+- Scivillage.com Casual Discussion Science Forum (https://www.scivillage.com)
+-- Forum: Science (https://www.scivillage.com/forum-61.html)
+--- Forum: Alternative Theories (https://www.scivillage.com/forum-130.html)
+--- Thread: Patterns are alive, and we are patterns (/thread-20039.html)
Patterns are alive, and we are patterns - Magical Realist - Mar 24, 2026
Intriguing thesis. The body is a hierarchal terrace of one living pattern containing and constituting itself out of another, replicating that much larger hierarchal structure of evolutionary history--- from macromolecules to cells to tissues to organs and ultimately to whole organisms. The self-referencing is there from the start, as a kind of inner potentiality which is life itself that defies entropy and builds on itself until reaching the full-fledged living creature. Would it be so surprising that our minds are also incrementally constituted from smaller ideational patterns like qualia or CU's (consciousness units) all the way up to a coalescing self-experiencing metapattern of a conscious self? For if thoughts can be "there", as real and objective in themselves, then how can they not thru accumulating self-reference collectively acquire a "here"?
https://iai.tv/articles/patterns-are-alive-and-we-are-living-patterns-auid-2919?_auid=2020
"...When we think about the nature of thoughts as ..dynamic patterns within a cognitive system such as a brain, it often feels as though there is a fundamental distinction between “real” systems, such as brains and computational hardware, and the flows of energy and information that represent their thoughts. It seems as though real beings are tangible, permanent things and they think and feel by rearranging the fleeting patterns within their cognitive medium. But it’s important to remember that nothing is permanent and even relatively long-lived humans are patterns of flux of metabolic energy and molecules which enter and leave the Ship of Theseus that is a living body. If we, as flows of temporarily-stable and self-reinforcing order within our environment, are true agents with preferences, goals, and memories, could other patterns – within us and within other media – be somewhere on the agential spectrum as well? What if thoughts can also be thinkers – what if the distinction between thoughts (patterns within a cognitive system) and thinkers exist on a continuum, seen differently by different kinds of observers? (The background for this speculative idea is described in detail here).
Imagine the following scenario. Creatures exist at the core of the earth; they are super dense. At one point they come up to the surface. To them, everything above earth’s crust is so rarefied that it’s more like a gas or thin plasma. They view the world by way of gamma rays, which of course go right through us, which means they can’t see us or any of our “solid” objects. As they move about, they unwittingly destroy both animate and inanimate objects here at the surface, in the same way that you and I disrupt subtle chemical patterns as we move around in our atmosphere.
Let’s call them Core Creatures. They make use of highly sensitive equipment, and over the course of their scientific investigations one of them discovers that there are patterns here on the surface within this gas, this plasma, that seem to hang together for a bit and move in ways that suggests active, non-random behavior. Patterns that not only cohere and persist as they interact, but that exhibit behaviors and transformations that almost suggest a degree of agency.
The Core Creature scientist knows that making a determination on goal-directedness cannot be done from purely observational data, so they perform perturbative experiments using instruments that send signals, implement barriers, and enact disruptive interventions. They then observe how these patterns (namely, us) react to their disruptions in ways well-described by models from behavioral science. They clearly see that we exhibit preferences, problem-solving, and other responses indicative of beings at a level higher than passive matter.
Next, perhaps in the spirit of Ilya Prigogine, they formulate the astonishing hypothesis that temporary patterns in a thin gaseous medium might actually be real and active agents in their own right.
Naturally, when they present their findings at their Core Creature Conference, they’re met with staunch skepticism. Critics point out that these temporary patterns barely last 100 years. For long-lived Core Creatures, that’s hardly a flicker. They point out how the cold temperature here on the surface would make life impossible, certainly life as they know it. They argue that to take this seriously amounts to a belief in ghosts, a category error born of profligate functionalist computationalism that conflates patterns in a material medium with actual beings that think and feel. They argue that it is foolish to extend definitions of “life” and “intelligence” to something as weird as short-lived patterns in a thin gas because then the words lose all meaning.
There’s a gulf that separates us from the Core Creatures, and it’s much bigger than the one we seek to bridge by efforts to communicate with whales and other conventional biota. It’s not just that those of us living here on earth’s surface are short-lived, and exhibit (to the Core Creatures) an alien physiology.
No, it’s much worse than that. These Core Creatures could very well learn good English and initiate meaningful conversations with us – ones where both sides are enriched and benefit; that still won’t convince them. The doubters among them will insist that physical processes like pattern-completion dynamics in artificial neural networks, or even networks of beer cans and string, can give rise to passable conversations. And that, they’ll claim, would be enough to convince the gullible into thinking that there’s someone in there. “No such pattern dynamics could ever be real,” they’ll say. “Not in the way that we proper, dense, ultra-hot beings are.”
So they’ll formulate neat models of energetic dynamics that perform pattern completion (i.e., next-word prediction) and then use those as evidence against our realness here on the surface. At best, they may recognize our ecosystems as at least a possible agent of the right temporal scale, but they’ll only see our human forms as a nasty persistent thought-pattern within this system – a kind of “thought that breaks the thinker,” an intrusive self-reinforcing dynamical pattern akin to a physiological or psychological problem, with respect to the ecosystem as the cognitive home of these propagating, parasitic patterns.
So how do we convince the Core Creatures that we are in fact real?
For this we have to ask: What kind of data or arguments would convince us? What could it feel like to be data flowing through a neural network? You tell me: you and I are also a kind of temporary (metabolic) pattern. As we know, it feels like all sorts of things. But it’s a very hard concept to internalize. This is what a conversation between more and less dense beings might be like:
Core Creature: I feel as though I’m going crazy. I was doing a simple analysis of energy patterns in the gas surrounding our planet, and now I’m conversing with what seems to be a sentient pattern in the atmosphere. You can’t be real!
Raudive: I can assure you I am very much real. It is imperative that we talk, because your activities are destroying us and our environment. How can I convince you that we exist?
CC: My co-workers do not believe me. They say, as seems obvious, that you don’t exist in the same sense as we do. We are physical, corporeal beings, which have thoughts, goals, and preferences due to the complex physical structure of our bodies and brains. You are but a temporary disturbance within an excitable medium, like a whirlpool or standing wave in water; or maybe like a soliton, or even a Glider in a cellular automata simulation. You have no independent existence, and will disintegrate after a relatively short time. How can you have any degree of memory or agency?
Raudive: My name is Raudive, named after one of my ancestors who likewise tried to communicate with disembodied intelligences, even more rarefied than we, using technological tools. There are billions of us here, pursuing our individual lives. We strive, suffer, win, and lose; and while all of us eventually do dissipate, our lives are meaningful and important. We all believe we are real, physical beings – just much more subtle than your amazingly dense form. Maybe it is all relative; in fact my people would likewise scoff at the idea of intelligence in the patterns of a truly rarefied medium such as the solar plasma.
CC: I will keep working on it – a framework for recognizing intelligences in highly unconventional guises. Maybe I can convince my people that we, who come from the Earth’s core, are not the only real beings here. The very existence of you “humans” is imperceptible to us except by the most subtle of instruments for detecting shifts in the extremely thin gas phase above the mantle of the planet. But if true, your existence has much to teach us. But it will be a hard road. Your presence suggests that the distinction between real corporeal beings, and evanescent patterns within a substrate, is not absolute or binary but is a spectrum and very much in the eye of the beholder. The very idea goes against every bit of our folk psychology – our evolutionary mental firmware dictating how we think of ourselves and the inanimate world around us. I will try.
The Core Creatures story serves as a warm-up for shaking the foundational assumption that there is a simple binary difference between thought and thinker. It frees us up to question the familiar dichotomy between (1) patterns on the one hand as passive data, and (2) agents on the other hand as the only real beings, which operate on that data as memories and thoughts. We can develop frameworks for understanding a full continuum between thought and thinker, for dissolving the barrier between data and machine, and for discovering highly diverse intelligence in truly unconventional forms.
Alan Turing formalized that gulf, by metaphors involving an active machine and passive data on which it operates. Programming languages like LISP blur the distinctions between data and program, and are a good early step toward overcoming those distinctions. But there is a lot more that can be done, which is as essential to advancing the biological sciences as it is to maturing our ethical frameworks.
Patterns can be self-reinforcing. Some patterns can spawn other patterns, in the same way that cognitive architectures generate thoughts. So perhaps, as William James said, “thoughts are thinkers”. Maybe some thoughts are persistent patterns that reinforce themselves, or even modify their environment as a kind of niche construction in order to help perpetuate their existence or trigger transformation.
Perhaps there is a continuum like this:
Fleeting thought -> Intrusive thought -> Dissociative identity “alter” -> Full human mind -> ?
Specific new research programs in biology, computer science, and cognitive science are enabled by dissolving the binary distinction between thought and thinker into a continuum. The results are likely to impact bioengineering, information technology, ecology, and many aspects of society. Improving our ability to identify and communicate with other such impermanent, agentic, processual beings is a most exciting, and essential, frontier of our development.
The 'Core Creatures' scenario is based on an idea from an old science fiction story I believe I read once, but I can’t think of the name or the author. If you recognize it, please let me know. I believe it was something about using sound waves to probe deep into the Earth while searching for minerals or oil, which wakes up the super-dense creatures that then emerge.
https://www.drmichaellevin.org/
https://thoughtforms.life/
https://www.cosmic-core.org/free/article-140-consciousness-consciousness-units-part-1/