Order vs. Randomness

[Rayaan]

Agreed. Pattern recognition is a vital part of our existence. In a sense it seems that pattern recognition has become like a second nature to us.

But, one additional thing that I believe in is that our minds themselves are patterns, not just something that we use to recognize patterns. The mind as a whole is a patterned system of patterns that evolves over time. This idea is known as the patternist philosophy of mind (see the quote below). Patterns are foundational to intelligence. And this patternist view of the mind (i.e. that the mind is made of patterns) is in total agreement with my argument that there is a correlation between order and intelligence at a fundamental level of reality - i.e. that order/pattern = mind/intelligence.

The patternist philosophy of mind is a general approach to thinking about intelligent systems which I (Ben Goertzel) have developed during the last two decades (in a series of publications beginning in 1991, most recently The Hidden Pattern). It is based on the very simple premise that mind is made of pattern.

Now, pattern as the basis of mind is not in itself is a very novel idea — this concept is present, for instance, in the 19th-century philosophy of Charles Peirce (1935), in the writings of contemporary philosopher Daniel Dennett (1991), in Benjamin Whorf's (1964) linguistic philosophy and Gregory Bateson's (1979) systems theory of mind and nature. Bateson spoke of the "Metapattern": that it is pattern which connects. In a series of prior writings (Goertzel, 1993, 1993a, 1994, 1997, 2001) and most recently in the philosophical treatise The Hidden Pattern (2006), I have sought to pursue this theme more thoroughly than has been done before, and to articulate in detail how various aspects of human mind and mind in general can be well-understood by explicitly adopting a patternist perspective. This work includes attempts to formally ground the notion of pattern in mathematics such as algorithmic information theory (Chaitin, 1986; Solomonoff, 1964, 1978) and probability theory, beginning from the conceptual notion that a pattern is a representation as something simpler and then utilizing appropriate mathematical concepts of representation and simplicity. In prior writings I have used the term psynet model of mind to refer to the application of patternist philosophy to cognitive theory, but I have now deprecated that term as it seemed to introduce more confusion than clarification.

In the patternist perspective, the mind of an intelligent system is conceived as the set of patterns in that system, and the set of patterns emergent between that system and other systems with which it interacts. The latter clause means that the patternist perspective is inclusive of notions of distributed intelligence (Hutchins, 1996). Intelligence is conceived, similarly to in Marcus Hutter's (2005) recent work, as the ability to achieve complex goals in complex environments; where complexity itself may be defined as the possession of a rich variety of patterns. A mind is thus a collection of patterns that is associated with a persistent dynamical process that achieves highly-patterned goals in highly-patterned environments.

http://wiki.opencog.org/w/Patternism


Ben Goertzel, who has published many technical papers that explain connections between artificial intelligence and cognitive science, believes that the same reasoning holds for the universe at large: the universe is a complex environment of patterns - patterns emerging from patterns emerging from patterns and so on - and the patterns altogether constitute a "universal mind" where our own patterned minds are embedded in. He discusses this interesting but no-so-novel idea in his book The Hidden Pattern: A Patternist Philosophy of Mind.

You can read it online for free at the link below and the notion of a universal mind (or "pattern theology" as he calls it) is summarized in the book in chapter 3, specifically starting from page 35.

http://www.goertzel.org/HiddenPattern_march_4_06.pdf