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Are you a "patternist"?

#1
Magical Realist Offline
I think I might be. Ray Kurzweil has some interesting things to say about this new ontology of pattern, being a basic irreducible of our reality:

From "The Singularity Is Near" by Ray Kurzweil, pg. 5:

"Muriel Rukeyser says that 'the universe is made of stories, not atoms.' In chapter 7, I describe myself as a "patternist", someone who views patterns of information as the fundamental reality. For example, the particles composing my brain and body change within weeks, but there is a continuity of the patterns that these particles make. A story can be regarded as a meaningful pattern of information, so we can interpret Muriel Rukeyser's aphorism from this perspective."

If you really think about it, it's not so much the "stuff" composing the world that matters so much as the patterns that stuff is configured in. In both the physical and mental realm, we can see this clearly. Taking just atoms, behold the huge variety of elements and compounds that result from just changing the structures they form. With the mind, we have the same synaptic firings zapping repeatedly. But it is the configuration of these millions of firings, in both space and timing, that give rise to the manifold elements of mind--the perceptions, the thoughts, the memories, and the feelings. The only thing that can be identified as a self in you is a roughly identical pattern of information contained inside your brain and body. And if that pattern changes TOO much, it becomes questionable that you are the same self at all.

The question arises, when you recognize a pattern of events or objects, in what sense is the pattern objectively "there" and in what sense is it a subjective construct of the mind? The pattern is certainly "there" in some sense without our perceiving it. It was latent and imminent. But it also only emerges into being by being constructed as "there" by our minds. The patterns thus become the fuzzy interzone by which objective reality and conscious experience interact and link together in a third synthetic mode of being--the emergence of the discerned pattern.

“The library will endure; it is the universe. As for us, everything has not been written; we are not turning into phantoms. We walk the corridors, searching the shelves and rearranging them, looking for lines of meaning amid leagues of cacophony and incoherence, reading the history of the past and our future, collecting our thoughts and collecting the thoughts of others, and every so often glimpsing mirrors, in which we may recognize creatures of the information.”
― Jorge Luis Borges, The Library of Babel
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#2
C C Offline
It's difficult to see how there could be any kind of fundamental "stuff" that's resistant to change in the context of presentism. Essentially the universe of one moment is eradicated and replaced by a slightly different parallel universe in the next ephemeral moment. What survives the gap is the continuation of the grand cosmic theme / structure (including information about the past) and a quantitative carryover of the energy account. Affairs which indeed are not so much "stuff" as principle.

Since the regulation of the process appears to be brute or magical (there is nothing more ontologically available beyond itself to ensure its proper management or inter-consistency after an exponential number of annihilations and creations), then presentism should always be teetering on the edge of radical skepticism regarding whether or not the world of X-period was anything like the world of right now. In the end, evidence that "the same story is being adhered to over time" -- that reality is not as mutable as a dream -- is dependent upon believing the environmental records and personal memories of a particular moment or stretch of moments. Which circularly attest to their own validity or that the "same overarching story" is surviving the gap from substitution of one universe pattern for the next pattern.

Whereas in the context of eternalism, the "railroad tracks" are already laid out, which also provides the governing framework (the extra dimension provides the lawfulness). The past-present-future would be an integrated being which never changed, apart from the slices experienced in consciousness (the supposed "flow" of time). While there might be an inescapable determinism on a large scale, contingent options could be available in its finer substructures (i.e., the routes which experience takes at critical points could be variable).

In the future, technology will allow movies to be somewhat different each time they are viewed (like games). Which will finally help predestination Calvinists, scientism folk, and other ideation restricted factions grasp how it is possible to have determinism or a fixed template at a very general level while still having unpredictable caprice or even willed choice at the participation level of the particulars.
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#3
Yazata Offline
Magical Realist Wrote:Are you a "patternist"?

I think I might be.

I have that tendency, sometimes. (I don't think that I'm fully committed to any single ontology.)

I'm pretty much a functionalist (though without any positivist undertones) when it comes to the philosophy of mind. So I'm inclined to reduce mind to information and its transformations. (Not a very popular position here in 'Chalmers-land'.)

I also have an occasional tendency to construe mathematics Platonically. I often think that numbers, geometrical forms and other more abstract mathematical relationships have some kind of reality.

Sometimes quantum mechanics makes me feel that way too. When particles are entangled they seem to share a single state, as opposed to separate states for each one that happen to be identical. So if the shared state changes, it changes for both particles, even if their other states make them physically remote from one another. That may or may not suggest that states have as much reality as particles. (I don't know enough about physics to lean very hard on that one.)

Quote:Ray Kurzweil has some interesting things to say about this new ontology of pattern, being a basic irreducible of our reality:

Is it really a new ontology? It reminds me of an update on Plato and his forms.
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