“Was not their mistake once more bred of the life of slavery that they had been living?—a life which was always looking upon everything, except mankind, animate and inanimate—‘nature,’ as people used to call it—as one thing, and mankind as another, it was natural to people thinking in this way, that they should try to make ‘nature’ their slave, since they thought ‘nature’ was something outside them” — William Morris


Tuesday, March 8, 2011

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 Marks require a withdrawn object, such as an inscribable surface, on which to strut their stuff.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.

3 comments:

ai said...

Why can't we call those patterns "nature"? (You are too prolific, man - can't keep up with you.)

Unknown said...

One would also say there is the execution or performitive activation by the object of the algorithim and patterns that it displays or communicates in reference to other sensual objects within the contexture of the environment.

You're definitely cooking today! Keep churning the galactic milk... the butter is coming! :)

Joe Clement said...

"Starling flocks, it turns out, are best described with equations of 'critical transitions' — systems that are poised to tip, to be almost instantly and completely transformed, like metals becoming magnetized or liquid turning to gas. Each starling in a flock is connected to every other. When a flock turns in unison, it’s a phase transition"

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2011/11/starling-flock/

It's a bit late of a comment, but I instant remembered what you wrote in this post when I came across the above information.