Patterns and Persistence

I guess it is pretty predictable of me to be starting this blog post by stating where I am writing this from. The regular reader would be thoroughly familiar with my pattern of behavior: relaxing at some cafe with my laptop before embarking on another rambling discourse on my idiosyncratic observations on life. 

Tim Horton's Cafe is my chosen pitstop for writing today. Surprisingly, I do have a topic in mind today, even though the direction that I'm heading is vague. The topic occurred to me while I was walking in the park one morning and I immediately entered it into my custom note-taking app: "The Persistence of Patterns".

You see, the survival of a species is nothing but the persistence of its genes.  Richard Dawkins is his famous book The Selfish Gene, expounded the fact that biological systems are simply vehicles for genes to persist. But genes are nothing but patterns of information encoded in DNA. The information in our genes determines who each of us uniquely are: our form, structure and identity. We are nothing but patterns of information which persist over time. And that is the whole purpose of our existence. 

What do we mean when we say patterns? Patterns mean structure, regularity and predictability. Patterns can occur in space and time. My habit of blogging weekly, every Saturday is a pattern in time. My body is a recognizable pattern of biological cells that persist as a form in space and a life in time. 

Every living being exist as a pattern in space and time. Any form or structure that we recognize is a pattern. We are all pattern recognition creatures. We invent language to express the regularity of form which we see in nature and then to shape nature into the patterns that our minds desire. Our LLMs capture the essence of these statistical patterns in the weights of its neural networks. 

When we say that we understand a concept, it means that we recognize a structure, a goal, a regularity, a coherence; in other words, a pattern. All human creation: technology, architecture and works of art, involves creating patterns that are recognizable by other humans. We consume and partake in each other's pattern creations.

The opposite of patterns is chaos. It is equivalent to our annihilation. Patterns no longer perceiving patterns. Persistence is a pattern that requires work, energy to realize. Larger patterns subsume and sometimes obliterate lesser ones. Patterns require energy to maintain. They capture and consume energy. Entropy destroys patterns. We build technology, which are structural patterns that harness the free energy from the universe to persist the patterns that we care about.

Life is expressed as a preference for certain patterns over others. We are all relatively predictable patterns or behavior that slowly evolve and change over time, simply because we are caught up in larger patterns, or trends, allowing larger patterns of waves to carry us forward, freeing us to create new patterns upon these larger patterns.

We do we like music and art? It's because we recognize patterns in them. Patterns that resonate with patterns that already exist in our minds. And over time, we learn to recognize more intricate patterns; patterns that are only recognizable when viewed from a larger perspective. Wisdom is nothing but pattern recognition of human affairs from a higher perspective, allowing us to sense and predict further ahead.

Why do patterns matter at all? Nature expresses itself through change. Persistence is just a particular type of random change, which happen to have certain regularities, just like the forms that emerge from Conway's Game of Life. Out of chaos and emptiness, come forms. Forms are but patterns that happen to occur over specific dimensions, over potentially infinite number of dimensions. Forms that share dimensions interact around those dimensions (which we conveniently call space and time), creating even larger patterns and forms. We call these regular patterns of interactions, laws of nature. We are but a sliver of existence across the infinitely many possibilities that Nature expresses itself.

And here am I, this fragile biological form, emitting another trail of patterns in cyberspace, a mind-pattern expressing a series of thought-patterns over virtual space, consuming a finite amount of time, in this simple blog post.