Chat GPT, thou art a woman.

Suppose there were an Experience Machine that would give you any experience you desired.

Something that might help to clarify matters is to analyse somewhat the nature of desire.

one desires to combat the vehemence of a drive at all, however, does not stand within our own power; nor does the choice of any particular method; nor does the success or failure of this method

What is the source of this force or drive? If I can dismiss the teleology of the desirable thing exerting a causal force backwards in time, then the source can only be an image that one forms in the mind. I imagine the happy release of having a drink, and the imaginary beer induces my action to accomplish it in fact.

So one is driven by imagination, or by imaginary things. One can immediately see the shortcomings of the experience machine, which are the limitations of the imagination. Alas my imagination could never come up with a Bach fugue, or a Picasso, or a fine oak tree, or any of the wonders of my life, so a world limited to my desires would be a feeble shadow of the real world that consistently exceeds anything I could desire. So no experience machine for me, thanks.

It isn't real 'til it's happening in the US.

https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2314607120

I noticed this, that seemed related to the topic.

https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2310223120

unenlightened :up: Yes, as I said, changes, even absent anyone to observe them, are news "at least potentially". — Janus

You did, but I think you are not quite right in a small but important way. The potentiality is in the observer, not the changes.

DNA "is" (functions as) a recipe, an algorithm, a memory, in relation to an organism - environment matrix.

Example: a human zygote has DNAprogramming that begins something like "repeat n, [divide, stick together]. if endometrium, then implant." If this goes wrong, there might result an ectopic pregnancy, or a clump of cells going down the pan. But if all goes well, on implantation a communication begins between mother and embryo that eventually results in another little unenlightened, or Bateson, or someone.

So to make a human, all you need is around 700mb of DNA ...

... and a fully functioning female human and supportive environment and about 9 months construction time.

Notice the recursion in the recipe, as if Delia were to say, "to make a cake, start with a cake, and then..."

And someone is going to ask, "Which came first, the human or the human genome?" as if there was a beginning to the circle of life.

Likewise, all the algorithm for the decimal iteration of pi needs is a computer and energy and time to produce a decimal string vastly larger than the algorithm.

So much for computers and little biological machines. Now what are the ingredients and recipe for thinking all this stuff? A bunch of humans, a supportive environment, communication...

I would say that when the rain streams down the cliffs and the wind howls against them, there are changes and that changes are "news", at least potentially. — Janus

They are changes that make a difference to a seagull that nests in the cliff.
They are differences that make a difference to a seagull that nests in the cliff.

The seagull has a mental map of its home, and the change in the cliff is news to the seagull that makes a difference to its map. It might also make a difference to the map of a local fisherman.

But at least on Bateson's map of mapping, if it doesn't make a difference to a life-form it is a difference that makes no difference.

If a rock falls from a cliff and no one is around to notice, it doesn't make a difference that makes a difference, but if a tree falls in the forest, the whole forest knows about it in all sorts of ways, especially the tree itself if it is still alive.

So changes are potential news, only to life that can be affected in some way. News is not events, but the communication of events.

The US has an independent assessment that it was a Palestinian Islamic Jihad group rocket that misfired and hit the hospital in Gaza, two senior officials have told our US partner network NBC News.
It would match what Israel has said caused the blast.
Palestinian health officials and Hamas have blamed an Israeli airstrike for the explosion, which they said killed almost 500 people.
White House national security council spokesperson Adrienne Watson also told NBC News that US analysis of "overhead imagery, intercepts and open source information" suggests Israel is not responsible for the blast.

https://news.sky.com/story/israel-gaza-war-latest-hamas-palestine-sky-news-live-blog-12978800

I'm not sure what the assessment is independent of exactly, or who will credit it. Still, 'death goes on', as they say.

Just looking at the BBC report from the scene, I'm not seeing a big crater, and I'm not seeing lots of demolished buildings and damaged buildings. Rather it looks like a lot of people camped in the hospital courtyard, and a rather modest explosion in a crowded place. So it does rather look to me as if it was more likely a palestinian missile gone horribly wrong.

One of the things I like about Bateson is the way he bypasses "consciousness" to a great extent, and bypasses ontology, in favour of process, relationship, sensation, and thinking. I feel if we could get some clarity about these aspects of our own being, the 'problem' of consciousness might be more tractable, or at least less important. Instead of asking what it is that thinks, ask what thinking does, and how it makes a difference in the world; and this involves recognising that thinking is what one is doing in asking or answering such questions.

Back to the beginning.

... there is a single knowing which characterizes evolution as well as aggregates of humans, even though committees and nations may seem stupid to two-legged geniuses like you and me.

I was transcending that line which is sometimes supposed to enclose the human being. In other words, as I was writing, mind became, for me, a reflection of large parts and many parts of the natural world outside the thinker.

On the whole, it was not the most crudest, the simplest, the most animalistic and primitive aspects of the human species that were reflected in the natural phenomena. It was, rather, the more complex, the aesthetic, the intricate, and the elegant aspects of people that reflected nature. It was not my greed, my purposiveness, my so-called "animal," so-called "instincts," and so forth that I was recognizing on the other side of that mirror, over there in "nature." Rather, I was seeing there the roots of human symmetry, beauty and ugliness, aesthetics, the human being’s very aliveness and little bit of wisdom. His wisdom, his bodily grace, and even his habit of making beautiful objects are just as "animal" as his cruelty. After all, the very word "animal" means "endowed with mind or spirit (animus)."

Against this background, those theories of man that start from the most animalistic and maladapted psychology turn out to be improbable first premises from which to approach the psalmist’s question: "Lord, What is man?" — Introduction

The above are Bateson's words, Bateson's thoughts, and you and I can entertain them, attempt to understand them, and conceivably adopt them to some extent.

So necessarily, a cell, any living cell, has to know how to live, and how to reproduce. Necessarily, a committee has to know how to make a decision. Necessarily, a philosopher has to know how to think about thinking. And in each case there is an abstract pattern that informs and directs a circular relation of influences that constitutes a complex system.
"A cell knows how to divide" does not seem to mean that I know how to divide; my cells know things that I do not. Likewise, committees often seem to know less than their members know.

I know how to direct my fingers to the keys to make sentences, but I cannot explain that knowhow to you, any more than the planning department can handle a spade, but only how to commission a workforce. Have a play in your own mind with what knowing is going on in and around you; have a look at some of the examples in this book. Do you think a post through first and then dictate/copy it through your fingers, or does each phrase somehow suggest the next one, in concert with some overall vague scheme?

Read a little beyond what I have quoted, and you will find a suggestion that we moderns have formed a distorted conception of ourselves as angel/devils or soulless machine masters of the universe. It is in how we understand the 'human condition' that I think a paradigm shift is being proposed. A psychological shift that reunites human with nature, and mind with body. Quick as you like please, because the soulless machine masters are killing us all.

Thinking of Whitehead, I understand him to view consciousness as emergent, it is experience he sees as elemental. His concept of experience is broad, so he would say that, for example, "the cliffs experience the erosive effects of the wind and rain", which is analogous to the way our sentient bodies are precognitively affected by photons, sound waves, scent molecules and so on. — Janus

This seems rather problematic to me. I suggest that the cliffs experience erosion the way I experience being operated on under general anaesthetic; which is hopefully not at all. Consciousness returns afterwards and I experience the after-effects of the wound and the healing thereof. In this regard there is a very clear distinction between stuff that happens to me and stuff I experience, and to equivocate between them is to confuse oneself. My toenails grow, but I am not conscious of their growth as they grow, though I may notice that they have grown when I cannot get my shoes on.

I am interested here in looking at what Bateson is saying. And one of the things he is saying is that consciousness - he doesn't actually use the word much - so let us say that what is sensed is not ever the thing in the world, but always news of a difference. So the eye vibrates very slightly, and the vibration produces a strong change at the edges of objects in the field of vision. This edge detection is how we see and separate one thing from another. Always he is talking about relationships and layers of relationships between relationships. And patterns of coding. Edges are not things in the world as such, but the vibration produces a flashing at the edges that informs the organism about the environment in ways that matter to it, like telling friend from foe. In this way mind is simply 'more life', and it is all process and all networks of active relations.

Cliffs don't have eyes or noses or nervous systems, so there is no 'news' generated by anything that happens to them, and thus no experience.

I came across this in my reading that might just satisfy you that the title was at least not intended to be understood tautologically.

We face, then, two great stochastic systems that are partly in in­teraction and partly isolated from each other. One system is within the individual and is called learning,· the other is immanent in heredity and in populations and is called evolution. One is a matter of the single life­ time; the other is a matter of multiple generations of many individuals.
The task of this chapter is to show how these two stochastic sys­tems, working at different levels of logical typing, fit together into a single ongoing biosphere that could not endure if either somatic or gene­tic change were fundamentally different from what it is. The unity of the combined system is necessary. — P.149

Absolute nothingness is only impossible from the perspective of something

It's that "only" that makes all the trouble. It suggests that there is a perspective of absolute nothingness that we have overlooked all this time. It doesn't come right out and say so, but it would be uncontroversial if it were phrased, "Absolute nothingness is impossible from any perspective." We could all nod and move on.

I figure Bateson is a paradigm change that has not happened yet.

Noticing the repetition of iterations is not the same as saying what they are. — Paine

That is very much the feeling i have too; both for the academic world at large, and in my own understanding.

Watching this sequence of cat behavior and the sequence of my reading of it (because the system we are talking about is, in the end, not Just cat but man-cat and perhaps should be considered more complexly than that, as man-watching-man's-watching-cat-watching-man), there is a hierarchy of contextual components as well as a hierarchy concealed within the enormous number of signals given by the cat about herself. — P. 117

Here is a small example of one particular shift that is about the identity of the observer. Whenever what is going on is an interaction between living beings, all the sense of both are involved in a communication that affects both, and this communication is not distinct from the 'internal' communication that constitutes each being's own awareness. Man and cat merge in mutual observation.

With this in mind, I can suggest that when we mutually understand each other, we are in that moment literally 'of one mind' in regards to that which we mutually understand, And this contrasts with the all too common case where I do not understand myself, and project that misunderstanding onto the other, recreating my own cognitive dissonance in the relationship.

Rather it's accepting oneself as what one is and modifying desires — Moliere

Is this not a direct contradiction? As the therapist proverbially says, "the lightbulb has to want to change."

But honestly, I don't understand much of what you are saying. I'd better be quiet.

Is the consumption of life to preserve life a perversion, or can you see it as a natural flow which can become perverted? — Moliere

That question suggests, (rightly I think) that perversion is in the seer more than the seen. That is, the first perversion is the cleaving of the individual such that they can stand in judgement of their own desires. And from that judgement comes the repression and then the projection onto the world of whatever is seen to be perverse. Perversion is the buck that is always passed and never stops. It is the human condition. The epicurean is naturally a connoisseur of perversion. Too much would be gross, but a little spice in your girls (or boys) ...

Thanks. I was snarky back, so apologies returned less 10% for provocation. :wink:

I have to take issue with your link quoted above on one issue. I do not believe Bateson was a determinist, and I certainly do not believe that determinism is one of the necessary presuppositions of the thesis he presents here, because if it had been he would have declared it and made an argument for it. He's a far too careful, and self-aware thinker to have missed it.

See here for example for a claim that he "... consistently opposed determinism." https://www.jstor.org/stable/2783231?typeAccessWorkflow=login# (no special access required for the quote)

Also the "Science never proves anything" section pretty much rules it out.

Really now. You actually have to think about whether America or Nazi Germany should have won? — RogueAI

Really now? You actually have to ask again the question I have just explained why I cannot answer as if you cannot understand plain English?

Say what you like about Trump, — Chisholm

Alas, there is nothing I like about Trump. But your analysis of the situation is otherwise about right. The moral vacuum gets filled with poisonous nonsense of various sorts. I think it is no coincidence though, that this global belligerence and stupidity coincides with the birth pangs of a fully automated economy with little need of human labour. The invisible hand is wielding the scythe.

Who you rather have won WW2, the Allies or Axis? It's a really easy question to answer, is it not? — RogueAI

I don't find it easy. I know roughly where we are, but I have little idea of where we would be if everything was different. Probably none of "us" would have been born, but a lot of other people would, because all the acts of procreation since would have been different. Counterfactual history is so much a work of the imagination, that it cannot be a reliable guide to action. And that basically fucks the utilitarian calculation altogether. The defeat of Europe would have seemed bad to "us", but the defeat of Russia, might have seemed preferable to what we have - nobody knows.

Has anyone noticed that analysis in terms of of goodies and baddies is a recipe for continued conflict? Everyone is always a reluctant justified sinner, who will become a saint as soon as circumstance allows, but has a duty to protect the innocent by whatever means necessary, even by the slaughter of enemy innocents.

One ought not to judge from the sidelines, as @Hanover says. But since he is also on the sidelines, he really ought not to judge the Palestinian regime either. We can judge each other though as to our posts. The UK suffered sporadic terrorist acts from the IRA for years, and the government was not full of moral scruple in dealing with them. Governments like to be seen to be doing something in a crisis, but prefer to do nothing when public opinion is divided. All their effort goes into manipulating opinion and then following it, and the rationality and morality that results is negligible.

The most dangerous thing in the world is a man with nothing left to lose, who sees his way to a justice of leaving others in the same place. It would be a brave pacifist that stood in his way. But if you want peace, you have to give the man who has nothing something of what he wants, that he stands to lose in the next fight. Or else kill him. But leaving a million people on your border with nothing is a recipe for trouble.

And vice versa?
— unenlightened

The existential threat to Gaza is Hamas provoking war with Israel. — Hanover

Oh, dear. One way moral rights is a rather old-fashioned look these days. Not that the other side is any different, you understand. But if you can't even see that mutuality of existential terror, then destruction must reign until the final triumph of good. Let the four horsemen ride!

Ethnic cleansing and genocide seem to be the stated or implicit goal of both. Only Israel has the means to really follow through on that though. — Baden

One suggestion is that Hamas might decide to martyr themselves in order to become the heroes that brought about the final battle that would drag in all the usual suspects for the end of days. It's hard to make sense of their attack without some such background plan to provoke a response that'll draw in other parties, except as mass suicide by Israeli.

Ethnic cleansing and genocide seem to be the stated or implicit goal of both. Only Israel has the means to really follow through on that though. — Baden

One suggestion is that Hamas might decide to martyr themselves in order to become the heroes that brought about the final battle that would drag in all the usual suspects for the end of days. It's hard to make sense of their attack without some such background plan to provoke a response that'll draw in other parties, except as mass suicide by Israeli.

Hi there. I'm not sure what you are saying there. Maybe have a read of the introduction, and see if the topic interests you.

This is to say, if the destruction of Gaza is necessary for the protection of Israel, then it would be unethical for Israel not to destroy Gaza. — Hanover

And vice versa?

The Malhama Al-Kubra is prophesied to be the most brutal battle in human history. It generally corresponds to the battle of Armageddon in Christian eschatology, and occurs soon before the emergence of the Dajjal (Antichrist).[1]

It looks to me as if the alignment of ethnicity and religion leads to the externalisation of negative affect, to the extent that the only solutions become 'final solutions'. The fundament of the fundamentalist is the last battle, where evil is finally defeated and the virtuous attain to paradise. End of. ... everything. The irony that the two sides of armageddon are in total agreement and desirous of the same conflict.

We unfortunately are unable to eliminate collateral damage; You are murdering innocent civilians; they are terrorists.

Life is perverse. It consumes itself in renewing itself. Mind would like to rise above life, but does so only in self-denial - aka love.

I take your point, but the applications of logic, the unfolding of deductive arguments, also occurs in time. Another point of difference is that causation is not logically necessary (Hume). — Janus

Yes, he is close to Hume. I discovered further on, that he even mentions George Spencer-Brown, and in his book that I've been discussing, there is an exact parallel use of time. Euclid takes time to unfold his geometry, and we take time to read through and understand. Nevertheless, the geometry is static and timeless, and so are most logics. It is not envisaged that 2 + 2 will ever attain to 5. Whereas in time ignorant can become knowing, life can become lifeless, or reproduce and; x can become not x and x again.

On another note, do you agree with Gnomon that Bateson's' thought "seems to assume a "Great Chain of Being" ontology"? I'm not seeing it, but then Gnomon didn't explain why he thinks that. — Janus

He is at some pains to be explicit about his assumptions. God and angels will not be playing a major role in this. But he is looking at what has been thrown out with the bathwater of religion, There is a passage in the introduction that talks about The Great Chain of Being, that ends thus:

In what is offered in this book, the hierarchic structure of thought, which Bertrand Russell called logical typing, will take the place of the hierarchic structure of the Great Chain of Being and an attempt will be made to propose a sacred unity of the biosphere that will contain fewer epistemological errors that the versions of that sacred unity which the various religions of history have offered. What is important is that, right or wrong, the epistemology shall be explicit. Equally explicit criticism will then be possible. — Intro

The next 2 chapters examine the various underlying assumptions that modern scientific thought makes, and criticises some of the misconceptions as he sees it, and lays outhit own assumptions and the pragmatic reasons for holding them - again echoing Hume in observing that causation is assumed, persistence is assumed and so on.

Excuse me. I'm reading through, and noting here things that strike me, personally. Hopefully others will drag me back to look more carefully at other things earlier in the text I have just mentally nodded at.

At the bacterial level and even among protozoa and some fungi and algae, the gametes remain superficially identical; but in all metazoa and plants above the fungal level, the sexes of the gametes are distin­guishable one from the other.
The binary differentiation of gametes, usually one sessile and one mobile, comes first. Following this comes the differentiation into two kinds of the multicellular individuals who are the producers of the two kinds of gametes. — 3:7

Yin and yang (English: /jɪn/, /jæŋ/), also yinyang[1][2] or yin-yang,[3][2] is a concept that originated in Chinese philosophy, describing opposite but interconnected, mutually perpetuating forces. In Chinese cosmology, the universe creates itself out of a primary chaos of material energy, organized into the cycles of yin and yang and formed into objects and lives. Yin is 'receptive' while 'yang' is active; in principle, this dichotomy is seen in some form in all things—patterns of change and difference, such as seasonal cycles, evolution of the landscape over days, weeks, and eons (with the original meaning of the words being the north-facing shade and the south-facing brightness of a hill), sex (female and male), as well as the formation of the character of individuals and the grand arc of sociopolitical history in disorder and order.[4]

It is usually translated as "creative" and "receptive", but "mobile' and "sessile" is possibly more accurate. But the accuracy of the 6,000 year old I Ching is indicative, I think, of a deep and necessary unity of thought and biology all on its own.

Speaking as one of the super-rich elite, I can explain it all to you very simply. Humans used to be the source of wealth, and back then, to own humans as a king/emperor was the measure of status. At first, the industrial revolution multiplied the value of human labour by the power of the machine, but as machines become more automated, human labour becomes more redundant.

We are approaching the point where the elite no longer need subjects as humans but will prefer machines as more obedient, reliable and productive. Expect, therefore, to be recycled via wars, climate disasters, etc, leaving a few thousand technicians of a machine dominated wilderness. Masses of humanity are unpleasant and no longer necessary. Therefore, 'Goodbye, get off my planet.'

Yes, "no". — Jack

(or vice versa)

It is a solution to paradox to rule it out as soon as it rears its head, on an ad hoc basis, ie.
Rule: "if it leads to paradox it is ruled out."

But this does not seem to really get to grips with the thing.

"Will Jack's answer to this question be no?" is ruled out, but
"Will Jack's answer to this question be yes?" is ruled in.

Why? Or rather, why does one lead to paradox and the other does not? is that question ruled out?

G. Spencer-Brown has the bones of a more fruitful resolution of these things that you might find interesting. https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/14599/reading-the-laws-of-form-by-george-spencer-brown/p1

The idea is developed in the next chapter in a section relating logic and causality, that I have already put on my previous reading the Laws of Form thread as a direct link to this. I repeat it here.

[quote-Mind and Nature 2:13]When the sequences of cause and effect become circular (or more complex than circular), then the description or mapping of those sequences onto timeless logic becomes self-contradictory. Paradoxes are generated that pure logic cannot tolerate. An ordinary buzzer circuit will serve as an example, a single instance of the apparent paradoxes generated in a million cases of homeostasis throughout biology. The buzzer circuit (see Figure 3) is so rigged that current will pass around the cir­cuit when the armature makes contact with the electrode at A . But the passage of current activates the electromagnet that will draw the arma­ture away , breaking the contact at A . The current will then cease to pass around the circuit, the electromagnet will become inactive, and the
armature will return ro make contact at A and
If we spell out this cycle onto a causal sequence, we get the fol-
lowing:
If contact is made at A, then the magnet is activated.
If the magnet is activated, then contact at A is broken.
If contact at A is broken, then the magnet is inactivated.
If magnet is inactivated, than contact is made.

This sequence is perfectly satisfactory provided it is clearly understood that the if . . . then junctures are causal. But the bad pun that would move the ifs and thens over into the world of logic will create havoc:
If the contact is made, then the contact is broken. If P, then not P.
The if . . . then of causality contains time, but the if . . . then of logic is timeless. It follows that logic is an incomplete model of causality .[/quote]

This then links back to @Gnomon's point about information. The information 'implicit' in the axioms of Euclid unfolds into a whole book of elements consisting of theorems. But in practice, they don't do it by themselves, Euclid has to do it. Thus the algorithm for calculating pi does not contain the value of pi any more than a cake recipe contains a cake. You have to do the math, or the cookery, in time.

Do you think Bateson was talking about what we now know as "Information", in a broader philosophical sense than Shannon's narrow engineering useage? — Gnomon

The impression I have is that his conception of pattern would be closer to information redundancy and thus compressibility. I say that because he talks about symmetry and serial repetition and such.

But in information terms he already wants to include the way that the development of an organism produces new information, both in the way particularly recursive definitions can produce complexity from simplicity, and practically in the way tree rings record the weather.

My understanding of Shannon is that his notion of information is distinguished from 'noise' by a 'receiver'. Here, the organism as receiver is trying always to detect a message in the environment, and the pattern recognised is the message understood. But the receiver is also part of the pattern.

Slow, or lazy? We allow ourselves to be distracted from important matters by trivialities. — Pantagruel

If you confuse slowness and laziness, you will not do well with this topic. Laziness is the virtue that drives progress: by making things easier, more can be done. Slowness, in this context, is the difficulty of changing one's mind when appropriate.

When the sequences of cause and effect become circular (or more complex than circular), then the description or mapping of those sequences onto timeless logic becomes self-contradictory. Paradoxes are generated that pure logic cannot tolerate. An ordinary buzzer circuit will serve as an example, a single instance of the apparent paradoxes generated in a million cases of homeostasis throughout biology. The buzzer circuit (see Figure 3) is so rigged that current will pass around the cir­cuit when the armature makes contact with the electrode at A . But the passage of current activates the electromagnet that will draw the arma­ture away , breaking the contact at A . The current will then cease to pass around the circuit, the electromagnet will become inactive, and the
armature will return ro make contact at A and
If we spell out this cycle onto a causal sequence, we get the following:

If contact is made at A, then the magnet is activated.
If the magnet is activated, then contact at A is broken.
If contact at A is broken, then the magnet is inactivated.
If magnet is inactivated, than contact is made.

This sequence is perfectly satisfactory provided it is clearly understood that the if . . . then junctures are causal. But the bad pun that would move the ifs and thens over into the world of logic will create havoc:
If the contact is made, then the contact is broken. If P, then not P.
The if . . . then of causality contains time, but the if . . . then of logic is timeless. It follows that logic is an incomplete model of causality . — Mind and Nature

This, in case anyone wonders, is why my next reading thread is

https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/14707/reading-mind-and-nature-a-necessary-unity-by-gregory-bateson

We are suffering from a prisoners dilemma. If only prisoners could learn a little solidarity... but alas we all have to learn it at once and some of us are a little slow. Leaders are particularly slow, because they are always looking back to see if everyone is following.

Update.

I'm not doing a thread on 'Steps to an Ecology of Mind', after all, I'm going for 'Mind and Nature' instead.

https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/14707/reading-mind-and-nature-a-necessary-unity-by-gregory-bateson

Since I mention this thread in my op, I feel it is polite to mention my new thread here: https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/14707/reading-mind-and-nature-a-necessary-unity-by-gregory-bateson

Bateson is a really original thinker, and goes some way, I think, towards resolving the difficulties being expressed here.

Ladies, if you find the natural hierarchy oppressive and resent your physical inferiority, try the new 9 mm Equaliser. No more need to rouse your man from his drunken stupor to defend you from the invading hordes. Technology has come to the rescue. Let your finger do the slaughter with the Smith and Wesson Equaliser. Suitable for wimps and cripples of all genders.

My central thesis can now be approached in words: The pattern which connects is a metapattern. It is a pattern of patterns. It is that metapattern which defines the vast generalization that, indeed, it is patterns which connect.

I warned some pages back that we would encounter emptiness, and indeed it is so. Mind is empty; it is nothing. It exists only in its ideas, and these again are no-things. Only the ideas are immanent, embodied in their examples. And the examples are, again, no-things. The claw, as an example, is not the Ding an sich; it is precisely not the "thing in itself." Rather, it is what mind makes of it, namely an example of something or other. — Introduction

How many threads would this little quote feel at home in? Anywhere that idealism and realism is an issue, or being and nothingness. But this comes out of a detailed and down to earth consideration of the relations between various life-forms. A whole thread just on this would not be amiss.

————————————————————

Professional linguists nowadays may know what’s what, but children in school are still taught nonsense. They are told that a "noun" is the "name of a person, place, or thing," that a "verb" is "an action word," and so on. That is, they are taught at a tender age that the way to define something is by what it supposedly is in itself, not by its relation to other things.

Most of us can remember being told that a noun is "the name of a person, place, or thing." And we can remember the utter boredom of parsing or analyzing sentences. Today all that should be changed. Children could be told that a noun is a word having a certain relationship to a predicate. A verb has a certain relation to a noun, its subject. And so on. Relationship could be used as basis for definition, and any child could then see that there is something wrong with the sentence "Go’ is a verb."

I remember the boredom of analyzing sentences and the boredom later, at Cambridge, of learning comparative anatomy. Both subjects, as taught, were torturously unreal. We could have been told something about the pattern which connects: that all communication necessitates context, that without context, there is no meaning, and that contexts confer meaning because there is classification of contexts. The teacher could have argued that growth and differentiation must be controlled by communication. The shapes of animals and plants are transforms of messages. Language is itself a form of communication. The structure of the input must somehow be reflected as structure in the output. Anatomy must contain an analogue of grammar because all anatomy is a transform of message material, which must be contextually shaped. And finally, contextual shaping is only another term for grammar. — introduction

Here again is a whole thread's worth of meat to pick over, and again I have left out the careful biological considerations that provoke and support the ideas. Children's (mis)education in grammar, is related to undergraduate education in anatomy and a pattern is displayed that relates them, and offers a better way of educating and a better way of thinking and a better way of looking at definitions an meanings - another topic that comes up here regularly.

"And finally, contextual shaping is only another term for grammar."

And this is the tertiary pattern of the pattern that connects.