Pattern, Form, Causation

Emergence is the formation of patterns. Rupert Sheldrake was mocked for saying that patterns have causal effects. But if sensuality is causal, as OOO argues, then the fact that patterns have causal effects is almost trivially true.

Patterns are patterns-for. Take perception for instance. It's likely that many forms of perception are based on quantum scale phenomena. Fruit flies smell by detecting the quantum signature of an object. This means that something in their smelling apparatus becomes entangled with something in the scented object's apparatus. There are quantum-scale magnets in the eyes of birds that enable them to orient themselves.

Quantum scale phenomena just are patterns. For instance if you put two little cogwheels together (really little nanoscale ones), Casimir forces start to glue them together. They start to become the same object. Nothing is doing this except for the physical proximity of the cogwheels. Mechanical forces sit on top of deeper, aesthetic ones!

It's easier to think of quantum scale objects as patterns than as spooky ping pong balls that somehow know what other ping pong balls are doing. The little squares of color in the embedded video appear to know what the other squares are doing. No: information is patterning the mesh of squares so that a certain shape emerges-for an observer.

This my sense of how Spencer-Brown style marks work. Marks require a withdrawn object, such as an inscribable surface, on which to strut their stuff. At least one object subtends the magic of marking. Seen this way, the mark loses its mystery. So 1+n objects make a system that can make a difference.

A NOR gate is a minimal Spencer-Brown style Mark

Nature is a sensual system like that. That's the trouble with nature: it's someone's, something's nature. It's a pattern. That's why I'm arguing for ecology without nature. We need to stop arguing over what kind of pattern we want and for whom. All that is secondary to recognizing coexistent objects.

This emergence requires shapes, an algorithm and a surface upon which the shapes are configured (amongst other things such as a computer terminal, an LCD screen, electronic currents and so on). There are objects. And then there are patterns of objects. These patterns are loosely what we call causality.