The Power of Patterns…
Verstand, Patterns, and Landscapes of Thought
“Mathematics is the science of patterns, and nature exploits just about every pattern that there is”…
— Ian Stewart
“To understand is to perceive patterns”…
— Isaiah Berlin
To understand the World, we perceive patterns.
Pythagoras [1] saw patterns in nature like harmonies [2] of music arising from numbers.
Empedocles [3] anticipated Darwin’s [4] evolution through combinations of basic building blocks of organism structures [5].
Plato’s Theory of Forms [6] — natural universals — presented the world as imperfect copies and forms of an ideal reality.
Patterning, Creativity and Second Nature
In attempting to bring a sense of coherence and order, we perceive through metaphysical rules of abstraction and reductionism (Verstand) patterns.
Uncovering new types of representations that may have predictive power (e.g. heuristics, algorithms) that codify new knowledge (Verstand), mitigate uncertainty and simplify complexity.
The combination of 3 types of metaphysical frameworks of relational structures — Aristotelian term logic, Cartesian Rationalism (a Priori ideas through deductive reasoning) and the Scientific Method — spawned a new Age of Reason.
It led to a shift from the Discovery of Mother Nature — Sensing the World — to Human Creation (Second Nature) — Acting in the World.
“Creativity involves breaking out of established patterns in order to look at things in a different way”…
- Edward de Bono
An acceleration of Human creativity through developing metaphysical frameworks — relational structures of semiotic signs —of semantic abstractions.
By combining Discovery — World as Sensed — Learning — with — Creation — World of Action — Agency, a Phenomenological World was increasingly being shaped.
The Scientific and Digital Revolutions
The Scientific Revolution [8] saw the dawn of Modern Science, where the developments of new languages of semantic abstraction – mathematics, physics, astronomy, biology and chemistry – transformed our views of society and nature.
The expansion of Verstand led to the emergence of industrial machines, calculating devices, telescopes, barometers, air pumps and steam engines.
It changed the nature of our materials, construction and even our aesthetics.
It coalesced into a new World View which upended our place in the Universe.
It enabled energy to be harnessed, transforming economic production and giving rise to untold Wealth and Prosperity.
It reframed the role of Religion in our lives, separating the Church and State [9], giving rise to the birth of secular liberalism.
By the 1940s, the combination of Cartesian Rationalism, Aristotelian term logic, and the Scientific Method – saw the emergence of a new Theory of Information (Claude Shannon) [10] and the creation of Turing Machines (Alan Turing) [11].
It drove automation, digitisation and an era of classical computing culminating in the development of the internet and the dawn of an Information Age [12].
The emergence of Patterning Machines — the mechanisation of Verstand for high-dimensional relational structures of semiotic signs – From single rules ( Cartesian Rationalism – Deductive Reasoning – Deterministic Algorithms ) to landscapes of abstraction ( Cartesianism Rationalism – Inductive Reasoning – Non-Deterministic Algorithms )
“Pattern recognition and association make up the core of our thought. These activities involve millions of operations carried out in parallel, outside the field of our consciousness. If AI appeared to hit a brick wall after a few quick victories, it did so owing to its inability to emulate these processes”…
— Daniel Crevier [13]
By the early twenty-first century, the explosion of digital data and exponential growth in processing power & memory saw these top-down logical machines turned upside down.
Inductive bottom-up inference emerged based on multi-variate statistics, calculus, computation and correlations.
The emergence of non deterministic algorithms that could provide different outputs for the same input on different executions.
A new inductive mechanical capacity to allow multiple outcomes in problem solving through being able to explore the high dimensional spatial landscape of semiotic signs.
[ Note – Top-Down Cartesian Reasoning prevalent in classical computing had been applying deterministic algorithms that produced only a single output for the same input even on different runs – a non-deterministic algorithm travels in various routes to arrive at the different outcomes ]
Revealing the inherent properties of the machine program itself by uncovering higher-dimensional patterns and structures through Machine Learning and Neural Networks.
A bicycle of the mind that extends human rules-based thought (Verstand), creativity, and our senses.
These developments provide new tools for Verstand and the semantic abstraction of the Material World.
“AI can help humans to model and manage the systems on which we depend for our survival. This challenge will drive AI in directions it needs to go, it will accelerate science and engineering”…
— Paul Cohen, Professor of Computer Science Pittsburgh University & ex DARPA
Metaphysics frameworks — Relational Structures of Semiotic Signs (Verstand) — Semantic Abstractions in the 21st Century
What if these computational machines were simply illuminating the creators of the pattern (i.e. the metaphysical structures and landscapes of human thought) rather than seeing or making sense of the Material World? Revealing relational structures of semiotic signs and rules of abstraction (Verstand)?
What if their adoption made Human embodiment, contextualisation, integrated reasoning (Vernunft) and meaning (Logos & Semiotics) more important than ever?
In the 1700s, Isaac Newton [14] upended the world by combining metaphysical frameworks of relational semantic structures such as Mathematics, Science and Aristotelian term logic.
Universal Gravitation, Calculus and the Laws of Motion followed, providing the foundations for Modern Physics, the explosion in Science and the Industrial Revolution.
It disrupted our knowledge, challenged our truths, and raised questions about our beliefs.
Will computational pattern recognition, coupled with the possible emergence of even more exponentially powerful Quantum Machines (N²) [15] that illuminate human thought, creativity, and Human Sensemaking [16], do the same in the 21st Century?
“When patterns are broken, new worlds emerge”…
— Tuli Kuferberg
Looking for Patterns: Understanding How We See the World —https://www.simonsfoundation.org/2023/04/26/looking-for-patterns-understanding-how-we-see-the-world/
Footnotes:
[1] — Pythagoras — https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/pythagoras/
[2] — Pythagoreanism — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pythagoreanism
[3] — Empedocles — empedocles
[4] — Darwin: From Origin of Species to Descent of Man — origin-descent
[5] — Powers, Structure, and Thought in Empedocles — https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/rhiz-2016-0004/html
[6] — Plato: A Theory of Forms — https://philosophynow.org/issues/90/Plato_A_Theory_of_Forms
[7] — Enlightenment — enlightenment
[8] — Scientific Revolution — Scientific-Revolution
[9] — The Secular Enlightenment — https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/9780691189123/html
[10] — A Mathematical Theory of Communication — http://people.math.harvard.edu/~ctm/home/text/others/shannon/entropy/entropy.pdf
[11] — Turing Machines — turing-machine
[12] — Information Age — https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/Information%20Age
[13] — A Smart Look at Artificial Intelligence — https://www.wired.com/1994/10/a-smart-look-at-artificial-intelligence/
[14] — Isaac Newton — newton
[15] — Quantum AI — https://research.aimultiple.com/quantum-ai/
[16] — Sensemaking, the core skill for the 21st Century… — https://richardschutte.medium.com/sensemaking-the-core-skill-for-the-21st-century-ebc8c679cfe8
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