Topic: Is a Pattern a Thing?

[Sealchan]

Perhaps a root axiom that I apply automatically to most Jungian concepts is whether the concept is based on a "thing" or a "pattern".  But what do I mean by this? 

A thing is a thing.  It has a name and it has qualities.  A pattern is a set of qualities of things but itself is not a thing. 

At this url (http://www.mathsisfun.com/definitions/pattern.html) there is a straight-forward definition:

Pattern

Things that are arranged following a rule or rules.

A pattern is a form we recognize in the field of objects we perceive.  For example, we can see the ocean, a big body of water.  On the ocean we can see waves.  Waves are a pattern embodied by the ocean.

From the point of view of human language (a point of view hard to escape!) we can label the ocean and waves just as easily with a word from our respective languages.  Such a word, a noun, is a person, place or "thing".  So from a grade school grammatical perspective a wave and an ocean are both "things". 

So if we contrast pattern with thing we need to recognize this intuitive mistake, that there is a difference between a thing and a pattern regarding its substantiality no matter whether both are equally "noun-able" so to speak.

Now to apply this to complex adaptive systems let's look at Conway's Game of Life:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway's_Game_of_Life

The animations on this wikipedia page show what appear to be little pixel critters that move across the page.  However, if you read the website carefully you will discover that the pixel critters do not exist!  That is because they are patterns we recognize in the way that the pixels alternate between black and white, on and off, based on the underlying rules of the program.

This program serves as, perhaps, one of the simplest examples of how the behavior of parts, combined together in a wide field of similar "dumb" parts can give rise to "emergent behavior".  We have hear a kind of rudimentary pair of "organisms" that can move and retain its shape and produce a smaller type of off-spring. 

Of course, the whole draw of Conway's Game of Life is that it seems to create these critters from these "dumb" rules.  This example gets to the core of what systems theory and science say when they say the "whole is greater than the sum of its parts".  There is some magic leap that produces these emergent things that are, after all, reductively just patterns of dumb parts.

However, patterns become things as soon as the patterns become information for some other thing.  Now I am relativizing the very distinction I started to make between pattern and thing.  A pattern can be a thing and it may not be a thing; it depends on a specific context from which you address the pattern/thing.

We thing-itize waves when we say that they are "energy".  Even as we understand that waves are the transverse (at right angles to the referent) motion of water molecules, the wave itself moves in a give direction.  So to the surfer the wave is an object.  To the physicist waves are a pattern of water movement. 

The surfer uses the wave to achieve an end while the physicist examines the wave to understand the wave's own nature without any explicit need to get something out of it.  Treating a wave as a thing works if it works.  The surfer can talk about the waves, their quality and size and whatnot.  It helps the surfer know when it is a good time to have a good time surfing.  For the surfer it is practical to consider the wave as a thing.

The practicality of treating the wave as a pattern is that the physicist knows that the ocean is subject to energic changes caused by gravity and the geography that the ocean is contained within.  Inevitably waves in the ocean have similar, predictable qualities to other kinds of waves and all these waves help to identify the natue of particles and energy. 

We might say that the value of seeing the wave as pattern is in understanding the how of the wave.  The value of seeing the wave as a thing is to explain the how of surfing.  So a thing at one level is a pattern to the level below it.  The fact that human language can treat a "thing" as a "thing" or a "pattern" is par for the course in the way that language does not make a conceptually linear one-to-one map between its terms and the world.  Our nouns do not construct a rational phenomenology but one which is full of contradictions which are only resolved by defining perspectives.  Even our relativizations need relativization such that it is not possible to construct a widely coherent and rational map of truth. 

In my view Jung's four functions define a kind of ground of truth that is poly-modal in this sense. Even the four functions are complimentary in the way that they polarize their contents with respect to each other.  While sensation sorts one sensory perception from another, intuition tries to unite them.  While feeling valuations make one act with a sense of justice, laws which define actions as good and bad by their precise language may be crossed in such thinking-countering rationalizations.

In bringing Jungian terms to bear in the light of the brain as a complex adaptive system.  Perhaps in understanding projection we can see ego, shadow, anima/us, Self as things, as psychic entities that can be addressed as imaginary others.  These inner people make the most sense as we explain our social actions. 

However, in understanding how the brain gives rise to our consciousness, these people are mere mappings of associations between our facial recognition cortex and our linguistic cortex and other areas of the brain that have developed varying strengths of neural interconnections.
 

[Matt Koeske]

In bringing Jungian terms to bear in the light of the brain as a complex adaptive system.  Perhaps in understanding projection we can see ego, shadow, anima/us, Self as things, as psychic entities that can be addressed as imaginary others.  These inner people make the most sense as we explain our social actions. 

However, in understanding how the brain gives rise to our consciousness, these people are mere mappings of associations between our facial recognition cortex and our linguistic cortex and other areas of the brain that have developed varying strengths of neural interconnections.

I think these phenomenal personages (the Jungian archetypes) owe their "mindedness" and much of their agency to the human brain's powerful predisposition for a theory of mind or projective consciousness.  That is, we tend to see and understand certain patterns (in the sense that you are using the term here) as minded like us.  As we projectively install mind onto these patterns, they become more "thing-like".  They become beings.


I think this propensity for a theory of mind is largely responsible for the psychic phenomenon of the Self as it is most commonly represented (in dreams, art, religion etc.).  Some Self representations are anthropomorphic, some are animal, others are less or even non-intelligent.  This is one of the peculiar attributes of Self phenomenon.  Sometimes they seem to possess a "super-consciousness" (such as that attributed to God) . . . but other times, they appears as mechanical or as forces (e.g., of nature).  The Self can seem mindless as well as omniscient.


But other representations of the Self are more clearly patterns.  Usually patterns that suggest complexity.  I find Self phenomena especially fascinating, because of this range of representation.  I think it tells us that the thing represented (as translated into human language) is a complex pattern (i.e., a complex dynamic system) that is simultaneously minded and not-minded.  Its "mind" is Other . . . so Other as to not really be a mind at all.  And yet, it seems to "think", to know, to process information, to learn, to calculate.  And often we recognize this seeming contradiction (and then usually rationalize or confabulate its thingness, often in an anthropomorphizing way).


But I suspect there is no contradiction on the level of physiology.  We (conscious thinkers) suffer from an inadequacy in our language and in our linguistically bound capacity to think or conceive.  That is, we cannot really understand true complexity.  We only understand by languaging and reducing to models or metaphors.  Complexity is no longer complex once it has been reduced and languaged in this way.  So the essence of the thing in itself is lost through languaging, is lost in the very manner in which we must think about it.  Complexity remains elusive.  Even more than that . . . it remains defiant to our languaging and mentalization (and of course, this "defiance" is an anthropomorphic projection, a poetic reduction that utilizes our theory of mind).  Such is its Otherness, its autonomy.  Complexity is beyond us.