Steven Livingstone at Requiem picked up on my recent entry regarding The New Fascism and ran with it. On our level of awareness, he raises some excellent points. I’m concerned with the larger pattern of existence and action, so I’m going to attempt to rephrase and clarify my original ideas.
As the sciences progress and “hidden in open view” secrets of our universe are uncovered, we’re seeing pattern-based construction everywhere. Everything, it seems, is grown from basic patterns in a simplicity to complexity scheme which should make Intelligent Design proponents and other creationist brands green with envy if they could look past their holy scratch. It’s so elegant, so no-maintenance, so right, it makes everything else look like thrashing about in the dark.
We are fundamentally a physical system. Our thoughts are grown from patterns in physical substrate. Thoughts are physical things, not some ephemera floating through your skull. As physical patterns, thoughts follow the same simplicity to complexity rules of all systems here. Moving up from thoughts to minds to cities to nations to entities larger than nations, we find structures created by the smaller patterns beneath them in the hierarchy: multi-national corporations, media conglomerates, big government.
Knowing that we ourselves are collections of smaller patterns giving rise to intelligence, I see the larger sphere of multi-nationals as similar constructions. What is the purpose of a living pattern? To go on. Corporate entities, just as people, cats, science and religion, exist to continue existing.
Like all other patterns, they are perhaps not aware of the doings of their constituent parts, nor what havoc actions on their level may wreak upon those constituent parts. An executive makes a decision based on the needs of the pattern: upward stock growth, profits. It’s what an executive pattern does in the system. The larger entity destroys the livelihood of those who would, in 20 years, be potential new bodily fabric. The juggernaut of Big Oil perpetuates itself across the globe, but in so doing destroys the very support structure in which it lives.
According to Jeff Hawkins, the brain is a tiered pattern processor. Stimuli comes in and is sent up the chain until some part of the hierarchy recognizes it. It’s then referred for action based on what it’s identified as. An expert is someone who has managed to store a pattern at lower levels in the hierarchy. In an expert, stimuli is recognized and acted upon without referring up to the big guns in the tower of abstraction.
We can think of the system of our world in the same way. Beyond the multinational corporations is the larger pattern of the world itself. Our task is to learn the patterns now stored and referred for action by the multi-national level on our more immediate layer of individual behavior. On the levels Steven is speaking to, awareness of ourselves as a substrate for pattern is the first major step. We must become experts in the ways of pattern, of life, of interdependency, of simplicity to complexity. The feedback lines are in place: we can see and understand what’s going on in the layers above and below. If we don’t change the way patterns of need are interpreted and action is created, the world itself will change in an action based on the pattern playing out in its body.
Just as we individually destroy or move away from what we believe conflicts with our well-being, destruction on the world’s scale of action is merely a means of balancing itself and permitting its pattern, the overlapping rise and fall and rise of life, to continue.
