Pattern

We search for Pattern. Where does pattern come from? Is pattern inherent in the world? Or does pattern come from a source outside of this world? Or is patterns a lucky accident?

Pattern comes from outside of this world. Beyond this world is a supernatural world of the true pattern. All of our patterns here are but imitations of that real pattern. We cannot experience that real pattern in this world. We must leave this world to reach what is real. The pattern is supernatural, above nature, existing wholly outside of nature.

Pattern comes from the world itself. The world has its own system of organization that is intrinsic. The pattern is hidden as the root of everything. This pattern from within guides the formation of all that exists. The pattern is natural, existing wholly within nature itself with zero supernatural influence.

Pattern is a lucky accident. There are certain physical laws that just exist. All things act in accordance with these laws. By lucky accident, and not by any grand design internal or external, all that now is, came into being.

Hi xanderman,
I also believe that there is some type of pattern that is “inhereted” or rather “innate” in our minds. Maybe our desire in life, at least for some, is to transfer that pattern into the real world; the idea of making the world “better.”
I am not sure if I understand what you mean by pattern being a lucky accident. Could you also give an example of what you believe is following a pattern? I would like to make sure I understand what you are saying before actually commenting on it.

Why did you put this in the essays thread, xanderman? No problem, just wondering.

Lucky, yes, an accident,… depends on how you define ‘purpose.’ If you stretch a time line out long enough, everything exists for only a moment compared to the next in which it changes. It is when time coresponds to reoccurance in such a way so that it can be plotted, that allows for similarities to exist, and be percieved. The patterns and rhythms we experience happen by ‘accident’ in the grand scale of things, but contingency appears in reason and perception to be purposeful, useful, if even by design or plan.

Recall when Polemarchus said that we never “count the misses.” I think we look for patterns because we are inherently organizational, we sense and think in terms of ‘things,’ ‘places,’ measurements,’ ‘lines,’ ‘quantities,’ etc. Because of this we put the world into a framework, arrange it, find order and repeating patterns throughout it, and suppose that existence itself is ‘purposeful.’ Also, psychologically, there might be an advantage to thinking in one’s favor as opposed to intentionally looking for things that don’t fit a plan, with no purpose. This would explain how we have natural tendencies to locate order and find purpose for things.

Okay, fine, you don’t like that idea, eh? Well, what is the alternative and how much simpler is it? Let’s put ‘fate’ into play…or ‘destiny,’ or ‘God,’ or universal ‘spirit,’ or anything else that would support the notion that the particular contingencies we experience as life are part of a larger scheme, but are equally significant, and precisely planned from the beginning…

That when you heard that rare song on the radio twice in the same day, after not having heard it for ten years, means something because it was so unlikely to happen. It must! What are the chances of that?!

Or that because when you fell off the bridge and only broke your arm, God must have not wanted you to die yet…or no,…better yet, you were supposed to die but there was a little divine intervention at the last minute because he changed his mind, means that ordinarily anybody who took that fall would be dead and that ‘fate’ saved your life. It must! What are the chances of that?!

Pattern is what we have established in order to make the World intelligible. We have established being where there was only becoming in order to prosper. “… the value for life is ultimately decisive.” F.N. It may be more pragmatic than descriptive, E.G.(No one person would be able to correctly describe the entire process of living in all of the various levels and sublevels but each person uses his bit of knowledge to deal with his environment) Pattern is the universe beginning to know itself, a crystal has memory of a sort. Man knows himself better than any creature, and yet, can any tool truly know itself? (Nietzsche Godel).

Man is a lucky accident.

I frequently post here rather than in the philosophy forum because there is a greater chance of ideas being taken seriously here. Of being understood and receiving a well thought out reply, of not being victimized by some chimera built out of the arumentum ad populam, ad baculum, and ad hominem. Where there are truths but no truth, no one person claims absolute knowledge, the shadowy substance of which is then used to beat other people senseless with. A land free of dogmatism, fundamentalism, extremism, and every tyranny over the mind of man. where people are unsure in their pursuit of truth. Who was the Czech president who said something like, “pursue those who search for the truth and flee those who have found it!”

We do miss the misses, which is one reason why statistics is a good science for sociology.

Shalom y’all
Marshall

I want to thank everyone for their responses.

A new possibility has been suggested.

Pattern exists in the human mind alone. The human mind, a thing of pattern, seeks to find its likeness in nature. The goal creates a self-fulfilling prophecy. We go looking for pattern, we focus on the successes and ignore the failures. We impose pattern on the world.

This search must not be completely in vain. We can trace a practical line of cause and effect. Deeds do have consequences. Pattern is not alien to the world. There is a pattern in the mind and there is a pattern in nature. The most obvious features of pattern are easy enough to discern. We are part of this world. So where does the pattern inside of our mind come from, if not from the nature itself?

So it seems to be that we hold an imperfect mirror up to nature. Then seek to correct that vision, to see nature free of distortions.

From nature we make summaries, maps and models to represent the world.

Will we ever have the perfect representation? Or as we look deeper and deeper into nature will we find complexity that exceeds our ability to comprehend it? Will our representation ever be complex enough to accurately represent nature? Or will our representations become so complex that we will eventually need secondary summaries, models and maps to represent our representations?

Advanced sciences seem to already go in this direction. At the early levels you represent nature by Model One, but then later you are taught that Model One is just a summary for Model Two, a more complex model of the behavior of nature.

Which leads me to speculate is our world final or is our world just a model made by beings of nearly unimaginable complexity that they created as a simplified representation of their world. They study our world as a model in an effort to understand their greater complexity. Similar to how we study beehives and ant colonies. This is merely speculation.

de’trop,

If we could perceive on a grand scale of time, then would we see a grand pattern there? We see in part. We see moment to moment. We can see moderately small patterns. Are these part of a larger pattern? Hindsight, as they say is 20/20. Once we know the result we can look back and easily see have everything that came before led up to this point. How much of that is the mind playing tricks on itself and how much is real? Or is that very question meaningless because we cannot tease these two apart?

What goal doesn’t become a self-fulfilling prophecy?

Now I would consider “fate” as different and distinct from “God.” Fate, at least as presented by the Greeks, is impersonal. It just makes everything happen. Even the gods cannot go against fate. Men can resist fate even less so. Fate is almost completely static.

God or Spirit is personal. It is force with a personality. We can appeal to a God, please it or displease it, gain favor, or be damned by it. It is somewhat dynamic and interactive.

The psychologist Carl Jung was fascinated by these seemingly meaningful coincidences. He called the phenomenon synchronicity. To him these seemingly meaningful coincidence told us more about our own psyche than they did about nature.

It is funny when an extraordinary chain of coincidence takes place that result in something good they call it a miracle. What about when an extraordinary chain of coincidences takes place that results in a disaster? Is that any less miraculous?

Nietzsche said some similar stuff in his notebooks, that we impose pattern on the World.

The Greeks called it ‘Moira’. Even Zeus was subject to it.

And here i thought synchronicity was an album by the Police!

Knowledge as model, as simulacra. The word is definitely not the thing as many thinkers have seen, and yet without the word the thing does not come alive in our minds. Caught like a bee in amber! We can not have knowledge separate from our perception of it. In this respect, every perception is a model, a view from somewhere, and therefore partisan. One would have to have know all of the models at once in order to completely define a thing!

sounds like a divine explanation of the theory of Platonic Forms, if you ask me.

That’s one way to look at it. as universals, platonic forums. Thank you for that insight!

Conscious being.

That is the only goal that exists.

What does ‘goal’ imply first and foremost? It implies a lack, an absence, since there would be no goal unless a present state desired to overcome itself. But in the world there is no such thing as ‘absence’ or the sense of incompleteness. Absence is introduced into the world by consciousness and it is for no other reason than to determine what is present as a possible state for which to become. We profile the world by drawing comparisons between things, and the concept of absence helps organize it. Without this negation, this notice of lack and will to evolve and progress, there would be no ‘goals.’ there would simply be existing things.

When you concieve of ‘patterns’ and ‘goals’ the conception is already bias. You are thinking in terms of ‘intention’ for an existing universe, where there isn’t any. It is easy to expand the notion of ‘goals’ to the point where one could imagine one grand scheme of things. Simply because of the way in which we think. We apply the same organization that conducts our intellection to the actiual world itself, as if it were out there without us. So assuming that since we experience resolution and integration in the events that we witness, that this has to be common place in the universe, is quite alot to swallow.

I’d like to hear more about this.

Having-ness: The sense of having. Have I got it or have I got it?

“This is mine.” We can call it possession, ownership, or having-ness.

To want must come from a sense of lack. “I ain’t got it.” Do beings of different consciousness experience lack? Do plants long for the sun at night? Do animals yearn?

Hunger and thirst are obvious lacks which every mammal experiences. What of more subtle desires?

Zero is a bubble. An imaginary nothingness surrounded by the real something-ness of everything. It can pop in an instant. Its surface tension is only as strong as the imagination itself.

We explore the mystery of cause and effect. In most of our mechanical actions we can see a linear path of cause and effect. Newton described the common behavior of cause and effect. Yet with more information discrepancies appear which the old model fails to explain. Yet the engineer still uses more Newton than Quantum Mechanics.

What explains the relationship of cause and effect? In an effort to understand these forces we originally attribute them to supernatural agency. We personify the forces. We give them a face and a name. Then we treat these forces as if they were people. Animism. We pray to the storm. We ask favors from the gods. We beseech them. Much as a child might ask favors from a more powerful adult.

What causes the wind to blow or the sun to shine? Not some abstract force to be cut up and demystified with the power of formulae but a force with a Persona. Force with a face and a name.

Human beings live in the now and in our imagination. We imagine the past and the future as if they were here. We seek not just to imagine the future but to cause our vision of it to come into being. We see to mold the future and master the future. We develop our power of anticipation. We want to accurately predict the future. We plan. Oh how we plan.

Death is either our insight into the supernatural or our first inspiration to delusion. My friend was here and now he is gone. We take special effort in burying out dead. Why? Why bury our dead with tools, flowers, and other good things? Because he is dead and he is not dead. We imagine him to be alive in another place. “My friend is dead and gone.” His body might lay there, a husk. I imagine that somehow he lives. It is too much to think of him as ending. So I tell myself that he is alive. Not his body, but his soul, yes his soul. Since the body is dead then his soul must be the real him. It is insubstantial but more important than his body.

To honor his soul I will bury his body with ceremony. I will bury his tools with him. I will bury beautiful flowers with him.

This met the pinnacle with the Egyptians. What a way to go! They really took it with them. Which set the stage for the grave robber. Now a grave is a perfect place the microorganisms that do the essential decomposition work. These dis-assemblers for the great organic recycling program can be highly effective as disassembling living organic tissue as well. So began the idea of the curse. If you entered the tomb then you would die. It was not by a supernatural agency, but by an unknown and invisible agency. Microscopic decomposers that were only doing their job get read as a supernatural power from the dead.

The mystery of cause and effect, with limited data, leads to erroneous conclusions. What makes the wind blow? Is it the gods? Or is it the effect of the sun heating the earth along with the Coriolis effect.

We are now in a universe of forces with names, but no faces. Cause and effect can be traced with the proper formula.

We have stripped away the anthropomorphic layer of out understanding. Taken down the insulation and now we look upon the raw mechanical universe. It is a heartless and mindless machine, totally alien to humanity.

I am not faithful and I am not religious, I am only a little bit superstitious. So I find all of this generally unappealing.

The rapidness of change and the massive influx of information is too much for us to digest. We drown in a sea of our own creation.

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