In answer to my musing:
Not a big deal to discern patterns out of
collections of beings and/or objects, but how does
one manage in actual practice to discern patterns of
values?.
Steve writes (on Feb. 11):
An easy quiz...
1.What sort of pattern is it when balls fall after
being dropped?
2.What sort of pattern is it when animals breathe in
and out?
3.What sort of pattern is it when new acquaintances
shake hands?
4.What sort of pattern is it when a cue ball strikes
another ball and
we conclude that the cue ball caused the other ball to
move?
These patterns are all inferences that are easy to see
as patterns."
=====
I wouldn't call this an easy quiz although,
admittedly, there are some more complicated, as the
ones proposed by Steve in the continuation of his
post. Let's try to tackle them:
What sort of patterns are they? The question is a
bit awkward because 1. to 4. are not patterns. "balls
fall after being dropped" , "animals breathe in and
out" and "new acquaintances shake hands" are
statements. Statements are not patterns. Neither are
inferences patterns (as in Steve's "These patterns are
all inferences").
From general empirical statements such as the above
we can extract, deduce, infer or just intuit,
patterns; but better not confuse the mother with the
child. I might be sounding a bit pedantic here but,
reading the digests posted in this thread in the last
couple of days, where patterns are used as synonyms of
practically everything, I can't help feeling that some
reflections into the concept of patterns in and out
the context of the MOQ, might be useful for us all.
Pattern seems to be a pretty bogus term as used
in daily language. This largely stems from the fact
that the word has such a large amount of senses (as a
perusal into any dictionary shows) which in turn give
rise to a host of synonyms ( More than 20 in my
Thesaurus). Not an easy thing to live with in the
context of the MOQ which places so much emphasis in
"static patterns of value"; if something can mean
practically everything we'd be left with an almost
meaningless concept.
Even our ineffable Wikipedia doesn't help us out
much(quote):
The pattern is a form, template, or model (or, more
abstractly, a set of rules) which can be used to make
or to generate things or parts of a thing, especially
if the things that are created have enough in common
for the underlying pattern to be inferred, in which
case the things are said to exhibit the pattern.
I'll leave patterns as forms (in the Platonic and
Aristotelian sense) and templates for others here and
concentrate on patterns as models because I am more
familiar with them; also because models are essential
to Systems Theory, whose approach to patterns of value
I began exploring in my last digest.
As stressed by C. Alexander, the architect,
recurrence is a determining trait of Patterns
(Alexander ought to know because he wrote many books
on the subject; for a good reason, you won't find a
definition of patterns in any of his books).
Recurrence, from verb recur in its senses of: "to
happen, come up or show up repeatedly".
In this sense of recurrence, [&$#] is Not a
pattern; neither is this: [&$#&$#&$#]. It starts to
look like a pattern only when the number of
repetitions is (sufficiently) large, like in this for
instance:
[&$#&$#&$#&$#&$#&$#&$#&$#&$#&$#&$#&$#&$#&$#&$#]
for here, the unit [&$#] keeps happening, showing up
or coming up "repeatedly".
From this point of view a rock is not a pattern, a
thought is not a pattern, a pipe is not a pattern, a
value is not a pattern. In my view, an important
distinction. Ron writes for instance (in an answer to
SA):
"DOES NOT Pirsig state that subjects, objects, trees,
rocks, You, me, are all patterns of value?"
To which I can only say that, if he did write that,
he wasn't talking about patterns in the sense I am
talking about here; this sens reflects, I think, the
common-use sense of the word.
What does recurrence has to do with models? A
model, if it's well designed, keeps repeating the
same, doing exactly whatever it's supposed to do over
and over again (as long as we don't change variables
or parameters). For example, from Steve's statement
1. " balls fall after being dropped" we can make a
simple model made up of a ball, a releasing device and
a vector pointing downwards. Whenever we release the
ball, the ball follows the vector, over and over
again, till we get fed up of the game. In this case we
don't really need a model because we already have a
general empirical statement in our hands but, in other
cases, models may be useful to generate patterns of
behavior that could be used in turn to generate
general statements.
Steve writes in his same digest:
"What I think you may mean is how can look at our own
experience and see
different value patterns at work. That is not easy."
I decidedly agree on the question: How to look at
one's (or other's ) experience and discern different
value patterns. I also roundly agree that it is not
easy at all. I'll have a try in my next post.
___________________________________________________________
Support the World Aids Awareness campaign this month with Yahoo! For Good
http://uk.promotions.yahoo.com/forgood/
Moq_Discuss mailing list
Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc.
http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org
Archives:
http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/
http://moq.org.uk/pipermail/moq_discuss_archive/
