Pattern Recognition as the Essence of Philosophy

unenlightened

I don't have a question or a thesis, I'm just going to throw some shit out there, and see what sticks.If anything sticks to you, throw some back or complain to the mods, or take a shower, or whatever.

Wiki disambiguates, but I am trying to recognise a pattern in the ambiguities.

The obvious beginning is in psychology, and from there the connection to machine learning seems natural, medicine is just an application of the psychology. The biology things a surprise to me and if anyone can explain it in words of less than five syllables and two hyphens, I'll be most grateful.

Sherlock Holmes (based on a medic by the way) comes to mind as a recogniser of patterns; reader of footprints and human motivations and so on, like the mythic 'tracker' reading the animal trails. Like the reader of confused posts looking for a point or a topic.

And so I arrive finally at the beginning, which was @Tim Wood 's thread, Simplicity, virtue of.

Because to recognise a pattern is to simplify, and it is the thing that science and philosophy and literature and music all lean towards; the making sense of complexity and its subsumption into a pattern.

It is the very substance of the faculty of understanding, and the whole basis of prediction. It is surely what big brains are evolved to do.

{If you haven't read the William Gibson novel, it's recommended, and there is a BBC radio adaptation. that is also good if you can get it.}

bongo fury

Because to recognise a pattern is to simplify, — unenlightened

If recognise means impose, then yes, preferably.

Does it? ...Which is to ask: nominalist or platonist?

Forgive me if I impose, haha.

Srap Tasmaner

Because to recognise a pattern is to simplify, and it is the thing that science and philosophy and literature and music all lean towards; the making sense of complexity and its subsumption into a pattern.

It is the very substance of the faculty of understanding, and the whole basis of prediction. It is surely what big brains are evolved to do. — unenlightened

Two other ways of putting this come to mind, each of which has a sort of icky loop in it:

(1) Patterns aren't found in real things, but in abstractions, the real things considered only in certain of their various aspects. Which aspects? Well, um, the aspects that are relevant for ... the pattern.

(2) A pattern is something that repeats, something that goes on, something we can extrapolate the rest of given the first bit. We can predict because there's a pattern. How do we know there's a pattern? Well, um, because we can ... predict.

But those loops are only icky if you were hoping for a static, crystalline, logically structured universe. If you're cool with something more dynamic, more interactive, something with feedback loops, something evolution could get ahold of, then not icky at all but just what we were looking for. Or expected. Whichever.

Deleted User

This user has been deleted and all their posts removed.

Srap Tasmaner

I have a vague memory of Wittgenstein's mentioning templates. All perception being a matter of the template laid over reality by the observer. — tim wood

I hope he didn't say that because I've been feeling somewhat kindly toward LW lately and I have a strong allergic reaction to that idea.

I think it's the suggestion -- in the versions I've seen of it around here over the years, mostly third-hand Kant, I guess -- that the template is arbitrary, that either we cooked it up without reference to reality or it just fell from the sky somehow. And thus the only word for what we do to reality with it is "impose". We "impose" on reality our belief in space, in time, in the permanence of objects, and so on. And we could just as well have "imposed" some other conceptual scheme "on" reality, even an incommensurable one, as they say.

I think that's all horseshit. We don't impose anything. Reality isn't out there and our conceptual scheme over here in a drawer full of conceptual schemes. We are part of reality, organisms embedded in an environment, and a conceptual scheme is what evolves through continued interaction of the two and untold layers of feedback.

unenlightened

If I sort some pebbles by size, and put big ones here and little ones there I am imposing a pattern. However, the pebbles on Chesil Beach have had a pattern imposed on them by waves and tides.
Pebbles are not abstractions, are they?.

the question as to what a pattern is — tim wood

A pattern is an ordered structure. stuff has structure and the structure is real as is stuff.

The patterns of petals on flowers tend to conform to the Fibonacci series. This is the mathematics of gene expression, not of human brains. In the limit. Pattern in information equates to compressibility.

Pattern, then, a capacity to associate perception with memory and recognize similarities. — tim wood

No. "Recognition" is the term that denotes the mental aspect. You are muddying the waters. You define pattern as the ability to recognise similarities and that implies that pattern recognition is the capacity to recognise the capacity to to recognise similarities. Ugh!

I think that's all horseshit. — Srap Tasmaner

And so do I.

180 Proof

↪unenlightened

Interesting but I'm inclined to disagree. I think instead "the essence of philosophy" is pattern-less (pattern-loss) recognition within "pattern recognition", that is, meta-cognitively making explicit (i.e. less transparent to ourselves) the many 'holes fissures lacunae discontinuities gaps elisions ...' which our instinctive / habitual simplifications (i.e. generalizations) usually occlude, or course-grain out of our conceptual and theoretical discourses. "The essence" is to find the noise within the signal in the noise – never completely knowing what we think we know (Laozi, Democritus, Socrates, Pyrrho, Sextus Empiricus ...) After all, it's that crack in 'everything' that lets in (some) lumen rationale, no?

unenlightened

↪180 Proof

Alas yes, practice does not conform to my theory, but that is exactly where I wanted to get to. One recognises a pattern, and another pattern, and one would like to find the overarching pattern of patterns, but they conflict, and philosophy is born of the conflict

the noise within the signal in the noise — 180 Proof

Deleted User

This user has been deleted and all their posts removed.

unenlightened

What is it (usually) made of? — tim wood

Yawn. The presumption behind this question is that substance is the only real. But take an example "some ducks in a row". And you doubt that this row is real and ask me what are rows usually made of. So I reply, "usually they are made of fence posts, but in this case, it is made of ducks." Does that answer your question?

Edit. What are footprints made of? they are made by feet in the pattern of a foot, and they are made of mud, sand, clay sometimes fossilised and hardened over millions of years. And they are as real as anything.

Deleted User

This user has been deleted and all their posts removed.

unenlightened

as a practical matter, rows make sense; a lot of things make sense. But but does not mean they exist out there — tim wood

So what does it mean? But alas, I am banging my fingers on these keys in what I think is a meaningful pattern and you discern nothing of it, but impose your own meaning. Ain't no use to talk to you.

Deleted User

This user has been deleted and all their posts removed.

Srap Tasmaner

↪180 Proof

↪unenlightened

Epsitemically, there's no final settling down to either "this is patterned" or "this isn't". You've no way to know that a pattern you perceive will continue as it has up until now. (Hume says hi.) But when a pattern you've been following breaks, how could you possibly know whether the break is "genuinely" stochastic or itself part of a larger pattern? For that matter, there could be pattern anywhere you don't perceive it, or anywhere you do but not the one you think. In short, you cannot know whether you can predict anything, meaning both: can't know that you can, can't know that you can't. So we predict, defeasibly.

Aprokrisis would have a whole metaphysical lecture about this, but I'm not inclined to fill in for him.

I'll only say that it's hardly a surprise that there is this sort of oscillation. It is what you'd expect in an experimental system driven by feedback, evolving and incorporating and growing. Of course we keep finding patterns and of course they keep breaking and of course we keep finding new patterns.

Is it ironic if I've already started repeating myself?

Wayfarer

Ratios are not necessarily patterns, are they? Like when the Pythagoreans discovered that dividing a string by specific proportions, it produced different notes that could be harmonised. Sure there’s a pattern in a sense, but it’s not a pattern that’s visible to the naked eye, like a hexagonal pattern in beehives or granite outcrops. I think patterns are a sub-set of order, but they can’t be used as a substitute for reason, which I think is what you’re trying to do here. (There was a poster went by the name of A Seagull, sometimes posted here, who had a website and self-published book on this idea.)

Wayfarer

Which naturally enough leads to - or should lead to - the question as to what a pattern is. — tim wood

Isn’t the fundamental characteristic of a pattern that it is a repeating sequence? I mean, I can write any number of series of characters, alpha or numeric, that suggest a pattern such that you would have no trouble guessing the next set or next member of a set by recognising the pattern. But there’s no discernible pattern in the sequence of prime numbers or (I think) the genetic code, which (I think) is endlessly variable. Kind of agreeing with @180 Proof on this one.

Actually from Chinese culture, an example comes to mind, which is the principle of ‘li’, derived from ‘the grain in wood’. It suggests a quality of naturalness or spontaneity which is esteemed in Chinese art. But it’s not a repeating pattern - unlike for example the patterned motifs you find in Greek pottery or Islamic architecture. So it’s not really a pattern, but still a principle, if that distinction can be made.

Tom Storm

↪Wayfarer

I think it was William Morris who made the point that no pattern should exist without a meaning. It seems to me that patterns have significance if they are also suggestive of a narrative. Couldn't it also be said that defective pattern identification is one of the reasons people embrace conspiracy theories?

Wayfarer

↪Tom Storm

I would have thought faulty reasoning was a better explanation.

And there are patterns in for example crystal formation that have no specific meaning - other than something you or I might attribute to them. The emergence of meaning is co-extensive with the emergence of organisms (vegetative semiosis, one of the things I learned about from Apokrisis.) But again, is DNA strictly speaking a pattern? Now there’s a big question, but I’m thinking it’s not, because again it’s irregular. If it were a simple pattern, then you’d be stuck with something like a crystal. It’s the irregularities that make change possible. (Is this anything to do with symmetry breaking? :chin: )

Deleted User

This user has been deleted and all their posts removed.

Srap Tasmaner

from Chinese culture, an example comes to mind, which is the principle of ‘li’, derived from ‘the grain in wood’. It suggests a quality of naturalness or spontaneity which is esteemed in Chinese art. But it’s not a repeating pattern - unlike for example the patterned motifs you find in Greek pottery or Islamic architecture. So it’s not really a pattern, but still a principle, if that distinction can be made. — Wayfarer

That's really lovely, and very on point because that "spontaneity" you mention, that's chance under another name. And yet woodgrain is an excellent example of some kind of pattern, just a pattern that incorporates chance within certain constraints (or now and then overflows those constraints in ways which are in turn somewhat predictable), which feels very, very close to the sort of thing I was attempting to describe. Lovely idea.

Joshs

↪tim wood

Out there, nothing repeats. — tim wood

What does the ‘out there’ do? Are you following the Kantian line which argues that pattern, logic, time and space are all mental processes? Is your argument metaphysical or empirical?!

TheMadFool

I'm currently involved in ethics if posting 2 small paragraphs on a thread on ethics can be treated as involvement. To cut to the chase, ethical systems/moral theories are attempts to construct a set of beliefs that repeats (pattern) in all moral issues. So, we begin with a list of good and bad actions (thoughts/speech/actions) and what we hope to do is extract those beliefs that are common to all items in that list - these items, beliefs, then constitute a moral theory like utilitarianism or deontological ethics. So, yeah, from where I'm standing at, philosophy is about patterns.

Deleted User

This user has been deleted and all their posts removed.

Deleted User

This user has been deleted and all their posts removed.

TheMadFool

And I do not think you will find disagreement. But answer this: what is a pattern? That is, pattern as pattern is a something or a nothing. If something, then what are some of its qualities/accidents, or even its substance. But it can certainly be an idea and without substance or accidents. Which, do you say? — tim wood

Patterns are what's common to things i.e. those qualities/quantities that repeat in them. In philosophy a pattern goes by another name, essence. One may be given a set of items and if one finds a certain quality/quantity repeats, is common to all the items, we have basically discerned a pattern/essence in/to these items.

Interesting but I'm inclined to disagree. I think instead "the essence of philosophy" is pattern-less (pattern-loss) recognition within "pattern recognition", that is, meta-cognitively making explicit (i.e. less transparent to ourselves) the many 'holes fissures lacunae discontinuities gaps elisions ...' which our instinctive / habitual simplifications (i.e. generalizations) usually occlude, or course-grain out of our conceptual and theoretical discourses. "The essence" is to find the noise within the signal in the noise – never completely knowing what we think we know (Laozi, Democritus, Socrates, Pyrrho, Sextus Empiricus ...) After all, it's that crack in 'everything' that lets in (some) lumen rationale, no? — 180 Proof

It's a tendency in philosophy to look for the generalization that covers all the cases and we always lose but we can't resist trying. — Hillary Putnam

Joshs

↪tim wood

What is a row? Answer: nothing in itself, but that you make it so. — tim wood

What I’m wondering, specifically, is how you are defining what takes place at the ‘mental’ end of the subject-world encounter and how you would talk about what takes place outside of the mental. You mentioned row and pattern. What exactly is it about these entities that make makes them mental , and what does that imply about what constitutes the substance or content of the non-mental? For instance , is what a row and a pattern have in common the fact they they are abstract relational concepts? Are all causal relations also purely mental? What about temporal sequences? Is time a mental construct not existing in the world , as many physicists believe?

Deleted User

This user has been deleted and all their posts removed.

Manuel

↪unenlightened

If you're up to a quite challenging, but extremely fun philosophical book, I suggest you try Novel Explosives by Jim Gauer. If you want a lighter read, Ubik by Philip K. Dick is quite fun and leaves you feeling quite disoriented.

What you say is true. We see this "blooming buzzing confusion" in William James' term, as evidenced by an utter bombardment of sense data what with trees, apples, rivers, grass, birds and everything else that happens to be in your field of vision at the moment.

I think this leads to a natural intuition: all this diversity had to come from somewhere and furthermore, they must be related somehow, otherwise how could different things even exist? From this we abstract away things that we think make sense to parse out: the sky is blue like this river, the leaves are green like the grass, the butterfly flies, like a bird.

From these properties, we attempt to establish regularities or patterns that hopefully say something about the world. But, as has been the case in human history, our initial approach to things via intuition frequently misleads us, but serves as a heuristic to further refinement.

TheMadFool

Repeat? Repeat? Nothing in the world repeats. Repetition is a seeming. Or do you have an example of something in the world that repeats? — tim wood

I get up in the morning. Breakfast. Go to work. Lunch. Get home. Dinner. Sleep. Lather, rinse, repeat (Shampoo algorithm).

Deleted User

This user has been deleted and all their posts removed.

Deleted User

This user has been deleted and all their posts removed.

Pattern Recognition as the Essence of Philosophy

Welcome to The Philosophy Forum!

Categories

More Discussions