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
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