept of "classes", an abstraction away from sets, and "quantities" as I mean them here mapping roughly to the mathematical concept of "cardinality", an abstraction away from the measure of a set or class). And with that can be conducted all of the construction of increasingly complex abstract objects built from sets as detailed in my previous essay on logic and mathematics...[/quote]
I then go on to talk about space, time, and possible worlds all being abstractions in which to organize those patterns of experiences, and things like substances and causation likewise.
Interesting stuff. I almost named this thread "the logicism of patterns". A blank canvas seems to have no pattern, but if you draw a triangle on it it seems like it does. Draw a landscape and our brains fire even more neurons. I want to know more about the transition between a bunch of white, a triangle against a lot of white, and the landscape painting. I'm being very Cartesian or should I say logistic about it. Maybe I just have ocd. But i think there is gold in these here hills. I named the thread after St Augustine and his treatment of physical beauty. For him beauty, pattern, order and proportion were not in our minds but in the things themselves. So is there more to patterns than complexity?
Some patterns are very simple, others more complex. Complexity, itself, does not imply patterns. Nor does it necessarily imply chaos.
It seems to me that we have a predilection towards pattern, order and proportion, and it seems more prevalent in males, the rate of autism in males being one indication (from memory). Traditional composition of painting has been around a long time, the triangular arrangement of elements for example, and the arrangement of elements regarding balance and space. One of the radical changes in art was to smash this idea of balance and create tension in the work by breaking these rules. Everyone is comfortable with these ideas about balance and proportion even though it’s unconscious. People are satisfied by this subtle arrangement in images, be in paintings or photos. The fact that artists break the rules to create new tensions or draw attention to things suggests an understanding and acceptance of what might be regarded as objective patterns. Otherwise why smash the idea of proportion and balance with something in mind?
Maybe this proves nothing and someone will deconstruct what I’ve said, but I find it interesting all the same.
Edit: “ The college I went to after high school was Catholic and they hated basing math on logic.“ What was their position?
This applies to all primes so we can say 733[sup]610699[/sup] leaves remainder 733 when divided by 610699. We can know this without doing the calculation. Simplicity and universality of patterns in mathematics are what the mathematician seeks.
Were patterns subjective, some would see them and others wouldn't. This isn't the case, no?
Nice! I was there a year in 2004-2005 but then left because I lost traditional faith. They told me "its natural to believe in God." I said that maybe Hume was right in saying the meaning of the universe comes from within the universe instead of from with-out. They responded " that's unnatural thinking" and were glad I left. I struggle a lot with how much to trust my common sense because it was formed by Catholicism. On this very thread I'm doubting the objectivity of patterns and maybe doing so because I doubt the existence of a deity as well. Philosophy is SO fun. But it can be hell sometimes
Plato did. For him, these mathematical objects do exist "out there".
I'm not going to differentiate between "pattern" and "mathematical object" here as the link is obvious, but it's a subtle one. Your question can be related to the mathematical philosophy of formalism.
In my opinion, formalism struggles with object, but only in function of games. And games you play against an adversary, someone or something "out there". Intuïtionism on the other hand excludes the possibility of subjective interpretation of pattern. But for this to be valid, a mathematical object has to have consciousness, not existence. That's how the time spirit evoked "man is a number". Intuïtionism shouts: don't fight, build.
And he is a number, if people only realize the truth of microscaling religious concepts. Bringing "pattern" down into existence first passes through institution. On another level, this implies that two mathematicians are not "really" communicating their findings. Institution knows that intelligence can be reflected, so religion is dead, and unfortunately a good mathematician needs better glasses.
Thanks for the post. People are capable of seeing space thru proper eye adjustment and intuiting. Time can never be seen. We only feel it. The infinite and the finite can make beautiful things, but the world is contingent so it's the movement of time which makes these patterns. I can't comment any more on Plato
There's a difference, but there needs to be a type of matter condensation that signals the onset of idea. Without condensation, not much can be said.
Entropy is explained (nowadays) in terms of self-organisation. When Claude Shannon first published his paper in 1948, there wasn't much talk about complexity and chaos. Nowadays, self-organizing systems realize the importance of language into the equation. Metaphor is used to build structure (roads etc... ). It takes a specialized leap to link chaos and language (not mathematical) though. Not my department.
Truth is, i believe, to be found in language and purpose. The only caveat with purpose is that things only get organized in conjunction with other goals. This is another way of saying that man cannot act without information, unless abstract awareness 'sees' a pattern distinctively. Another result of this is lateralism.
If buildings are constructed, other things are constructed along the way, a type of disinformed reactionism. Did you ever acquire something, but had to take in 'the rest' too?
I have no doubt of that. However, most things come from the future. If you reflect on things, this doesn't mean they are thought out. One can reflect and express, another can think and express. Reflection is assumed as a given plus it acquired the status of common sense. The stereotype philosopher reflects and expresses. Thank god we have forums to edit things even after some idea is expressed. But ideas are essentially good, why not? We all are subject to growth and decay, the effects of entropy. However, it's not that depressing. One only needs to know when to stop if reflecting.
I'll quote my book also for the sake of some discussion, a rather psychologistic viewpoint. An excerpt from Standards for Behavioral Commitments: Philosophy of Humanism, "The General Nature of First Person Experience: Universal Characteristics":
"...Distal extension is simply the occupying of space that is characteristic of all physical entities. We define this property with geometry accompanied by processing techniques of algebra, trigonometry, calculus, etc., which can be based on any degree of dimension, but in practical applications are usually restricted to one, two, three or four dimensions. The first three dimensions combine in universally intuitive three dimensional space as length, width and depth. The fourth dimension is more technically abstruse ‘spacetime’, with relevance for many scientific fields that involve modeling relativities of change falling within the purview of conceptualizations such as gravitation, chemical reactivity, quantum mechanical accounts of subatomic phenomena, etc.
Occurrence is the phenomenon of time, measured mathematically as duration integrated with spatial dimensionality as the fourth vector in four dimensional spacetime. While time as pure mensurative concept is very abstract, simply a counting of bare numbers in nondimensional quantities, physically it is no more than distance: length of the equator is the essence of a day on earth, and it is very intuitive perceptually, the chronological unity of all things, an interrelationship of sequential causes and effects, foundational to notions of structure and logic that underpin civilized reasoning in general.
These two domains, distal extension and occurrence, conventionally known as 'space' and 'time', delineate basic corporeality, the principal medium by which behavior integrates with nature. They are organically experienced as a synthetic manifold of cyclical ‘recurrence’, the repeated returning of all substances to at least approximately similar states. This seems to be a universal actuating principle of our perceived reality: the constrained, recursive nature of transformation. Though mysteriously fascinating, quite the enigma, we can elementarily define the phenomenon as ‘pattern’, a general concept for ubiquitous, perpetual presence of unity in multiplicity...
...The mind/environment interface embodied in perceived patterns is describable as a combination of two facets of basic substance: phenomenality and supraphenomenality. Phenomenality is what the mind contributes to perceptions, which exists as an element or potential element of consciousness even in the absence of direct inspection of complementary contents in the external environment, streamlined to assimilate the natural world with an adequate amount of abductive functionality. Supraphenomenality is what the external environment contributes to perceptions, the compositional integrity of which remains in some way as unobserved reality while direct inspection is not happening, constituting the nature of what existence essentially is behind the scenes of awareness, which may be nothing like the intuitive perceptual world human minds have adapted to assume veritable within Earth environments. Reality and human subjectivity are of course a unity or at least some kind of linkage or simultaneity, but are also separate in a way that has so far limited the capacity of human comprehension, a paradox of intrinsic but to this point imprecisely knowable boundaries..."
That's how I look at patterns, entities spontaneously impinging upon consciousness from out of nowhere, but in orderly ways provisional of a baseline objectivity.
The human mind seems to organize the pattern through reflection and "noticing". Although the mind is "noticing", this is not enough for me to say the pattern is out there. Take a beautiful cathedral or the arabesques of the Alhambra. Are these different styles compatible? Some people like one, some the other, some both. Saying there is something rational objective about patterns that applies to every creature in the universe is what I am questioning. I took the most basic example I could above. Take a blank white piece of paper. Does it have pattern? When exactly, once one starts drawing, does patterns start? It doesn't seem to be clear to me what a pattern is, objectively. Seeing patterns might be more connected to our spiritual side than to our mathematical side. What you guys think?
I'd say that objective patterns (interrelationships) are all we see in the world. The personal meaning of those patterns is subjective. We perceive abstract patterns out there, then conceive them as-if concrete objects in the mind. For example, a sinuous movement on the ground is quickly interpreted as a snake, even it is a dragging hose. :smile:
Real Patterns : The central concept of the philosophy presented is the concept of "pattern": Minds and the world they live in and co-create are viewed as patterned systems of patterns, evolving over time,
https://www.amazon.com/Hidden-Pattern-Patternist-Philosophy-Mind/dp/1581129890
Patternity : https://www.patternity.org/philosophy/
Patterns without meaning : http://bothandblog6.enformationism.info/page36.html
The Shanon Entropy of a signal gives an indication of how repetitive that signal is. Any pattern can be coded as a signal, and then the degree to which that signal is repetitive calculated.
Hence patterns are "objective", their degree of repetition indicated by the Shanon Entropy of their encoding.
The scare quotes are there to mark that "objective" is a term itself fraught with ambiguity.
This answers my objection. Thanks
Quoting Banno
If patterns are all we see, then this example is of complex patterns. The ground, however, of it might might be subjective. Have you seen anything from Donald Hoffman? I would explain his thesis by saying that the proprioception (also called kinaesthesia or kinesthesia) of a bird might be totally different from ours. If the bird could see our physics, he would say "there is no way things move that way". So physics, and thus the world, might be subjective at the last level, but we might have to regard everything as patterned because we are human.
"Let us take the claim that something can be proven to be true on the basis of other facts known to be true. Suppose, to use a favorite example from the Logician Gautama, I want to know how much an object weighs. I put it on a scale to measure its weight. The scale gives me a result, and for a moment that satisfies me; I can rely on the measurement because scales can measure weight. But hold on, Nagarjuna flags, your reliance on the trustworthiness of the scale is itself an assumption, not a piece of knowledge. Shouldn’t the scale be tested too? I measure the object on a second scale to test the accuracy of the first scale, and the measurement agrees with the first scale. But how can I just assume, once again, that the second scale is accurate? Both scales might be wrong. And the exercise goes on, there is nothing in principle which would justify me in assuming that any one test I use to verify a piece of knowledge is itself reliable beyond doubt. So, Nagarjuna concludes, the supposition that something can be proven through reference to some other putative fact runs into the problem that the series of proofs will never reach an end, and leaves us with an infinite regress.... [T]he Logician might, and in fact historically did, try an alternative theory of mutual corroboration. We may not know for certain that a block of stone weighs too much to fit into a temple I am building, and we may not be certain that the scale being used to measure the stones is one hundred percent accurate, but if as a result of testing the stones with the scale I put the stones in the building and find that they work well,I have reason to rely on the knowledge I gain through the mutual corroborations of measurement and practical success. This process, for Nagarjuna, however, should not pass for an epistemologist who claims to be as strict as the Brahminical Logicians. In fact, this process should not even be considered mutual corroboration; it is actually circular. I assume stones have a certain measurable mass, so I design an instrument to confirm my assumption, and I assume scales measure weight so I assess objects by them, but in terms of strict logic, I am only assuming that this corroborative process proves my suppositions, but it in fact does nothing more than feed my preconceived assumptions rather than give me information about the nature of objects."
Nagarjuna was followed in the West by Hume, who said the same thing. It seems one has to allow some subjectivism in in order to have a rational understanding of the world.
If so, I'd counter with Davidson's argument that this would imply that we could make no sense of the bird's actions, and hence never be able to see it as coherent.
That is, in order to recognise that the patterns seen by a bird are utterly different form the patterns you see, you must first recognise that the bird sees patterns; hence those patterns cannot be so utterly different.
Not sure what you are saying. 1/1 + 1/2 + 1/3 + ... is the Harmonic series that is unbounded (adds to infinity, not 1). The addition of all fractions of the form p/q likewise.
Im not sure what you mean. An abstract number can be divided into infinite fractions. So can a brownie. The brownie clearly is finite though, while 1 is finite by our definition alone
Note that you are imagining a patternless state - a blank sheet - that you then ...for some reason... want to impose a pattern. And the pattern is then judged meaningful in light of that reason.
So this is a very human-centric start point - subjective rather than objective. You supply the formal and final cause. And you need a blank and passive material ground on which to impose those designs.
But pattern in nature is produced by stochastic self-organisation. Pattern emerges as free action or raw material possibility gets organised by the imposition of generalised constraints.
So "objective" patterns have this natural logic. Their underlying meaning or finality is encoded by a statistical law - principally the laws of thermodynamics. Nature has a "desire" to entropify. Characteristic dissipative structures, like vortexes, erupt everywhere in nature where that is the form which best serves the purpose of entropification at that locale.
This is a really good technical paper on the topic - The Common Patterns of Nature
So the patterning of nature does have objective existence in that it embodies all four Aristotelian causes. The structures really do exist. And they do exist because they are functional. And they exist in a hierarchically complementary fashion. The patterning exists to the degree they suppress or constrain the otherwise lawless or patternless ground of free material possibility that they make organised.
A vortex develops in a flow as a more efficient structure for serving the global purpose of statistical entropy. The vortex breaks the patternless symmetry of the flow - water molecules jostling in any old direction - and entrains them to the directional pattern of a localised rotation ... that allows everything now to get to that desired higher entropy state faster.
The glugging bottle is a good example of this. Fill a soda bottle with fluid and tip it upside down. If there is no spin in the fluid, you get an inefficient glugging as air is having to get in while the fluid is trying to drain out. But if a vortex can develop, organising the draining fluid around a rising air channel, then the bottle empties in a flash.
Coming back to your blank sheet of paper, you can see how this a quite different "subjective" view of reality. All the final and formal cause is Platonically in your head. You want to make the patterns and find them meaningful. And to do that, you also need to manufacture a "world" that is matchingly stable and unresistant in the face of your pattern imposing.
Nature itself starts as chaotically as possible. It is a fundamental source of instability - as by definition, that is the opposite, the vivid contrast, to what it then becomes when that patternless symmetry state get broken by the emergence of a direction, a form, an organising structure.
But a blank sheet of paper is at the other end of the spectrum to this in being engineered by humans as something that unresistingly will accept our marks. You can't draw a pattern on the surface of a stream. But you can make paper that has that quality of being maximally passive in terms of its material/efficient cause. It is the very definition of what most people think of as "material", or brute and inert, mindless and formless, matter.
So what is illustrated here is that there is nature as it actually is - the world as a self-organising stochastic structure serving a generalised thermal purpose and (paradoxically) rooted in a fundamental material instability - and then the "world" as it is generally conceived as the passive material "other" to the active and willing human mind.
Maths - as the science of patterns - has got rather screwed up by conflating the two paradigms. There is certainly the artificial "world" that humans can create by imposing their designs on a nature pacified - the forms we construct from piles of bricks or careful straight lines. If we have stable materials, then we are free to produce these engineered patterns that we find useful for our purposes.
But then there is the still fairly recent turn towards the maths of actual natural patterns of nature. This became big news with the discoveries of chaos theory and non-linear dynamics. Yet the metaphysical significance of this has been slow to percolate.
Which are the real patterns here? The ones we can (subjectively) impose on a suitably pacified nature, or the patterns which are (objectively) the only ones nature can arrive at to organise its instabilities to maximum effect?
Great post. I'm tending more towards Hegel than Aristotle though.
But seriously, they are all on a continuum as process philosophers - talking about a reality that self-organises in this dialectical fashion. Being as becoming.
Which of his books talk about points and quantity? Wikipedia says Whitehead wrote stuff that was wrong about wholes and parts, while Husserl wrote good things. This is stuff that I'm interested in
Don't be afraid of the T word. As a natural philosopher (cf: Stan Salthe), we can parse finality into the developmental stages of {tendencies {functions and purposes}}}. Or {teleomaty {teleonomy {teleology}}}.
So when we are talking about desires when it comes to plate tectonics, rivers deltas, and other examples of natural dissipative structure, then clearly it is teleology of the dilute kind - a statistically-inevitable tendency of nature.
Then once you have life and mind - systems that can construct informational models of their own worlds - you have now the further possibility of a localised desire for a function (like breathing), and for a purpose (like surviving).
Formally, a simple natural system is just entropic. It serves no other purpose than to accelerate entropy and thus the extremely general desires of the second law of thermodynamics. But any living and mindful system is defined by its countering negentropy. It is in the business of producing local information - memory structures like genes and memes - that encode a local way of being that appears to swim counter to the generalised entropic flow, imposing its own ideas of order on the material world.
Of course, life and mind only exist because, on the whole, they do in fact overall increase the world's entropy. So they don't transcend the limits imposed by the second law's desires. They instead live within those desires as local agents of the entropification process. We use our smarts to produce more waste heat than would otherwise be the case.
So we - as living and thinking systems - are fully part of the great cosmic entropic flow. But being a part of that involves also our being able stand apart from it. To be local stores of negentropic form and finality and so break down "resources" - natural stores of negentropy - and speed their path to becoming waste heat.
Quoting tim wood
That is the principle I am basing things on. Pattern has objective existence in nature as that which can locally suppress uncertainty. So every locale would have fundamental uncertainty - as quantum theory has empirically demonstrated. But then the job of emergent constraints is to produce a localised statistical regularity.
No two things could be exactly the same because the baseline of reality is just a pure uncertainty or vagueness (Peirce's tychism). But then a reality that develops generalised law or habits (Peirce's synechism) will constrain that uncertainty as much as it can be constrained. The statistical fluctuations will be reduced to the absolute minimum - ie: a Gaussian distribution.
So sure, minds can read patterns into nature by learning to overlook individual differences and conceiving of the world in terms of some larger generalising abstraction.
But the Peircean point is that is how nature itself works. For real. It develops the habits of regularity that constrain local irregularity. Laws evolved in ways that make being even possible by preventing absolutely everything just wanting to happen in a radically incoherent fashion.
Every brick that makes up a house is different. But that difference has to become trivial enough that as the houses get bigger, they don't start falling down.
Nature is the same. Its own growth is a constraint on variety. It has to arrive at the most robust patterns of organisation just to exist as a persistent process of being. Or rather, becoming.
Quoting tim wood
Aristotle's was a first clear attempt to dissect causality as a logical system. It may be a picture he read into reality - a metaphysical model. But a systems scientist has no trouble seeing it as the right model.
Reductionist science was based on the Platonic/Cartesian trick of splitting off material/efficient cause from formal/final cause. It cleanly divided the world of the Real from the world of the Mind.
Now that is a great model if you are a human wanting to impose some private desires on the world via the patterns of machines and engineering. You can build a science that is all about passive matter and the way it can be bent to serve your will.
But here we are talking about what is really real. And that is a nature which is immanent and holistic - a product of all four causes. With no external help.
Of course, you might find that metaphysical alternative arguable. And the first thing to protest is the idea that nature could have "a mind of its own" - as if finality still equals consciousness or spirit once you have actually shifted to a natural philosophy paradigm where nature starts out down at the maximally "mindless" state of having tendencies or habits. A teleomatic structure rather than a teleological one.
Do you see the difference at play? Once you are signed up to standard issue Western metaphysics circa 1600 - reductionist science tied to Platonic/Cartesian dualism - then any hint of mindfulness in nature becomes the extraordinary problem to solve. And patterns are the famous Platonic bone of contention.
But flip to a systems science or process philosophy paradigm and now the opposite is the focus. We are asking about where "mindfulness" ever actually ceases to be the case. On the local scale, even particles seem either weirdly quantum willful, or secretly following these abstract laws what someone wrote.
Peirce never wrote books as such. But his writings were voluminous. So there is no easy way in.
I don't really get what you mean by points and quantity. But if you want to dig into the patterns of nature, you might be much better off with books on fractal geometry, scalefree networks, chaos theory, and those kinds of things. You need the science to give you the conventional story on self-organising patterns in general. Only with that kind of grounding could you see how this relates to the metaphysics developed by someone like Peirce.
As a chess player, the first thing that comes to mind when I hear "patterns" is to think of patterns in chess which are really just geometric truths that one either grasps or doesn't. A pattern doesn't not exist simply because no one sees it. In this sense, I see patterns as being objective. If these types of patterns were subjective it would imply that the first player to grasp them brought them into existence which seems strange to me. It makes more sense to me to say that the pattern already inheres within reality and minds can either grasp or not grasp them.
It is all models. What more are you hoping for here? Revelation? Faith?
Quoting tim wood
In a general way, we are talking about a form or state of organisation that somehow looks habitual, repetitive, meaningful, deliberate, pervasive, ordered. And thus not the opposite of being patternless - chaotic, accidental, arbitrary, lacking predictable structure.
The presence of a pattern implies a pattern generator. A finality. There is some larger process that is placing constraints on irregularity or uncertainty.
Thus a pattern does not simply exist as a result of meaningless accident as you seem to want to suggest. It has to be generated by constraints imposed on otherwise free possibility
Where modern statistical mechanics gets us to is the realisation that even the random and chaotic patterns of nature are also the product of exactly this kind of causal set-up - an Aristotelean or systems causal story. So there is nothing in nature that escapes this causal ontology as even “raw chance” is being shaped into its completely predictable patterns - if you check my citation.
There is always finality present in this sense. Even the random decay of a particle has a (Quantum) generator by virtue of the fact that we can observe its predictable statistical pattern.
If we are merely reading patterns into nature, then there would be no pattern generation machinery for science to discover and model. And really, what else defines nature than it is a pattern - a structure, a process, a system of dynamical generation or becoming?
If you want to argue this is not the case, how does science manage to extract universal strength laws of nature? What is going on there?
Nop
Quoting apokrisis
And nop. There is no proof there is super daddy out there, or some guy with a long beard and a long toenail. There simply isn't any evidence your mind isn't making this stuff up
As I have stressed multiple times here, even randomness and chaos can now be described as predictable patterns in terms of their generators.
So it is not I who is invoking supernatural beings. Just you as a way of ducking the argument being made.
I'll be upfront. I don't like Aristotelians. They claim to everyone they can prove that personhood is beyond this universe that is not embodied HERE. No way to do that.. The opposite can be proven
1) The world must reflect God
2) yet theodicy says God can't resolve the human condition without allowing pain, forcing people into situations they weren't consulted about, and doing things God never did
3) God is imperfect
A stronger argument: does God make painful decisions? If he is does, then he is not all actual and in possession of all perfection. If he does not, he is inferior to a good human.
This disproves the God of Aristotle and Aquinas. Another form of God might exist, but Pluto might have a toenail. There is no knowing this with human intellect
I just corrected the grammatical errors in my last post
Anyway, you proposed a generator. That word means a person who generates. Then you say "find something in nature that you can't go deeper into". Uh, where is this going? We see patterns. They might go on forever (no in time, but in space). That doesn't mean there is a patterner, a causer, or a generator. You need desperately to put down the Aristotle and read some Freud on religion
You are ranting against theists now. And all my arguments are atheistic.
Quoting Gregory
It is a mathematical term - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generator_(mathematics)
Quoting Gregory
The rant continues. You are unable to furnish an example of a natural pattern that wouldn’t have a generative process behind it. Case closed.
Which turtle do you want to focus on?
The presence of pattern implies a process of pattern generation, which I imagine is what you’re referring to in ‘generator’ as a mathematical term, rather than a being. My background is neither mathematical nor scientific, but I have been exploring the idea of a six-dimensional stochastic process whose dimensional constraints and relational structure manifest an evolution of information: the difference that makes a difference. I’d be interested in your initial thoughts.
As a drastically simplified structure: free possibility is both existent and non-existent; matter in relation to anti-matter manifests as random potentiality; interrelating patterns of potentiality manifest as random energy (wave-particle); interacting energy patterns manifest as diverse localised atomic relations (including atoms); interacting atomic patterns manifest as diverse molecular relations (including molecules); interacting molecular patterns manifest as diverse physical/chemical relations (including organic structures and objects); interacting physical/chemical patterns manifest as diverse localised events (including living organisms); interacting patterns of events/change manifest as diverse conceptual relations (including ecological systems, weather, social groups, etc); and interacting conceptual/predictive patterns manifest as meaningful relations - all in relation to a meaningless (free) objective possibility of existence...
No, it starts things. It accepts that any ontological enquiry is rooted in a pragmatic epistemology. We can only "know" the world via whatever modelling relation we find to be useful.
It is a statement of epistemic humility. It begins an actual metaphysical-strength effort to talk about the "truth of reality" with an appropriate disclaimer.
So it is why I can say "reductionism" is perfectly fine within its own (restricted) purposes. And why "holism" can be also "just a model" and yet be the model demonstrably closer to the "truth" because it models that reality in terms of all four Aristotelean causes. It treats formal and final cause as also "part of nature", whereas reductionism posits only material and efficient cause as "part of nature", leaving formal and final cause hanging in the air as "super natural".
So a reductionist might claim that nature just doesn't contain its own forms, its own finalities. That becomes an ontological-strength claim they then need to support. You appear to be wanting to argue that.
Or a reductionist might more humbly agree that reductionism chooses to be mute on the question of how form and finality play a part in reality because - for the purposes of pragmatic modelling - reductionism simply doesn't need to include the class of top-down causes. No ontological claim is made. The reductionist model already presumes an intelligent human with some goal in mind and an ability to construct a design. The necessary formal and final cause will be supplied by a "creating mind".
And as I would then say, sure you can just model reality in terms of material and efficient cause, then call it quits. Meanwhile I'll go and join up with the guys who have the ambition of a full four causes model of reality. That is going to be the cutting edge of anyone actually still interested in metaphysics as a totalising inquiry into the nature of nature.
Quoting tim wood
Well there you go. You are taking a basic reductionist modelling trick and convincing yourself that is then "the world" truly described. You presume an atomistic ontology and read that into everything you see - so don't really ever see all that is there.
A systems perspective is holistic and so the whole idea of reality as a sequence of states - one damn instant after another - is clearly a wild over-simplification. A holist would see the same reality in terms of a dynamical flow, a process with structure.
So while things may be different from one instant to the next (they MUST be if the holism presumes that local possibility always has a baseline (quantum) uncertainty), overall everything is being kept on track by a global flow - a generally constraining purpose, direction or finality.
What you are saying is that you presume reductionism, and hence reductionism is what your argument must spit out.
I am saying check your presumptions. Reductionism just isn't a large enough model if you want to do anything as ambitious as metaphysics.
Visually or logically? There's a distinction. Perhaps not a great one.
Would seem to me the mind seems to prefer complete shapes mixed with open accent patterns. Say a marble column accented by a wreath.
Could be wrong but that's just what it would seem based on the prevalence of pattern and design that seems to have gained popularity/stood the test of time.
The deeper mechanics to that (if correct) are at the moment an enigma.
Aesthetics. Ornaments. Etc. Very interesting and worth delving into full discussion about.
Pretty for one. Perhaps mentally invigorating or even occupying for another. Perhaps the concept of "balance" or even symmetry plays a role. Who could say.
Non-visually as in logic or math. Well it's just what happens when your brain connects two and two together. That's, after all, how we advanced so far. Is it simply trying to find shortcuts mentally or something greater? Now there's a debate.
No. The underlying patterns of information are the same for everyone. It's the "icons", mental constructs, that differ among observers. That's why Science is an attempt to remove the personal bias from our observations. And mathematical models (equations) are about as close as we can get to the fundamental Information patterns of reality. Unfortunately, bird concepts, translated into abstract math, would not mean much to the average human. :smile:
I think that what underlies everything is the pure potentiality of Infinity and Finitude. If you have a segment pi in length, then a piece of the segment corresponds to each number. It goes on forever (Infinite) but has a limit (Finite). Where the infinite meets the finite (at the limit) is an infinity mystery. So nature can never even be understood
If we talk at cross purposes, it is because you turn the original question about the ontology of patterns - are they real, and thus in what sense? - into an argument about epistemological foundations where I’ve already indicated my general agreement.
Anything we can say about “nature” is going to be a model - a pragmatic business of constructing a general causal theory to be constrained by “the facts” as we then discover them (the facts being of course measurements predicted by our models, so leaving us in Kantian fashion, still on our side of the epistemic bargain).
All this is completely accepted about the relation we would have with “nature” - our Umwelt.
And then there is my point. Broadly there are the two metaphysical models in play here. You - consciously or unconsciously - appear only able to apply a reductionist perspective to things. I am saying that a holist has a larger four causes model that can “naturalise” formal and final cause too. They are fully part of the world being described (and so not left hanging as being supernatural powers, nor simply dismissed as mere human social constructions).
Quoting tim wood
This was the question you posed.
So you seem to want to say that abstracting over the particulars is a mental process. The real world is some unpatterned state of affairs, a mereological collection of concrete individuals, and we then invent notions of universals by choosing to ignore all the individual differences by applying some arbitrary, socially constructed, rule.
My reply is that nature itself is organised by abstracting over the particular. That is how the world develops its complex hierarchically structured form. Any collection of Interacting individuals will fall into emergent patterns as they develop a temporal history or memory - become constrained by their own past. Lawful and predictable behaviour will result.
So a pattern in nature is emergent form that serves some purpose. Although that purpose can be pretty humble and statistical. It can be just the finality of arriving at the collective, detail-forgetting, state of an equilibrium balance.
In an ideal gas model, it doesn’t matter what the particles are doing. Their motions are random - in a way then described by a simple globally-constraining mean. The gas has a temperature and pressure. And the temperature and pressure are quite real things, aren’t they? They might emerge at the collective level. But they act on the world in a measurable and not abstract way.
Again, my point was that even if an analysis of the situation in terms of four cause thinking says that any form or finality is mighty dilute in comparison to the kind of intentional twist we would give those metaphysical terms in relation to humans and their “minds”, there still is a need for a four causes model to account for what is going on. Nature actually forms its entropic patterns for causal reasons - such as achieving global equilibrium balances.
To deny this “desire” is to make the Cartesian ontological error of treating mind and world as divided realms. To be quite comfortable with psychologising nature is just a normal step towards being a proper natural philosopher or systems thinker.
A Cartesian thinks of matter as concrete stuff, and mind as an experiencing or rationalising stuff. A systems thinker would say instead that even matter is not as thus imagined (an idealised combination of material and efficient cause, hence little imperishable atoms). Why, our best physical theories confirm that particles are really waves. Of maybe quantum maps of potential. Or just informational constructs of some kind.
Science has dematerialised the material now! Particles are events that only exist with any concreteness in the sense an act of measurement has been recorded. They are purely contextual in their being.
So matter is no longer matter. And equally - as you are no believer in spooky soul stuff - mind is no longer mind. To now talk about Nature with either a super-physicalist rhetoric, or try to over-protect the use of mentalistic terms, is just a cultural exercise in boundary policing. It is preserving the Cartesian world view and not allowing in the clean air of new thought.
Any information can be encoded as a string of bits. We can then calculate the entropy of that string. No 'icons' would be involved - unless bits are considered icons.
Hmm.
So what is the entropy content of the decimal expansion of Pi? Is the resulting bit string all signal - that is minimally entropic? Or all noise - that is maximally entropic?
It rather depends whether sender and receiver share the same decoding key - the pattern generator or mental construct used to encode the string of bits.
If it is the algorithm for computing pi that was at work, then the string is all negentropy. Even if sent over a noisy channel, the receiver could fill in any gaps or errors by just doing the computation to double check. In fact, simply transmit the algorithm - the pattern generator - and have done with it.
But if the receiver has a different model of the situation - a different theory about the pattern, a different mental construct - then a very different message might be read.
The model in mind might be "this is a perfectly random decimal sequence". And yes, it then passes all the usual tests for being "patternless" - what we would expect to get by drawing numbers out of a hat by chance.
So we have here exactly the same "information", and precisely the opposite conclusion as to the underlying "data generator" in play. And each model can confirm its interpretation as the proper one by the different kinds of measurement it chooses to employ.
First: welcome back.
Second:
edit: objection: badgering. Sustained, stricken from the record.
Indeed, that is what I was asking. Do we look to 3.1415... or Machin's Formula? One is finite, and so would seem to be the obvious choice.
And yes, welcome back.
"Space is abstract generality"
"To speak of points of space, as if they constituted the positive element of space, is inadmissible"
(Only the mind can be continuous)
"Points are the negation of space because it is immediate undifferentiation" (Heidegger thought this refers to potentiality, the ground)
OK. But what is "that which underlies patterns"?
Have you read any of his argument against reality? If you don't want to read the book, there are several videos on related topics. But you may not like what he's implying. His theory is a form of Idealism, in which what you see as real is a mental model, not the underlying essence of reality. His argument makes sense to me, but then I am not a committed Materialist. :smile:
Hoffman TED talk : https://www.ted.com/talks/donald_hoffman_do_we_see_reality_as_it_is/transcript?language=en
Are you familiar with "black hole" physicist John Archibald Wheeler's "It From Bit" hypothesis? In Hoffman's theory, Icons are what we believe to be real. Is a "bit" of information real? In what sense? :smile:
It From Bit : “All things physical are information-theoretic in origin and this is a participatory universe… Observer-participancy gives rise to information.”
"“Reality is what we take to be true,” pioneering physicist David Bohm asserted in 1977. “What we take to be true is what we believe… What we believe determines what we take to be true. What we take to be true is our reality.”
https://www.brainpickings.org/2016/09/02/it-from-bit-wheeler/
Yes. Patterns are not random, they are caused. And the "finality" is the First or Final or Ultimate Cause. The "larger process" is a Teleological System with Laws (constraints) and just enough freedom from determinism to allow for the creativity of "uncertainty". Do you have a more specific name for your "Pattern Generator"? :smile:
Well, nature is the generator. So really I am talking about the long tradition within metaphysics and science that seeks an immanent and self organising, thus triadic, approach to the development of the structured reality we observe. This knits together systems science, cybernetics, Peircean semiotics, hierarchy theory, thermodynamics, etc.
The key insight is that reality is the evolving product of top-down constraints interacting with bottom-up constructive degrees of freedom. Global constraints shape the local degrees of freedom to be what they are (the atomistic stuff that can construct). And local degrees of freedom then act to reconstruct the world that is the collective state of constraint forming them. Reality is a habit that works.
So a detailed summary of how the many strands of thought now weave into a tight thermodynamic story can be found here for example - https://arxiv.org/pdf/1006.5505.pdf
The key is the shift from a mechanical or Cartesian framing of Nature to a triadic framing that is thus large enough to include the idea that reality must evolve, develop or self-organise into being.
So Nature is self-generative. It is always forming patterns for reasons. Even its randomness or indeterminism is a pattern - the one produced by the least amount of possible constraint on what is going on locally.
Quoting tim wood
A lazy insult.
More pointless snark.
The generator would be the "physical" process. So whatever nature is and how it counts as a generative process. (The Big Bang tells us it definitely counts as such.)
We would then model that generative process. The model is a model, not the thing-in-itself.
Where you may be getting constantly tripped up is that the Peircean systems perspective closes the loop. The model of the process, the thing-in-itself, is that it is a modelling process. That is how it generates something so rationally structured and lawful.
As Peirce said, the Cosmos self-organised into existence as the inevitable expression of universalised concrete reasonableness. Rationality was the finality. (Hegel said much the same thing.)
But anyway, you have to take all three steps to arrive back at the whole picture.
First nature is nature - it looks like some kind of evolving and structure-producing process. Then we jam on our science hat and model that in good pragmatic/empirical fashion. Finally, the best possible theory of nature as a process turns out to be itself the very image of this pragmatic method. Nature is a triadic modelling relation.
Semiosis is all about a "system of interpretance". And as such, it anticipated all the mysteries of quantum theory. It is exactly the metaphysics we have discovered as physics.
But physics itself struggles to see that as it is still caught up too much in a conventional Cartesian framing of nature - the irresolvable duality of the observer and the observables. It is only when you start to get to a modern thermal decoherence story of quantum theory, or a quantum information one, that you start to move sideways into a systems metaphysics that works.
No need.
Yes. In practical Reality, what you see is what exists. But in theoretical Reality, what you see is a mentally constructed image (icon) of abstract energy patterns. Hoffman is not an experimental (biological or neurological) scientist looking through microscopes. He is a theoretical (cognitive) scientist, using metaphors to describe things we can't see, such as Ideas. :smile:
That is also a "key insight" of my Enformationism thesis. :up:
Creativity -- Freedom with Constraints : The process of evolution can be construed as an ongoing reckoning of Cause & Effect events. Another way to put it is to say that Natural Selection is the product of freedom-of-action (randomness) and constraints-on-action (selection).
http://www.bothandblog.enformationism.info/page51.html
One starts off the general conception of the Cosmos as case of "there is nothing, so build me something". The other says "anything and everything is possible, but that in itself is going to result in a self-selecting competition". As in a quantum sum-over-histories, reality is what is left over once all the possible alternatives have cancelled each other out to leave a single sharp outcome remaining.
10 J Q K A(suited) is a high scoring hand in poker; I think about the pattern of my poker hand subjectively, or objectively and seek to construct good patterns.
Pattern recognition is a skill, and therefore I can become fluent in this skill-set.
To think of patterns as subjective only is an amateur understanding (in that progression to become fluent); as objectively, more is to be gained from successfully recognizing good patterns.
Yes. That mental image is what Hoffman calls an "icon", by analogy with the symbols on your computer or phone screen that represent the low-level functions of abstract mathematical processes in the processor. We don't need to know the nitty-gritty details, just what to expect from what we "see". :smile:
Actually, I have discussed both sides of the something vs nothing dichotomy. In unlimited Eternity-Infinity all things are possible, but in our constrained space-time Reality, only some things are actual. That's how I conceive of Natural Selection : random evolutionary change (including mutations) produces a variety of possible options, but the Selection process "chooses" which will go on to the next stage of evolution. Presumably, "unfit" options are the ones that "cancel each other out", via direct competition for niches. In that sense, evolution is a win-lose game. But ultimately the world as a whole is a winner, it progresses in quality. :smile:
1. AA is 75% of the time, a severed hand, metaphorically, if still a pair on the flop; it is best to play AA by betting minimal until the end phase - don't just go all-in.
2. Play low-cards as a hidden-blade, sometimes.
3. Raise often, if 3 diamonds are on the table, then you may raise as a bluff signalling to others that you have a flush.
4. Betting rhythm is important to register, even better a face, but without faces, betting rhythm (which can work against you or with you; clockwise/anticlockwise logic) is the way the betting and cards rhythmically intertwine; for example, K4 of hearts is your hand, 3 5 6(h) is the flop, rarely you'll see a larger bet, in this case, so if someone does bet large, what do you think? Bluff, pair in hand, straight draw, etc. It's hardest to explain betting rhythm, but, again, no no no no, it is skill-based too.
5. Have a comfort zone, don't lose your ability to raise.
6. Don't fold if only the blinds are bet, because you may as well see the flop; if the blinds are humungous, maybe not.
7. Luck is that all these rules may not apply! :)
EDIT:
Unless you mean: "To win big at a low-level, you'd literally have to get lucky, and the chances are much slimmer on poker than they are on betting on sports.", then I agree.
This is what annoys me. You misrepresent.
Again, your Kantian epistemology is our shared departure point. We can only speak of reality as pragmatic truth. We are in a modelling relation with the thing-in-itself.
The Peircean twist on Kant is to argue that this psychological fact is not a bug but a feature. It is how a "mind" can separate itself off from a "world". The self (as a point of view, a state of conscious being) arises as from the Umwelt that pragmatic modelling will produce.
So the reason why science has the form that it does - a pragmatic story of theory and measurement that "represents" the world - is because it is just a natural extension of how psychological being in general works. The brain evolved to be able to interpret reality as a "system of sign", or the semiotic thing of an Umwelt.
So step one is the model of epistemology. And the Kantian cognitive model was the first major correction on Cartesian representationalism. It began the shift to a triadic and semiotic model - the generic modelling relations model.
That in turn had ontological implications. If we now ask why science is "right", it is because it has that particular epistemic structure - the one that evolution arrived at with conscious brains. And theoretical biology now says it is the epistemic structure that even explains life itself. Life and mind are both expressions of generalised biosemiosis – the ability to construct a "private" world to control the "real" world via a modelling relation (see Robert Rosen for the mathematically rigorous argument).
So step one is semiosis as our best model of epistemology. Then step two is semiosis as the best ontological model of mind, and even life - living epistemic systems.
Step three is where it gets pansemiotic. The Comos itself is - in some formal or model-theoretic sense - is ontologically-speaking, an epistemic system. The huge difference is that the Cosmos has no mind, no sense of self, no experiential Umwelt as such. It is not a private model within a reality, but reality itself.
However what does carry over is the triadic model of causality. A hierarchical or Aristotelean view of causality which is about global informational constraints on local entropic uncertainty or statistical degrees of freedom.
In some useful sense, the Cosmos is its own model. It has physical boundaries that encode information (hence holography, hence wavefunctions). That is globalised or contextual information that acts to constrain everything that can be observed at spatiotemporal locales. Or as Newtonian science would put it, the Universe has laws that regulate local actions.
Pansemiosis is a powerful advance in ontology because it can include all four causes put forward by Aristotle in a logically closed structure. The systems view demystifies "the laws of nature" as much as it does "the problem of mind".
And this is where we get to the patterns of nature as being something physically real - even if emergent from the interaction of globalised cosmic constraints and localised freedoms of action.
Another way of saying this is that Nature is essentially a statistical pattern. It has to develop structure stochastically - as an equilibrium outcome.
Any pattern that can't self-organise in a statistical fashion simply won't be found in nature - or at least on that side of the boundary which is "nature in the raw" and not nature as it becomes to a pattern imposing epistemic system.
So pansemiosis is granting special privileges to life and mind as being able to impose their will on the world. Humans have no problem constructing patterns that are rigidly mechanical and thus artificial. It is how we set ourselves apart from the world - re-imagining nature as a machine and thus gaining useful control over it.
But ontologically - if you have followed the whole trail of thought through to its scientifically-validated conclusion - the world is not actually a machine. It is a statistical pattern generator. It is a realm of structured entropic flows that everywhere do the job of dissipating entropy. And that kind of triadic or hierarchically-organised story - constraints in interaction with degrees of freedom - is Peirce's definition of semiosis.
Every definite material event is also - from the point of view of the cosmic context - an informational sign. Something happened, rather than didn't, and so is concrete step added to the great construction that is a cosmic history. The radioactive atom decayed. It becomes now a contextual fact which changes things for everything else that might follow with "wavefunction collapse" definiteness.
Quoting tim wood
I keep saying this is standard cognitivism. This is the Kantian model of epistemology that became validated as the ontology of mind by psychological and neurological science.
Well, to be accurate, that is the 1970s form of cognitivism that suffered from a residual Cartesian representationalism and which has been fixed by the more recent Peircean and triadic brand of cognitivism known as enactivism (and various other things).
But anyway, you yourself are making the move from a model of epistemology to a model of ontology - in regards to our scientific models of an epistemic system like a "pattern-fitting" brain.
What you don't appear to get is that after a dualist causal paradigm must come the larger explanatory framework of a triadic causal paradigm. And that we need this kind of enlarged ontological holism to fully get at the workings of reality in general.
Quoting Gregory
Quoting Gregory
Quoting Gregory
As regards whether patterns are objective or subjective, it is probably the same problem as to whether patterns are discovered or invented.
As noted by Pfhorrest, the concepts quality and quantity are important in explaining a word. The word "pattern" has two meanings.
As a quality, pattern is a mental concept, a universal definition, and therefore subjective.
As a quantity, a pattern is a particular thing that exists in the world. A pattern is understood by the spatial or temporal regularities in the elements that make it up. But is such a pattern objective or subjective ?
Start by considering a pattern dependent on time, such as a musical pattern, where the regularities in the elements that make up the pattern are through time. For a pattern to be objective, the pattern must exist in a world having a space-time of three spatial dimensions and one temporal dimension.
But within our world only one moment of time exists. Therefore, in our world, the relationships between the elements that make up a musical pattern cannot be objective. If a musical pattern can only exist through time, then it can only exist in the mind, meaning that such a pattern is subjective.
Patterns (considered as a quantity) exist in space and time. When we think about patterns - a wave on water, a Derain, a Santana, a fractal leaf, a William Morris design, a Sondheim - we generally don't treat patterns in space as being ontologically different to patterns in time. Therefore, if a pattern in time is subjective, we can deduce that patterns in space are also subjective, ie, all patterns are subjective.