I think patterns are one of the most important ontological concepts, and most of the rest of ontology is just about structuring patterns in our experiences.

... 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... — “The Codex Quaerentis: On Ontology, Being, and the Objects of Reality”

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?

So is there more to patterns than complexity? — Gregory

Some patterns are very simple, others more complex. Complexity, itself, does not imply patterns. Nor does it necessarily imply chaos.

Chaos vs symmetry... That's a lot to think about. It's deep. Maybe because I suck at math in trying to make up for it by over thinking this stuff. Maybe there are truths that simply can't be said. The college I went to after high school was Catholic and they hated basing math on logic. I feel like I'm trying to do something similar, but I like it.

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?

Patterns in mathematics are often simplifications. Also, some patterns apply in infinitely many situations. For example, if p is prime, a^p leaves a remainder a when divided by p: 3⁵ = 243 which leaves remainder 3 when divided by five.

This applies to all primes so we can say 733⁶¹⁰⁶⁹⁹ 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.

Well, there's this oft mentioned belief that humans are pattern-seeking creatures. This suggests that patterns are objective and while some are known, others lie waiting to be discovered.

Were patterns subjective, some would see them and others wouldn't. This isn't the case, no?

The college I went to was Thomas Aquinas college in Santa Paula CA. They believed logic and math to be separate disciplines and that basing math on logic was unnatural. The reason I brought it up was because their position seems more in accord with common sense to me, and my rejection of their position is making me doubt patterns now

Hey, a local! I'm next door in Ojai. Just went up to Punch Bowls on Monday morning and saw your alma mater.

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

I was wondering if anyone had any arguments that patterns are objective — Gregory

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.

Hm. How does a pattern differ from Shanon Entropy?

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

Hm. How does a pattern differ from Shanon Entropy? — Banno

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?

the world is contingent so it's the movement of time which makes these patterns. — Gregory

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.

Hm. How does a pattern differ from Shannon Entropy? — Banno

Open this door a bit more?

For example, this is amazing:
"English text, treated as a string of characters, has fairly low entropy, i.e., is fairly predictable. If we do not know exactly what is going to come next, we can be fairly certain that, for example, 'e' will be far more common than 'z', that the combination 'qu' will be much more common than any other combination with a 'q' in it, and that the combination 'th' will be more common than 'z', 'q', or 'qu'. After the first few letters one can often guess the rest of the word. English text has between 0.6 and 1.3 bits of entropy per character of the message." wiki.

What this means is that a message in English, say 500 characters, could be transmitted by a string of about 500 Xs and Ys, with maybe an occasional Z thrown in. Shannon wrote that this was an ideal limit(!).

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.

That's how I look at patterns, entities spontaneously impinging upon our consciousness from out of nowhere, but in orderly ways provisional of a baseline objectivity. — Enrique

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?

If you have all the fractions from 1/2 to the infinitesimals (what are they?), you can add them up to make 1. 1 can contain that infinity because it's an abstract number. But an object is finite extension. It has uncountably infinite points yet it is finite in form. Maybe add time to the equation and finitute+infinity+time=beauty (which in turn equals patterns once consciousness is added).

I was wondering if anyone had any arguments that patterns are objective — Gregory

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

I was wondering if anyone had any arguments that patterns are objective — Gregory

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.

I'd say that objective patterns (interrelationships) are all we see in the world. — Gnomon

This answers my objection. Thanks

Hence patterns are "objective", their degree of repetition indicated by the Shanon Entropy of their encoding. — 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.

Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Nagarjuna

"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.

Is Hoffman claiming that the way a bird sees the world could not be translated into a form that we could understand?

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.

Certainty is not needed.

If you have all the fractions from 1/2 to the infinitesimals (what are they?), you can add them up to make 1 — Gregory

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

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? — Gregory

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.

Skip Hegel and jump straight to Peirce. :razz:

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.